Contaminated Chunks

[snow]

If nausea was removed and only carnivores could eat contaminated chunks would the effects be positive or negative?

I find that if you don't berserk often and don't cast really high hunger spells you can survive off just clean chunks and permanent food. Furthermore ring of sustenance is rather common, you can always acquire for food if you need it late game, and there are many outs to surviving if you find yourself without any food... so I think the food clock would be manageable even if contaminated chunks aren't edible.

I'm not really for or against a tight food clock... I just feel nausea punishes the player based on luck and I don't think that is fun. If a centaur gets a lucky hit on you it can be exciting and the luck factor is fun but with nausea it's not exciting at all and just makes you annoyed.

I know most people don't like my suggestions or ideas so thank you for listening and I hope you like this one.

Also this could be expanded a bit... at the moment carnivores are always engorged. Maybe simply allowing them to eat contaminated chunks would be enough if nausea was removed? But they couldn't eat till engorged anymore and Trolls could get a little less hungry all the time too for balance.

[evilmike]

I think it would be better than the current system.

I'm one of those people who doesn't find nausea very annoying... mainly because I don't eat contaminated chunks that often in the first place. When I do, I always have a "backup plan" where I'll just eat permafood instead if I get nausea, or quaff curing if I have a big enough stockpile of those. So no big deal. I prefer it over the old sickness system, only because with nausea I feel there is no pressing need to "rest it off".

That said, what I just described is still bad gameplay. Nausea doesn't really add anything to the game for me. Among my many gripes with Crawl's food system, one big complaint is that it's too demanding of your attention, getting in the way of the more interesting parts of the game. And I don't think the food system should try to be highly-involved, either... in fact, I believe we can make it more "interesting" by stripping away the bad parts as much as we are able to. When I look at roguelikes that have the best food systems, they are always the ones with the most straghtforward systems.

Therefore, I think your suggestion is a good idea: get rid of Nausea from Crawl, and simply make contaminated chunks useless to non-carnivores. Worry about the balance implications later. I suspect there are no serious ones.

[dpeg]

I second this. When I supported and refined the food change programme, I was deluded: it is much harder to come up with interesting choices via eating than it is via combat or stuff that comes up rarely. Perhaps a reason is that food is *not* about consumables (chunks are consumed, but they are infinite in most of the game).

Also, having played Brogue, I was really envious of the tight food clock that game sets up. (Good Brogue players complain that the clock is not nearly tight enough, but I felt the pressure all the time.) It's probably unrealistic to expect something like for Crawl, but slowly tightening the availability of free food (chunks) seems good to me.

[KoboldLord]

My only complaint about the food clock is that the gap between normal satiation and engorged is way too enormous. Gourmand or carnivore 1 basically triples your safe margin. It isn't too hard to thread the needle between normal satiation and starving even with a high-hunger spellcaster or a healer, but once you have one of those two things it stops being interesting entirely.

To fix that, it seems like a good idea to have carnivore and gourmand only allow you up to full from eating chunks, and rescale the satiation levels above normal so that full comes in at around 3,500 and the rest of them are spaced evenly up until engorged. That way, there's still no chance of wasting nutrition from rations, but the span of the scale under normal use is much shorter.

I never really saw the big deal about nausea. If it keeps me from eating chunks when I have them available, I just use a permafood. I have enough.

[pubby]

A much replacement for gourmand is sustinence. Both reduce the importance of the food clock, but one requires hitting 'ce' three times as much.

Also, what if carnivore/saprovore were the only way to eat contaminated chunks (and without nausea)? Having more food available for those races seems better than allowing them to eat more often.

[evilmike]

Regarding food clock suggestions:

I see the proposal in this thread primarily as a move to streamline the interface, with the effects on the food clock being secondary. It is a minor change which I think can be done by itself (we can worry about all the other stuff later).

It's fine to talk about things like gourmand, satiation levels, etc, but they are really a much broader topic than what this thread initially brought up.

[yogaFLAME]

It might make contaminated-heavy places early on like orc a nuisance. Not difficult, just a nuisance: which is actually a pretty good summary of the food clock in its current state. That's all it takes to make Ce unpopular.

[Guppyfry]

I vote yes on OP suggestion. Nausea and sickness from eating are annoying. Outright restrictions of eating bad meat makes mores sense to keep the game running. There could be more early veggie food vaults placed if there was a concern about non-carnivore nutrition caused by this.

[mad]

And perhaps a new food item that can only be eaten by people with the herb mutation if balance could be an issue?

Perhaps the mighty snozzcumber could even be repurposed for this? (After all, I HIGHLY doubt a creature that has a taste for raw chunks of flesh could stomach one of those revolting things. Maybe a particularly large, particularly affable ogre, but that's it...)

