The Tavern

I was reading this thread about a character that starved to death due to not paying attention. While, of course, you cannot prevent every such death, I think in this case it would be justifiable to do something to help avoid accidental starvation - there is a lot to pay attention to on the Crawl screen and sometimes, people do just fail to notice their hunger situation deteriorating - whether due to just walking around and being a bit too inattentive to notice the "Starving" thing pop up, or perhaps not noticing a hungry ghost next to them in an otherwise trivial mob of monsters. My suggestion, in my opinion, does not have any real drawbacks, only benefits, and should not be too hard to implement. (I do not consider the "tough on crime" stance of "it's totally fine to punish players for being careless". Being exhausted and thus making poor decisions or forgetting about your scrolls of blinking is something to be punished. Failing to notice a change in your hunger status that really isn't that conspicuous isn't.)

The crux of the idea is: on the turn that your character would starve, sensing that s/he is about to collapse from exhaustion, your character will begin consuming a food item from your inventory that has the shortest possible eating time. This would be suboptimal compared to manually eating something, because your character might have to eat at an inopportune time in the middle of combat, whereas s/he could have eaten earlier, in a safer position - but it still prevents the character from dying while being loaded with food and having no in-universe reason to starve to death. This is done automatically and cannot be interrupted if it takes several turns (e.g. chunks, rations), unless the character is forcibly interrupted by paralysis or something (paralysis does stop the character from eating, doesn't it?).

That's pretty much it. Please don't turn this into a general discussion of the merits of the food system, there is another thread for that. This is just a small proposal independent of any possible food reform.

Maybe I'm crazy but the game refuses to stop informing me that im even the slightest bit hungry .... That and bright yellow/read capital letters against black are pretty darn noticeable. Maybe if you're color blind, I don't see how you could ever "accidentally" starve to death.

I've died to starvation twice as a high level troll. Here's how it happened:

1. I tried to go to a shop without noticing I was starving. If you use the "G"o command to travel a long distance while you're already starving, the game gives no checks and will happily kill you. Losing consciousness will interrupt movement, but trolls sometimes just die the first time they lose consciousness.

2. I got hit by famine as nemelex wrath while hasted and and didn't notice until I was dead.
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12299&p=172962&hilit=yasd+starved+to+death#p172962

The few combat situations (not counting random hungry ghost enc) where I was starving mostly due to high lvl spells or rod spam, I wouldn't want my character to auto-eat a meat or bread ration, because missing those 3 turns would've probably killed me. I tend to only carry rations and carrying extra foodstuff to prevent the 3 turn paralasys is annoying.

The idea is that you'd auto-eat on the last action you could take before dying of starvation...so it would be impossible to die of starvation with food in inventory.

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Does lignification still stop hunger? If so that may well be a more desirable option than eating a ration, depending on the situation.

I've accidentally starved to death on three separate orb runs, since my brain goes from hours of relatively high-stress attention to a relief state of passively clicking the nearest staircases.

I'm confused. Isn't it easy to prevent accidental starving with a simple force_more_message set up in the rcfile?

I don't have anything against the proposal in the OP, I'm just curious how someone can accidentally die from starvation (let alone several times). Or is it just that not everyone knows how to use the rcfile options?

Actually you should not click on staircases but use autotravel to the exit on D:1 so that you will get the shortest route.

I misunderstood, well seems fine to me.
Could be a start to remove food, since you can't die from it anymore (even through your own blatant unattention which was almost the only way left).
Guess somebody should start a thread on auto-quaff HW soon.

Aside- we really really really need an rcfile tutorial stickied somewhere. So many FRs could be answered by "add this setting"

This would be awesome!

FWIW, I'm still not totally sure why starvation has to kill the player instead of some other very bad thing, like we have with statzero in modern Crawl. I'd be much happier with no hunger and no food, but the fact that you can be instantly killed because of hunger seems unnecessary.

+1 to an rcfile tutorial on Tavern, but until then, the guide included with the game is a good resource.

Have starving give you statzero in all three stats.

Or just very rapidly drain them all. Like -1 each stat per turn until you are no longer starving.

Another option would be to rapidly rot health. This would be kinder than instant triple-stat-zero (which has a good chance of being fatal if there are even any moderate-power monsters around), but nastier than just rotting stats (since rotted health requires consumables to fix).

That guide seems to be only for download players and not online players, unless I'm missing something?

Note that 0 Max health is very slightly more fatal than triple start zero ( so while rotting health is less likely to kill you short term it *will* kill you, whereas stat 0 lets you survive at much lower odds, but indefinitely)

To me health rotting doesn't change the status quo, it just extends the existing timer, personally I don't think starving to death needs to take longer than it does.

I don't know that I love stat zeroing even for the intended purpose (If you to get fed then do you have to wait more like you do normally when you zero a stat? depending on how long you had to stumble around until you found some food, you may have to starve yourself again while waiting for the penalties to wear off. ) but it does change the dynamic a little.

It's all the same thing. Hit "edit rc" next to the version of your choice on webtiles.

This suggestion is similar to how Brogue does it.

In Brogue a starving player will uncontrollably eat any food in their inventory, which makes an awful lot more sense to me than starving to death because of an inattentive player.

Brogue also has a non-instadeath starvation system: it stops your hp regen and does damage over time, although it's possible for some characters to last for a long time like that with healing charms or rings of transference (essentially vampirism).

I think it would make more sense if you went thru some cummulative phases:

irritability
berserkitis
maprot and some enemies having their tiles replaced by statues or fountains
attribute damage and hp rot (cancels berserkitis)
organ damage and in worst cases, organ failure
paralysis
coma
death

"Are you sure you want to do that while starving? [Y/n]"

You begin hallucinating food.

A bread ration comes into view. It is wielding a fruit. The bread ration roars! The bread ration mumbles a few words. The beef jerky misses you. The beef jerky hits you! You resist. You crush the bread ration like a grape!!! You bite the bread ration. You kill the bread ration! Okawaru accepts your kill.

exactly.

Come on wheals, implement some real change!