41.78 calorie change is destroying game. walking takes more calories than running?

[DreadLordNaf]

Never in my years of playing have I had a problem maintaining weight, until this last patch. My char was going under fed status fast even when stuffing his face with hohos and chicken and I couldnt figure why until I saw someone did a test of the calories burned for 41.78.

In summary, walking now burns calories 5x faster than in 41.73 and if you measure how many calories to go a certain distance, then walking actually takes 10% more calories than running the same distance, wtf? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZl5O7ZdoKc

If you play normal settings with ♥♥♥♥ tons of canned food then this prob doesnt affect you. But if you like rare loot challenge games this change makes no sense. It means you can keep your char's stomach full, yet still be starving and losing weight, and yet not able to eat more since again, you are already full. While at the same time there is almost no way foraging can be beneficial now for food, you will burn more calories walking around than you will gain with food since walking now apparently takes the same energy as running/sprinting.

I hope they fix this, and in the meantime if anyone knows a mod I can adjust to put back like 41.73 was I would be appreciative.

[DreadLordNaf]

Thank you for clarifying, though in-game testing on a game I'm doing currently verifies his overall point. My char can stay full all the time and still be starving somehow. And his values of burning 100 calories every 53 seconds walking means you need to find some canned food almost every minute or two IRL if playing normal speed to maintain your weight. Very easy in beginning but makes long term survival almost impossible. And even if you could find it, your person will not be allowed to eat a new can every minute or two because they will always be full. There doesnt seem to be a connection between hunger and calories which is very odd.

It also means long-term survival just got much less freedom of playstyles which is sad :( You now have only 1 or 2 ways to survive longtime: to ultra micromanage min/max cabbage growing or very high end fishing to maintain such a high calorie burn versus playing different routes, or you will die. Growing anything else will be pointless.

I think all that's needed is a slight adjustment to walking burn rate. From what I remember walking IRL burns about 1/3 the calories running/ jogging. So perhaps that should be the modifier of .3 instead of .6? Otherwise as it stands now his point of walking burning more calories than running the same distance is accurate given the .6 modifier, but the increased rate of speed you get places from running. Seems like there is no purpose in walking anymore and oddly enough with this change if you are starving you can now save calories by running places?

[dustbiter]

You don't need very high end fishing to gain weight. With spear fishing daily from 1800 to 2000, while fishing level is near 0 with bad luck you may not catch enough fish, but on average with a few fishing levels, around 2 or 3, you can quite reliably catch enough fish to fatten up since you can catch large fish and big pikes over a a meter long pretty frequently.

I think the process of gaining weight on my most recent play seemed to slow down a bit once I was near or around 85 kg, since energy consumption has been adjusted for weight? But I mostly lost interest in playing the character so I haven't tried stuffing my character by eating all the fish I can catch in the evening in the current game version. Typically I'd stop playing a character when I can survive as long as I want, it's just fishing, farming and patrol chores with zero or near zero zombies encountered daily.

In an older version of the game I got my character to what seemed like the max weight of 130 from stuffing the character on fish.

[DreadLordNaf]

Yeah but that just proves my point. You now have to spend more time doing fewer very boring activities to survive long term. Also fishing is just standing still and that hasnt changed calories burn in 41.78 as far as Im aware, but not everyone wants to stare at the fishing screen all day. Doesnt make for the most fun game.

I do agree it was too easy to gain weight before but this still doesn't address the fact that the .6 walking modifier for calories is now broken. It means if you are trying to save calories in 41.78 there is no benefit now, not even a tiny one, from walking versus running. Very counter intuitive that players now need to run everywhere when starving in order to "gain weight" and that just walking around my house relaxed doing chores or organizing things is a caloric death sentence on challenge games.

[SnuffSaid]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Here's the modifiers from the game code:

Spritning: 1.3x
Running: 1.0x
Walking/Sneaking: 0.6x

These aren't directly applied to the BMI of the player but the caloriesDecreraseExercise value, which is 60 calories per 10 minutes.

Spritning: 78 cal
Running: 60 cal
Walking/Sneaking: 36 cal
Wake: 10 cal
Sleeping: 5 cal

For the default weight, that'll be
Spritning: 78 cal
Running: 60 cal
Walking/Sneaking: 36 cal
Wake: 10 cal
Sleeping: 5 cal

So let's s \ay you walked 16 hours in-game, you can expect to lose about 3400 cal. About half of what you'd expect in real life, if you were to do that.

