Remove/improve hunger system?

Hunger just adds to the realism, and to be honest... I love farming.

 

I think the hunger system is fine. It's not like they developers were going to give the game some forms of challenges. And honestly the hunger system isn't that bad, with how slow it decreases and how plentiful food is.

 

I can see two solutions for the system. Both should really be implemented and not just one or the other.

1. Make two difficulty settings on new character creation, one for "Survival" and the other for "Normal". Normal would not have a hunger system or that stupid cold system that happens at nighttime on a lush forest planet. (Seriously there's another system that makes no sense. It makes sense on a snowy planet sure but a forest planet? Really?)
2. Make the hunger bar regen hp and energy rapidly when full, less rapidly when a bit over half full, and not regen at all when half full or less than half full. In addition, if you eat food when full, you get a 2 minute debuff that says "Overstuffed!" and slows your characters speed by 30%. If very hungry or starving, your character will deal reduced damage and take more damage from enemy attacks. Your character will NEVER die of starvation, so that aFKers won't be getting punished for the system. Let's also remove that annoying alarm sound please.

It's a mechanic that only punishes AFKers. It affects nobody else in its current form and it's just a minor annoyance that kills your character if you don't press a button every 30 minutes. This is why it needs to be changed or removed.

 

It doesn't kill you on your ship. Anyone who goes afk away from their ship is asking for it.

 

That and I think the question should not be on the hunger, but why there is no pause menu in singleplayer (though I know why pausing wouldn't work for multiplayer)? If you're sitting AFK in some place that your character is going to die from hunger, then more then likely something else can kill you before hand.

 

Are you seriously trying to say that anyone who goes afk after spending an hour underground so they can eat food and survive in the REAL WORLD deserves to die? This game is not a person's life, it's a game. We need to be able to attend to real life needs without the character just dying because of some lame arbitrary system. What if grandma has a bad fall in the other room? What if the phone rings and you don't have a second to do much except wall yourself in? Saying people should be punished for doing nothing is implying that games should become even more mind controlling than the garbage that Zynga spits out. (ie: farmville and its subsidaries)

Of course if you have no life or friends that care about you then it doesn't really matter to you either way so why am I having this conversation.

A pause button would be awesome too, yes.

 

I like the farming too, which is why I'd rather see food improved instead of removed. I also doubt they'll remove it - all it needs is a bit of tweaking to make it into a fun system.

 

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Remember the Armor Piercing system they had before? They could have tweaked that to make it better, but instead they scrapped it for a new system. So I wouldn't think they couldn't just scrap food/farming for something else.

 

I like the hunger system. In Terraria there is no hunger system in the game. Now granted, you could argue that yes you can make food and eat it for buffs, but there is nothing forcing you to eat to stay alive. In Starbound I've found the games experience is far better with the hunger system in place.

I would like it if they added buffs to the food types. The only food types I'd want buffs to, are to the food you can craft from the cooking table, that way it's a meaningful reason to plop that table down. Making the hunger system more more meaningful in the game is a good thing, but I wouldn't want the buffs to be super OP that it breaks the game. I like the hunger system for the immersion of it, I just want it expanded upon to allow for different buff types. What buff types to have added, I don't know.

Anyway, I'm in favor of the hunger system 100%. I just learned here that I can stop hunger by using a bed/tent/chair, so one of those things I'll carry around all the time so I can wall myself in and go afk sittin in a chair and not dying of hunger when I forget I have Starbound running when I run downstairs. LOL!

 

Same here. Heck, I'd like it even more if they added a hydration and sleep system as well!

 

I stand by my statement. Anyone who goes afk away from their ship is asking for it. If you need to leave your pc, quit the game you fool! It's a game, not a life-support system. You can come back to it.

 

And then I have to trek all the way back down to the underground area I just spent an hour exploring. How about we just not penalize the afk player?

 

Are you talking about singleplayer, or mp?

 

How about you suck it up? :/

You might as well suggest not penalising the player for not playing the game; let's measure how much ore per minute they mine and give it to them while they idle! It wouldn't be fair to penalise someone for not playing! What if they have work? They can't mine at work, are you gonna penalise them for having a job?

 

I mean the hunger doesn't bother me, but you REALLY think that's a good argument? "Suck it up" + a bunch of completely out of proportion examples? Really?

Really really?

 

I'm sorry, i just think he's whining.

 

You're only hurting your side by resorting to straw men and insults, though.

As for the OP: I AFK a lot too. Mostly because I hate surface exploration at night because you can't see ores, so I'll often just idle for a half hour or more, go play a different game, whatever.

Here's what you do: Start carrying a tent or bed of some sort and a heat source of some sort. Put down your heat source (camp fire, nanostove, barrel fire) and then put down your bed item so that the head of the bed is by the fire. Then wall it in and go to sleep. It takes like 10-30 seconds. Which you can do on the phone or just before getting up to grab food or whatever.

Works beautifully.

 

So sleeping does halt the hunger bar? Does sitting in chairs also halt it? If so I never really noticed it, granted I usually just explore things, even if it is dark out.

 

I've noticed I'm hungry afterwards a lot, but I've gotten up for upwards of 45 minutes and not starved to death, so I think it slows it a bunch. Might stave off death too.

I could start up and test it more.

In fact I think I will. I'll report back in like an hour or two.

Edit: Test started at 5:18, Central US.

 

I want a more logical hunger system, and one that doesn't go out of its way to punish AFKers. The current iteration of the hunger system is utter garbage. You shouldn't die so quickly once the gauge goes down. Maybe after several days of not eating would you then die.

The hunger meter goes down too quickly and, instead of dealing damage to you once the bar has gone to zilch, it should merely be a spectrum of buffs. Under 50% and you have debuffs, and above 50% you'd get something akin to regen or some other kind of buff.

The way hunger works right now is neither realistic nor fun. It punishes AFKers and the hunger system will fall short of its great potential ,in the context of this game, if it's not drastically improved (unfortunately, a lot of features in Starbound are similarly hinged on such a contingency).