Musings on the needs system and Food/Cooking (Wall'o'Text)

[Sex_Robot]

Ok so I have a lot of free time and I have a bad habit of coming up with random ideas for stupid shit and thinking about them in too much detail but I saw some other people talking about similar things so I thought i might as well type out my ideas for better or for worse. I sat in a coffee shop and started jotting down notes and then suddenly it was 90 minutes later and I had typed out 2000 words and my coffee was cold. Sorry about that. If you can be bothered to read it all I would be greatful for thoughts and other shit. So here goes...

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Although the Simsesque needs system that came out as an april fools was an excellent troll all round, some aspects of it were cool, after a while of fucking around and listening to other people I have been thinking about how the idea of needs could be appied to goonstation in a fun way without sucking. But first some tennets of what I think makes goonstation unique and fun and what a system of needs cannot fuck up in any way.

1. Goonstation is about experimentation and trying as many new things as possible.
   Every time something cool happens on Goonstation 9/10 its because someone had a spark of inspiration and the crazy voodoo code that holds the station together knew how to handle it and something incredible occured as a result. Any needs system cannot interrupt this process otherwise it will be nothing more than a hurdle instead of something that can add to gameplay. You should never have to say "My giant disposal tube butt removing device is nearly complete! but first I need to go sleep for 5 minutes" These systems should only improve and expand on these things but never take presidence over them. The main crux of any balance in a system like this is waking the tightrope between keeping it none invasive but not make it so inconsequential that it might as well not exist in the first place.
   
   
2. People should not be punished for not complying.
   Goonstation is good for not imposing too many dumb arbitrary rules on people. As long as you're not a dick to other people and aren't actively trying to fuck other peoples rounds up with no good reason, the world (station) is your oyster. From actively attempting to do your job to just sitting in the bar drinking and smoking as much weird glowing weed as the botanists can throw at you. If there's one thing that players hate it's being told what to do. So in a perfect world someone who has no interest in attempting to satisfy their needs should be no worse off in the game than they are in a preneeds world. But there should be benefits for those that do participate in the system. tl;dr The carrot, not the stick.
   
   
3. Flavor and fun over mechanics
   There are already a million and one ways to buff yourself in this game from medical resources, borging, the multitude of chemical cocktails that chemists can feed you, genetic alterations etc etc etc. While mechanical benefits for participating in the needs system are fine, people will walk through fire for the ability to glow a slightly different color for a round. This offers a multitude of reasons to participate in the system because you want to not because you have to. So a hybrid of mechanical and flavor benefits can create a lively system that becomes more than a "be robust" button.

With this in mind, I was looking at one of the more complex and definitely one of the biggest sources of sprites that is inversely one of the least experienced of the whole ship.

FOOD

The cooking system is, in my opinion, really fucking cool. From the multitude of cool tools you are given, the sheer number of things you can create and the ways you can vary them to the way that cookery is designed in a perfect world to interface regularly with botany, the quartermaster, the bar and even sometimes the medbay for a few fresh corpses. You can create a mutitude of dishes and be swedish as fuck. So with this cool system that does cool things, why do we barely ever see the fruits of it's labours. Why do Chefs often either fuck off to other jobs or go braindead from boredom 10 minutes in? Because nobody gives a fuck that food exists. So After a lot of thought I have been thinking about a way to reintroduce food as a more prominent entity in the game without making it the devil on your shoulder constantly interrupting you to go stuff something in your face.

There are two sides to this issue. Chefs have no reason to be creative with their cooking. Food is food and thats it. And people have no reason to eat the food because the effects of food are at best negligible most often non existent.


