Suggestion: Merge Bread and Meat Rations

[xentronium]

Why not merge meat and bread rations to simply be 'rations'?

With the removal of carnivore/herbivore bad mutations, the only real difference this would make would be that more permafood would be available to Spriggans. This could easily be compensated by increasing Spriggan metabolism or giving them "inefficient digestion" (less food/ration). It would also be a very slight buff to ghouls.

Another way of putting it: right now we have "food 1" and "food 2" which are identical except that spriggans can't eat "food 2".

[nago]

Also kobolds and cats but I don't believe that really matters

[bcadren]

Can we remove Beef Jerkies and Pizza Slices while were at it? [I'd say Merge Jerky, Pizza and Fruit into one thing; but...Fedhas.]

[le_nerd]

Thats not only true for meat/bread, but also for beef jerky, pizza, royal rellies. We have 5 different sorts of food. With a strict interpretation I can see the need for 4: strategic vegetarian/carnivorous (take 3 turns to eat a bread/meat rations) and tactic vege/carni, take 1 turn to eat a jerky/fruit because you were stupid and are starving to death in a fight.

I dont even know why royal jellies are still a thing btw.

We can tone that down to 2 food stuffs in different ways:

1) Make the defining factor vegetarian/carnivorous, and make rations eatable in 1 turn.

Pro: No fiddling with spriggan metabolism needed.
Pro: No change in Felid/Kobold metabolism needed.

Con: Fedhas needs major redesign. (hard)
Con: People will whine about having to eat a full ration even if they are only starving a little bit!!!

2) Get rid of vegetarian/carnivorous, and make the defining factor the time it takes to eat.

Pro: no fiddling with Fedhas needed

Con: Spriggans need increased metabolism or some other solution for increased permafood. (easy)
Con: Felid/Kobold have more permafood. Which, those being natural gourmands, was honestly never a problem with balance at all.

So yeah, totally in favour.

[archaeo]

Fedhas needs major redesign

I have thoughts about that because I was thinking about removing food earlier.

You could make "potions" into "herbs" and require sacrificing those instead.

Or, you could just make Fedhas' abilities take piety, like normal.

Or, you could retain fruit, and make them useless for characters that aren't worshipping Fedhas.

I bet there's a better way, though!

[Wahaha]

Praying sometimes makes fruit instead of toadstools.

[mps]

My suggestion: Remove Fedhas and Ashenzari, then remove the concepts of food and curses from the game entirely. Give Sif an ability that increases your magic skills by 5, like heroism does for combat skills, then call it a day. Tons of cruft removed, nothing of value lost. No more item gods.

[Arrhythmia]

nothing of value lost.

well, except for the two really good gods

[TeshiAlair]

Orrrrrrrrr just don't touch Sif because Sif is fine, don't remove two gods just because they have two fiddly mechanics that can easily be gained, and don't remove food because, with the removal of eating poisonous chunks, Spider is a lot more interesting now.

[le_nerd]

Its not about removing food entirely (yet), just merging some useless inventory juggling. And how in gods name did spider get more interesting suddenly? You have to eat like 3-5 rations now, unless you incur humongous hunger somehow. Oh noes, I will only have left 35 instead of 40 rations left at end of game!

There is too much food in the game by a lot, and not eating spider/snake chunks doesnt even put a dent into that food pile.

[roctavian]

If it were up to me, we should remove all food except pizza.

[bel]

I think the purpose of royal jelly is that it can be eaten by both herbivores and carnivores. Also it takes only 2 turns to eat.
I agree with suggestion in OP.

[dpeg]

Royal jellies are one more instance of humour. I will defend them to the death.

There was an attempt to get rid of pizzas, probably even more than once. Turns out that too many developers like them, gotta try again.

I wouldn't mind combining rations. If we want to keep Spriggan food balance (which is okay, and a good example, in my opinion, as there's only permafood for them), we could make new-rations inedible for them and increase nutrition from jellies/fruits for Spriggans. (That makes Sp^Fedhas harder but who cares, it's a power species anyway.)

Sacrificing two gods for food streamlining is an exceptionally dumb idea. (I am learning my posting methods from the best!)

Finally: trying to generalise the original idea (combine meat & bread) into a sweeping food reform is the best way to achieve nothing.

[Curio]

Personally, I'm saddened that now it's more logical to merge two rations into one, instead of differentiating them enough to avoid that. But with gradual dumbing down of a food system there is not much point to have so many food items.
Possibly, when there's only one food type left - food system might be removed altogether.

