Hunger/thirst difficulty

[Waladil]

So far, I've found that hunger and thirst are complete non-issues except for maybe the very earliest stages of the game. You make a couple goatskins and refill them occasionally, water's solved. There's tons of things to butcher for food and if you want to stretch that even further you can cook the meat, food's solved.

So I wanted to see if anyone else has had *different* experiences with food and water, such as a promising run running out of them.

If it's a pretty universal experience that it's trivial to handle food and just adds some light overhead rather than any interesting decisions or challenges, I may put together a mod that removes hunger and thirst entirely.

[H-H]

In my personal experience, it's pretty easy to find food. I always try to get a fishing rod from a fisherman when game starts , then I just fish on water. Catching a fish is a very high chance. It's just sometimes very dull work. I guess those who play as trolls may experience such issues as trolls gain hunger 50% faster.

[Wegadin]

My first playthrough, the god of the river attacked me. After he died, no more river. If I wasn't a vampire that playthrough, I would have thought: "Hmmm, this might make needing food and water a bit harder." However, yeah. It is just not a bit deal. I would like to see a buff for maintaining high levels of satiety... though that could make the game more tedious if you felt like the the buff was constantly required.

[Nneu]

I tend to agree. DCSS ended up removing food because it didn't provide much value. I am about 12+ hours into my run and I have never fished. Later on, you end up killing some monsters that drop 100 meat and I have never had to butcher since.

I do sometimes find myself heading back to get some water, but now I just carry around 2 waterskins and it's usually not an issue.

Maybe if the cooked food rotted, but I think this would probably just make it more unfun. Without respawning enemies, I think fishing might be a requirement if the cooked food did rot.

In CDDA and Unreal World, I remember having to focus on food often, especially in CDDA if I'm sitting in my house reading books all day. CDDA is nice because you can get bonuses depending on how good the food was. Unreal World it can be very easy to starve to death.

[Celgaming]

Fishing should provide random items, not just fish. Schools of fish added for fun but could contain artifacts too. Perhaps the ability to fish up a fisherman for fighting and so on. Fishing can be a nice addition in any RPG but I agree with everything said above:

Hunger is rather pointless. If there was a good reason to keep it high then it would mean something, like having above 80% makes you regenerate 2x faster health or stamina on rest and so on. So far it doesn't do anything and even if you dip below 1% you still get another grace period in starvation.

[Nefaro]

Originally posted by Celgaming:

Fishing should provide random items, not just fish. Schools of fish added for fun but could contain artifacts too.

Ah, yes. Ye olde Ultima Online style fishing.

Perhaps we might pull up a treasure map.

[Waladil]

Unfortunately, if I do make this mod it wont be anything really cool to expand the hunger/thirst system, it'll probably just remove them because that's what I'm capable of implementing. If someone else wants to use more code knowledge to instead make them interesting systems, I'm all for that too/instead.

[The Grand Mugwump]

The only time I've been bothered by hunger/thirst is when I'm using a weaker character who has to spend a lot of time healing. I did get bothered by life essence as a lich while doing the maze below the emperor's palace. That was a real pain finding enough life essence to survive, though a couple broken altars literally saved my (un)life.

[Total Oh No]

In my opinion, survival mechanics like hunger and thirst aren't intended to make this game more challenging or to offer strategic decisions, but simply to make you engage with the game in a different way than you would if it didn't have these systems.

I think that this, and the item durability system as well, is supposed to make it so that your expeditions into unknown parts of the map can't go on indefinitely and that eventually you will have to return to a safe haven that you have previously conquered by clearing it out from enemies, where you can recuperate, resupply, rearm and repair.

It gives you a reason to engage with the game in a non-violent way, as a downtime from progress, where you complete more mundane tasks, like catching fish, milking animals, or harvesting/threshing/milling grain to make bread, as well as encouraging you to make use of the crafting system a bit more and generally preparing yourself for the next adventure.

I think what these more reptitive tasks, like backtracking, ultimately cause is to increase the total amount of work that is needed to progress in the game, but I don't mean that in an "artificially lengthen the game" negative kind of way (though it definitely does lengthen the game), but that it means that progressing feels a lot more satisfying than it would if the game was simpler. I very much know that feeling from other games, like Workers & Resources (a city builder where even a simple road can turn into a lengthy, complex construction process) or Vintage Story (a minecraft-like game where even crafting simple copper tools requires a ton of work and resources), but it is often overlooked by players.

If you find the idea of these tasks tedious or if you don't really have the spare time for this kinda gameplay, then you can use mods to get rid of thirst/hunger and durability, but it will make the game less interesting, more straight forward, in my opinion. It will be a more traditional dungeon crawler where you always move forward. As weird as it sounds, but the "tedium" is one of my favourite parts of this game.

