Make hunger relevant: add mild drawbacks to cooked lizards and stomafilia
issueid=3907 09-24-2015 11:07 PM
Ancient Member
Number of reported issues by Al-Khwarizmi: 62
Make hunger relevant: add mild drawbacks to cooked lizards and stomafilia
Hunger is now largely irrelevant in the mid and late game due to sources of unlimited food. These sources could use a mild drawback.

ADOM has an interesting hunger mechanic, but it is only relevant in the early game. From the early midgame, it becomes largely obsolete, for two reasons: ratling fodder (cooked lizards) and stomafillia, which provide unlimited amounts of food.

I think the game would be more interesting if these unlimited foods had a small random chance of having a mild drawback. Nothing that would make them useless, of course, but at least something that could make it not so much of a no-brainer to eat large quantities of them, so that other food can be of at least some use to mid and late game characters, and make the decision of whether to use a lot of artifacts a bit more relevant.

This is also a chance to kill two birds with one stone and give some prevalence to underused player statuses such as Mute, Sleep and Drunk. These statuses are a feature of ADOM which is so rare that some experienced players don't know (or forget) that they even exist.

So I suggest the following:

- Cooked lizards could have a 5% chance of poisoning the player, and a 5% chance of putting the player to sleep.
- Stomafillia could have a 5% chance of muting the player, and a 5% chance of making the player drunk.

The actual percents and statuses are just a suggestion and can be open to debate (although I think poison or sleepiness from fast food is quite thematic).

I think this wouldn't have a big impact on the overall difficulty of the game, as none of these things is really a big deal and mid to late game players should have more than enough resources to survive these statuses. But it would make the game more interesting and make some currently underused mechanics become more relevant.
Issue Details
Issue Number 3907
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Suggested
Priority 8
Suggested Version ADOM r61
Implemented Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Votes for this feature 1
Votes against this feature 13
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




09-24-2015 11:37 PM
Senior Member
That suggestion doesn't really seem to address the problem you're bringing up. With that change, players will just have to reconsider eating them in combat; but outside of combat (when you typically eat), nothing will change.

To encourage players to use other types of food, you might decrease the amount of satiation stomafillia provides every time you eat one (to the point where after 100 of them, they provide as much nutrition as a rat). Or you refuse to eat gross-tasting stomafillia plants unless you're Very Hungry! Or you can only eat the same food item n times within m turns, or you get sick of it and refuse to eat any more and have to wait m turns until you can eat more of it. I don't think I'm necessarily suggesting these, but maybe just as an example of other ideas.

09-24-2015 11:37 PM
Ancient Member
I think hunger is already annoying as such, no point making it more so.
This isn't a game element I would include in any list of things to change in order to make the game more challenging.
If anything, having to eat food is just a nuisance, a roguelike thing kept there not because of its inherent positive effect on gameplay (or lack thereof in this case) but because it's a feature typical for the genre, one of many that players have to cope with.
Why don't PC's ever sleep? Urinate? Defecate? These things aren't there because they would needlessly complicate gameplay without obvious benefits.
On the other hand, food consumption serves another purpose, namely providing certain intrinsic bonuses to PCs when a corpse is eaten.
I don't think this should be extended further, turning it into a mini-game of its own.
Otherwise you risk people having to restock in Munxip's shop because that's the best way or simply collect large/iron rations and clog their inventory with heavy stuff when they could be using it for something more important.

Any real life soldier can tell you that food rations taste like shit and for a good reason.

09-25-2015 04:09 AM
Ancient Member
Maybe if the weights of the majority of food wasn't so obscenely high and cooking didn't take 50 turns per corpse...

I like having food acting as a challenge to deal with in the early game and for new players, but that you can more or less take care of by midgame, to be replaced by corruption, which acts in a similar sort of way but in the endgame.

09-25-2015 11:35 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
and cooking didn't take 50 turns per corpse...
If you bless a cooking set, it will only take 20 turns.

09-25-2015 06:29 PM
ixi ixi is offline
Junior Member
I want to see changes to hunger mechanic in game but not changes proposed here.

One problem we have here - hunger system is really disbalanced. Easiest sources of food are stomafillia and cooked lizards indeed. +Most of my characters are able to stay alive eating just corpses. Other sources are both rare, heavy and as satiating as above.

I would propose the following nerfs:
1) eating too much of the same food could really cause vomiting, if tried more minor sickness and finally PC could just refuse to eat this again unless he is starving. Nice race/class tweeks could be included too, e.g. trolls and orcs surely should ignore this penalty for lizards.
2) Increase chances to get stomacempia from farming to, say, 90% and make it harder to identify.
3) Cap number of cooked lizards for traders to, say, 15.
4) Reduce satiation from cooked lizards (well, for all, except ratlings).
5) I really would like to see hunger more challenging so would like more negative effects from raw corpses. Especially rotten corpses. Low chance of vomiting, minor sickness... (again trolls, orcs, barbarians are exceptions).

Still above sources are the best.

Hence buffs to other sources:

1) Just make other food junk more satiating. And some of it at least a bit more common. I rarely eat cakes, sauseges, frog legs, melons, almost never apples...
2) Reduce ration weights 4-5 times. No kidding. 100/200s is 5/10kg which seems insenely huge. How one could eat 3-4 such rations in a time!? But, yes, keep original satiation value.
3) Buff cooking. Lets imagine that PC's are butchering corpses before cooking. So cooked corpses should weight less - from 90% to, say 30% when cooking is maxed.

For those who don't wanna deal with hunger and feel like it shouldn't play any role in game and cause deaths: turn it off. Shouldn't ADOM have difficulty settings now? Don't know myself since I missed crowd funding... :/

09-25-2015 07:03 PM
Ancient Member
Like Jelly says, I like that hunger is an early game issue, and corruption is a subtler - UNIQUE - late game issue.

09-30-2015 07:16 AM
Senior Member
Honestly the game is better with hunger off. There is essentially zero danger of dying from hunger if you play the game for any amount of time, it's just an inconvenience.

Look, if you have to try this hard to make a feature "relevant", maybe the feature isn't that great to begin with. Blasphemous is right, it's here because it's a vestige of earlier design, not because it really adds anything.

If you were dead set on keeping hunger, you could make satiation deplete much less rapidly, make rations much lighter, and make them much rarer. Then carrying them and eating them is no longer a constant annoyance, but hunger is actually relevant and can potentially have an effect on gameplay (survival might be semi-relevant then too).

It would still make no sense, though, for the pc to starve to death in an environment where there should be tons and tons of food sources.

09-30-2015 12:41 PM
Senior Member
I'd just make the bloated penalty worse if you want to nerf stomafilla. I don't use it apart from wilderness travels because of the speed/DV hit

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