Walraven/SIMud

At present, hunger is really quite complicated. It does its damage in weird scaling ticks that vary in rate from race to race. Eating different items of food provides an assortment of unreliable and difficult to track buffs (that may be abused horribly). Eating habits will affect your character’s weight - with most players trending toward skin and bones as a result. Gurgling stomachs can interrupt spellcasting, and sufficient hunger results in a penalty to strength, constitution, and dexterity.

Not only is this too complex and involved, it’s too harsh and arbitrary. Yes, player characters should need to eat (it’s part of the mudlib’s original vision). No, they shouldn’t die because they idled out. Yes, wolves should eat deer. No, peasants shouldn’t starve to death because their employer’s player went on vacation for a week.

What we need is a simpler system that motivates people to eat - requires them to eat if they want to play the game at all, but does not penalize them for periods of inactivity and does not require the balancing of quite so many variables.

The current base rate of food/drink decay is 4 points per minute RL. There are reductions in rate for sitting or lying down when a tick occurs. An average player’s food capacity is around 1000 points, and drink capacity is slightly less. Starvation is defined as having zero food when the food tick comes around. That means that players can currently take roughly 4 hours before going from completely stuffed to the brink of negative consequences.

I was logged in for 10 hours today - idle 99% of it. That’s a lot of coconuts.

I’d like to see players eating much more frequently than once every 2-3 hours while playing actively, but I don’t want it to be a hassle and a danger while chatting in town.

food as fuel

Food is fuel. When you live an active lifestyle, you burn more calories. When I was in highschool, I could eat 6000 calories a day and not gain a pound. Now that I live at a desk? Heh…

In stead of ticking food down at the current rate and eventually imposing starvation penalties and weight loss on players, what if the rate of food consumption was tied into the character’s activity level? If I’m asleep at Malap’s tree or playing Mafia at Connol’s pub, I shouldn’t be burning through nearly as much food as when I’m digging for silver or hunting polar bears.

I propose that food and drink be tied directly into hp and mana regeneration rates respectively. If you’re not burning endurance, you don’t burn as much food. If you’re not spending a lot of mana, you’re not going to get as thirsty. (Yes, water to mana has been done before, it’s an accepted trope of the genre - and NO, it was hardly Blizzard’s idea).

In stead of subtracting at a rate of 4 food per minute tick (give or take a point or two for race and throw in a multiplier for the accident of stance at the time of the tick…), I think subtracting food at a rate of 1 unit per minute (keep the ticks the same) is a good idea. This lets players sit completely idle for 16 hours before they run out now.

Now… to drain food and drink when players exert themselves. Once, we had a system where bleeding caused direct water loss. It was the most brutal thing I’d ever seen. With all of the debuffs from extreme dehydration, it was possible to hit someone with one blow of a knife that only did like 5% of their life total but cut their stats in half because their thirst became critical. A few more hits like that, and they could die from thirst before their health ever dipped into the yellow - they could even die while shielded and at full health by using magic. We don’t want a repeat of that

hypothetical numbers

In stead of directly damaging food and drink when damage occurs to one of the stats, we should debit from these pools whenever health and endurance and mana regenerate naturally. If 1 point of food translates to 1 point of natural hp regen and 1 point of drink translates to 1 point of natural mana regen… Well, the natural rate of regen is capped at 1 point of hp per 10 seconds and 1 point of mana per 20. That’s 6 hp and 3 mana per minute. Thus, a player who is recovering naturally from an injury would go through food at almost 2x the current rate… until fully healed, at which point, they’ll drop back to 1/4 current.

But there is an additional monkey wrench to be thrown into all of this. If players never spend mana (it is possible, really), then they’re never using water. But worse yet, if they meditate or are healed/channeled/etc… they can wreak absolute havoc on the system. It might very well be possible to meditate spam charge crystals for hours on end w/o needing to eat.

