Food reform

[Grimm]

Given that the gourmand amulet is less useful now, perhaps the delay could be removed.

[galehar]

Given that the gourmand amulet is less useful now, perhaps the delay could be removed.

The delay isn't there because the amulet is too good. It's there because the amulet has a strategical value, not a tactical one. Without a delay, you'd swap to eat it just for eating then swap back to something else.

[Danei]

My impressions from playing a few games with the food reform:

As others have said, there's a lot more hovering between hungry and very hungry.

I didn't find it to be hugely more tedious, but I also didn't find it to add much depth to the chunk game.

Sometimes I would cast hungering spells just to get myself into very hungry before my brown chunks decayed, which is gamey behavior, but that sort of behavior was already in the game anyway.

Overall, my opinions on the food reform are neutral.

HOWEVER: I am very confused about the gourmand nerf. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but the amulet seems almost completely useless now. A single hunger level of difference (full vs. baseline satiated) has minimal strategic value, and while I did switch it in now and then to get myself up to full because it was strictly optimal to do so, it didn't really change the game at all.

[galehar]

Sometimes I would cast hungering spells just to get myself into very hungry before my brown chunks decayed, which is gamey behavior, but that sort of behavior was already in the game anyway.

Huh. The goal of the food mini-game is to keep your satiation as high as possible, not eat as many chunks as possible. If you know you're close to the very hungry threshold, then it might make sense, otherwise it's useless, or even harmful.

To clarify, I don't think that temporarily inedible chunks should be treated as "useless" (in neither colouring nor '&' selection).

Well, they don't, and we don't plan to change that.

After some playtesting, here are the planned changes:

• Remove edibility of rotten chunks to non-saprovorous. If you're hungry enough to eat a rotten chunk, then you would have eaten it before it rots. The cases were you actually do it are extremely rare, or non-existent. But the fact that they are edible in theory make the game consider them as not useless and they become a minor annoyance.
• Colour in brown all food which is temporarily inedible (and fix lich form considering all food as useless while we're at it).
• Mention the satiation threshold needed to eat a food item in the description, and in the error message when trying to eat it. Inscriptions might have a pedagogical value, but they are spammy and not trivial to implement.
• Adjust nutrition penalty for bad chunks and/or satiation levels. If anyone tries a Centaur, feedback is welcome (herbi 2 too). The low satation threshold needed to eat chunks is already a harsh penalty, I'm not sure the nutrition penalty need to be that high. If they are supposed to spend a good part of the game around very hungry, we might need to adjust the satiation levels to make it playable too.

[Danei]

Huh. The goal of the food mini-game is to keep your satiation as high as possible, not eat as many chunks as possible. If you know you're close to the very hungry threshold, then it might make sense, otherwise it's useless, or even harmful.

Brown chunks give enough satiation that it's better to eat one at very hungry before it decays than it is to sit at hungry and have the chunk decay (unless I'm wrong about this, but from doing so it didn't seem like I was). That ceases to be true in situations where you can almost be guaranteed to get more chunks by the time you get to very hungry naturally, though.

But in many places that situation isn't the case, especially if you don't have rPois.

And obviously, it takes some consideration. You don't want to push yourself 3/4 of the way toward 'almost starving', and you don't want to do it if you've only just become 'hungry', because that defeats the purpose, so it requires some awareness of your position within a hunger level, and how much hunger a particular spell will cause. But those things aren't difficult with spoilers and player experience.

[dpeg]

You see, the rules have changed. You cannot eat contaminated chunks at Hungry anymore. Having the inscriptions would make this change obvious, reducing the confusion. It would also explain the mutational changes without additional words.

(That was to jpeg and is probably dated after galehar's reply. Sorry.)

[minstrel]

Is it intentional that you now get nutrition out of contaminated chunks, even if they also make you sick?

Given that you now can't eat them until very hungry, this is good IMO. At the same time, it doesn't seem to have changed the game very much: more food pressure in one respect, less in another.

[jejorda2]

I find it a little confusing that my centaur can't eat white chunks when hungry. (Centaurs are herbivores and must be very hungry to eat clean chunks, near starving to eat contaminated chunks.) The proposals to change their colors or add inscriptions would help keep track of this.

This is more a matter of being used to the old system than a matter of the new system actually being confusing.

[absolutego]

centaurs are very frustrating now. you spend most of the time between very hungry and starving. i've already hit starving well over a dozen times at XL13, and i don't use spells, rods or invocations. clean chunks are ok, but you can only eat contaminated chunks at near starving, and they give so little nutrition that after eating them sometimes you're still at near starving, and often sick. the satiation margin is in practice very, very narrow. if nutrition from vegetarian items has increased i barely notice it (it is my impression that meat rations don't work as well as bread rations, though).

i'm not a good player, so you'll want more feedback, but herbivore 1 is so restrictive now that you may have to get rid of fast metabolism 1.

