/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

I think point number 4 is a feature, not a flaw, especially considering there are 4 points currently nutrition can enter the station, chemistry, cloning, botany, and cargo, with a possible 5th in xenobio if I recall. It is probably the most redundant system in the station.

Food riots shut down the station about as much as engineering all going MIA or atmos all going MIA locks down the station. Slightly less probably considering that it doesn't in of itself force the round to end if a few guys go MIA and no one notices, as you can always just get cargo on it ASAP. It takes something special to go down to cause food riots. This suggestion used to be how food worked and it really didn't end up affecting things too terribly when individuals were not present.

It also really wouldn't be more consistent with the game's mechanics to remove hunger. Hunger was originally in the game primarily to force you to get food or starve, it was not a roleplay mechanic at first.

The only way I can see a buff based chef and bartender working is if they provided short term, around five minutes, buffs that were very noticeable when gone. Even if food isn't made a big mechanic it would be nice for the people refining food to have some mechanical backing. Nothing as big as oldschool doc's delight, but something.

As for why people play service jobs, I suspect it is for a similar rote based enjoyment that people get out of chemistry coupled with some roleplaying. But removing mechanical consideration from food doesn't improve roleplay, and adding some doesn't reduce it.

Now as for raisins and food hoarding, that would easily be fixed by preventing large foods from fitting in storage containers, which they probably should already considering most food is larger than the box is.

An0n3 wrote: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.

Violaceus wrote: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.

An0n3 wrote: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.

kosmos wrote: 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.

dezzmont wrote: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.