Examples of nutritional needs in a hunger system?

[deuxhero]

Every hunger system I'm aware of (I admittedly haven't looked too far) has been based on a single "hunger" bar or (rarely) that and a "thirst" bar, and many don't even bother making food perishable. This always winds up being gamed by most players who then focus purely on weight to hunger ratio and making characters survive on a diet that would quickly kill anyone who tried it yet render the "survival" aspect trivial. Are they any examples that implement more complex nutritional needs (such as vitamin C to avoid scurvy), and if so are they effective?

I'm thinking all a system would have to model to limit abuse is protein and vitamin C. Scurvy is perhaps the best known and most iconic vitamin deficiency, and getting it in a survival sense has unique issues: Most sources only last a relatively short amount of time (week or two) after harvest and the two pre-industrial methods for longer preservation I'm aware of (hard cider and pickles) need heavy containers (ceramic or glass) to store them in. This would force either relatively short trips where fresh food could be taken along, dedicating a large amount of your carry weight to them, or being at the mercy of scavenging (which should also require knowledge to avoid poison and foul tastes). Adding protein prevents the next logical abuse (high calorie+minimal vitamin c material). Protein also adds to provisioning expense as it is either very perishable (meat and to a degree "opened" hard cheese), requires prep well ahead of use (beans require hours of pre-soaking and long cook time), is heavy (hard cheese in a whole unit) or all that and being expensive (salt meat). Thoughts?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead currently has something like this, vitamins and protein IIRC, but to be honest it only slightly changes gameplay. Its very rare that I felt the need to search out some vital nutrient, mostly it was fairly easy to handle. But admittedly that's a game set in the remnants of our civilization, so there are tons of ways to get proper nutrition that someone in medieval times or an island wouldn't have.

Although to be honest, I don't think scurvy starts quickly enough that your standard dungeon crawl would be an issue. I could be wrong. And there are always plenty of sources of meat inside a dungeon.

 

[deuxhero]

Even before the outwardly obvious symptoms, losing vitamin c for a few days can cause fatigue.

 

[Bester]

Keto dieters don't even need vitamin C.

I think Unreal World may have added macros in later updates. Or not, but it had an interesting system before that: food had "fullness" and "hunger" stats. So you could eat a lot of veggies and become "full", but not stop being hungry.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q--XRnb1ag

This game divides nutrition into water, protein, carbs, fats and vitamins.

 

[Reality]

You kind of need an artifical Life game like The Steve Grand Creature's Series -

The different foods in this game are part of a 13 Chemical nutrition cycle --- But in addition to the actual chemical content of the various foods the foods also have a "food drive value" which is how much the creatures THINK they are full after eating them / desirable the food is (seperated into seperate drives for protein/fat/carbohydrates in Creatures 3)

Technically the other (mostly poison) chemicals can be "added" to the nutritional cycle if you mutate the creautures - even in positive ways eventually since chemical reactions are NOT global but controlled by the game's neural system on an individual animal basis.

 

[spectre]

This game has an autistic approach to nutrition.

I'm more fond of the "less is more" approach of ADOM. On the surface level it's very simple - numerical value represents your satiation level (on a scale from Starving to Bloated),
different foods have different satiation values vs. food weight vs. price and availability. You can also eat corpses of various critters, which can have various effects,
from being inedible (not everything is to all races), poisonous, causing disease, to growing your stats and giving you extra abilities.
In the end, food is (almost) never a trivial matter and integrates well into the system of each item having a blessed/uncursed/cursed status.
Cursed apples will have worms in it, blessed will be slightly more satiating, blessed ogre corpses give you a bit more chance to gain strength, etc.

Further on top of this, various factors affect the speed at which you get hungry. Chaos mutations, divine favor, magic items, etc.

 

[Hag]

I liked the nutrition aspect in Valheim. You have a base health and stamina, pretty low but manageable. Each meal you eat act as a buff to these two stats, taking some time to reach full value, and decreasing after some time. Each kind of food having different buff value for health and stamina, and since you can only have three meals at the same time, eating becomes a matter of choosing the right ingredients for the job. Great idea, underdeveloped as most things in this game.