I wondered why my last character ended up underweight despite me playing how I usually do. Obviously the problem here is that in real life you'd burn less than 100 calories for every mile walked and in game time you probably don't walk much more than a mile on any given day, so the two are difficult to compare, but it's pretty crazy to need a 3400 calorie bodybuilder diet just to maintain your weight from walking around inside your safehouse. Maintenance calories for the average man are about 2,500.

To balance this out they should significantly lower the calories burned from walking and up them for running, because running definitely burns a lot more than double the calories of walking. And sprinting should absolutely torch calories and have you exhausted within 20 seconds.

[Links_♡♡♡]

nice game

[V-Bro - The Titan's Driver]

I'm mostly okay with the calorie burn - except for the fact that besides fishing, there's not many fatty foods out there, save for some canned goods that will eventually run out. (Perishable meats that expire right when the power grid dies don't count to me.)

Hopefully with animal NPCs coming, they will change that up by offering new hunting options.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by SnuffSaid:

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Here's the modifiers from the game code:

Spritning: 1.3x
Running: 1.0x
Walking/Sneaking: 0.6x

These aren't directly applied to the BMI of the player but the caloriesDecreraseExercise value, which is 60 calories per 10 minutes.

Spritning: 78 cal
Running: 60 cal
Walking/Sneaking: 36 cal
Wake: 10 cal
Sleeping: 5 cal

For the default weight, that'll be
Spritning: 78 cal
Running: 60 cal
Walking/Sneaking: 36 cal
Wake: 10 cal
Sleeping: 5 cal

So let's s \ay you walked 16 hours in-game, you can expect to lose about 3400 cal. About half of what you'd expect in real life, if you were to do that.

I wondered why my last character ended up underweight despite me playing how I usually do. Obviously the problem here is that in real life you'd burn less than 100 calories for every mile walked and in game time you probably don't walk much more than a mile on any given day, so the two are difficult to compare, but it's pretty crazy to need a 3400 calorie bodybuilder diet just to maintain your weight from walking around inside your safehouse. Maintenance calories for the average man are about 2,500.

To balance this out they should significantly lower the calories burned from walking and up them for running, because running definitely burns a lot more than double the calories of walking. And sprinting should absolutely torch calories and have you exhausted within 20 seconds.

It's actually not much more than 2x.
30 mins at a walking pace of 3.5mph is 150~ cals, 30 mins at a 6mph run/jog is 350~. Roughly 2.3x

Per distance travelled(Ie, a mile), running is about 25~% more calorie consumptive than walking.


Also, What the character does in game isn't technically Sprinting; It's running. The animation cycles are basically walk/jog/run.

The average human can't maintain a top speed sprint for more than 10 seconds, Not even olympians. Our bodies just can't keep up the transfer of resources needed to maintain it so we necessarily slow to a near sprint run when our muscles exhaust their existing stockpile and have to work off only what can be delivered. That near sprint speed can be maintained for around 30~ seconds before dropping off even further.

[DreadLordNaf]

@Shurenai and EnigmaGrey - I think your getting lost in mundane details. The game has always been designed around the trifecta of balance/fun/realism. The fact that you now in 41.78 have to run in-game to save calories and "gain weight" versus walking makes no sense, which is what occurs since the time you spend running is so much less. Also that spending all day moving from point A to B in your safehouse burns 3400 calories the same as if you were walking in the field all day, also doesnt, and just adds tedium to the game.

[Ghost]

i like this game

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by DreadLordNaf:

@Shurenai and EnigmaGrey - I think your getting lost in mundane details. The game has always been designed around the trifecta of balance/fun/realism. The fact that you now in 41.78 have to run in-game to save calories and "gain weight" versus walking makes no sense, which is what occurs since the time you spend running is so much less. Also that spending all day moving from point A to B in your safehouse burns 3400 calories the same as if you were walking in the field all day, also doesnt, and just adds tedium to the game.

If you're walking around for it for 16 hours of your game day, you need to design your safe house better. Even on the days I spend all day at base I don't walk around anywhere close to that much. 80-90% of that time is fast forward reading, or fast forward waiting for item transfers, or for something to finish cooking, or just passing time till morning so I can head out.

