Mechanics of malnutrition

[tjbiel]

Hello! Love the game. I saw that malnutrition was slated to get a little more attention at some point, and I thought maybe I could put my medical education to work. Not sure if things are already feature-locked, but here are some thoughts on game mechanics for malnutrition.

 

I would strongly suggest the three types of food stats/nutrients be calories, protein, and vitamins. This would add some diversity without being obnoxious, and is true (enough) to life in terms of diet deficiencies that it furthers the survival atmosphere at the core of the game.

It also corresponds neatly to four main categories of food stuffs.

• Starches: high calorie, low protein, low vitamin
• Meats, eggs, legumes: medium calorie, high protein, low vitamin (*edited from medium per feedback below)
• Vegetables: low calorie, low protein, high vitamin
• Fruits: medium calorie, low protein, medium vitamin

And here are some suggested effects of deficiencies with a little physiological basis. These would be progressive/cumulative, so that severe deficiency involves all the prior symptoms as well.

• Calorie deficiency
  • Mild: decreased stamina
  • Moderate: increased fatigue, increased anger
  • Severe: further increased fatigue, further decreased stamina, decreased happiness, decreased movement speed, increased time for interactions, decreases protein stat over time
• Protein deficiency
  • Mild: increased anger, increased fatigue, decreased stamina
  • Moderate: decreased happiness, decreased melee damage/accuracy
  • Severe: further increased fatigue, further decreased stamina, further decreased happiness, decreased carrying capacity, damage over time (protein wasting is generally the part of malnutrition that actually kills)
• Vitamin deficiency
  • Mild: increased fatigue
  • Moderate: decreased stamina, penalty to healing
  • Severe: further fatigue, penalty to sight, penalty to hearing, damage over time (e.g., scurvy leading to hemorrhage)

-TJ

[Bennytheowl]

If meat is medium for everything but protein surely you could just eat a lot of meat and avoid vitamin deficiency.

[jefferyharrell]

If meat is medium for everything but protein surely you could just eat a lot of meat and avoid vitamin deficiency.

 

Pretty tough to maintain a lot of meat in your diet in the game, isn't it?

[Bennytheowl]

 

If meat is medium for everything but protein surely you could just eat a lot of meat and avoid vitamin deficiency.

 

Pretty tough to maintain a lot of meat in your diet in the game, isn't it?

 

 

Trapping, worms, fish, insects..

 

I find it very easy to keep a meat diet once i'm up at the hunting lodge near the river..I've never ever farmed in my whole Zomboid career besides maybe a few lone wolf broccoli

[tjbiel]

True enough! From a mechanics standpoint that would be less interesting. Also, while meat is a pretty good source of a lot of nutrients (you can even overdose on vitamin A that bioaccumulates in the liver of carnivorous animals), it's true that there are some important vitamins you just don't usually get enough of from meat. Given those two things, I'll edit OP to suggest meats be low vitamin.

[jefferyharrell]

True enough! From a mechanics standpoint that would be less interesting. Also, while meat is a pretty good source of a lot of nutrients (you can even overdose on vitamin A that bioaccumulates in the liver of carnivorous animals), it's true that there are some important vitamins you just don't usually get enough of from meat. Given those two things, I'll edit OP to suggest meats be low vitamin.

 

I would love it if the game included a special-case exception for rabbit starvation.

[Bennytheowl]

That's kinda my point, if put in the game it needs to get kinda specific to make any sort of impact on gameplay, and it then runs the risk of sorta being a " It's impossible to find food I died from scurvy what is this pirate simulator? F this bullshit game!!" situation..

[Svarog]

Page from a diary of post apocalyptic survivor:

"I visited our group's doctor today about my constant fatigue, he told me I need more vitamins in my diet and gave me one of those lollipops he has Jerry constantly scavenge for..."

Prescription Quest: Talk to group's farmer to get some broccoli.

[Bennytheowl]

Whole idea makes sense though, considering i'm living in the church right now eating crisps and cupcakes to live,

[hrot]

Well, idea is not so bad to categorize food value in 3 categories protein, calorie and vitamin but force player to eat meat because it's best kind of food doesn't have any sense. Alse from science point of viev humans don't need meats in diet, furthermore meat is kinda bad for us (but of course not so much deal in zombie apocalypse).

Also humans don't need so much proteins in diet (most people eat way too much proteins).

Only good thing in meat is that if you eat it you don't be hungry so quickly and that should be represented in game.

Also values of vegetables are very different. You can't compare for example potato to radish, it doesn't make any sense.

But overall i like your idea, you can't eat chips 2 month and be perfectly fine but let's keep it simple, too compliceted system would be bad for game experience.

Sorry for my english, im not soo god at it

[tjbiel]

@Bennytheowl I thought about suggesting a few additional categories but then it started to sound like a micronutrient simulator instead

 

In reality, most essential vitamins and whatnot are stored up at high enough levels in your body that you would need months or even years without them before you start to have noticeable symptoms. Mechanistically the trade-off is often between complexity and learning curve, to say nothing of fun. Also, having more than a few categories of nutrients means a lot more complexity in managing the properties of food items in the game.

 

If the dev team is interested in putting in some other specific illnesses/diseases, that might be a better fit for "you need X" scenarios than having both players and the devs managing all those bits and pieces through food. There's a lot of opportunity to do more with infected wounds, have people able to catch colds, run fevers, have functional injuries like sprains/breaks, asthma, etc. Each of these might have a more specific way to help it, like bed rest, antifebrile meds, splinting, anti-inflammatory meds, steroid inhaler, etc.