[Narretz]

Since when are Centaurs Herbivore? Has playing them not been difficult enough, or why was this implemented? Granted, they are not a beginners species, but this sounds like it only makes one aspect of the species much harder that is tedious anyway.

[absolutego]

since as far back as i remember.
until the food reform herbivore 1 was pretty much irrelevant, and fast metabolism 1 only somewhat problematic. they were pretty damn good, actually.

[galehar]

centaurs are very frustrating now. you spend most of the time between very hungry and starving. i've already hit starving well over a dozen times at XL13, and i don't use spells, rods or invocations. clean chunks are ok, but you can only eat contaminated chunks at near starving, and they give so little nutrition that after eating them sometimes you're still at near starving, and often sick. the satiation margin is in practice very, very narrow. if nutrition from vegetarian items has increased i barely notice it (it is my impression that meat rations don't work as well as bread rations, though).

i'm not a good player, so you'll want more feedback, but herbivore 1 is so restrictive now that you may have to get rid of fast metabolism 1.

Thanks for the feedback, that's what I feared. Instead of removing fast metabolism, I'm thinking about improving herbivore instead. And yes, meat rations don't work as well as bread rations for herbivore of course. This was already the case in the old system, we just changed the numbers to make it noticeable.

Since when are Centaurs Herbivore? Has playing them not been difficult enough, or why was this implemented? Granted, they are not a beginners species, but this sounds like it only makes one aspect of the species much harder that is tedious anyway.

Do you know what horses eat? But mostly, because we think herbi/carni distinction is more interesting than just fast and slow digestion. Yes, as absolutego pointed out, herbi 1 is extremely tedious right now, but this is just the first iteration of the new system. So we'll try to improve herbi 1 and centaur will keep the mutation.

since as far back as i remember.
until the food reform herbivore 1 was pretty much irrelevant, and fast metabolism 1 only somewhat problematic. they were pretty damn good, actually.

Before the food reform, centaur had just hunger 2. We gave them herbi 1 and reduced hunger to 1.

After more testing and thinking about it, here are the planned changes (in addition to the ones posted above):
make food with preference 1 (brown chunks) edible at hungry, and pref 0 at very hungry. Basically, it means normal chars eat like before, herbi 1 eat like normal char in the current version, and herbi 2 like current herbi 1. Requiring players to be near starving to eat something isn't good.
I'm also thinking of changing the effect of brown chunks to prevent eating instead of regeneration. Maybe a new nauseous status, or just change the effect of sickness. That way, if you can choose between brown and white, it's never optimal to eat the brown first. Just always eat the best chunk available.
Also, I'm still not sure about showing temporarily inedible chunks in brown. We would lose the colouring distinction of contaminated chunks. Other possible colours would be blue and lightred. There's also the possibility of showing them darkgrey but without marking them useless. Might be a bit confusing, though.

[absolutego]

Before the food reform, centaur had just hunger 2. We gave them herbi 1 and reduced hunger to 1.

damn right, my bad. there are so many changes (usually in a good way) any given single week that it's hard to keep track.

make food with preference 1 (brown chunks) edible at hungry, and pref 0 at very hungry. Basically, it means normal chars eat like before, herbi 1 eat like normal char in the current version, and herbi 2 like current herbi 1. Requiring players to be near starving to eat something isn't good.

I'm also thinking of changing the effect of brown chunks to prevent eating instead of regeneration. Maybe a new nauseous status, or just change the effect of sickness. That way, if you can choose between brown and white, it's never optimal to eat the brown first. Just always eat the best chunk available.

if i understand it correctly, this would break symmetry right? as in: a normal character could eat clean and contaminated chunks at hungry, while herbivore-1s could eat clean chunks at hungry and contaminated ones at very hungry.

you could also keep symmetry and drop herbivores one level (clean and contaminated chunks at very hungry), but the effect is so strong that one level would be just a bit better than now, and 2 just about unfeasible without the rest of the spriggy stuff (slow metabolism), no matter how much nutrition you allow from permafood.

still, i can't come up with anything better. nausea would work under this proposal, maybe even in addition to sickness. (sickness from others sources, as komodo dragons or vampire mosquitoes, should keep its current effect in any case.)

[cerebovssquire]

I am currently playing a MuCK and find this rather out of place:

Pick up 2 chunks of orc flesh {edible when very hungry}?
i - an orange {edible when full, god gift}

I think we should remove this for Mu and Vp, and if it's not in yet for Ko and Fe regarding plant-based foods.

[Kate]

Mm, I quite like minmay's suggestion as for herbivore. (Carnivore already works quite nicely with the limits on how full you can stuff yourself - although I guess currently that has two thresholds as well? They're just less noticeable, since they're at satiated/hungry for clean/contaminated respectively at carnivore 1). That plus galehar's suggested changes sounds like it'd be a big improvement.

