The hunger mechanism needs work

[elloco999]

I think it is possible (and everybody uses it) to (ab)use the hunger system in your advantage. Let me explain.

As soon as you start starving, your condition drops 1% per hour as long as you make sure the other stats don't get too bad. So you can keep this up for roughly 3 days (not letting your condition drop below 30% or so, for safety's sake) before eating your fill, sleeping a lot and heal back up to 100%. Now I don't think there's anything wrong with how this part works. If I'm not doing anything but drink and sleep/ sit, maybe walk a bit around this would be somewhat realistic. I say somewhat, because unlike IRL you can do this over and over again in TLD, while IRL your body would not be able to recover from 3 days of starving that quickly and be starving again for 3 days.

But other than the -1% condition per hour there is no further penalty for starving. And this is where the problem lies. I use this mechanism to forage for wood for free for one. Normally when you forage for wood it costs you 300 calories. Now that's a lot more than doing nothing for an hour. But when your starving (and already at -1500 calories) doing nothing for an hour means you loose 1% condition. Foraging wood for an hour costs you the exact same: 1% condition. So why would I do nothing/ sleep when foraging for wood costs me the same? (Of course you need to sleep to let your fatigue go down but that's only 6-8 hour per day)

So I say starving should have a bigger impact on everything you do. Maybe not directly when you get to -1 calories, but -1500 calories should do more than just lower your condition 1%. I see several options:

1. The amount of condition lost per hour could be linked to your calories. -1 to -499 = -1%, -500 to -999 = -2%, -1000 to -1499 = -3% and -1500 = -4%. That way the player will be motivated to keep the calories from dropping too low, instead of being able to use it to their benefit.

2. Starving could have an impact on everything you do, reflecting how you get weakened from lack of food. Lowering the amount of wood you get per hour of foraging, lower the chance of starting fire, lowering your chances of successfully repairing something, lower your run speed. This could also be coupled to the amount of calories, the less calories the stronger the effect. Maybe no effect at all for the first couple hundred calories in the negative.

This could also be tied to your condition in stead of the amount of calories. 1-25% = strong effect, 26-50% = medium effect, 51-75% = low effect and 76-100% = no effect. Or maybe a combination of both condition and the amount of calories.

IRL nobody in their right mind would eat nothing at all while foraging for wood all day for 3 days, while having a load of food lying around, certainly not during a survival situation. But that's exactly what I and many other players are doing in TLD.

To summarize, I think starving should have bigger impact.

[madrepityu]

I think it's fine. And it's not an abuse. And it's should be more.

In RL there's weeks before someone would die due to starvation. And you mind that 3 days ingame? What would you like? Die after of one day starvation? That would be bad.

Penalties? On your 2nd and 3th day the protagonist become into a pretty bad shape. The character become pretty good for nothing, just to stay inside the house. Not much room left for making a mistake (freezing, wolf attack). Isn't that enough?

Please take a look at Accurize’s “Let’s play TLD” on youtube. On his Life 10 series he’s eating ridiculous amount of food day by day. Not just looks unrealistic, but damn, I don’t want to play with an eating simulator just because they don’t have better idea to make the game “hard”.

A lot of confusion is caused by the time "mechanics" in the game, imho. When they talk about item deteriorate they state that time are accelerated. When they talk about distances, they state that time are accelerated. Time is always accelerated but in a pretty asynchronous way. Sunrise to sunset it’s only one day. And they cannot make me believe it’s two.

If I use a knife and it’s became ruined after 3 days = ohh, it’s fine, it’s realistic! Time are accelerated, you know, otherwise the game would be “easy”.

If I don’t eat for 3 days = ohh, it’s not fair, not realistic, should have some penalties. You should eat more, otherwise the game become “easy”.

[northerncities]

In response to this, a weird idea that I had was to add a 'weight' mechanic to the player.

A pound is equal to 3500 calories. So for every net loss of 3,500 calories, a person should lose a pound. So if you operate at -1500 for three days, you should be down ~1.3 pounds, in real life. (now, of course, this math is simplified. Actually if you operated at 0 calories a day intake, you'd lose however much you burned that day, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm assuming positive calories is equal to having food in your stomach to draw calories from, instead of the body digging into its fat stores).

Ultimately, I was thinking that a way to remove the player's ability to abuse the current mechanic is to have them lose weight, which is something that would definitely happen IRL. The amount a player can carry (smaller/weaker), how quickly they get fatigued (again, smaller/weaker), or how susceptible to cold they are (less insulation) could be tied to their weight.