[asdu]

Personally, I'm saddened that now it's more logical to merge two rations into one, instead of differentiating them enough to avoid that. But with gradual dumbing down of a food system there is not much point to have so many food items.
Possibly, when there's only one food type left - food system might be removed altogether.

(thanked by mistake)

There was never a need for 15+ food types, removing honeycombs and cheese etc made it smarter, not dumber. Actually, when that happened, I was quite disappointed that pizzas and royal jellies and beef jerkies were kept.
Ideally the current system should be distilled down to chunks and one permafood item, or, for a more moderate approach, chunks, rations, royal jellies (for humour and spriggans) and fruits (for Fedhas).

[Curio]

snip

(here, take this thanks in return)
I'm not advocating for 15+ types of food. I just saying that it would be good if there were a meaningful difference between carnivore and herbivore food types.

[Sprucery]

I liked cheese, or rather, I liked the flavour messages (what cheese is this?). In my opinion, pizza, cheese, jerkies and royal jellies could be combined in inventory the same way fruit are. Then when you ate one, you would get a random flavour message. Nutrition value could be set to 2000, for example, and maybe spriggans just could not pick up jerkies.

[Sandman25]

As long as food is plentiful and functions as it currently does food differentiation will not trigger any interesting decisions because you will eat ration without monsters in LoS (even if you don't need that many calories) and 1-turn food with monsters in LoS (because you cannot afford spending more time being paralyzed).

[le_nerd]

@Sandman: indeed, deciding which permafood to eat is not an interesting decision, and should in theory be gotten rid of.

If the devs are so in favour of royal jellies and pizza, why not make those the primary foodstuffs? I'd totally be in favour. I am in favour of any changes related to food that stops us having it being a factor at all.

[njvack]

I wouldn't mind combining rations. If we want to keep Spriggan food balance (which is okay, and a good example, in my opinion, as there's only permafood for them), we could make new-rations inedible for them and increase nutrition from jellies/fruits for Spriggans.

Alternately, make new-rations give partial nutrition.

My sense is that fruits are a particularly stochastic nutrition source; there seem to be a bunch of fruit vaults but fewer ration vaults. I should really consult objstat before making claims like this, though :/

[Marbit]

Marbit propossal:
Change bread to "bread rations" and meat to "meat rations".
These items work like fruit in the sense that they merge into "food rations" when picked from the ground.
Species with dietary restrictions keep them separated as they were in the ground.

Pros: Simple change, no species or gods need to be altered.

[Siegurt]

Royal jellies are one more instance of humour. I will defend them to the death.

There was an attempt to get rid of pizzas, probably even more than once. Turns out that too many developers like them, gotta try again.

I wouldn't mind combining rations. If we want to keep Spriggan food balance (which is okay, and a good example, in my opinion, as there's only permafood for them), we could make new-rations inedible for them and increase nutrition from jellies/fruits for Spriggans. (That makes Sp^Fedhas harder but who cares, it's a power species anyway.)

Sacrificing two gods for food streamlining is an exceptionally dumb idea. (I am learning my posting methods from the best!)

Finally: trying to generalise the original idea (combine meat & bread) into a sweeping food reform is the best way to achieve nothing.

I am worried that there would not be enough and spriggans would end up shoehorned into roles that don't demand much extra food, I also don't like the idea of racially based resource constraints on god worship (tactical restraints I think are good and fine) but playing a spriggan of fedhas and having to micromanage your food doesn't sound fun to me. (Both of these concerns are addressable, but do require some thought and care)

[duvessa]

Royal jellies are one more instance of humour. I will defend them to the death.

Wait, how? Royal jelly isn't necessarily a NetHack reference (though it was originally included as one), it's an actual substance. Unless you're talking about that one vault?

[dpeg]

No more explaining of jokes. Either people get it or they don't.

[Berder]

There's really only 2 kinds of permafood needed: rations and fruit. Logically each ration is a complete meal containing both meat and veggies. Carnivores and vegetarians get half nutrition from rations since they can't eat half of it.

[partial]

why do you people hate flavor?

don't you guys wanna eat dungeon pizza?

[archaeo]

why do you people hate flavor?

don't you guys wanna eat dungeon pizza?

First off, the idea that Crawl is losing some significant amount of flavor is a criticism meme I will never understand. If you go into your bedroom, light 13 sexy elf-shaped candles, and summon duvessa, his ghostly presence will hang there in your room and talk about how in every version, far more goes into crawl than comes out of the game. Every time someone suggests removing something, a whole chorus shows up to decry the flavor cost, yet Crawl still remains an enormous game filled to the brim with stuff, great stuff, all of it lovingly described and given cute individual quotes and pleasant tiles.

