Make food more important.

[bandit]

It's fine for what it is. If you want to encourage people to eat more food or make the chef more important, don't force players to have to eat more but give the chef's recipes more chemistry-like effects and buffs that give people an incentive to want to eat them. It's a stretch, but look at how MMO's do it. Your character wont starve to death if they don't eat, but if you DO eat you'll get more maximum HP, heals over time, increased experience, or whatever. Having food that gave you things like damage resistance, run speed, long term healing, shorter stun time, whatever would raise demand for the chef's foods without crippling the rest of the station.

We have this to some extent -- some foods contain tricord, kelotane, etc. -- but either people don't know or don't care, and there's not nearly enough of it anyway.

[Erbbu]

It's not a simulator, lets remove breathing.

Well I mean, there are already ways of doing that in the game. But breathing isn't there just for show, it's because the game is heavily focused around its atmospherics system. In most games characters don't breathe as a mechanic outside of perhaps having an animation for it.

[kosmos]

It's fine for what it is. If you want to encourage people to eat more food or make the chef more important, don't force players to have to eat more but give the chef's recipes more chemistry-like effects and buffs that give people an incentive to want to eat them. It's a stretch, but look at how MMO's do it. Your character wont starve to death if they don't eat, but if you DO eat you'll get more maximum HP, heals over time, increased experience, or whatever. Having food that gave you things like damage resistance, run speed, long term healing, shorter stun time, whatever would raise demand for the chef's foods without crippling the rest of the station.

This sounds like a good approach. Make it like virology, no one notices if the virologist isn't working, but when a competent virologist is doing his thing, everyone benefits from it. Being a competent Chef right now has way too little benefits.

[Erbbu]

This sounds like a good approach. Make it like virology, no one notices if the virologist isn't working, but when a competent virologist is doing his thing, everyone benefits from it. Being a competent Chef right now has way too little benefits.

I never thought of that but you're right, virology does function as neat bonus sort of thing right now. If we could get service jobs to feel that way as well, that would be sweet.

[Rolan7]

Food makes a lot of sense as a limit to how long you can be in private, secure areas with no interaction with other people. To make it work in this capacity would just require that all vending machines enter a public space, and perhaps installing an upper limit on fed status if you eat out of one.

Hunger was originally a much larger part of the game, but it was removed because it forced people to stop 'doing their jobs' to leave their work area every so often at a rate that caused food production jobs to be important, which was the freaking point. People claimed it was unfun and not important because it was a simulationist aspect, but it played a major part in circulating players around and 3 entire jobs were dedicated around the system, the bartender, chef, and botanist, with the quartermaster and cargo techs playing a minor role. There is a somewhat complicated production chain for filling high end foods that doesn't do what it is supposed to when food is insignificant. You don't get famine events either which were always a blast.

Not everything in a game is designed to maximize an individual's ability to have complete freedom to do what they thing is fun uninterrupted and without distraction.

This is exactly right. It's a game mechanic, not "realisms". And right now it's nerfed into irrelevancy.
As for food riots, if they're based on timing then maybe spacemen should start the round with different amounts of hunger in order to stagger the cafe visits.
I'd like the chef to be more important though, like with more recipes with meaningful effects. Right now it's really just hydroponics which matter.

To dredge up an old idea I never got around to, CentComm (or Nanotrasen ships) could request a certain amount of food, or specific foods be delivered via cargo. A way to reward a food surplus.