And this, unlike Hunger/Calories, could be a permanent status. That is, if you lose 10 pounds, you can't easily get back to your starting weight. If you need a surplus of 3,500 calories per day to gain a pound...

Everyday, you burn ~6,000 calories (250/hr * 24hrs). So you'd need to eat 9,500 calories per day for 10 days.

In the end, it would make it so that abusing the current hunger mechanism makes it harder to survive.

[Ruhroe]

I agree and have posted about it elsewhere a few times.

The game currently has a 'menu' cycle problem. It's that point where you get everything looted and consolidated, and all that's left is grinding out food <> wood <> mending gear. The starvation system currently means you end up spending a lot of time sleeping. Ideally, you eat just enough to sleep to get your condition to 100%, then immediately go back to starvation, and sleep until you are at -1500 calories. Then, do whatever chores you need to do, rinse and repeat.

The majority of the game, once consolidated, is looking at the menu. Other than running out to kill/get meat briefly (Trapper's cabin makes it quick and simple), that's all there is. This shouldn't be the game's focus--it gets very boring, very quickly.

Plus, the starvation system currently undermines the whole calories system. While you are out running around at -1500 there is no penalty when you carry more (outside overburdened if you carry too much), or sprint. All that happens is the slow condition loss.

Personally, I think the starvation system should progressively be less effective. At first, sure, you bottom out at -1500 calories. After a week or two though, your body depletes and you simply can't starve as effectively. Speed up the condition loss rate. Something, anyway, to make it so this isn't the main way to survive.

[elloco999]

I think it's fine. And it's not an abuse. And it's should be more.

In RL there's weeks before someone would die due to starvation. And you mind that 3 days ingame? What would you like? Die after of one day starvation? That would be bad.

I think you misunderstand me. I don't have a problem with the fact that you die after 4 days of not eating and wouldn't mind if it would be longer than that either. I have a problem with how things that cost me something when I'm not starving are suddenly free when I'm starving. The game is thereby encouraging you to starve in a controlled fashion.

And IRL it doesn't take weeks to die from starvation when you are in a very cold environment like that even if you do nothing. Although it would probably be longer than 4 days, more like 7-10 days or so. Unless you'd find a good source of heat, your body will burn calories much faster just to keep warm, so you'll die sooner too. And people who have been starving for weeks were not working hard for 16 hours a day. Talk to someone who has experienced real starvation, after a few days, maybe a week depending on the conditions/ weather you will be too weak to do anything. Now that would be a boring game, if you could starve for 3 weeks, but not be able to do anything after the first week...

Penalties? On your 2nd and 3th day the protagonist become into a pretty bad shape. The character become pretty good for nothing, just to stay inside the house. Not much room left for making a mistake (freezing, wolf attack). Isn't that enough?

I'm not saying that after a day or 2 of starving the player shouldn't be able to do much anymore, just saying that it should have an impact on the things you do. If you don't eat for 2 or 3 days, you won't be able to think as straight, you won't be as strong as you'd otherwise be. The game should reflect that so people won't use the starving as a free way to get things done that would have cost them otherwise. Again, I'm not saying that after 3 days of starving you shouldn't be able to do anything successfully, but the results of what you do should be lower than when you have a positive calorie count/ condition.

Please take a look at Accurize’s “Let’s play TLD” on youtube. On his Life 10 series he’s eating ridiculous amount of food day by day. Not just looks unrealistic, but damn, I don’t want to play with an eating simulator just because they don’t have better idea to make the game “hard”.

I don't want to play an eating sim either, but not eating for 3 days and then consuming 3 venison steaks in 30 min is not very realistic either (your stomach wouldn't even be able to handle that much food after 3 days of nothing). Not to mention that repeating that cycle for months on end wouldn't even be possible IRL.

A lot of confusion is caused by the time "mechanics" in the game, imho. When they talk about item deteriorate they state that time are accelerated. When they talk about distances, they state that time are accelerated. Time is always accelerated but in a pretty asynchronous way. Sunrise to sunset it’s only one day. And they cannot make me believe it’s two.

If I use a knife and it’s became ruined after 3 days = ohh, it’s fine, it’s realistic! Time are accelerated, you know, otherwise the game would be “easy”.

Yes, time is accelerated in this game, but I don't see what's that got to do with it. The reason for the acceleration seems clear to me too, who would want to sit behind his/ her PC for a few hours to gather wood/ boil water etc? It would make for a very boring game if you ask me. Don't get me wrong, I do think the mechanism needs tweaking, but that's not what this thread's about.

