Eating food should give you increased stamina regen/cap

[Dauntasa]

A few people in the stamina thread have said that they'd prefer it if the stamina gauge lasted longer.


well how about making it so that for a while after you've eaten food you have a higher stamina cap and a faster regen on it, with how much better they are depending on how good the food was? This would give people an easy way to get better stamina and actually give people a reason to eat things ever.

[Keelin]

It's already like that although the effects are minor.

I suppose now that people have sort of gotten used to things i can increase these things and add more like them.

[mozi]

Please make working out increase stamina.

[Frank_Stein]

Please make working out increase stamina.

I think the best way to do that would be that working out a few times gives you a little buff that lasts a few minutes, so that people will just make periodic trips to the gym if they want to maintain them. Same thing with whatever benefits food provide.

Certain drugs like steroids or traitor items like the wrestling belt could let you stack those buffs while making that window before they go away longer.

[Zadeon]

Have working out use up stamina while also raising your max for a few minutes. This way you can be raising your max but at a slower pace and not really fast.

[david2222121]

If this leads to caffeine/sugar/meth fueled workout sessions, I am all for this.

[Klayboxx]

What ever happened to foods giving you special powers?

[QP Evergrande]

I do feel like there's a lot of unrealized potential in the botany/chef/barman jobs to be useful to the station. Right now foods only heal you a bit depending on their quality, plus the effects of whatever horrific chemicals have been added in. I propose an expansion on two fronts.

As I understand it, poor preparation causes a food item to be ruined, so it tastes bad. Instead of that, give all ingredients a "nutrient" value, depending on the ingredient and its quality level. Just like in the current system, higher nutrients will heal more. Maybe let extremely high quality food items give a bit of slow health regeneration that lasts for a while. Food items of that level should be buyable, but very expensive. Cooking should reduce the amount of nutrients, just like in real life, (particularly with repeated use of the deep fryer) but in exchange it lets you combine ingredients together into a single food item. Added all together, a collection of raw food items should have the highest nutrient value in total, but since you have to eat them one item at a time, it won't give you the top-tier benefits until it's been combined in a recipe. To balance this, and avoid chefs simply loading tons of crappy ingredients into everything they prepare, perhaps food items should have a "bites" variable that increases for every x number of ingredients are added. The more ingredients, the more food there is, and the more bites it takes to eat the item. Each bite gives you 20% of the maximum benefit. At five bites you're full, and any subsequent eating averages out the effect (so, if you eat something of lower quality, it'll go down) but won't increase it any further until you digest a bit. But digestion should be on a delay, and take a while, so the benefits last. There should also be a "calories" value, which determines how much of a bonus to your stamina, stun resist and stun recovery you get. This should work the opposite of the nutrient value. Heating food basically pre-digests it, increasing the amount of energy our bodies can absorb. So, cooking decreases nutrients, but increases calories, by a capped percentage. And, of course, overcooking makes the food inedible to the point that you'd puke if you tried to eat it.

The second expansion proposal I have is to add a more complex taste system, for the purpose of increasing "morale". Morale can affect a lot of things. Separate from stun resistance, it gives a bonus to critical recovery, that is, the time it takes you to regain consciousness when you pass out due to being in crit, as your high morale makes you fight harder to stay alive (normal space station life is so soul crushing). It acts as a natural painkiller, so you don't slow down when injured. It should also reduce the effects of illnesses, so you cough less, flail about less, and survive longer for the nastier ones. Of course, depending on their symptoms, certain diseases should reduce your morale- if you have a fever or cough it should be a small amount, and if your skin is sloughing off, it should be very large. On the other hand, space madness might send your morale straight to the top. Being around corpses, particularly rotting ones, or people with the foul body odor mutation should reduce it as well.

So how would taste work? Just like ingredients have nutrients and calories, they should also have values for the five or six tastes that humans are supposed to have- saltiness, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, savoriness, and fattiness. As part of character creation, give players the ability to set their character's taste preferences. There should be a default, which favors saltiness and sweetness very highly, savoriness and fattiness moderately, sourness a little, and bitterness not at all. But we should be able to set it in any crazy way we want. Boost to morale should be determined by how closely the ratios of the food item's six tastes match our personal tastes. All ingredients should have a mix of tastes, so you won't get optimal results by just putting all your taste into a single category... unless you put it all into saltiness, but pure salt will give you no calories and no nutrients- that value should represent vitamins and such. And lest you think you can down a ton of salt, and then just eat a separate food item for the other two benefits, eating foods you hate should lower morale to balance it out. Also, about salt, some chemicals should have tastes just like food ingredients. Cyanide should be extremely bitter, for example. But most chemicals that don't occur in nature should have no taste. Also note, generally speaking, cooking food makes it more savory, sweeter, and less bitter. Something to keep in mind when choosing your spread. A lot of really healthy veggies are quite bitter when raw, so if you want to adopt a raw food diet, you might want to jack that up. On that note, raw food options, like salads and... fruit salads should also be added to the menu.