[Thasero]

It's also just somewhat of a bother to have a status appear on your screen which you can do nothing about, i.e. having the game warn that you're "Hungry" when there's a number of race/mutation/dungeon branch combinations where there's actually nothing you can do about that. If you can only get chunks that are edible at "Very Hungry", then having your character at "Hungry" is optimal play, but it makes the status screen light up with a warning.

I think an issue is that the food reform had two goals: to reduce the hassle of the chunk minigame, and to make the food system somewhat harsher (i.e. nerf Gourmand, make Sustenance/Hunger equipment more relevant, etc.). But these goals conflict with each other pretty directly. If players experience more food pressure, even after picking up Gourmand or useful mutations, then they'll need to spend more time and effort managing food. Given that the player is not supposed to be frequently dying from starvation - unless they scum, or cast Fire Storm/use Berserk on every monster - any effort spent managing food is just "hassle". Having "Hungry" appear on your screen when it's not actually something you should act on is an example of that: information the game gives you which you can and should mostly ignore.

There are some good changes in the food reform, such as letting contaminated chunks grant nutrition even if they make you sick. That's an improvement, because sickness on contaminated chunks is kind of a newbie trap - if you're just starting Crawl, you might not realize that eating contaminated chunks is a default, correct decision, since the game will pop up a warning message that "There's something wrong with this meat", make you diseased, and leave you still hungry. I can't find the post right now, but there was actually somebody who came into the Tavern asking for help with starving even though they weren't playing a spellcaster or Berserker; the player had been scared off of contaminated chunks, and their problem was immediately solved when a poster told them to eat those chunks anyway. Given that the game includes Potions of Poison and Scrolls of Immolation, players will not necessarily assume that an item which hurts them when used is an item they should keep using until it works.

[betamin]

I have played some more and I don't support this change because this is something that doesn't really add much in terms of tactics/strategy and it's really tedious and annoying. If you wanted to restrict things like berserk and spells, you could raise the cost of them or have less corpses appear, but with this system you situations like having to find enemies to cast spells on to eat brown chunks or if you're hungry and have a white chunk and a brown chunk you cast a spell, get very hungry, eat the brown one, cast spells then eat the white one, just lame micromanaging. Plus you spend more time eating and that's boring.

As something that forces you to dive, food was a pretty damn good system without being too intrusive, right now it achieves this but it also became a waste of time.

[thenewflesh]

Food reform does seem like a textbook case of fixing something that wasn't broken. However, some annoyances have to do with the interface and hopefully will be dealt with before release.

[smock]

I like the food reform. (Though Centaurs need help.) I'm not annoyed by having to butcher slightly more often. And waiting until very hungry to eat contaminated corpses -- so what? It's not hard to do. Under the food reform I get sick less often, which I think is very good.

Does Crawl keep statistics on how often corpses are cut up? If we compare pre- and post-reform butchering numbers we should have some idea how much more work it takes.

A suggestion that might make it less annoying to some: allow the eating of contaminated corpses when not hungry, but with a much higher chance of sickness. I think this would get rid of all the micromanagement, as long as you're willing to risk sickness.

Also, the word "contaminated" makes the corpse sound like it should never be eaten. Does this confuse new players? Might there be a better name?

[vintermann]

I appreciate that it is stressful to hang around at hungry/very hungry as a herbivore all the time, although in principle it's not very different from hanging around between full and very full for a carnivore.

That centaurs don't feel the nutrition advantage from being herbivore is not as I wanted it; I'm not sure if it is in, but I wanted herbivores to have a large nutrition bonus from herbivorous permafood, far larger than the carnivorous bonus for chunks (carnivores were also not supposed to get larger bonuses from meat permafood). I also considered the possibility (not sure if I discussed it) of coupling a slow digestion effect with herbivore as well.

I liked Galehar's nausea suggestion, and also minmay's alternative to hunger tresholds. Might it be possible to combine them?

Everyone who can eat chunks can eat them at hungry, but...

* At no mutations, brown chunks gives nausea (can't eat any chunk for a while - long enough that you will often end up lower if you keep eating brown chunks)

* At 1 herbi, white chunks give nausea (long enough that you will often end up lower each time if you keep eating white chunks)

* At 2 herbi, meat rations AND white chunks give nausea (but the nutrition from rations should probably still be good enough to carry you a decent way beyond the nausea)

* at 3 herbi, no meat as today.

* Saprovore permits eating rotten meat exactly as if it were fresh. It could also cut nausea times, giving some differentiation between sapro 1 and 2.



Nausea should probably get a somewhat kinder name, since at least non-berserking/non-casting centaurs probably will keep stuffing themselves to preserve permafood.