The fact you're not punished for not eating, but that your life gets much easier with a few meals is really neat.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I'm not that interested in hunger systems in games. What I really want to see is more pooping systems. I have always been disappointed at games that touted their realism, and they incorporated mechanics such as hunger and fatigue, but then completely overlooked this important aspect of living. ARK: Survival Evolved at least made an effort. Things eat and poop, and then you can eat the poop. Or you can use it to make fertilizer. And different size poops from different size dinosaurs have different values as fertilizer. And you can build a toilet! And pooping in the toilet gives you extra bonuses. So ARK was a good start, but just think about all of the untapped potential of pooping in video games.

Or we could just be satisfied that games are an abstraction, and accept that players enjoy finding optimizations and exploits, and that going too far into the simulation aspect of any game will just end up becoming a game of Outside.

That being said, I don't know of any games that force you to vary your diet for optimal health, but I have played a few games that have food spoilage. Mount & Blade and Subnautica are the first that come to mind.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I'm not that interested in hunger systems in games. What I really want to see is more pooping systems. I have always been disappointed at games that touted their realism, and they incorporated mechanics such as hunger and fatigue, but then completely overlooked this important aspect of living.

Hobo: Tough Life includes a shitting system.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Every hunger system I'm aware of (I admittedly haven't looked too far) has been based on a single "hunger" bar or (rarely) that and a "thirst" bar, and many don't even bother making food perishable. This always winds up being gamed by most players who then focus purely on weight to hunger ratio and making characters survive on a diet that would quickly kill anyone who tried it yet render the "survival" aspect trivial. Are they any examples that implement more complex nutritional needs (such as vitamin C to avoid scurvy), and if so are they effective?

I'm thinking all a system would have to model to limit abuse is protein and vitamin C. Scurvy is perhaps the best known and most iconic vitamin deficiency, and getting it in a survival sense has unique issues: Most sources only last a relatively short amount of time (week or two) after harvest and the two pre-industrial methods for longer preservation I'm aware of (hard cider and pickles) need heavy containers (ceramic or glass) to store them in. This would force either relatively short trips where fresh food could be taken along, dedicating a large amount of your carry weight to them, or being at the mercy of scavenging (which should also require knowledge to avoid poison and foul tastes). Adding protein prevents the next logical abuse (high calorie+minimal vitamin c material). Protein also adds to provisioning expense as it is either very perishable (meat and to a degree "opened" hard cheese), requires prep well ahead of use (beans require hours of pre-soaking and long cook time), is heavy (hard cheese in a whole unit) or all that and being expensive (salt meat). Thoughts?

Battle Brothers has perishable food, i know there is other games having perishable food as well but they don't come to mind.

On a personal note, i think it's just a waste of time, both for the dev and the player unless your game is about a post-apocalyptic or at least a hash or deserted world and your team is going on expeditions.
Of course, you have to make the system not tedious and somewhat interesting.

Still, i wouldn't waste a lot of time on this unless everything else it top notch already.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

i know there is other games having perishable food as well but they don't come to mind.

Dead State?
Subnautica
Fallout76

 

[deuxhero]

I know there's some examples of perishable food, but most limit it to a few types and give you enough non-perishables it doesn't matter. Mount and Blade had raw meat be perishable, but any preserved meat or other food lasted indefinitely. Kingdom Come had most things spoil, lowering how effective they were, but 1: the non-perishables were common enough and carrying them didn't present any issues 2: You never really get that far from town long term due to the save restrictions 3: The farthest you'll get is bandit camps, which (naturally) have plenty of food you can eat after killing the inhabitents.

Best implementation of food spoiling was Dragon's Dogma, where (strictly speaking) you didn't truly have to eat. There most food perished in a reasonable timespan. You could store food in a magic flask to preserve it, but this made the food very heavy for its effectiveness. Food that wasn't perishable and had good stamina to weight ratio was very rare and expensive. The game didn't have a real hunger system, but it did have a system where healing magic could only restore a fraction of HP lost from damage and you'd need sleep, food or one of the rare (only 3 in the entire game) magic healing springs to restore you to full HP (I recall level ups also restored you to full, but can't recall for sure) so you actually needed to pack consumables. This, alongside the fact that there's only two real settlements on the entire island (plus a few traveling merchants with limited stocks further out) meant you actually had to prepare for adventure.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Dead State?

