Calories, food, weight and strength

[RCCross]

I'm sorry if this has been already brought up before, but this came to my mind today and I thought I should share with devs.

It's kinda weird to receive insta calories when eating, specially meat that needs a long time to become calories in the system.

Also, our body can store calories, at the cost of carrying more weight.

I can't talk about this subject without entering in the carrying capacity and strength feat and some RPG elements.

It goes like this:

Start with X calories. Character has Y body weight and Z strength.

When stomach goes empty, calories goes down by the minute. (meat makes calorie restore slowly but steady, chocolate and granola bar restores it quickly)

The more weight is carried in the backpack and the distance traveled, the more strength goes up after a good rest. Of course there's a limit to Z.

If there's not enough calories to maintain X then the character starts to lose body weight and strength (fat and muscles). 

If there's too much calories above X, the character body weight goes above Y and gets tired faster, but gets stronger faster too.

 

It makes me think of African tribes who eat a whole elephant then travel for days until they find another hunt for the whole tribe.

 

I'm sorry if this scheme is too simplistic, I'm not a game developer and I can't get more detailed than this.

[furball444]

Definitley a juicy suggestion

On 11/27/2016 at 7:38 PM, RCCross said:

 

When stomach goes empty, calories goes down by the minute. (meat makes calorie restore slowly but steady, chocolate and granola bar restores it quickly)

 

This is how I think food should be integrated with body weight and strength.

Protein: Takes a long time to digest. builds up your muscles (strength) Found in meats, nuts, fish, and some plants. It can also be used as energy but takes longer to breakdown (digest)

Carbs: Quick and instant energy. Does not get stored. Found in sugar foods or grains: fruit, soda, candy, crackers, bread, etc.

Lipids: This food is stored in the body, it increases body weight. Found in meats, fish, and other fatty-foods.

Thoughts?

[HazardousHowitzer]

Cool idea, way too complicated.

 

The menus can get complicated enough already, and while this can be a thing that doesn't show in the menu, it would also be a very annoying confusing thing for myself and other players and most definitely new players. The instant calorie thing works great and makes good enough sense with the game I think. People want realism so bad, but remember, it gets much too complicated when you get realism. MUCH too complicated..

[furball444]

It's supposed to be realistic and confusing. Complication makes you think and plan, exactly what the creators of TLD want. 

And its actually not that complicated, I'll explain what RCCross meant by these X, Y, and Z variables. He said that food should be able to be stored as body fat, or muscle. Body fat you get from lipids and muscle you get from protein. Your body will only use body fat and muscle for energy when theres nothing in your stomach. When you eat something, your stomach will digest it, and you will receive calories ready to be used for energy. When theres nothing in your stomach and the body needs calories, it will take the muscles and body fat and digest that instead. The downside for storing calories, is it takes makes you heavier, making you slower (This is the balance). Body fat gets digested before muscle. Muscle is used for every task, so digesting it will make you deficient and weaker. More muscle can be gained by eating foods with proteins (I explained the different kinds of foods in the previous post). Once there's nothing in the stomach and all the muscle and body fat is digested, the player will die. Once everything in the stomach is digested, the player will enter starvation and use the body fat and muscle. 

[Kayosiv]

The only thing I would like to see implemented is that your strength should increase over time if you are constantly at high calories and lower over time if you are starving for more than an hour at any given time.

[mystifeid]

11 hours ago, furball444 said:

Body fat you get from lipids and muscle you get from protein. Your body will only use body fat and muscle for energy when theres nothing in your stomach

What about when there is glycogen in your liver?

Actually most obesity in the western world comes from eating sugar. Half of all the sucrose you eat is fructose which is metabolized by the liver into fat and in dealing with the other half - glucose - fat burning is effectively switched off.

Uncooked fats and oils tend to slip through you very quickly and promote the fast passage of other food.

It is ironic that most food marketed as low fat needs something to make up for the taste that is lost with the fat. That something is usually sugar.

Anyway I think you can safely forget about realism with regards to food because it really is too complicated for this game.

[RCCross]

On 1/9/2017 at 3:49 AM, furball444 said:

Once there's nothing in the stomach and all the muscle and body fat is digested, the player will die. Once everything in the stomach is digested, the player will enter starvation and use the body fat and muscle. 

That's exactly the point. The way players make the character starve is near to hacking or exploit the game. 

I don't think it needs to be complicated in the UI and all, it just needs the player to think about real life: Carry too much weight? needs more calories (looses fat or burns the sugar). Don't eat enough? Become weak, can't carry stuff and then possibly die.

THEN the harder difficulty levels would be truly... difficult.

But frankly speaking, it seems like Hinterland have so much left to do that they won't bother with this. Next game maybe?