"Gourmand -> "Sustenance

[luckless]

Amulets of the gourmand should be replaced with amulets of sustenance, which eliminate all hunger when worn.*

Justification: Except for a few edge cases which don't matter and/or could easily be handled individually, these would have identical effects to amulets of the gourmand in practice except for being (a) simpler and less tedious, and (b) not abusable.

Amulets of the gourmand are abusable because they encourage the most degenerate and laborious kind of swapping. (The attunement period is virtually a non-factor here.) If you're going to use an amulet of the gourmand, the optimal way to use it is to only put it on when you're running low on nutrition, wear it for a couple of fights against popcorn (which maybe you encountered earlier and kept alive for this very purpose), eat until you're engorged, switch back to another amulet, and rinse and repeat.

An amulet that just removed hunger entirely when worn would prevent this. (You could still abuse it by putting it on before resting or exploring, but this could be easily prevented by giving it a big one-time hunger cost like with vampiric weapons, or by setting your satiation to starving when you take it off.) Since amulets of the gourmand mean you virtually never have to resort to permafood regardless of how much you cast or berserk, the result would be identical in practice except in the following edge cases:

• Extended: clearly doesn't matter. Despite the relative paucity of edible corpses, food supply is only anywhere close being an issue in extended if you're really lazy, really sloppy, or like to grind, but these are exactly the kind of players who will go out of their way to get Necromutation anyway. (I speak from experience.)
• Necromancers: it's true that you can only reanimate what you don't eat, but in practice this only adds tedium since you just have to be a little choosy about what you cut up. Safe to ignore.
• Spriggans: if it's essential that they always have to rely on permafood, just prevent them from wearing the amulet and hand-wave a reason why. imo probably fine to just let them wear it though.
• Gozag: same thing as spriggans. In practice, amulets of sustenance would work a lot like amulets of piety for Gozag worshippers. I could see why someone might worry about this but honestly I bet it would be fine and in any case you could hand-wave a restriction ("too anti-consumerist!")

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* this originally was going to be a reply to this similar post, but I think it deserves its own topic. also it seems likely that this idea has been put forward before, maybe multiple times, possibly by me on an occasion I forgot about. if so, apologies.

[Hellmonk]

One implication of "sustenance is that it guarantees you'll never starve as soon as one is generated, since you can just swap it on once you run out of food. Another implication of the version that sets you to starving on removal is that you can swap it on before doing a very long autotravel, say from U:5 to A:4, and then kill something that leaves chunks to maybe save a ration. If food actually mattered then these things would probably be bad. The proposed "sustenance is still better than "gourmand though. At least I can just turn food off if I choose to wear it instead of having to keep on juggling chunks all game.

My solution to "gourmand is to remove it. I am honestly amazed that it survived amulet reform untouched. Tedious? Check. Barely does anything? Check. 'Turns off' a game mechanic? Check. Why the hell does it still exist? "Sustenance would solve the first problem but not the other two. Of course, the game mechanic it turns off should be turned off for all characters all the time. We have to talk about edge cases like 0 spellcasting shatter rush or "what if necromancers get one extra orc zombie instead of an orc skeleton" in every thread about hunger because food straight up does not matter in the vast majority of scenarios. It strikes me as a little ridiculous to wring our hands at the edge case balance implications of a mechanic that manages to require rcfile automation or hundreds of keypresses every game and also manages to barely do anything. Let's quit trying to extend the shelf-life of this stale mechanic and #removefoodin0.21.

[watertreatmentRL]

This is a half-measure which, like the existence of mummies, would come up as an argument against food removal as long as the game continues to be actively developed. "Hey, there's this thing that's already in the game that 'removes food,' so logically food must do something and be an important thing to keep around."

In my opinion, the last year or so of active development outside the DCSS process shows one thing very conclusively: Going for a total solution to a problem rather than an incremental or compromise position is always better. Even if the total solution isn't perfect and requires further revision.

Obviously, the full solution I refer to here is food removal. This sustenance amulet would be wildly superior to the gourmand amulet of current crawl in terms of gameplay. It would be bad for the game in the long run, as I suspect autobutcher will be. Further entrenching bad mechanics is bad.

[Airwolf]

I'll argue the opposite: " of sustenance seems like a wedge that might lead to Crawl adopting total foodlessness.

