Prodigal Son

I'll start by saying, I really doubt this will receive any consideration; for all I know, Hinterland may be really adverse to smoking and encouraging it in any way. But I think it's a fun idea nonetheless and just wanted to throw it out there. Essentially, the cigarette would be an optional debuff players can use after they've started a game on a particular difficulty, but find they want to tweak it to be a bit harder in situ. It would do this by adding a permanent debuff to stamina and/or condition. The fun comes in with both the challenge and the implied ennui. Players can brag that they've smoked a whole pack of cigarettes and are thus playing with a permanent 80% condition cap. And really, like a soldier on a battlefield, having a smoke at the end of the world is a cute little #%@! you to the situation. Just a thought.

Yes that's it. That's how the game is currently set up.

Thanks for everyone's input so far. However, the core of my argument remains un-touched. What I think @ManicManiac is missing here is that what I'm proposing is to add more depth to gameplay (via more elaborate hunger mechanics,) rather than specifically discouraging a 'wrong' form of gameplay. I admit my forum title is very misleading on that point, I hadn't honed in on what I was aiming at yet. If you'd like to see just how much an improvement to hunger can add to the game, I'd ask that you search the TLD 'hunger revamped' mod and see what accolades it got. People really enjoyed what it brought to the game and I believe it was universally appreciated. We can say 'HL would've changed that if they wanted to by now' but that's simply not true. The dev team has limited resources. The effort put in can be 100x the pay-off - and that's if it doesn't just generate new problems. So to avoid a not-so-squeaky wheel in favour of bigger priorities is entirely possible. It's no different than ignoring a noise from your car because your home furnace isn't working, and you're saving up to fix that instead. As for @kristaok, and @stay puft, right now there is only a flat penalty for starving, no matter how active you are. Basically I'm looking at a way to make that more interesting, by making the condition loss match with how active your character is. That way, not only is keeping fed part of the game, but playing around with your own hunger becomes part of it too. I speculate that HL has looked at simply raising the penalty to starvation but decided against it. I don't know why, but I'd trust their conclusions regardless.

If the game was structured differently and didn't have scarcity and trade-offs in needs as a core part of its gameplay - I'd agree with you. But I'm talking about adding a dimension to hunger that currently doesn't exist - and that people can avoid by adjusting food availability upwards. The only way I could artificially impose this at present would be to 1) raise resources, then restrain myself from using extra matches etc. in a game where I must make use of all I find. 2) impose a sleep limit or alter recovery rates in Custom, which affects my ability to recover from all other forms of condition loss 3) never slip below zero calories and call it quits when I do, which would be constant at high difficulties, 4) lower the hunger rate, which would excise a big chunk of the food gathering/hunting parts of game-play. So you can see the self-imposed solutions are all imperfect relative to one that Hinterland could implement, and which players could choose to avoid.

A popular topic, but having read the forums I have a take on it that I haven't found here yet. It's a minimal solution that would only affect gameplay at higher difficulties in Survival Mode. Before I get in to it, I'd like to pitch the main benefits of the idea: No new game mechanics are required. No changes to the UI is required. No change in the numeric values or descriptions of items is required. The proposal does not require complex mathematics or changes to any formulas currently used in TLD. The change will not effect WinterMute - as even on 'Hardened' calories are plentiful. The idea uses mechanics that HL clearly wants to be a part of the experience, and has made moves in the past to emphasize. It increases the meaningful choices players can make, but without mentally taxing them, adding things to keep track of, or upsetting the current balancing of the game. So it sounds like a magic bullet! Probably because there is some flaw I haven't noticed but will soon be pointed out. Here is the alteration proposed: When a player is starving, and takes an action with a calorie cost, those calories are deducted from the player's condition as a 1/100 percentage. This does not eliminate hibernation as a strategy, but it does confine it. A player may cook, boil water, gather sticks, forage, and in general do all sorts of low-intensity activities while starving without exacting a higher cost than s/he already experiences now. If the player is afflicted or in very poor condition, and needs to save their food for rest and recovery, I personally would want this kind of hibernation to be viable. There is plenty of this game that would be silly in life, and HL says as much in their loading page. That's because this is a game first. No one is going to play a bad game just because it's more realistic; introducing realism over time without breaking mechanics is a necessity and I laud HL for understanding this. By making calories a price on condition - when starving - the player is met with a transparent choice. Let's say an Interloper is in full condition, but starving, and heads out to a ravaged deer he knows is nearby. Simply existing, he will lose 16% of his condition but can gain ~22% with sleep. He has 600 calories in cat-tails in reserve for when he sleeps that night for just that purpose, which means he has an 8% surplus of condition. After an hours walk (270cal/hr) he arrives at the deer and - with the change implemented - has lost 2.7% condition for his trouble. The walk back will exact the same toll if he remains starving, for a 5.4% loss. (These costs are already at work in the game, it's just that they cease to function once a player hits 0 calories, and don't currently impact condition.) This means his remaining surplus for hibernation is only 2.6% He'd like to take everything off the deer, the cost is 262 calories; thus a penalty of 2.62% condition for doing this while starving. The player is now met with several choices, but the costs are transparent and are the kinds of choices made all the time in TLD: 1) Take the penalty - he can just squeak by so long as no surprises are in store for the rest of the day and he sticks to basic activities until going to bed. If he has to sprint at any point (400cal/hr) he'll be waking up tomorrow feeling a little poorer than yesterday. 2) Eat his food reserve; after all, the harvested meat can replace what he's losing when he cooks back home - but the price paid is he'll have to go out again tomorrow and hope his luck holds out. But eating the reserve also buys him more time to explore today, he can walk around for another 1hr15min free of penalties and even gain a bit of condition. 3) Harvest just the meat, and leave the guts and hide. This leaves the player with some surplus condition at the cost of resources left behind. If he's playing it safe for hibernation and healing up - this may be the best option. Going straight home, the deer meat will buy him an extra day of rest. 4) Take the penalty and continue exploring while starving. After all, the 'loper started the day at full health. Maybe a rabbit warren isn't far away. Does he take the risk that the weather won't turn, or a wolf head him off? The rewards are obvious, but now there is a price for failure - wandering around for five hours while starving will take away an additional 13.5% condition. It's hardly a death sentence - but it does force him out of the hibernation strategy after a few days. None of these choices or dynamics are in consideration when the player can freely starve and take only the base penalty. They go home empty-handed but no worse off for their trouble. With the change in place, they are gambling risk vs reward, and can only afford to gamble so many times. But none of this factors when food is fairly abundant - as it is in the Wintermute, Pilgrim, and Voyageur. The calorie mechanic still works exactly as it did before, but since players on these difficulties and game-modes hardly ever starve, it won't enter their consideration. Thus this tweak only affects players in late-game or higher difficulties, while sparing others the grief. I have read a lot of suggestions for fixing/nerfing hibernation - including how the ReVamped Hunger mod worked - but they all boiled down to new mechanics, adding information to the UI, changes to item values, or increasing the base starvation penalty in a way that sledgehammers the problem. All of them demanded a lot of back-end work on Hinterland's part either in coding or game-balancing. I feel my suggestion threads the needle. Thank you for your time.