[Grimm]

Nausea should probably get a somewhat kinder name

Indigestion

[absolutego]

I liked Galehar's nausea suggestion, and also minmay's alternative to hunger tresholds. Might it be possible to combine them?

(snip)

you'd eat a chunk and drop the rest. that'd be tolerable on normal chars, but very tedious on herbivores. you'd just be chopping up corses all the time.

I appreciate that it is stressful to hang around at hungry/very hungry as a herbivore all the time, although in principle it's not very different from hanging around between full and very full for a carnivore.

what? the difference is obvious: you can drop many satiation thresholds as a carnivore. as a herbivore you're starving in no time. couple that with fast metabolism 1 and you can see the problem.
besides, why should herbivores stay at low satiation levels all the time? just for the sake of differentiating them? there just isn't enough permafood for this playstyle unless you couple it with slow metabolism.
at least with minmay's proposal you make decisions: you're alright in areas like lair, but you'll have to plan ahead for orc or elf.

[thenewflesh]

This system sounds more and more complicated with each new change.

[vintermann]

I appreciate that it is stressful to hang around at hungry/very hungry as a herbivore all the time, although in principle it's not very different from hanging around between full and very full for a carnivore.

what? the difference is obvious: you can drop many satiation thresholds as a carnivore. as a herbivore you're starving in no time. couple that with fast metabolism 1 and you can see the problem.
besides, why should herbivores stay at low satiation levels all the time? just for the sake of differentiating them? there just isn't enough permafood for this playstyle unless you couple it with slow metabolism.

Well, I did entertain the idea of coupling herbivore with slow metabolism. Maybe remove the slow/fast metabolism mutations entirely, and make metabolism speed a consequence of size + carnivorousness (that way, trolls are still hungriest, spriggans still leanest, and kobolds still not as hungry as trolls, especially if they are cut to 2 carni). Nutrition bonuses are quite close to this in practice, over most of the scale.

But anyway, a point of the change was precisely to force centaurs dip into permafood (instead of herbivore mutation actually forcing you to eat more meat than usual, as it used to be). Sadly that isn't possible without them reaching starving at some point from eating chunks... but I'd rather they spend most of their time at satiated ++ from a single food ration, than perpetually hovering over starving.

[AtT]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not, but why don't characters who have no use for rotten chunk just drop them (like autopickup) when it is safe to do so? As an option you could turn off of course, but it seems like this could take some of the tedium out of weight management.

What if the autochunk select still existed, but it selected older chunks before newer ones (for non-ghouls) to keep them from rotting? With the priority noncontaminated, contaminated, other, etc.

Why don't mutagenic corpses give nutrition? It would be a small change on the game but it would encourage more risky behavior if you were on the verge of starving to death, which is the point afterall isn't it?

[galehar]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not, but why don't characters who have no use for rotten chunk just drop them (like autopickup) when it is safe to do so?

Patch welcome.

There's a plan to revert the whole thing and just implement a few simple changes (it's being discussed on c-r-d). The low satiation threshold is problematic and the whole system is designed around it.
Removing fast and slow meta and tying digestion speed to herbi/nutri is interesting. I'll think about it.

[KoboldLord]

There's a plan to revert the whole thing and just implement a few simple changes (it's being discussed on c-r-d). The low satiation threshold is problematic and the whole system is designed around it.
Removing fast and slow meta and tying digestion speed to herbi/nutri is interesting. I'll think about it.

Impressive level of vitriol on that sourceforge thread. I didn't realize the devteam was quite that aggressive when interacting with each other. I'm sorry to see the food reform go, although it isn't like I tried a centaur with it.

Is there any particular reason the gap between the bottom of full and the top of hungry is so much larger than every other entry on the chart, by the way?

[snow]

I might be wrong but if the amulet of gourmand is changed as suggested on that page wouldn't it then be optimal for spriggans to pick up meat rations and eat them with the amulet on? That doesn't seem right.

While we're talking about butchering has anyone tried using a vampiric weapon that you can't butcher with? You take a hunger hit every time you try to unequip it to butcher... can you PLEASE just remove everything hunger related from the brand?

Anyway I feel the "edible at very hungry" thing is silly and everything was better off before.

[absolutego]

from the mailing list:

4. herbi 1 can't eat contaminated chunks, herbi 2 no chunks at all, but can eat meat permafood (and gourmand can help here).

Most of food supply comes as contaminated chunks -- and in some branches, all of it, so you're starving anyone who had an ounce of bad luck near a neqoxec (or Ijyb). No chunks at herbi 2 would turn the probability of "find cure mut or perish" that much higher. Remember, we removed Hive, so you can't count on practically unlimited permafood anymore.