[vitokin]

Wow people always complain, its endless... how can someone complain about a bonus feature is beyond my understanding.... Also i make hunger and thirst brutal in my upcoming total conversion mod inspired by mad max wink

[Total Oh No]

Originally posted by vitokin:

Wow people always complain, its endless... how can someone complain about a bonus feature is beyond my understanding.... Also i make hunger and thirst brutal in my upcoming total conversion mod inspired by mad max wink

I think you're misrepresenting this thread. The OP was just asking a question about what people's experience and opinions are about the hunger/thirst mechanic. That's not complaining. It's a reasonable discussion.

[vitokin]

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

Originally posted by vitokin:

Wow people always complain, its endless... how can someone complain about a bonus feature is beyond my understanding.... Also i make hunger and thirst brutal in my upcoming total conversion mod inspired by mad max wink

I think you're misrepresenting this thread. The OP was just asking a question about what people's experience and opinions are about the hunger/thirst mechanic. That's not complaining. It's a reasonable discussion.

Oh sorry ;(

[Waladil]

Yep! I'm really just polling folks to see what they think. So far, mostly people have had the same assessment as myself, but I notice a few dissenting voices.

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

If you find the idea of these tasks tedious or if you don't really have the spare time for this kinda gameplay, then you can use mods to get rid of thirst/hunger and durability, but it will make the game less interesting, more straight forward, in my opinion. It will be a more traditional dungeon crawler where you always move forward. As weird as it sounds, but the "tedium" is one of my favourite parts of this game.

This actually points to the center of the thread: Should I make a mod to remove thirst/hunger, because I haven't seen one as of yet. So far, I'm leaning towards yes but I'm not entirely sure how to implement it. I could just change the character.json file to give each race 2.0 hunger and thirst (it seems like lower numbers mean more hunger, humans have 1.5 for "50% slower" and trolls have 0.5 for "50% faster"), but I think this method would then be incompatible with other mods that modify character.json. I could also do a similar thing to my mod that lets all classed start with bolt skills and give everyone a skill that restores hunger and thirst, but that's just a really awkward way of doing things. I haven't yet seen a graceful way of just saying "hunger: no" in my exploration of the code.

[Nefaro]

I'm glad it's relatively easy to find food. I don't want to play a farming simulator.

As far as food and water requirements go, they've had influences on my longer forays. Since carry weight is a prime consideration, I tend to only take a small stack with me when exploring, and leave the rest in conquered towns being used as a home base. However, when getting sucked in to a long expedition, such as the constant fighting through the big city, I've run out before and been forced to scrounge until I could get out and head back to base before starving.

It's there, but it's not a constant concern. Which is quite alright by me.

[Banci]

Originally posted by Total Oh No:

In my opinion, survival mechanics like hunger and thirst aren't intended to make this game more challenging or to offer strategic decisions, but simply to make you engage with the game in a different way than you would if it didn't have these systems.

I think that this, and the item durability system as well, is supposed to make it so that your expeditions into unknown parts of the map can't go on indefinitely and that eventually you will have to return to a safe haven that you have previously conquered by clearing it out from enemies, where you can recuperate, resupply, rearm and repair.

It gives you a reason to engage with the game in a non-violent way, as a downtime from progress, where you complete more mundane tasks, like catching fish, milking animals, or harvesting/threshing/milling grain to make bread, as well as encouraging you to make use of the crafting system a bit more and generally preparing yourself for the next adventure.

I think what these more reptitive tasks, like backtracking, ultimately cause is to increase the total amount of work that is needed to progress in the game, but I don't mean that in an "artificially lengthen the game" negative kind of way (though it definitely does lengthen the game), but that it means that progressing feels a lot more satisfying than it would if the game was simpler. I very much know that feeling from other games, like Workers & Resources (a city builder where even a simple road can turn into a lengthy, complex construction process) or Vintage Story (a minecraft-like game where even crafting simple copper tools requires a ton of work and resources), but it is often overlooked by players.

If you find the idea of these tasks tedious or if you don't really have the spare time for this kinda gameplay, then you can use mods to get rid of thirst/hunger and durability, but it will make the game less interesting, more straight forward, in my opinion. It will be a more traditional dungeon crawler where you always move forward. As weird as it sounds, but the "tedium" is one of my favourite parts of this game.

this is really good explanation. im still unsure if i should buy this but it is very different from allot of other roguelikes i have played

[Ragna]

Do you need food/water for your allies/army in this game? I haven't gotten far enough but I was under the impression that you would have to feed them and stuff. Would be an interesting balance mechanic between having more allies and then managing feeding them and getting resources.