Foraging Vegetarian - Viable?

[El Presidente]

I was roleplaying a vegetarian on a MP server for a challenge who wouldn't eat any meat, fish, bugs etc., which worked well in the city by eating crisps and ice cream, but would it be possible to continue this RP out in the woods once I've eaten all the food nearby?

My foraging is level 3, and the few times I popped into the woods I found a wild onion, though my mate also instantly died from a mushroom he found, so I'm hesitant to eat wild food. Could I survive using the foraging skill? There's something appealing about the skill but can it actually be used to survive?

[El Presidente]

Michael님이 먼저 게시:

Advent Dawn님이 먼저 게시:

Are you talking about in-game mechanics or real life? Is an all vegetable run in PZ not possible then? I fully agree about it being impossible in real life though.

PZ has a weight system in which you need to ingest enough calories (modified by nutrients and physical exertion) per day in order to maintain your weight. Vegetables in game are not high in calories, so you would have to absolutely stuff yourself with them to survive on them alone in the long term. I'm not sure if it's actually possible or not, I've never tried it.

Ah ok, so it'd be a hard balance between actually finding enough wild veggies with the forage skills vs energy spent actually wandering the woods then, but could be possible. Very interesting... normally food isn't a problem in standard runs of the game, so I like the sound of this more challenging foraging/starvation run. Thank you!

[El Presidente]

stevasaur님이 먼저 게시:

In-game, you can definitely survive on only plants. You just have to spend a lot of the day eating and you need to eat a lot more than you need to fill out your hunger meter.

It's a shame I mostly find sticks and rocks when foraging and not food then, at max I find a couple of berries or mushrooms a day

[El Presidente]

Itharus님이 먼저 게시:

Nuts are extremely high calorie and a single tree yields a great many... if nuts in this game are poor nutrition, that's blatantly wrong. It should also count as a good protein for vegetarians. Nuts are an incredible food source and really quite healthy for you to boot.

Also... how vegetarian? I know "vegetarians" who are willing to eat eggs and cheese and some of them even fish, one of them is ok with insects.

Do you mean vegan?

I have so far had my character just be a straight vegetarian, so no flesh from animals, but other animal products like honey or milk is ok. I thought that veganism would be too difficult to try because I'm already limiting my guy on most available foods in-game, and then on top of that I might have to avoid pasta in-case it was egg pasta or something etc. At that point it seemed too much.

I wish nuts were added though, not just for my little challenge RP but just for everyone; they could be a helpful little boost out and about and wouldn't spoil, and like you said they'd have great protein.

[El Presidente]

quothz님이 먼저 게시:

Advent Dawn님이 먼저 게시:

my mate also instantly died from a mushroom he found, so I'm hesitant to eat wild food.

Just as a side note, the herbalist trait or magazine will let your character identify poisonous berries and mushrooms. And it's only berries and mushrooms you need to worry about - stuff like rose hips or violet petals are always safe.

Ah cheers! I did wonder how to identify these things; I thought it was just a case of finding more and eating more until your character learnt. It's a bit strange that your person can't make their own identifications (even if it was just "bland brown one", "smokey black one" etc) without a book, it's a bit of a shame that it's kind of RNG then to find this one item instead of skill based. Still, thank you very much for letting me know!

[El Presidente]

Yurikano님이 먼저 게시:

Ignore all of the above posts that claim that you cannot survive on farming alone, these people clearly have zero clue about what they are talking about.

One cabbage is 178 calories and 9 protein. When made into salad by an expert cook (10 cooking), it's 240 calories and 12 protein.

One healthy cabbage plant yields on average 10 cabbages (actually 9 to 11) every 12 days.

If you plant 8 cabbage plants you will have, on average, 80 cabbages per 12 days, or 6-7 cabbages _per day_ which translates into at least 1440 calories and 72 protein _per day_. Not only you will be well fed all of the time (you are eating 25+ hunger meal 6 times a day), you will also have strength exercise boost with this much protein. And this is just 8 cabbage plants. If you add more, or add any other vegetable, or add mushrooms or fruit from foraging (some fruit like lime, lemon, grapefruit can be foraged in winter), or anything else really, you will struggle to keep eating fast enough.

Ok so farming is fantastic then for a vegetarian RP, but foraging is useless/more of just a supplement to the farming itself? The math on those cabbages is very interesting though, I wouldn't have guessed that they'd be so efficient! Thanks!

[Comrade Pickles]

You can easily subsist on cabbages idk what this guy is talking about starving.

[Cult of Nobody]

Itharus님이 먼저 게시:

Nuts are extremely high calorie and a single tree yields a great many... if nuts in this game are poor nutrition, that's blatantly wrong. It should also count as a good protein for vegetarians. Nuts are an incredible food source and really quite healthy for you to boot.

There is nothing intuitive about the nutrition system in this game.... Just like every other mechanic you have to learn the foods because their nutritional value doesn't usually match it's real world nutritional value.... Some are not even close.

