Is "Well Fed" actually worth it?

[ajb1978]

1 hour ago, Pillock said:

More or less, yeah. My brain tends to get a bit scrambled when I try to do much mental arithmetic, but it strikes me that the game would have to start tracking your intake/expenditure as a ratio only when you first reached 0 calories, otherwise it wouldn't work. If it started tracking the ratio when you were full (at the start of the game, say), you would always be in the negative from then on because the game doesn't allow you to ever exceed your original "full" status.

Unless they revamped how your stomach works.  Like time spent with a calorie store between 2000 and 2500 count as fattening. Calorie store between 2000 and 0 counts as maintaining, and calorie store at 0 you start to lose weight.  So if you want to fatten yourself back up, keep your stomach topped off for a few days.

[ThePancakeLady]

6 hours ago, Pillock said:

I think it would also have to kick in more quickly than cabin fever does, otherwise it might not even occur. That is, I've never contracted cabin fever ever, yet I nearly always have a negative indoors/outdoors ratio. I don't really get how that works!

Ah, my ratio for indoor/outdoor is always off too. I think because the ratio covers the full length of a run, and does not start after the initial grace period ends. What mode are you thinking of, or are you playing, since the grace period does not exist in Loper, 25 days in Stalker, and I think 50 days in Voyageur? (I play Stalker most often). So for the first 24 days, I am indoors, a lot, while I can still get away with it. And on day 25, my play changes, to ensure I am outdoors more than indoors. Spend most of the day outdoors, sleeping indoors at night, if I am near a shelter. So, the ratio isn't really too accurate when looking at Cabin Fever for *most* of us, I think.

I feel like the affliction should possibly kick in at a slower rate than CF. And have it take much longer to recover from as well. A threshold, perhaps, for when it begins to seriously affect your carry weight, movement speed, ability to sprint or climb. A sneaky affliction that is harder to detect over just a few days, that rears its ugly head more prominently over the long haul. IRL you don't have to not eat anything (0 calorie store) before the effects of dieting or exercising have effects on your weight and BMI (or fat/muscle ratio), and your overall health. Malnutrition does not walk up and smack you upside the head after just a few s days, maybe not even a few weeks. Took weeks before a poorly balanced diet in my case, after my kidney transplant,, made me feel more tired than I normally would, and had significant enough symptoms for me to see my doc about it. And got the diagnosis of vitamin deficiencies, anemia, and a loss in muscle mass with an increase in overall body fat. My weight had not fluctuated, but my body fat/muscle mass ratio was greatly changed. After a few weeks on a very strict diet, things are getting better, but it will take a long time for my body to regain any "normalcy" it had before the massive dietary shift the kidney transplant necessitated. 

I kind of always have thought of the change in diet my survivor has to suddenly undergo, going from possibly being a "healthy" city dweller, in reasonably good shape,  but eating a far less restricted diet, with far less physically strenuous daily tasks. My IRL situation snuck up on me, even though I was aware of the need to monitor, and keep track of things like diet and exercise. I can't help feeling like it might be somewhat similar for our survivors.

I would not want something that replicates my real life medical situation, but toned down a bit, but with similar long-reaching effects. A gradual loss of strength, increased fatigue, slower condition recovery, if eating less than we needed for the number of calories our bodies needed for what we do in-game, every day. With a similar long-reaching effect to recover, and regain "normal" functions again. Knowing *that* might wait for me would make me more likely to stop eating only at bedtime, and start watching how much I ate vs. how much I burn each day, rationing my food differently, and not using the no-negative-calories-store to sit at 0 calories and chop the heck outta limbs and furniture, knowing that my calorie store might say 0, and not drop below, but under-the-hood, the line was dipping low, and eating away at my overall wellbeing. That built-in exploit the game allows us would seem a lot less useful to me.