People aren't annoyed with flavor; they're annoyed with the time that gets wasted every time you have to pick something to drop from your inventory so you can pick up chunks again, and how that process repeats itself every time autoexplore auto-picks up something while your existing chunks rot away. Or how there are so many food types that are mechanically indistinguishable (except for a time cost that is only relevant if you don't know what you're doing!) and remain because, I don't know, "Royal Jelly" sounds funny in German or something, or because we like to pretend that Spriggans really struggle to stay sufficiently well-fed. Or they don't think a tepid joke like "the fabled Pandemonium Pizza!" is funny enough to merit an entire item that takes up its own item slot, or etc.

[Sar]

except pizza descriptions are funny

I do wish pizza was a rare spawn, though, so you just find it and eat it

[duvessa]

well you could solve both problems by making it so pizza is automatically eaten as soon as it's found (even if you are engorged or a mummy)

[Berder]

except pizza descriptions are funny

I do wish pizza was a rare spawn, though, so you just find it and eat it

Generic "rations" could have a chance to give a pizza message as if you ate a slice of pizza, upon eating them. Sometimes the rations come with pizza.

[Sar]

well you could solve both problems by making it so pizza is automatically eaten as soon as it's found (even if you are engorged or a mummy)

The pizza lunges at you and you devour it hungrily in an instant!

[tasonir]

My explanation, and I may be wrong, is that "royal jelly" is funny because it comes from the "queen bee". So it's a play on monarchies in the insect kingdom, when really the queen bee is mostly just reproductive organs. With the hive removal this connection may not be as obvious anymore. You can still get vaults with queen bee + bees + royal jellies, but you can just as easily find royal jelly laying randomly on the floor.

[Sar]

royal jelly is funny because you find a semi-common food called royal jelly (which exists IRL) and eat it and much later you go into Slime and find the royal jelly and it kills you horribly

well or you just read wiki/learndb

[bananaken]

I feel like we need The Royal Jelly (the enemy) to explode into tiny royal jellies (tiny enemies) that die and just become royal jelly (food) to really hammer the point home

[duvessa]

royal jelly is funny because you find a semi-common food called royal jelly (which exists IRL) and eat it and much later you go into Slime and find the royal jelly and it kills you horribly

But since royal jelly exists in real life, surely The Royal Jelly's pun works just fine without there being an item called "royal jelly" too? That's why I mentioned "that one vault" (the one that's laid out like a miniature slime:6 with a royal jelly item in the center), it's the only place in the game where the item is actually needed for a joke. The "tarantella" joke works without the game including folk dances or tarantulas.

[Sar]

there are actually multiple vaults that connects jellies with royal jelly

[ragnarokchu]

why do you people hate flavor?

don't you guys wanna eat dungeon pizza?

First off, the idea that Crawl is losing some significant amount of flavor is a criticism meme I will never understand. If you go into your bedroom, light 13 sexy elf-shaped candles, and summon duvessa, his ghostly presence will hang there in your room and talk about how in every version, far more goes into crawl than comes out of the game. Every time someone suggests removing something, a whole chorus shows up to decry the flavor cost, yet Crawl still remains an enormous game filled to the brim with stuff, great stuff, all of it lovingly described and given cute individual quotes and pleasant tiles.

People aren't annoyed with flavor; they're annoyed with the time that gets wasted every time you have to pick something to drop from your inventory so you can pick up chunks again, and how that process repeats itself every time autoexplore auto-picks up something while your existing chunks rot away. Or how there are so many food types that are mechanically indistinguishable (except for a time cost that is only relevant if you don't know what you're doing!) and remain because, I don't know, "Royal Jelly" sounds funny in German or something, or because we like to pretend that Spriggans really struggle to stay sufficiently well-fed. Or they don't think a tepid joke like "the fabled Pandemonium Pizza!" is funny enough to merit an entire item that takes up its own item slot, or etc.

Well to be fair it isn't like it is partially game breaking or of any balance concern that there are an extra few types of redundant food mechanics, nothing is really gain or loss other then personal opinion whenever or not having more visually appealing food types is less annoying then one stack of generic food. It's not like people are buckling under the completely not restrictive inventory system. It was the same with racial gear that was removed awhile back too, removing racial bonuses for a certain type of gear was okay but it didn't really hurt anyone that stuff would randomly have elven in front or not.

[duvessa]

a major reason for removing racial items was that unspoiled players assumed the bonus for wielding a weapon matching your race was much higher than it was

[and into]

It was the same with racial gear that was removed awhile back too, removing racial bonuses for a certain type of gear was okay but it didn't really hurt anyone that stuff would randomly have elven in front or not.