To reach 3400 calories consumed you'd literally have to be walking in circles all day (as Enigma said, 16 hours) doing literally nothing else that requires you to pause and wait- Which is most of your base maintenance tasks.

[dustbiter]

With the current version of the game I haven't increased the amount of fishing I usually do, like I said it's just from 1800-2000, two hours of game time daily spent on fishing to catch enough fish to fatten. Clearing the surrounding area makes it safe enough to fish with a bit of fast forward on time. Farming is done every other day, typically about 2 or 3 tiles added. When my home area was pretty zombie free I went on foot exploring for hours a day, walking and jogging. I didn't eat all my daily fish and kept my weight at 80-85.

I think Zomboid could use more ways to preserve food, to smoke or dry the fish and meat, to dig cellars to store food, winter temperature can help to preserve food.

Also I hope for more realistic starvation mechanics like in Unreal World. You shouldn't die quickly from just "hunger", lack of nutrition weakens the character and takes a long time to kill a character through starvation. You shouldn't power up your character with a green moodle just from stuffing up on cabbage. Hunger should increase at a rate affected by nutrition level, hunger grows faster when nutrition is low.

[SnuffSaid]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Originally posted by SnuffSaid:

I wondered why my last character ended up underweight despite me playing how I usually do. Obviously the problem here is that in real life you'd burn less than 100 calories for every mile walked and in game time you probably don't walk much more than a mile on any given day, so the two are difficult to compare, but it's pretty crazy to need a 3400 calorie bodybuilder diet just to maintain your weight from walking around inside your safehouse. Maintenance calories for the average man are about 2,500.

To balance this out they should significantly lower the calories burned from walking and up them for running, because running definitely burns a lot more than double the calories of walking. And sprinting should absolutely torch calories and have you exhausted within 20 seconds.

That … doesn’t make any sense.

If you only walk the equivalent of 1 mile, you’re not going to be constantly walking for 16 hours.

Unless you literally set your game time for 1 in-game day to equal 24 real life hours, it makes perfect sense.

The default setting is 24 hours = 1 real hour. Your character absolutely does not walk much over a mile in real distance in 16 game hours.

[DreadLordNaf]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Somehow burning more calories walking doesn’t make sense given the math, anyway.

Yes it does. You spend 40% less calories by walking, but you get from point A to B 40% faster approx by running and spend less time burning calories. See the video I posted at 2 mins 15 seconds. Over the same distance it takes him 22 calories to run across his yard but 24 calories to walk the same distance. <-- This is what Im talking about. Regardless the larger debate on calorie balance, this shouldnt be a thing and it messes up a lot by having it be so.

[SnuffSaid]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

It's actually not much more than 2x.
30 mins at a walking pace of 3.5mph is 150~ cals, 30 mins at a 6mph run/jog is 350~. Roughly 2.3x

Per distance travelled(Ie, a mile), running is about 25~% more calorie consumptive than walking.

Nah, your confusion here is Googling running and it giving you figures for jogging at a leisurely pace, which is not what your game character is doing. As somebody who runs in real life I can tell you categorically that running at the pace this character does would burn a hell of a lot more than double it's walking pace.

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Also, What the character does in game isn't technically Sprinting; It's running. The animation cycles are basically walk/jog/run.

The average human can't maintain a top speed sprint for more than 10 seconds, Not even olympians. Our bodies just can't keep up the transfer of resources needed to maintain it so we necessarily slow to a near sprint run when our muscles exhaust their existing stockpile and have to work off only what can be delivered. That near sprint speed can be maintained for around 30~ seconds before dropping off even further.

Shift is to run, alt is to sprint. And again, you don't need to regurgitate Google to me, I do this in real life, and arguing about the difference between 10 seconds and 20 seconds, as well as what constitutes a maximal speed, is just pedantry. This forum seems to have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of that for some reason.

[SnuffSaid]

Originally posted by EnigmaGrey:

Originally posted by SnuffSaid:

Unless you literally set your game time for 1 in-game day to equal 24 real life hours, it makes perfect sense.

The default setting is 24 hours = 1 real hour. Your character absolutely does not walk much over a mile in real distance in 16 game hours.

Then you aren’t walking 16 hours a day.

Unless you don’t stop moving for 40+ minutes of that day, this distinction doesn’t matter at all.

You don't get this at all.