Personally I think items degrade to fast, especially tools (knife, hatchet, rifle, simple tools), but I don't see what that's got to do with the hunger mechanism.

If I don’t eat for 3 days = ohh, it’s not fair, not realistic, should have some penalties. You should eat more, otherwise the game become “easy”.

Again, I don't have a problem with the fact that you can not eat for 3 days and still be alive. I have a problem with the fact that if you're starving everything that cost something (usually in calories) when you're not starving is now all of a sudden free.

As it works now, I never forage for wood while I'm not starving. It's a waste of the calories I have left. I'll do other things that don't deplete my calories as quickly and do the foraging once I'm at -1500 calories. Why; because then it's free! And I don't think that's right.

@northerncities I think you have a good idea there, but it may be a little difficult to manage it.

[Beanie]

The simplest way to fix this issue would be to have hunger use up condition and exhaustion when the player has -1500 calories. So if you go foraging for wood, for example, you would lose maybe 30% exhaustion and 30% condition in lieue of calorie loss per hour. That would quickly limit what you could manage to do whilst starving.

Starving people have next to no energy so would tire very quickly and their bodies are cannibalizing themselves to keep going. It should be much tougher to perform any physical labour under such conditions.

[elloco999]

I like the idea of starvation increasing the exhaustion greatly. That way you'll also be exhausted if you forage for more than a few hours without sleeping, making your condition drop twice as fast.

But if things like foraging would cost you condition as well, you wouldn't be able to gather the wood needed to cook the meat that you need to get out of that starving. So that would probably be too much. It would mean you don't have any chance left if you're starving and don't have any food and wood left. Granted, you should never be in that situation once you get a good game going, but things happen and it would make the start of the game a lot harder.

[Trandor]

I agree with you there elloco. And just fyi, there are plenty of people that beg to differ that you have almost no more energy left when you are starving. People that lead anorexic lifestyles tend to have caloric intakes at about 1000-1500calories, which is below half the recommended intake for adults, still many of them do sports and are even more active than normal people. Beats me how they do it. Just trying to say just because you're really hungry won't lead to you lying on your behind all day.

So while i agree, starving in a controlled manner should not hurt you all that much. Also: it would be really hard to balance this imo. If you do unlimited negative calories, you'll never get back into the positive ever again, i think, because after a while resources become scarce.

if you do condition damage upon working when starving, you will barely have the time to gather everything that you need to survive longer. so while i do think this system is unbalanced, we have to remember here that we're playing the sandbox, where you are supposed to starve and abuse starvation. how this issue is handled in the Story mode will be a different question altogether.

[elloco999]

Yes it probably is hard to balance this. It should of course be possible to survive even when starving for a while, so you need to be able to get your calorie level back up and heal your condition. So starving can't be too much of a burden, but right now you can get away with a little too much while starving if you ask me. Also I don't think the devs intended for us to use the maximum negative calories to circumvent the cost of our actions.

Although starving in a controlled fashion should be a viable means of stretching the food you have available I don't think it should also be possible to do a lot of calorie burning activities while using that tactic. Lowering the negative calories boundary would not solve the problem and would indeed create a new one where it would be impossible to eat enough to get into the positive again. But I do think that starving could have an effect on the other stats. If you're starving, you get tired faster (not enough energy), you get cold faster (not enough fuel to keep your body warm) and maybe you get thirsty faster? To combat the getting tired/ cold faster you only need to sleep more, so you can do less. Seems not only reasonable but also realistic to me.

Side note: If you lead an anorexic lifestyle, your body adapts to that. I've never seen an anorexic person who has the body mass they should have for their size and age. That means they also require less calories to get by. But they didn't have an 200lbs body and completely stop eating all of a sudden. If you're used to taking in 2000-3000 calories a day and you stop eating for a few days that's going to impact you differently than eating 1000-1500 calories a day when you've been doing that for years.

[Trandor]

That sounds reasonable enough to me.

Quicker exhaustion as well as slighty increased cold meter could be a serious issue if you don't pay enough attention to it, while still not limiting the players severely, so that it's impossible to ever get out of starvation.

But the effects you intended would only occur once you've reached the lower boundary, right? Otherwise it would be kind of harsh.

[elloco999]

I think there should be at least some leeway yes, maybe start the effects lightly at -500 and increase them until you hit -1500 or something like that, or just have them start at -1500 would be fine for me too.