Plenty of players used gear that was worse than other stuff they had because they misunderstood the (tiny) boosts of racial equipment, such as demonspawn getting a (slight) damage bonus when using demon <foo> weapons. In part, these kinds of misunderstanding are reinforced due to the entirely reasonable expectation that such bonuses would not be included in a game if they did not actually matter, particularly given Crawl's stated game design philosophy.

So, yes, bad design did, and does, actually affect people negatively.

Auto-pickup is wonderful, things that make it more annoying are a problem. How big of a problem, and the best way to solve that problem, is of course a matter of discussion.

EDIT: duvessa beat me to the punch, but I posted more words, so there

[Sprucery]

The baby went with the bath water, however, when elven ring mails, cloaks an boots were removed instead of just removing the racial bonuses. Branded elven ring mails were excellent for casters and the cloaks and boots provided stealth. Not a big deal, best to think that it was a slight nerf and that's ok I guess.

[duvessa]

The baby went with the bath water, however, when elven ring mails, cloaks an boots were removed instead of just removing the racial bonuses. Branded elven ring mails were excellent for casters and the cloaks and boots provided stealth. Not a big deal, best to think that it was a slight nerf and that's ok I guess.

"basically leather armour that's called ring mail" and "boots that provide stealth, but not as much as boots of stealth" are babies i wouldn't care much about throwing out, personally

[ragnarokchu]

a major reason for removing racial items was that unspoiled players assumed the bonus for wielding a weapon matching your race was much higher than it was

Well I was more talking about the fact items can randomly be of a different variety like elven xyz then the bonus behind it, if they removed the racial bonus of the gear and just kept the item as flavor it wouldn't unnecessarily be any worse off then it was.

The arguments would it that it could confuse players or having redundant things is bad in the game, pros for it would be it adds flavor without effecting game balance at all. Personally I'm all for adding flavor when it doesn't effect game balance because I just find the game more interesting/fun that way. Game isn't always about optimizing equipment slots/item slots and being a complete competitive game where everything is 100% crystal clear with a intended competitive purpose.

Merging together bread and meat ration is another step is removing the flavor/mechanics that races have differences in eating/metabolism habits that directly change gameplay balance and game progression. We already removed almost all differences in races in eating and metabolism rates, at this rate we should just take look at the food system if we are going down this path.

[dpeg]

I believe that several aspects are conflated here.

1) Food has a gameplay function: it is intended as a (pretty weak) stopgap to some activities. Despite popular belief, however, it is possible that food shortage is noticeable. For this, you need exactly one food item. For this, the question whether there should be renewable food (chunks) is also crucial -- we'd have a much tighter control on the food clock if all food came from items.

2) There are some minor extra effects slapped onto food: carnivore vs herbivore, and fruits for Fedhas. The former could be dispensed with (ruling that Spriggans just won't eat chunks), the latter could be replaced by a Fedhas-only item type (I'd hate that).

3) Some food items are purely there for flavour/humour: pizza, royal jelly.

I don't follow that any players, including new ones, are confused by the food types. (That's a difference to racial items, which did mislead people.) Eating is as painless as never in Crawl. Crawl Light did away with food altogether (try it if that sounds good for you, and report). I'd prefer to keep and strengthen the limitations that food does bring.

[Sprucery]

"basically leather armour that's called ring mail"

No. AC 5, enchantable to +5 is much better than AC 3, enchantable to +3.

"boots that provide stealth, but not as much as boots of stealth"

What's wrong with having boots with smaller stealth bonus than boots of stealth? Items that grant rF+ are not useless just because there are also items that grant rF++ in the game.

[Rast]

So basically a kind of dragon armor that you get from killing elves instead of killing dragons

[Sprucery]

So basically a kind of dragon armor that you get from killing elves instead of killing dragons

Except that you usually found one earlier (in D or Orc) without having to go to Elf.

[Rast]

Sounds imbalanced. Good thing they removed it!

[Sprucery]

Yeah, well, like I said, it was a slight nerf (and I don't mind that). It just bugs me that the reason for removing elven armour was getting rid of the stupid racial bonuses (at least it was expressed that way), when in fact that was not the most relevant result of the removal, imo.

(This has nothing to do with bread and meat rations though, sorry for derailing.)

[tedric]

the idea that Crawl is losing some significant amount of flavor is a criticism meme I will never understand

actually, the flavor argument works BEST in the case of food

except chokos, those are pretty bland

[mps]

Sacrificing two gods for food streamlining is an exceptionally dumb idea. (I am learning my posting methods from the best!)

Whereas adding two gods based on items that the game would be better without is an exceptionally smart idea.