I believe that 4. is worth a try. It is a simple rule. Recall that herbi is supposed to increase nutrition from plant stuff and to slow digestion. It is fine if players have to dip into permafood.

herbi 1 would be challenging but manageable, herbi 2 would be a near death sentence (either through how difficult it'd be to play it, or how fast you'd tire of such a character). herbi 2 could be identical to herbi 1, as a buffer to herbi 3, with is extremely harsh. or you could just remove the three levels and make a single herbivore mutation, with the effects of herbi 1. spriggan can be special-cased as strict vegans or somesuch, which shouldn't be available via random mutations because it doesn't make sense without slow metabolism.

that's considering herbi/carni independent of slow/fast metabolism, as now. otherwise it could work but it needs a lot of testing.

(edit: i forgot to mention that, as stated in the e-mail, gourmand would help work around herbi 1/2, but the jump between herbi 1 and herbi 2 is still very, very large.)

[absolutego]

i may be exaggerating, and if you say so i'm sure either you've done or you know of those you have. so alright. i still find it a little drastic.
playing a centaur on trunk may have put me a bit on edge.

[ryak]

I still think it should have been tweaked in place, instead of reverted, but what's done is done. I strongly support the new list of changes proposed by dpeg, but I don't plan on writing any patch based on the new list of proposals at this time.

I'm not trying to be another complainer on the internet, but i don't think some people realize that i donated about 2 days of my time writing, testing, and updating that patch before it went in and basically got a lot of grief for my trouble.

Enough said, i think.

[dpeg]

ryak: The complaints are always cheap. If you offer something to the public, you have to develop a thick skin. And I am afraid that our players are rather on the civilised end of the spectrum.

Also, your work was not in vain. A number of food issues will be addressed (or are already) and I don't think that would have happened without Vintermann's proposal and your patch. Thanks again and don't take it too hard!

[thenewflesh]

ryak: The complaints are always cheap. If you offer something to the public, you have to develop a thick skin. And I am afraid that our players are rather on the civilised end of the spectrum.

Also, your work was not in vain. A number of food issues will be addressed (or are already) and I don't think that would have happened without Vintermann's proposal and your patch. Thanks again and don't take it too hard!

That's Internet for you. I was involved in the study a couple of years ago and the results were that forums, chats, etc. are great when you bounce random ideas off each other until a few strong competing proposals emerge. But then pure text communication creates more problems then it solves and you're better off with other forms of communication: real life meetings (ideal, but not feasible for OSS projects), video or audio conferences. Then, after decisions (sometimes tough) are made, Internet becomes useful again for working out details and getting feedback. Sorry for off-topic, but I read a bit of SF forum and that struck me as somewhat relevant.

[vintermann]

So maybe using video chat (hangouts?) rather than IRC for discussing crawl's future would make the process less frustrating?

I'm not surprised people dislike the multiple tresholds, but I suspect that it is because they insist on trying to do something (squeezing the most out of their permafood from eating low-quality chunks) that isn't supposed to be worth it anymore. The way the reform has failed, is that it hasn't convinced them to eat that permafood instead, so they're subjecting themselves to stress continuously which I really only wanted a player to face when they were actually low on food.

(For herbivores, it could be that the reform-hating players are in fact acting reasonably. It could be that the extra bonus from vegetable permafood isn't generous enough, or the digestion is still too fast, to permit forgoing chunks.)

Still, many players have expressed that they did approve of the reform, almost as many as were negative to it. I agree with ryak that we backed out a bit too quickly on this - it could be tweaked further. Many people probably also formed their opinions on the reform based on early, untweaked versions.

dpeg, galehar, devteam: How about we keep the ryak's code in a branch, so we can at least see what can be salvaged? branches are cheap. I though you were a bit quick to merge the code with head in the first place.

[thenewflesh]

Another problem is that you got the "wrong feedback". You should state clearly the purposes of the reform in a few simple words. And then get feedback from players not whether they "like it" (we'll hate it initially, that's for sure ), but whether it does its job in fulfilling its goals and simply ignore other comments as irrelevant to the issue.

For example, ask not "Do you like the reform?", but "Do you have to dip into permafood more often now?"

Also, I'm sorry for the rude comments that I posted earlier. For some reason Internet sometimes brings the inner jerk in me

[absolutego]

the patch was good, the problem was in the design. so good work ryak.

not that it was easy to see it coming. the proposal was around for a long time and noone realized, for instance, the silliness of using contaminated chunks before clean ones at very hungry (for normal characters), or how annoying it'd be to play a herbivore. i liked the reform, in principle, so much that i considered having a go at the patch myself (unfortunately i just don't have the time for it). and yet i'm very glad it's gone now.

even so, there have been very positive changes (e.g. carnivore was nerfed) and the debate was fruitful (some good ideas in this thread). it could come back in a new form, addressing herbivores differently.

