More Aggressive Hunger System

[Fortport]

There is simply too much food and nobody hungry enough to eat it. Why bother having a kitchen and botany? I think bumping up the speed of hunger would make the cook and botanists feel more appreciated. They sit there on a stockpile of foodstuff all day. Maybe some playtesting at a higher rate?

[Arvak Morekborn]

As someone who works in the kitchen regularly, I can vouch for the kitchen being overly stocked almost always, especially when i'm working as hard as possible. I think that speeding up the hunger-rate-thingy would totally make the kitchen AND botany a lot more relevant to the crew as a whole. It doesn't even need to be a like, hyper-speed increase. Just one that makes it so you have to visit the kitchen counter more often.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I kind of like this idea, but I have to wonder if this would be resolved a bit easier if we removed a few of the vending machines, or just made vending machine snacks refill hunger pathetically slow. Eating the entire vending machine's supply of twinkies shouldn't fill you up like a fried burger can. It should just make you vomit.

Otherwise increasing the hunger tick rate would give the kitchen more love and give survival gamemodes a new dynamic.

"but it's not realistic"

I preemptively counter this argument by reminding those about to utter this profane phrase by reminding them that wizards exist and are canon and i'd rather die before letting us cherry-pick realism for arbitrary reasons so either u find another argument against this other than realism or u come into my house and snap my neck ur call

[Zundy]

I agree with increasing the hunger tick rate for all the reasons stated already.

[Nanako]

I'm sure everyone knows by now that i love complexity. So overly complex hunger idea coming in, fair warning

I'd like to see a system which tracks a few things:

1, Eating food shouldn't just decrease your hunger value. it should go into your stomach, and from there be metabolised slowly to decrease your hunger. in real life it takes some time (the common saying is 20 minutes, though i don't think its really that much) for you to stop feeling hungry, after you eat.

2. The rate that hunger ticks at, should be dependant on what you're doing. If you're fiddling with consoles and chemicals, it should be slow. If you're dashing around the medbay dragging patients with you, constructing things, fighting, or steading your muscles to perform precise surgery, it should tick a lot faster. Thus engineers, nurses and security would have more need to eat than scientists. In all cases, even the sedentary workers should still have a significantly faster hunger tickrate than they do now

When you're sleeping, or SSD, the rate would be very slow (pretty much like how it is now)

3. being hungry should actually do something. At light levels of hunger (green indicator) it should just give you a nagging message every now and then, picked from a random selection(your stomach rumbles, you feel peckish, you could go for something to eat about now)

At moderate hunger levels, it needs to have a mechanical effect. the most logical thing i can think of is slowing you down. Decrease your movespeed by 10-20%. The nag messages should also get more frequent and more serious ('You feel less energetic, you should eat something', 'hunger is slowing you down', 'you should really get some food soon'). This would affect active people enough to make them go eat, although scientists cloistered away in their labs would probably still ignore it, that's fine and pretty in character really. It should also reduce your natural healing rate to about half of normal

At extreme hunger levels (red indicator), the effects should start to get really serious. First of all you should periodically take a little trauma damage, which would alert medics to your condition and make us nag you too. Maybe just 1 point of damage per minute or something.

Natural healing would be completely disabled while starving, any damage you suffer is not going away without treatment

It'd make you get dizzy sometimes, causing the screen to shake around

Occasionally you'd get a potentially disastrous "You space out for a moment, and drop [item] from your hand".

And an occasional passing out. Just ("You feel faint") and then you're on the floor for a little while, maybe a minute at most, but enough to annoy you,

This would continue until you get some food, or eventually fall permanantly unconscious after accumulating enough damage to hit critical

4. Overeating should have a penalty too. Your stomach should have a certain capacity, and could fill up to 150% of that capacity, with anything over 100% being overeating and making you bloated, slowing you down for a while until stomach contents are metabolised to under 101%

Trying to eat even more over 150% would cause immediate vomiting, regurgitating 30-70% of stomach contents and making a huge mess

[Fire and Glory]

At moderate hunger levels, it needs to have a mechanical effect. the most logical thing i can think of is slowing you down. Decrease your movespeed by 10-20%.

Just popping in to say that it already does this, fairly close to 20%, but because 'muh hunger speed' it takes an entire shift to get to 'moderate' hunger levels.

[Dreamix]

I guess, I oppose.

Dying out of hunger (not literally, I mean other consequences) after 30 minutes since the last meal is going to be an annoyance, not a nice gameplay feature. It will make chef's job more fun, at the expense of everyone else's fun levels.

But, what I propose is: Make diversity pay off. Eating junk food at obscene quantities shouldn't make you sated, it should make you puke and sick. However, eating a slice of really nice cake, or a luxurious sandwich filled with cheese, meat and vegetables and other healthy stuff, should make you feel good, and maybe even provide minor bonuses to a character, with a cooldown to disallow spamming like hyperzine of course. Especially species-specific things, like these K'oi's (or whatever, vaurca food) should make the vaurca move faster for a while, or liggers being stronger for a few punches, after eating some meaty-meat. Just some thoughts.