PART 1: THE NEED

I propose a system where every player is given a hunger level, this is not a visible bar or number but is delivered through descriptive feedback like addiction messages "you feel stuffed", "you feel hungry" or even "your stomach growls loudly" at intervals. A stomach growling sound effect that plays could be pretty cool for giving you away if you're trying to hide in the shadows. Suggesting that you should at least shove a donk pocket down your throat before you go do shady shit. There should be absolutely no mechanical penalties for not eating. You should be able to not eat for the whole round and the only repercussions for this should be one or two stomach growls, nothing else. Except one, which will probably drive many people to rage. Right now you need to have drank something to piss on the floor/in a glass whatever. I propose that to fart. You need to eat. Trying to fart on an empty stomach should result in a pathetic poot that embarrasses you and your space ancestors for such a shameful display. I can see the desire to fart loudly being a good base reason for people to be queuing at the bar for slices of pizza. A hunger level can also allow for some RNG style variation to each round. You could start the round with a random hunger level meaning you wanna go get something right now or actually you won't want to go eat until you've wondered round and got some stuff done. Or as I said you might not want to at all. Each round you could start with a randomly generated "favourite food" which when eaten provides double the benefit (whatever that may be) it normally would thusly giving reason to ask for specific dishes instead of living off of whatever is lying on the bar at any given time although then you have a choice. In this way we create a none invasive system that allows players to interact with it on 3 levels.

Level 3:The Player goes and eats when they are hungry, they order food, recieve food, eat the food and promptly are rewarded in some manner by small buffs and cool things.
Level 2:The Player grabs a donk pocket or a packed of chips out of the vending machine and shoves it down their throat before carrying on with whatever they were doing. They get no stomach growls and can fart their little heart out for a while.
Level 1:The Player never eats, and sans from a few flavor messages is not affected and carries on to do whatever they want to do during the round.

In this simple way we have changed food from a thing that is just *there* to a system that players can interact with no obligation, meaning that people would be drifting in and out of the cafeteria over the shift. If they have something more pressing to do they can do that thing with no penalty but if they're an engineer and the engine is running and none of the ship is missing they can drop by for a meal. medics can swap shifts meaning that while one person is sat in the medbooth another player can go grab some fries from the machine for both of them. Some asshole who rolled assistant can set up in the market with stuff they took out of the vending machine and sprinkled with liberal amounts of crank and spacedrugs. It transforms the chef from a swedish hermit who occasional places sprites that nobody cares about on the bar to some sort of cleric who you go to and ask for hand crafted benefits from which if the chef is smart, will come at a price (If people are eating lots, more ingredients will need to be delivered).


PART 2: THE CHEF

Which brings us to the chef. A good chef has to be as organised or as knowledgeable as any good chemist. They need to be able to juggle and combine ingredients as well as keep track of things they need and yet all these skills essentially fall on deaf ears when nobody wants what you're making. So what would help the chef. We've already looked at one problem which is give the crew a need for a chef. But there are other things that need to be addressed. The Chef's skills should be useful throughout the round. It means people are drifting in and out of the cafe across the whole shift and he often has something that needs cooking. There also has to be a reason for the chef to cook different things. As opposed to just shitting out infinite pizzas over the course of the round. How about one guy wants a burger, this guy wanted spergetti and meatballs and this guy wants popcorn. Then you have to look at recipies and use the full range of your cheffing skills to fulfill orders.

A good chef is defined by the food that he's putting out, so I propose a few fundamental changes to food that would give the chef a reason to be around and to be varied in his output.

Food as a buff: Now I talked about this in vague terms before when talking about an reason for crew members to want to eat in the first place. This is the part about which I have the least answer. Eating the right food at the right time should give you benefits to your game. BUT it is still just food. It should not be able to heal you more than medicine can and it shouldn't be able to buff you more than buffing chems and drugs. But it should also come with a corresponding removed risk too. The notion of risk vs reward is alive and well with certain drugs and chems. Meth may reward you with being much robust for a time but at the risk that you will start craving and then doubling over and being sick and farting a lot at the wrong time making yourself completely vulnerable.
Thusly I propose food offering a "risk/reward lite" small buffs and cool things with miniscule/no risk of overdosing, addiction and other horrible things (assuming the food hasn't been spiked with anything of course). There are a multitude of dishes that can be eaten and giving each one an individual effect would be confusing and would ultimately just blur into one blob of "buffed" so I was thinking about at leas at first while the system is being considered. Dividing food into categories that provide specific types of buff.