[mumra]

There is a problem (which I saw mentioned either by galehar or kilobyte) that it's possible for there to be literally no permafood drops in the first 10 or so levels of the dungeon. Later in the game, certainly, there's a surplus of permafood - but if we want to force players into permafood more often then that resource certainly has to actually be available before the character dies.

In my own limited experience with herbivore characters (pre-food reform) I died numerous times to starvation simply because I didn't find any food. Somewhere it was mentioned that maybe I was trying to cast too many spells at non-zero hunger; but I generally find it very hard to progress in the game without casting those spells at least a few times.

I think this is the reason why players are paranoid about consuming permafood, and are therefore stressing and going to huge lengths to stockpile it (I am the same). Maybe food simply needs to be far more readily available in the early game, and then the changes are more in context. In the early game, it's enough to worry about basic survival without having too many concerns over food. In the mid-late game you have slightly more options and food can become more of a strategic issue to consider because you have more options available.

Regarding dev discussions; the key problem I find with IRC is that very often comments can fly past without being read, and sometimes when more than one thing is being discussed at once it can get hard to follow individual threads. The problem with either a video or audio venue for discussions is that they're not as easy to record and archive as IRC (you all realise there are complete logs of ##crawl-dev, right?)

Then there are discussions on wiki, c-r-d (which I've only even recently been aware of), Mantis, and of course here in the Tavern. Now each of these formats has their own benefits and drawbacks; but the primary problem is simply that discussions are distributed across so many formats. It's incredibly difficult to follow all the points of view and threads of conversation when they don't happen in a single place, let alone five! There could be an additional problem that some people are using one medium but not another - e.g. I am seeing names on c-r-d that I rarely or never see on IRC or wiki.

Now, I don't know whether things working differently would actually have changed the sequence of events that has happened over the food reform. But it could certainly make it easier to respond in cases like this (and fairer on those directly involved) if things were slightly more centralised.

[TehDruid]

I like the food reform, it makes things more realistic. However, and don't get me wrong please, I have some suggestions for an even more realistic and ideal (granted, for me only, maybe) food game, would you gentlemen please lend me an ear?

"May the gods shield me from the flaming of trollish hellfire that may befall me."

-Me, right now

Now that the prayer is over, let me get to it. Anyway, the whole idea came to me while thinking about how we treat permafood, always sparing it, looking to eat weird monsters' flesh... My whole reasoning being that In "real world" situations (as in "as a normal race character"), you'd eat permafood over any other weird chunk of meat, correct me If I'm wrong. It's not RP-y to do that. Well, I can hear a lot going "But roguelikes are not about your immersion in the game world!". To those I have to say "I realize where you are coming from and it's a very dark place, so crawl back there." Nah, just kidding, everybody has the right to their opinion no matter how much I don't like it and I hope for the same state of mind from others. But, enough with the bitching, let's get this over with.

So, I'm saying the food game should focus more on ration obtaining and management, for the non raw flesh-craving (trolls, ogres, kobolds) races.

DISCLAIMER: By no means am I saying that the suggestions in this list are complete, plausible and possible to implement by anyone even If they have the time and the skills to do it. Most of them change the game in some very non-subtle ways which is a thing that might seem daunting and I understand it if this never comes to fruition. It is merely my opinions on making the game better in the very restricted yet important area that is the food clock management. If you are offended by anything in here, you may as well go to the next available post ASAP.

Races and satiation:

1. Make all "normal" races (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Merfolks, Halflings, Naga, Kenku, Minotaur, Draconian, Demonspawn, Demigod ) eat brown chunks only at Near Starving (I'd like it to be at Starving but it would be very harsh) and "safe" chunks at hungry as it is now the case... The way I see it, you'd have to be dying to eat something as disgusting as a rat or slug flesh... It's the pride of intelligence. Keep reading, I explain how to counter this)

2. Hill Orcs: They're ok with their ability to consume rotting chunks as if they're normal "safe chunks". They have a little lower base stats than most races anyway (for this reason I guess).

3. Kobolds: Bump carnivore 3 down to 2. They are good as of now, but I don't really get why they won't eat greens at all, do they have a vitamin-C intolerance? I assume their body follows some rule like that, which is obviously a design of the game developers which is ok. Still...

4. Trolls: Eat everything. This works well and is troll-realistic. Carnivore 2 so they prefer to eat meat and get far less out of vegetables.

5. Ogres: Ah... Ogres. I'd like for Ogres the same as Trolls but with carnivore 1 and Fast metabolism 2 instead of 3 (because of no extra hp regen, like Trolls) which would help balance things.

6. Centaurs: Centaurs are not horses, they are just another humanoid species. They're depicted as great at hunting wild game (in a range, especially with bows, but also throwing spears), not farming the land, which means they probably mostly eat by hunting. I won't say you should make them carnivores, no. Just leave them as normal races. Metabolism back to 2 as it was.

