Digestibility (split from Onion Soup)

[SekoETC]

One of my characters would know where to acquire all the resources for that onion soup but currently the only reason to make complex foods is not really supported by game mechanics. Now if we had a morale bar like in Human age and it would stay low if you ate bad food, that would give people incentive to cook something nice. Better yet, if someone had never seen anything but raw potatoes, they'd be completely content with eating them, but if they saw other foods then they would get a craving for them and start losing morale.

[Piscator]

Maybe we could introduce an efficency malus of one percent for every 20g of food you ate that day. Raw potatoes for example would let you work 10% slower while baked potatoes would only give you a 3% malus because they're easier digestible.

[HFrance]

And the next step will be to release the consumption of raw meat, with the harms that this would cause.

[SekoETC]

Oh, if people were able to eat raw meat but the consumption rates were large, that would be a good way of getting rid of all the piles but people would feel lethargic having to use so much energy on digesting it. You know how lions spend most of the day just lying around in the sun and they only charge at easy targets? That's because it takes so much energy to digest what they eat. But if the malus (doesn't that mean an anvil? ) the penalty was directly proportional to how much you ate, people who were starving would work the most efficiently. Although this kinda makes sense, at least in the early stages of starvation. People might start rationing their food to get the most out of work and might end up dying. Sounds interesting. And it might not be too difficult to implement either.

[Piscator]

Hmm, malus seems to be at least unusual in English, I mean a penalty. (I think a malus is a type of hammer by the way, not an anvil.)

I think in a hunger situation you could just get the penalty of the worst nourishing food (raw potatoes?) to reflect the lack of nutrients.

Also the penalty could generally be reduced by a fixed percentage so that very compact food would even give you a slight bonus. People shouldn't have the impression that every new implementation makes their lives harder.

[Gran]

I think that malus means solely penalty in english, although there is a reference involving hammers, but that hardly means anything to the speaker. Still, malus is very similar for the word malleus, which means "mallet".

Boyah, putting this all back into the rail, I think that penalty to work or lethargy is a rather harsh implementation. It is very interesting, I'm sure, but it should of course be applied only to some resources - as raw meat, which *may* be hard to digest (never heard of that though) and potatoes (which are hard as rocks without cooking - but are treated as a delicacy by unaware newspawns wanting to make a sympathetic roleplay ).

More "real" (read embarassing) penalties to eating some raw foods would be diahreea and vomit. That could actually convince people into properly cooking and storaging food.

[Piscator]

Well, if my suggestion would be implemented in it's original form it's pretty far from harsh I think. 10% from eating potatoes is already the maximum penalty and the 2.4% from bread for example would be hardly noticeable.

How about 1% per 10g minus 5%? Most prepared foods are eaten at a value of about 50g per day so the implementation in this form would have hardly an effect on people eating bread or baked potatoes and would only penalize people eating raw foods (up to 15%). The same penalty would be applied to hungry characters. That way people would have an incentive to keep their chars fed all the time. (I think it used to be a requirement for auto-healing, but currently hunger is only an issue when it reaches 100%.)

[Joshuamonkey]

By the way, when carrot eating values changed and my character almost died at sea, one of the ways I stayed alive was by dropping food, getting hungry, and then eating again. I guess in a way rationing food makes sense.