[cerebovssquire]

In the book where the snozzcumber comes from (Roald Dahl, The BFG) a giant who naturally likes man-flesh (iirc) forces snozzcumbers down for moral reasons and survives on them

[white_noise]

I would prefer some "cooking" feature than plainly cutting off things like nausea or sickness, but I think I've read about cooking in ideas that will never be implemented. Anyway, if you want less distractions and annoyance it may be a good idea to get rid of hunger at all. You do not lose much, because noone dies from hunger, but it keeps bugging you all the way.

PS
Also, if you kill something with poisonous weapon or spell, the chunks need to be poisoned too.

[mad]

@cerebovssquire - yes, that was my joke. I did mention a large, affable ogre, did I not?

[galehar]

I'm one of those people who doesn't find nausea very annoying... mainly because I don't eat contaminated chunks that often in the first place. When I do, I always have a "backup plan" where I'll just eat permafood instead if I get nausea, or quaff curing if I have a big enough stockpile of those. So no big deal. I prefer it over the old sickness system, only because with nausea I feel there is no pressing need to "rest it off".

I feel exactly the same. Nausea is an improvement over sickness, but the OP's proposal is a decent idea. Streamlining the food system is good, I support it.

My only complaint about the food clock is that the gap between normal satiation and engorged is way too enormous. Gourmand or carnivore 1 basically triples your safe margin.

Actually, carnivore 1 stop at Full, and carni 2 at Very Full. One of the few things which were kept from the food reform, but not very noticeable since no species start with carni 1 or 2. Gourmand could maybe be nerfed to carni 1 or 2 level. And your suggestion of adjusting the hunger scale seems like a good idea too. I think this thing has never been really considered in DCSS history, even during the food reform.

[dpeg]

+1 to galehar (to have some concrete proposal)

[snow]

I know it's a bit off topic but does carnivore actually need 3 levels?

I could imagine just having 2 levels of carnivore and 2 levels of herbivore could be workable: the extreme cases for trolls ans spriggans then the mild versions for kobolds, felids, and centaurs.

Gourmand at carnivore 1 sounds good if noncarnivores can't eat unclean chunks since it'll be MUCH more useful after such a change regardless.

[sardonica]

How about removing nausea and making it so that:

if you eat a chunk you get x nutrition

Contaminated chunk is x/2 nutrition except for carnivore 1 , who gets full nutrition from contam but cannot get "full" from chunks.

Carnivore 2 lets them get "full" from chunks.

This would be a lot simpler.

[snow]

What if those mutations just had one level each? Herbivore 1 does basically nothing right now.

Gourmand or carnivore 1 basically triples your safe margin.

...and still upholds the tradition of every amulet except faith being near-worthless for anything except sheer convenience. Better to remove it than nerf it if you think its effect is bad, since it already sucks.

So... centaur would lose herbivore? That sounds fine honestly.

[sardonica]

Eat a contaminated chunk:

"Eww, that didn't taste good, you spit most of it out!"

Lose the chunk, gain some fraction of a chunk's worth of nutrition.

carnivore mutation removes or ameliorates this effect.

[galehar]

I sent this to c-r-d and here is elliptic's answer:

I don't think anything that reduces early-game food by this much is a good idea... we don't actually want players to starve! Also, doing this would remove any interest in the matter... just some chars would have more chunks than others. I'd prefer to just remove the contaminated/clean distinction period if we don't like nausea. (Personally I think nausea is reasonably interesting though.)

[sanka]

Well, if you fear that early players will starve, give them two rations instead of one. Or generate more rats. I rarely eat brown chunks in the early game (with non trolls-ghouls-kobolds), and I have only starved with spriggans. I do not think this matters, really.

Early game is short, but nausea will bother you troughout the game.

Removing the distinction is also good, tough it will make food even more abundant than now. I tought that a little (not too much) tightening of the food clock was planned.

[snow]

Is early game starvation really an issue? An extra ration could fix that. Also in what ways is nausea interesting? That's the part I don't understand the most. I always thought it was just a way to tighten the food clock.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Realistically, early game is the only time you will be without 5 or 10 extra ration for most characters. If you cast a bunch of ## and #### hunger spells and get really unlucky with corpses, and lose access to the guaranteed ration somhow, I can see a character starving. This is basically the only wy I can think of, though.

[BlackSheep]

I liked the change from sickness to nausea. Prior to that, I never ate contaminated chunks unless I was starving. The change came along with the removal of the Hive, which took a lot of food out of the dungeon. Since food still isn't really an issue, maybe tightening the clock more by removing contaminated chunks from all but carnivores is a good idea. That or making contaminated chunks a hard choice by reintroducing sickness.