[Arvak Morekborn]

I guess, I oppose.

Dying out of hunger (not literally, I mean other consequences) after 30 minutes since the last meal is going to be an annoyance, not a nice gameplay feature. It will make chef's job more fun, at the expense of everyone else's fun levels.

But, what I propose is: Make diversity pay off. Eating junk food at obscene quantities shouldn't make you sated, it should make you puke and sick. However, eating a slice of really nice cake, or a luxurious sandwich filled with cheese, meat and vegetables and other healthy stuff, should make you feel good, and maybe even provide minor bonuses to a character, with a cooldown to disallow spamming like hyperzine of course. Especially species-specific things, like these K'oi's (or whatever, vaurca food) should make the vaurca move faster for a while, or liggers being stronger for a few punches, after eating some meaty-meat. Just some thoughts.

 

I actually think that sounds like a fantastic idea, it encourages people not actually sample EVERYTHING the chef sets out, and encourages the chef to have diversity in their cooking. The only thing I'm not too sure about is the bonuses, since I think you actually do get bonuses for sating yourself already. I don't want to push for anything being added that's overly complicated, I just want a slight tweak to the system, and what you listed sounds perfect; the changes that already will stem from that however are more than enough. The whole bonuses thing seems a bit too much for me at the moment.

[Frances]

Maybe if we relaxed the rule on ganking and loaded all the food with hyperzine and tricord it would turn the station into a hunger games environment and then the cooks would feel truly appreciated.

hunger games, get it

[Nanako]

I guess, I oppose.

Dying out of hunger (not literally, I mean other consequences) after 30 minutes since the last meal is going to be an annoyance, not a nice gameplay feature. It will make chef's job more fun, at the expense of everyone else's fun levels

i disagree.

for one, the cafeteria;/bar IS fun, it's the designated place to gather and RP with people, more traffic to it means more opportunites to interact.

If you really don't want to talk to someone, i suippose you could juist steal a burger off the counter and walk out

As for the annoyance of dying because of it? Well that's a matter of preparation. as a security officer you might die if your taser runs out of charge, or you don't repair your hardsuit between conflicts. As a nurse i've seeen patients die because nobody prepped the OR rooms with IVs, or made dexalin plus to prevent them suffocating. Preparing in order to do your job effectively is a neccesary part of gameplay, and if yours is one where collapsing in the field could kill you or someone else, then it'd be a good idea to carry a snack with you

[Guest]

Support. Lore justification is that folks do a lot of walking around the station and perform energy-consuming tasks anyway. You're not starved to death, you're simply out of energy and you need food to revitalize yourself. It's not that difficult a concept to grasp imo

[SierraKomodo]

If I remember correctly, on old code, the hunger system would have you yellow at about the 1:00, 1:15 mark, and in red by 1:45 to 2:00 if you did not eat at all and spawned at round start. I'd be fine with returning to that system.

[Guest]

It still does work like that, you go red at around 2 hours in which most people vote for transfer anyway.

[Nikov]

Assign random hunger levels at round start.

Colonial Marines has everyone spawn hungry, mob the vending machines, shovel down MRE's and put their boots on. Its wonderfully immersive in its own good-morning routine where everyone gets a minute or two to see people being people. I don't want everyone spawning hungry, but I would like if some random percentage "missed lunch" and a steady stream of customers went into the cafe over the next two hours as their hunger meters ticked up. A start of round burger rush or breakfast menu, followed by two hours of easy customers sounds like Engineer's engine-start routine, only now its the Chef's. No more Chef being useless for the first hour and a half.

For those LONG rounds, I don't mind very high hunger reducing your MAXIMUM health down to 75% or even 50%, in the general way cloning damage does. It won't kill you, but you can't operate at full capacity and will be more fragile if you're starving yourself. Hungry patients would also need some cute nurses delivering steak dinners hospital trays, something every red-blooded hungry man individual will support.

[Nanako]

Assign random hunger levels at round start.

I agree,i've thought of this idea a few times myself, too

As an alternative idea though, considering we have three spawning methods, it might be interesting to assign a hunger level to each.

If you wake up from cryo,you've probably been sleeping without food for some time, maybe months. you should be starving.

[Nanako]

If I remember correctly, on old code, the hunger system would have you yellow at about the 1:00, 1:15 mark, and in red by 1:45 to 2:00 if you did not eat at all and spawned at round start. I'd be fine with returning to that system.

 

1138 is right. This is exactly what we already have. It's too slow. By the end of the shift people are starving, but they're also calling the transfer shuttle, so they don't bother with eating and just head out starving. The chef gets no attention all shift,and half the station will never visit the kitchen

[Lucychan42]

Aerianna usually visits at round start but that's usually to chat with Anna and not necessarily any requirement of "boy I'm hungry." So unless people have a reason to gather there just to socialize, they don't really have any sort of reason to go visit if they can get away with eating snacks for their slight hunger.

What may be interesting is a lunch break period? That may be awkward to implement and with antags it provides a huge hole in safety where an antag can just be a dick and roflstomp everyone. It's the start to an idea, at least.