7. Octopodes: I can't really see octopi eating vegetables. They're cunning predators of the deep.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus So I'd say carnivore 3.

8. Spriggans: I don't know much about the Spriggans, I'm assuming they're fey creatures and don't eat meat so leave them at herbivore 3 I guess.

Permafood (more like semi-Permafood):

a. Concerning carnivores/normal races: Produce meat rations by chopping specific "domesticated" creature corpses that seem safe and ideal for consumption, like Yaks, Death Yaks, Sheep, etc.

b. Concerning herbivores/normal races: You see trees in many areas. That means trees grow underground, I guess. So, let's say there's special fruit trees from which fruit permafood drops right next to them. Make said trees re-bear fruit after thousands of turns or just make fruit spawn next to random trees in a per-hundreds of turns manner. That would make herbivores happier, since they can't eat raw meat and you're not guaranteed to get some fruit at every game. And it would also make Fedhas more popular (even for herbivores) a deity that as we all know has many great abilities to offer but nobody thinks of him that much, except for races that never eat fruit.

c. Make permafood (yes, rations, fruit, everything) decay like chunks, but a bit differently: First you obtain it and it's FRESH (which gives more satiation), after some hundreds of turns it turns to REGULAR (non-descript, gives normal satiation) and after some thousands of turns it goes to AGED (which should give half the satiation roughly I guess?). Remove this "permafood" from the floor. It doesn't make sense (unless in a storage-themed vault in places like the gnoll fortress, etc.) since it has been left there for god knows how long. Allow humanoid and monstrous-humanoid creatures have a VERY small (like, 2-3% maybe?) chance of carrying rations and a 5% chance of a small and random amount of a type of veggies (adjust the percentages for balance), etc on them instead. Uniques should always carry some rations on them (making killing uniques more of a necessity if you're low on rations, making sense in a way, since people can kill you if they're starved (of cash ) to get your money in the real world so that they can prolong their survival), unless a beast or undead or angelic being or anything else that could not possibly hold them with it or need them.

Chunks:

My rule about chunks is that there exist two kinds of meat: Good (normal) and Potentially Life-Threatening (brown), nothing in between. Mutagenic, poisonous and rot corpses are considered brown even when immune to their effects. The difference between Good and Brown chunks is 2 levels of hunger needed in order to eat the chunk. See below:

i. Make brown quality chunks consumable at Near Starving by the "normal" non-mutated races. Herbivore 1 can eat them only at starving, herbivore 2 can't eat them, like Herbivore 3 mutation exists, where they don't eat them at all. Carnivore 1 can eat them at very hungry, carnivore 2 at hungry, carnivore 3 at satiated. Rotting chunks get a further -1 hunger needed to consume.

ii. Keep normal chunks from a few select mobs only that seem safe for eating but don't have the body mass to produce rations like mentioned in a. above. The chunks can be consumed at hungry status by "normal" races, at very hungry by herbivore 1, at near starving by herbivore 2 and not at all by herbivore 3, naturally, at satiatied by carnivore 1, at full at carnivore 2 and very full at carnivore 3. Rotting chunks are treated like brown rotting chunks, so see section i. to understand where they'll stand.

And now, derailing the topic: Well, this might seem only remotely connected to the topic, but I would go so far as to suggest making a new skill called "Survival" or "Wilderness Lore" or something from which these two abilities can be more effective. You could also tie more things to that skill, such as the chance of getting useful chunks & rations off a corpse, delaying ration rot, and improving poison recovery/sickness recovery rates. Okay I took it a little too far with the wild suggestions, I know. Please don't flame.

Well, feel free to flame, admire or ignore this post.
Also, please forgive my imperfect use of English, for It's not my mother language.

Your faithful fan,

TehDruid

P.S: If this post is way off the subject what with all the suggestions, feel free to move it in suggestions or elsewhere in a topic of its own. Or tell me, and I'll do it.

[snow]

Food is a simple balance tool. It's not supposed to be anything else... especially not some elaborate system.

[vintermann]

Food is a simple balance tool. It's not supposed to be anything else... especially not some elaborate system.

The current system isn't all that simple, if you're not used to it. We want the food system to be simple to the user, but it need not be simple under the hood.

[galehar]

I'm not trying to be another complainer on the internet, but i don't think some people realize that i donated about 2 days of my time writing, testing, and updating that patch before it went in and basically got a lot of grief for my trouble.

I also spent a lot of time on the food reform, making spreadsheest, tuning formulas, testing and tweaking your patch. Yet, I was the first the support kilobyte's revert proposal. I think we went in the wrong direction. As soon as we realized that the lower satiation requirements was bad, the "food preference" wasn't needed anymore. It just brought additional complexity for almost no gain at all. And since the whole system was designed around it, better to revert it and start over in a different direction.