These things are mostly pulled out of my ass but are at least a starting point for what sort of thing would be appropriate for foods I have erred on the side of caution for all this because I don't want to come across as championing food as some new almighty center of the station thing so there is scope to do more. These "categories" are just me spitballing right now.

• Hearty (Full meals such as spergetti & meatballs, steak)
  Hearty meals are the "full meals" that require cutlery to eat and will completely refill your hunger bar no matter what. hearty meals could possibly provide stamina bonuses as well as giving you better farts and maybe improve blood generation.
  
• Spicy (Things with chillis in, maybe add some curries and stuff in)
  Spicy food already does some stuff in raising your body temperature allowing you to withstand colder temperatures for a while. It could also apply temporary speech effects (can never have too many speech effects) if spicy enough because you're tongue is burned or something.
  
• Cold (Ice cream? uuuuh)
  Like the opposite of Spicy it already has some ingame effects in lowering your body temperature and giving you a buff to withstanding high temperatures
  
• Sweet (Pancakes, Popcorn, Icecream, not meatcake)
  Sweet things could increase movement speed? Decrease recovery times from falling over or being stunned etc etc (Not to the level of drugs but a sugar rush could be a thing)))
  
• Comfort (Burgers, deep fried things, grilled cheese etc)
  This definitely has to be at thing, but I'm not sure how this could be applied mechanically. It should involve the biggest farting buff.

Some foods would be able to occupy more than one category with the benefit they provide diversifying across the types of buff provided. So for example Pancakes would be Sweet and Comfort, add icecream to the pancakes and they become Sweet, Comfort and Cold. To stop people trying to turn themselves into buffed terminators by eating everything. Food eaten after the hunger meter is filled would be disregarded in terms of buffs provided. Also a law of dimishing returns for eating lots of random things quickly would hopefully discourage certain players from sitting in the bar and just cramming everything into their mouth to try and find the magic order for the best things to eat for the most retarded buff.

Freshness: Finally I propose the notion of the food being "fresh" is introduced. Basically what food freshness would mean is that once a meal is cooked. It is "fresh" for roughly 5 minutes. It then loses the fresh status. Food that is not fresh still provides a benefit but at reasonably reduced rate as compared to food that is fresh. This would encourage the act of food being cooked to order instead of the chef being pressured by the crew into covering the bar in donk pockets and bowls of chilli at the start of the round then ignoring him for the rest of it. This would not apply to vended foods like chips, and discount dans and shit. They are never fresh to begin with.

IN CLOSING

These changes would hopefully create a system where a player who wants to participate in it decides what they want to eat, this decision is tempered by the type of benefits they want, how long they will have to wait for the benefits, if they want to get a specific benefit or go for the double benefit of whatever their designated "favourite" is. Go to the cafe. Ask for the food, possibly pay for the food and eat the food and then get on with whatever they're doing. If the chef has jumped into his gibber then the vending machines can suffice or the food mechanic can be ignored entirely. This makes the whole system an opt-in system that can adapt to each round depending on the will of the crew and the involvement of the chef on duty that round. If there is no chef. Everybody is on an even footing because they are all foodless but will not be inconvenienced by that fact. If the chef is in and competent those that participate will reap the rewards of those that don't but not to the point where they are marching round the hallways like robust gods. The best of both worlds.

This is not an answer to everything. All of this is abstract, the numbers and real nature of benefits will need a lot of consideration and balancing and the scope for none mechanics based things such as flavor text and visual changes etc etc has plenty of scope for expansion and fun. I have also not taken into account the idea of fractal cooking, I have no idea how the fuck that would work. Of course there are some people who probably saw the word "needs" and scrolled to the end straight away. But even if this just starts a discussion thats cool.

Sorry for the wall of text. I am a huge nerd.