And while I can appreciate the RL analogue… this is a gameplay balance issue. I don’t want a silly thematic insight to completely obviate an entire sector of the mud economy.

Endurance regen needs to drain from this pool as well. Endurance regenerates at a maximum rate of 1 point every 2 seconds - 30 points per minute of very active gameplay. There are currently very few ways to spend this much endurance, and they all involve combat. If we go ahead and debit 1 point of food per point of endurance regenerated, then we’re getting somewhere. 30 points per minute is still less than 10x the current rate - and if they’re actually burning that much endurance, it’s a good rate. I don’t want people to be able to sustain that level of activity indefinitely - hunger makes a nice limiter for this sort of thing. At 30 points of food a minute, players can still run at full burn for half an hour before taking a lunch break.

The simplest change to prevent meditation abuse would be to treat all mana regenerated through meditation as natural regen - thus, meditating for 200 points of mana costs 200 water. Simple enough.

food as power

I want players to be able to receive buffs from the foods they eat. I want people to gravitate toward specific foods because of the sorts of activities they’re engaged in. We’ve already established a list of food ingredients and possible related stats to modify, so I won’t get into that here. I like it, I want to keep it.

But I want to simplify it. Currently… it is possible to maintain food buffs forever, in all stats. I like the idea of allowing players to eat “meals” of multiple food items that combine themselves into a single buff, but I don’t want to see someone eat 1000 cherries and buy themselves a few hours of bonus will power. I’m not yet sure how to allow someone to eat a steak + potatoes + corn + milk as a single meal and gain some sort of synergistic bonus from it without allowing someone to eat a pile of sugar cookies and dragon jerky for a similar bonus… so I won’t worry about it right now.

Really simple meal = bread and water. For now, let’s allow a player to maintain exactly one buff from a food item and one buff from a drink item at any given moment.

Then, in stead of trying to track stacking durations, etc… I like the idea of setting the duration of the food buff to the actual duration of the food itself. Thus, if you eat an apple for 50 points of food, the food buff will last as long as those 50 points of food do. If you eat another apple before the buff expires, the timer will simply be reset back to 50. If you eat a banana, the banana’s buff will replace that of the apple and set its own timer.

This system is easy to learn and easy to balance. We don’t have to calculate separate buff durations, etc… because the durations are built into the character’s activity level.

It’s not a perfect system, and it still encourages strange eating habits… but it’s better than what we have at present.

limits for sanity

The final topic I want to address is that of death and stat debuffs and weight loss from starvation.

Weight loss doesn’t really affect much of anything in the game at present, but it is something that players are aware of. By changing the rate at which players burn through food so dramatically (in both directions), the current weight system will only become that more skewed. I think it needs to be disabled for now until we can come up with something better. A better system would only allow weight to fluxuate gradually - over the course of an extended period of time. Perhaps we compare natural food decay with accelerated decay due to activity and determine a good ratio for maintaining a constant weight? Shrug.

The stat penalties from hunger are huge. They’re actually the real cause of starvation death behind the scenes - the victim’s constitution is reduced to zero.

I’d like to see the stat penalties go entirely, but there are just as many good reasons to keep the penalties as to get rid of them. Playing the simplicity card again, however… I’d like to see a different breed of hunger penalty.

Since food and drink are being used to fuel regeneration, what if starvation just turned into a major reduction in regen rates? When a player goes from being able to regenerate 30 endurance a minute to only regenerating 5… they’ll feel it, and there’s no need to recalculate their constitution score (and all that entails).

This means that starvation is still bad - it cripples your ability to do very much of anything without actively deteriorating from your chance of success in any given action. It doesn’t kill idle players, and it doesn’t kill npc workers who’ve been locked in a barn during finals week… but it does kill the starving player who gets into a fight with a lion.

This doesn’t play nicely with the whole food chain background simulation we always wanted… but we’ve been talking about abstracting that sort of thing out to a pure numerical simulation for ages now anyway

allaryin idea buff, crafting, hunger, stats