[Martin Prchal]

17 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

But we have this debuff, to a degree. If you starve for multiple days, your fatigue recovery is capped at below full. You cannot become fully rested, you lose your max fatigue refill. And the longer you starve, the more you lose. Meaning your max carry weight goes down, and you become tired, faster. The eye icon gets a red line, and fills with red from the top (where full would be). At least, it used to. Haven't starved my characters in ages, so I haven't seen the debuff in ages. Could have been removed in an update, but... I am too tired to go look at all of the changelogs right now. 

Really? I guess I've never starved enough to see this happen. That's pretty cool. 

[odizzido]

Perhaps the best thing would be to have a simple debuff that increases as you are starving and goes away as you eat. For example for every calorie spent when at 0 calories would start increasing the debuff. You would repair it by eating, the calories you eat could remove the debuff the same way.

 

so for example if you hit zero calories and burn through 1000 more while at zero the debuff would keep track of that 1000 calories and will exist until you eat 1000 calories. If you only eat 750 then you will have 250 left on the debuff, but the debuff will not be added to anymore until you reach zero calories again. It should be very simple to understand and work with then. You could even remove the health drain for starving then, and only drain health if you’ve burned through like 50,000 calories or something(there could be a bar the fills much like risk for parasites and such).

 

I am not sure if I explained this super well...

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 7/17/2019 at 1:25 AM, rancid0 said:

in my experience well fed on interloper is 100% worth getting you really only need to starve yourself on interloper for the first 5 or 10 days once you make a bow and arrows there is more than enough food in the game to keep the well fed bonus forever, i normally live between 500 and 1000 days and can keep the bonus most of the time unless i get sloppy. the long dark is probably the most challenging survival game out there (on interloper) so i understand not everyone can do this but to say interloper forces you to starve is not true it just makes it hard to not starve yourself not impossible.  

Oh it is very much doable. I have a tendency of pushing the envelope more often than I should so I don't die from boredom and subsequent neglegance. When I restrain myself there really needs to be some freak accident to kill me off.

My point isn't really that it isn't doable (which it is) or that Interloper is too hard (which it isn't) .... my point is that, in my opinion, the ratio between reward for being well fed and punishment for being starved is off.

Like I said in the OP I'm not sure if this really does need fixing. It's something that bothers me, but it doesn't break the game. In any case I thank everyone for weighing in their point of view and their ideas so far. I'm not sure there really is the easy, elegant, slick solution here. While all ideas I've heard have merit and are well thought out, they mostly suffer from the same flaw everything I came up with so far suffers from: They, most likely, overcomplicate things, and @ajb1978's argument that at some point it would more feel like work is damn valid. We had discussions on the forum that didn't really go into vitamins, but actually revolved around general nutrition composition in terms of carbs, potein and fat, and I usually opposed those ideas for the very same reason.

I guess it's something that is really hard to address properly in as it doesn't annoy people (especially the crowd of new players critical to keep the game's ratings afloat), is easy to understand, gives the right incentives and employs positive reinforcement without making the game easier than it should be (which some do argue Well Fed already does). I genuinely have no good idea that fits all these criterias.

As for me, I'll probably revert back to employing starvation in my early days. I keep cursing myself when I do not and then cannot do something / fail because of it. I can't say that I do like it, but even if it's not how the game is meant to be played (I think), it apparently is how the game "wants" to be played - which is basically my arguement in a nutshell.

[Pillock]

13 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I'll probably revert back to employing starvation in my early days. I keep cursing myself when I do not and then cannot do something / fail because of it. I can't say that I do like it, but even if it's not how the game is meant to be played (I think), it apparently is how the game "wants" to be played - which is basically my arguement in a nutshell.

Well, it's been a viable strategy forever. And it's been a well known one for nearly as long.

The fact that the Hinterland haven't chosen to change it suggests to me that it's perfectly within the scope of how the game's "meant" to be played.

(I don't like it either though!)

[odizzido]

Every strategy that the game mechanics allow is valid I think. And they all have their place.

[ThePancakeLady]

9 hours ago, odizzido said:

Every strategy that the game mechanics allow is valid I think. And they all have their place.

This. ^^^