[luckless]

I'll argue the opposite: " of sustenance seems like a wedge that might lead to Crawl adopting total foodlessness.

Yeah, this strikes me at least as likely as the alternatives.

In any case, it also strikes me as more likely that the devs can be convinced to replace "gourmand with "sustenance than they can be convinced to remove food, since the case for removing food is pretty undeniable at this point and it still hasn't happened.

[Sprucery]

Did you know that we used to have rings of sustenance (removed in 0.15)? They didn't eliminate hunger but reduced the hunger cost of your actions by 40% (stackable).

[watertreatmentRL]

In any case, it also strikes me as more likely that the devs can be convinced to replace "gourmand with "sustenance than they can be convinced to remove food, since the case for removing food is pretty undeniable at this point and it still hasn't happened.

I mean, from skimming search results on food in #crawl-dev logs, it sounds like most active developers are more or less on board with food removal and that this has been the case for some time now. I'm not sure there's a lot of convincing left to do. Seems to be a process thing.

[njvack]

Did you know that we used to have rings of sustenance (removed in 0.15)? They didn't eliminate hunger but reduced the hunger cost of your actions by 40% (stackable).

Huh, I didn't realize they did that; I just thought they lowered your base food consumption rate. Not that it made a lot of practical difference.

Also it looks like the Staff of Energy still exists and gives hungerless casting, so we already have an item with the "turn off food mattering in the one case where it occasionally might kind of matter" function.

[mattlistener]

Gourmand is early-game relevant for some characters. It's ok to have items like that right?

Food is relevant for some characters. Probably more than is commonly thought because people habitually don't explore avenues of development that would be open if hunger were a non-issue.

I would try a foodless branch of DCSS. I bet it would raise quite a lot of issues. eg you're not "done" with a floor until you've hit its OOD timer.

[WingedEspeon]

Gourmand is early-game relevant for some characters. It's ok to have items like that right?

Food is relevant for some characters. Probably more than is commonly thought because people habitually don't explore avenues of development that would be open if hunger were a non-issue.

I would try a foodless branch of DCSS. I bet it would raise quite a lot of issues. eg you're not "done" with a floor until you've hit its OOD timer.

OOD stuff can start spawning before a normal crawl character has finished exploring the floor already. Sticking around for the OOD timer is more dangerous than just moving on already, even for Mu.

The 0 spellcasting shatter rush is stupid, you should train spellcasting when the cost of a spellcasting level is less than 1/4 of the cost of the spell school when rushing a single school spell.

[watertreatmentRL]

Gourmand is early-game relevant for some characters. It's ok to have items like that right?

No.

I would try a foodless branch of DCSS. I bet it would raise quite a lot of issues. eg you're not "done" with a floor until you've hit its OOD timer.

There is an actively developed fork with no food, hellcrawl. It also has no OOD timer, so you can evaluate for yourself whether there is a significant advantage to be had in first-hit-scumming and the other weird notions people have re: food as an anti-scumming measure.

[bananaken]

There is an actively developed fork with no food, hellcrawl. It also has no OOD timer, so you can evaluate for yourself whether there is a significant advantage to be had in first-hit-scumming and the other weird notions people have re: food as an anti-scumming measure.

My experience has been that most, if not all, of the times you get to do some form of meaningful scumming is when you've secured the level and can guarantee you're in a 1v1 situation. This way you can do pillar dancing without being cut off or other silly things like closing a door on a single enemy repeatedly. The potential for scumming in the context of hellcrawl is there but it's already pretty tame since the benefit is pretty miniscule compared to simply making sure you clear floors proactively so you don't miss out on XP before you go to the next floor (since there's no upstairs).

I'd go as far as saying scumming potential is worse in the base game with the existence of stair dancing alone, since the current composite "clock" is not effective at all in enforcing a cost appropriate for stairdancing.

[Kersey]

I'd like to suggest that Sustenance just remove food costs of actions/spells/abilities. Let normal food clock run.
If thats too strong, then i suppose half natural timer would be nice too?

[svendre]

I find Gourmand pretty useless these days. I've used it before, I'm not sure exactly what happened but currently I always toss them aside. The only time I have trouble with food is with Gozag, and not all that often still. I'll toss them for regenerations, mana regeneration or reflection any day now.