 

@hrot Some of that could probably be tweaked based on the availability of meats, and/or nerfing down the nutritional content of each. While it's true that you don't have to eat a lot of meat specifically, you do need nutrients found in meats, legumes, eggs, and nuts that are not as plentiful (or non-existent) in other types of food.

 

And I agree completely that many plants have different nutritional content. In general, I would call plants like potatoes, radishes, carrots, wheat/barley/oats, rice, and so on "starches" rather than vegetables. Another way to describe this category would be "grains and root vegetables." Starches tend to be fairly calorie-dense and have lower protein and vitamin content. By contrast, vegetables means leafy green vegetables like spinach, kale, cabbage, collards, and the "tops" of certain roots, like turnips.

[jefferyharrell]

…and the "tops" of certain roots, like turnips.

 

Step one: Add turnips to the game as a farm-able plant with harvestable roots and tops.

 

Step two: Add wild pigs as a renewable food resource that can be trapped or hunted somehow.

 

Step three: Turnip greens and ham hocks. Now you're singing the song of my people.

[hrot]

@tjbiel Meat can be replaced by vegatables like gorch, bean, soy, nuts.There are also microelements besides vitamins but in-game system should be pretty simple and not 100% accurate with real world. Besides that meat is very hard to obtain in game even with implemented hunting it will be hard so it will be not so good to force player to eat meat.

[jefferyharrell]

You're not going to find a lot of soybeans growing wild in suburban Kentucky. I think having long-term deficiency maladies brought on by a lack of dietary protein or vitamins is a really cool idea. The tricky part is making it clear to the player what's needed. Food craving moodles maybe? That might be too simplistic, even bordering on condescending. I think making it through a winter without fresh vegetables should be entirely possible, just challenging. Maybe a poor diet brings along with it an increased need for sleep, quicker exhaustion, that kind of thing. I don't know, I'm just spitballing. 

[Wveth]

I love this idea!  Man cannot live on on cake alone.

You might wanna look into the Imp's More Complex Needs series of mods.  Personally I think the best iteration for it was Fallout: New Vegas.  There was a similar system in place (divided foods into having hydration, protein, calories and "nutrients"), with different penalties for different deficiencies and different bonuses for having a good amount of a specific category of nutrition over an extended period of time.

It worked really well and it's a must-have mod for me for New Vegas.

It sounds like what's needed is a way of tracking your overall intake, both immediately and over the long-term.

[tjbiel]

@jefferyharrell Thank you for your idea! I think you've hit an important point about how to communicate the needs to the player. Moodles are one way to go, but do you have any thoughts on having it be a part of the Health Status screen? For example, a player with a couple of levels in First Aid (which in this case should perhaps be renamed "Medicine") might be able to do a medical check and "diagnose" a nutritional deficiency of some kind. Maybe "diagnosis" could even be a separate interaction from medical check, and require a little more time, and have a chance to fail or be incorrect/inconclusive.

 

This way, the Moodles that a player experiences will correspond to the symptoms, which is more realistic than a Moodle that just says "Find some protein."

 

@Wveth Thanks for your support! I'll check out that mod series you mentioned, they seem pretty interesting! It sounds like the F:NV implementation had a similar construction

[deprav]

I think nutrition/malnutrition has already been discussed previously. I like the structure of your idea, it's well thought !

BUT, that's not what project zomboid should be about imo. Food issues should be "Will I find enough food to make it through this week?" or "Will I survive winter?" and not "Will I find veggies to eat with my meat? Shall I have a fruit for dessert ?" In short, the issue should be starvation, not malnutrition.

Even tho I get that, for the moment, food shortage doesn't feel like an issue, I know for a fact devs have said that's what they were going for. They want the players to struggle to find enough food to survive, and they want the game to be hard enough so that kind of "long term concerns" [ie. malnutrition] are out of the picture : 90% of the players would most likely die before their bodies get any nutriment deficiency.
 

[Wveth]

It's really not going to mean you have to balance everything perfectly in order to live.  And you're right, most people wouldn't survive long enough for there to be a deficiency.  As I see it though, one of the biggest problems in this game is the lack of late-game diversity in gameplay for those who do make it there.  This would help alleviate that.

[deprav]

Well, the more the game progress towards 1.0, the harder it will be to reach "late-game". That's the point of the whole "Operation Fixing Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There". The diversity and danger will come from actual entertaining challenges, world changing events, NPC or other players, zombie AI getting improved, better combat & such...

I don't see nutrition being a real plus to the feel of the game, tho I'd sure like some hunger overhaul to have a deeper impact on the game, with long term consequences. The main issue should be the quantity of food, not its type.

[Wveth]

Well, we can agree to disagree.  Simply because survivors DO have to worry about it, it should be in the game to some degree.

This is my opinion.

[Bennytheowl]

Could do wonders for the health system. having to worry about anemia, scurvy (like stated already) and getting a UTI from only dirnking soda and alcohol.

[tjbiel]

These are all good things to consider, and I'd certainly leave it to the devs to decide how they want nutrition to factor into the mix of exciting/action-based dangers and mundane dangers. It may be worth reiterating, though, that death from starvation is almost always a matter of protein deficiency.

Early symptoms related to protein malnourishment take hold within days and get steadily worse. Full-on kwashiarkor-type could take weeks, but not months, with a severely protein-deprived diet.