I'm not surprised people dislike the multiple tresholds, but I suspect that it is because they insist on trying to do something (squeezing the most out of their permafood from eating low-quality chunks) that isn't supposed to be worth it anymore. The way the reform has failed, is that it hasn't convinced them to eat that permafood instead, so they're subjecting themselves to stress continuously which I really only wanted a player to face when they were actually low on food.

I disagree. You can't say that the system failed because the players played it wrong. Losing the food minigame means starving to death, you can't expect the player to do anything but try to play it optimally. And it means saving permafood whenever possible. Under your system, the way to do it was to be at the lowest possible satiation threshold to be able to eat the worst possible food.
If the goal is to have players rely more on permafood and less on chunks (and I think it is), then let's just start by reducing the number of chunks. We can make food more relevant by implementing a series of simple changes instead of a complicated system. Less chunks per corpse, less monster spawn, no hive, less food in bee rooms,...

dpeg, galehar, devteam: How about we keep the ryak's code in a branch, so we can at least see what can be salvaged? branches are cheap.

What's the point? I doubt anybody in the devteam is going to maintain it (I won't). If anyone wants to, he can do so in a repository clone.

[Grimm]

the goal is to have players rely more on permafood and less on chunks

Ideas:

-Have negative effects below Satiated. For example, at Hungry, have healing slow down. At Near Starving, have movement slowed. Have hunger rate increase by one for each level below satiated - i.e., the hungrier you are, the faster you get hungry.

-Possibly positive effects at higher satiation: +10% MP, greater poison/disease resist. Have hunger rate slow above satiation.

You see the point: to encourage eating permafood and staying satiated, make hunger states mean something.

Such a system might require increased quantities of permafood and reduction of chunk nutrition to near-trivial.

[Night2o1]

I'm glad to read the reform has been redacted. I understand its point, and as mentioned above I think the best adjustments would be small ones like reducing corpse drop or making more corpses inedible, say because "this creature is too bony/emaciated, and there is no salvageable/edible meat" (if simply reducing corpse drop would hurt characters who have skills that rely on corpses too much).

The post above mine is solid too.. My only roguelike before DCSSS was Dredmor. Anyway, when I was learning about the food system in DCSS I was surprised that the various hungerstates literally mean nothing until you are at near starving. I was disappointed, as that seems unintuitive. Perhaps nothing could be changed except that hungry has a small penalty to cast success and hit chance for physical attacks, and very hungry has a more significant penalty. I reckon the penalty should be very small at hungry, and become reasonably significant at very hungry (3% more miscast at hungry and say 8% more miscast at very hungry to pull numbers from my arse) this would encourage people to eat more permafood, especially to fill up when they expect things to get dicey. This wouldn't make it a big deal to run around at hungry, and not have to use up your permafood a lot, but again it would make it advisable to fill up if you are exploring a new dangerous area to avoid falling into Very Hungry as a badass monster notices you.

[bobross419]

Regarding a decrease in chunks - This would have side effects on things like Simulacrum, the Necro channeling spell, and Corpse Rot.

It might be safer and even easier to just modify the amount of satiation granted from chunks than to reduce the number of chunks altogether.

[Night2o1]

Regarding a decrease in chunks - This would have side effects on things like Simulacrum, the Necro channeling spell, and Corpse Rot.

It might be safer and even easier to just modify the amount of satiation granted from chunks than to reduce the number of chunks altogether.

I am not sure if it would be more annoying to have to stop, butcher, and nibble every corpse that drops or if it'd be more annoying to have a % chance that a corpse drop will be inedible because the monster was too emaciated to provide any edible meat.

[bobross419]

Regarding a decrease in chunks - This would have side effects on things like Simulacrum, the Necro channeling spell, and Corpse Rot.

It might be safer and even easier to just modify the amount of satiation granted from chunks than to reduce the number of chunks altogether.

I am not sure if it would be more annoying to have to stop, butcher, and nibble every corpse that drops or if it'd be more annoying to have a % chance that a corpse drop will be inedible because the monster was too emaciated to provide any edible meat.

Annoyance isn't the point. The point is that there are other factors to the number of chunks than just satiation. If its determined that the effects of decreasing chunk count wouldn't be detrimental to other chunk using mechanics then it doesn't really matter. I was simply pointing out that there would be side effects to decreasing chunk count.

Fewer chunks would have a stronger impact on early and super late game, whereas reducing chunk satiation would help smooth out the early game (compared to fewer chunks) while still having no significant impact on super late game.

[galehar]

Annoyance isn't the point.

Actually it is. Reducing chunk nutrition directly translate into more frequent butchering and eating. Reducing chunks does the opposite. The chunk using spells (which corpse rot isn't part of btw) can be buffed to compensate if needed.