[Trindalas]

Irl I think I’d rather die than live off cabbage 🤢 lol.
Being able to grow nut trees would be cool though.
And then they could make walnuts be an ammo for a sling or something as well 🤔

[Kaijupants]

Itharus님이 먼저 게시:

Nuts are extremely high calorie and a single tree yields a great many... if nuts in this game are poor nutrition, that's blatantly wrong. It should also count as a good protein for vegetarians. Nuts are an incredible food source and really quite healthy for you to boot.

Also... how vegetarian? I know "vegetarians" who are willing to eat eggs and cheese and some of them even fish, one of them is okay with insects.

Do you mean vegan?

There are three different words for those categories, vegetarian for anything non meat, vegan for anything not produced by animals whatsoever, and pescetarian, which is generally vegetarian but non red meat/fish or insects are okay.

[Itharus]

Wait there really is a whole group of vegetarians that's OK with eating bugs? I thought my friend was just the odd one out. Though I've had some kinds of bugs before, they're not as terrible as folks think, there's just an aversion built in unless you grew up with the concept.

A couple years ago though fish and bugs were both found to experience pain and what not. So... does that change things for vegetarians, I wonder? I mean what precisely is the heart of the being unwilling to kill an animal for food?

Do any go so far as to surgically remove their canine teeth in protest, I wonder?

:thinking:

[Graygan]

Advent Dawn님이 먼저 게시:

I have so far had my character just be a straight vegetarian, so no flesh from animals, but other animal products like honey or milk is ok. I thought that veganism would be too difficult to try because I'm already limiting my guy on most available foods in-game, and then on top of that I might have to avoid pasta in-case it was egg pasta or something etc. At that point it seemed too much.

I wish nuts were added though, not just for my little challenge RP but just for everyone; they could be a helpful little boost out and about and wouldn't spoil, and like you said they'd have great protein.

On a realistic note, dried commercial pasta is invariably vegan. It's flour, stabilizers, and water. No animal product. The addition of eggs would make it much easier to go bad quickly, thus no eggs. The same with commercial marinara sauce. Rarely does it have meat product in it unless you're specifically looking for it, like a bolognese.

So feel free to do a vegan and make vegetable soups, stews, and pastas.

I still have RL issues with it, but for pure game reasons and for seeking a self-imposed difficulty layer, it's very doable.

[El Presidente]

Itharus님이 먼저 게시:

Wait there really is a whole group of vegetarians that's OK with eating bugs? I thought my friend was just the odd one out. Though I've had some kinds of bugs before, they're not as terrible as folks think, there's just an aversion built in unless you grew up with the concept.

A couple years ago though fish and bugs were both found to experience pain and what not. So... does that change things for vegetarians, I wonder? I mean what precisely is the heart of the being unwilling to kill an animal for food?

Do any go so far as to surgically remove their canine teeth in protest, I wonder?

:thinking:

While I've never personally heard of vegetarians eating bugs, maybe they do it because they believe that bugs can't feel pain due to lacking a central nervous system, so bug consumption wouldn't cause 'harm' in the same sense as eating a pig would etc. Lots of people disagree that any animals can feel pain, so I guess it differs from person to person. I do know that bugs are supposed to be the food of the future due to climate change, as they're good for the diet while needing less space and resources compared to mammals, so it could be that 30 years from now the companies will have shifted the average consumer onto a more bug-centred diet as beef, pork and chicken become less and less economically viable. Or not, who knows.

[El Presidente]

Graygan님이 먼저 게시:

Advent Dawn님이 먼저 게시:

I have so far had my character just be a straight vegetarian, so no flesh from animals, but other animal products like honey or milk is ok. I thought that veganism would be too difficult to try because I'm already limiting my guy on most available foods in-game, and then on top of that I might have to avoid pasta in-case it was egg pasta or something etc. At that point it seemed too much.

I wish nuts were added though, not just for my little challenge RP but just for everyone; they could be a helpful little boost out and about and wouldn't spoil, and like you said they'd have great protein.

On a realistic note, dried commercial pasta is invariably vegan. It's flour, stabilizers, and water. No animal product. The addition of eggs would make it much easier to go bad quickly, thus no eggs. The same with commercial marinara sauce. Rarely does it have meat product in it unless you're specifically looking for it, like a bolognese.

So feel free to do a vegan and make vegetable soups, stews, and pastas.

I still have RL issues with it, but for pure game reasons and for seeking a self-imposed difficulty layer, it's very doable.

Ah ok, thank you, I didn't know that! Perhaps I'll try a vegan run next time then, see how long I can last! Cheers!

[Itharus]

IMO insects will only became a staple food in the more advanced part of the world if a) overpopulation goes to the utmost extreme and we start making subsidized basic allowance food, and b) if the advanced nations start basically sending mass amounts of food to impoverished nations to feed them better (I don't think the rest of the world is that charitable, honestly).

Cattle may give way over the decades, but pork and poultry and the like aren't that hard to maintain.

Insects are a larger food crop in areas with notoriously bad agriculture, or just a tradition of eating them.

[↯Zindy⛦]

Vegetarian is about cutting out meat when it is viable. In an apocalypse that philosophy can be thrown out.