So there you have it. A chef could get by with having no skill with this system, but the crew will love them if they can whip up a perfect meal that makes a crew member nigh super-human. And I suspect this won't decrease chef/barman shenanigans. In fact, I think it will probably increase them, since people will have much more reason to come to the cafeteria and try their luck.

Tldr: You have a stomach that holds five bites of food. Each bite gives you a boost through nutrients, calories, and taste, depending on the ingredients and how it was prepared, which in turn benefit you in various ways. Raw food has more nutrients, cooked food has (effectively) more calories. The tastes your character likes are determined on the character setup screen.

[Noah Buttes]

snip

That is the most well thought and thorough food system I have ever seen. Good job.

[Crumplehat]

Stuff about food

Sounds pretty cool but it also sounds like it'd be a nigh nightmare to implement since it'd take tweaking a lot of values for individual foodstuffs. Maybe without the taste stuff it could work alright. I'm all for stuff that gives people a reason to play chef more, but at the end of the day it really comes down to having botanists that A) don't suck and actually use all the tools at their disposals (I almost never see any other botanists that actually use those damn chemicals unless they're making rainbow weed) and B) are diligent enough to actually send food to the chef in the first place.

But like I said, it'd be cool if it could be done.

[QP Evergrande]

Stuff about food

Sounds pretty cool but it also sounds like it'd be a nigh nightmare to implement since it'd take tweaking a lot of values for individual foodstuffs. Maybe without the taste stuff it could work alright.

It shouldn't take that much tweaking, surely. This is mostly stuff that's being added. Each ingredient - grapes, carrots, wheat, eggs, whatever - just needs to have a baseline set of constants for nutrition and taste added. Then you factor in the plant's potency to get the actual value. (I'm thinking nutritional worth should be a straight multiplication, but increases to calories and taste should be logarithmic) After that, everything simply gets added together in the recipe. The recipe then has a "cooked" variable that determines how much nutrients are lost/effective calories are gained, and maybe also the "bites" variable depending on the volume of stuff added in... That's nine or ten more properties on top of the eight or so that plants currently have. A significant increase, sure, but worth it.

[Frank_Stein]

Rather than nutrients just being a value that goes higher or lower and contributes towards healing, what if all food had several nutrient stats based on what it provided for you, similar to a Nutrition Facts label? For instance:

Calories - Your max amount of Stamina
Fat - Stored stamina. It gets burned up as your normal stamina drops below a certain point. Too much leads to being overweight
Cholesterol - Too much and you go into cardiac arrest easier
Sodium - Affects your body's absorption rate of nutrients. Too much leads to hypertension
Sugar - Affects how quickly your stamina recharges. Too much leads to diabetes, too little to sluggishness
Protein - Affects your muscles mass and how quickly you heal
Calcium - Affects how easily limbs can broken
Iron - Affects how quickly you bleed
Fiber - Effects how often you can fart, and lowers fat and cholesterol
Vitamins...
A -Affects vision
C - Affects disease resistance
D - Effects how much brute damage you take

These and more could all be values inherent in each food item. These values could exist similar to chems, with a certain amount already present in the body at round start. As you eat food, it provides you with more of these nutrients, based on the values it has. Preparing and cooking meals would change the nutrient values, and a smart chef could combine ingredients that counterbalance negative traits in some foods.

[QP Evergrande]

Well, I just made a post defended the most elaborate part of my system, but there is such a thing as going overboard with this. By having only three variables that decay in the character's body and need to be tracked (nutrition/calories/morale, with sugar being a separate reagent as it currently is which stacks with these effects), I hope to have a fun, useful system that doesn't take up too much processor time. Also, it's meant so that people can function normally without worrying about it if they don't want to.

(Also also, a lot about what is commonly believed about nutrition is wrong, based on decades-old flawed studies. Fat doesn't make you fat, sugar does. And dietary cholesterol doesn't contribute to heart disease.)

[Splatpope]

I hope to have a fun, useful system that doesn't take up too much processor time.

is byond really that bad

[QP Evergrande]

is byond really that bad

All the little things add up. It's not just the decay calculation, it's the effect calculation as well, particularly if it's not a linear correlation. Then applying the effect. Multiply that by seventy players or more, plus however many NPCs are chemically active. That's why for nutrition and calorie effects I wanted a baseline people couldn't fall below, instead of starting at an elevated level at the start of the round like Frank described. Doing it my way, all this code would be inactive in those NPCs, and anyone who doesn't eat anything. I doubt it would seriously strain things either way, not like atmospheric behavior does, but every added bit brings the onset of lag a little closer. The question is, does added complexity add to the fun, or is it too much to keep track of for anyone to reasonably to reasonably master the system.

My proposed taste system is already pushing it, but with foods made to taste similar to their real world counterparts, it shouldn't be too hard for a chef to tailor a meal to a particular customer's preferences. And with only a single variable for nutrition instead of a dozen, people wouldn't be forced to all use the same taste preference settings to get the full benefits of healthy eating.