Maybe Dead State was the one where food was rotting in your inventory after a while.

 

[Norfleet]

I'm thinking all a system would have to model to limit abuse is protein and vitamin C. Scurvy is perhaps the best known and most iconic vitamin deficiency, and getting it in a survival sense has unique issues

Well, the obvious way of getting it in a survival situation is the same as getting it every other time: By consuming the livers of your prey.

Most sources only last a relatively short amount of time (week or two) after harvest and the two pre-industrial methods for longer preservation I'm aware of (hard cider and pickles) need heavy containers (ceramic or glass) to store them in.

Most methods of preservation tends to also destroy it, which is why you need fresh prey. Also, you forgot the most obvious ones: Dehydration and salting.

Adding protein prevents the next logical abuse (high calorie+minimal vitamin c material). Protein also adds to provisioning expense as it is either very perishable (meat and to a degree "opened" hard cheese), requires prep well ahead of use (beans require hours of pre-soaking and long cook time), is heavy (hard cheese in a whole unit) or all that and being expensive (salt meat). Thoughts?

Protein is pretty much going to be the easiest thing to acquire for a murderhobo. You know all those things you keep MURDERING? They are made of MEAT. Food, realistically, is not going to be a thing a murderhobo is likely to run out of. Unless your game consists entirely of battling mechanoids, ghosts, and skellingtons, sooner or later, generally sooner, you are going to kill something that is made of meat.

 

[CanadianCorndog]

I'm not that interested in hunger systems in games. What I really want to see is more pooping systems. I have always been disappointed at games that touted their realism, and they incorporated mechanics such as hunger and fatigue, but then completely overlooked this important aspect of living. ARK: Survival Evolved at least made an effort. Things eat and poop, and then you can eat the poop. Or you can use it to make fertilizer. And different size poops from different size dinosaurs have different values as fertilizer. And you can build a toilet! And pooping in the toilet gives you extra bonuses. So ARK was a good start, but just think about all of the untapped potential of pooping in video games.

Or we could just be satisfied that games are an abstraction, and accept that players enjoy finding optimizations and exploits, and that going too far into the simulation aspect of any game will just end up becoming a game of Outside.

That being said, I don't know of any games that force you to vary your diet for optimal health, but I have played a few games that have food spoilage. Mount & Blade and Subnautica are the first that come to mind.

You want to play Muddy Heights 2. The goal is to shit off a building and take out your targets. You load up on various foods, like tacos, then let 'er rip. When my son was four it was amusing for about two days.

 

[Van-d-all]

Green Hell has a diversified food (carbs, fats & protein) and other immersive systems like The Forest does (some guys worked on both games) but without all the mutant bullshit. It's also a fun game with decent plot. Definitely among my personal top 3 survival series (along Subnauticas and Solus Project).

 

[AngryKobold]

Complex hunger system, as described, is useless unless it's the main point of the gameplay. To make it the main point, the game has to be about survival in timespan of months or years.
What's the point?

Your average exploration FPP needs only two bars: hunger and thirst. Believe me, this is more than enough to complicate the game.
Want to add even more complication? Add damage system. Add illness mechanics. Force player to sterilize wounds. Force player to avoid getting unnecessary damage. Force player to dress accordingly to weather. Force player to prepare water and food in order to avoid poisoning. Make player afraid of eating random shit he found. Make the supply of medicaments scarce.

Old Robinson's Requiem and Deus had it done this way. And back then, the games hadn't got good reception. It's up to discussion if it the reason was the quality of games itself or the stupidity of reviewers ("I just want to kill things like in Quake, why the fuck do I need to purify water or eat antibiotics?")

 

[Endemic]

Oregon Trail 2 onwards, though that's more of an adventure-RPG hybrid (it does have character skills, eg fishing, that impact the gameplay).