The difficulty with hunger

As the discussion of this is spread around in various threads, a bit of background:
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Over the past little while, nightly builds and dev blog posts have sparked debates about changes in the mechanics attached to character difficulty levels. Two particular bones of contention being:
- The addition of ores dropping on the ground on death (still recoverable, unless you log off)
- The removal of the hunger system as part of a food system revamp

From what I can see, the dev response to feedback has resulted in this (correct me if it is wrong):

Casual - some (30%?) pixels lost on death, no hunger bar
Normal - some pixels lost and ores drop on death, with hunger bar
Hardcore - permadeath, with hunger bar
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This is a pretty good compromise is many ways. However I expect that many players returning after the next stable update to find the feature gone from their old 'Normal' difficulty characters will not agree and we will see the various debates about difficulty-related features we've seen reignited, on a larger and angrier scale. Except by then it would likely not be possible to consider changing it back because it would involve revising too much subsequent game development.

For this reason, there are two things I would like to ask before this happens:

1) Would it be possible to add a fourth difficultly level, 'Easy' which keeps the hunger bar but does not include ore drop?

2) Could it be made possible to change a character's difficultly level without restarting? This would let people change their old characters to whichever of the new game rules they want. Personally, if 1) doesn't happen, I know I will want to change my current bunch to the new 'Normal' (although I will not enjoy ore drop).

Why do I care about hunger? For me, it adds to the immersion, giving a sense of time passing and reflecting periods of strenous activity. I don't think of it as a difficulty-type feature - it is a part of the backdrop of adventure and a living world which makes starbound unique and exciting for me. I would very much like it to be available for a more casual playstyle.

 

(Yellow commentary text and scratch-outs mine.)

Although I'd like Normal/Hardcore to have hunger the way you said, they don't at the moment. And I think the ability to change difficulty (or lock it, if so desired) would be a welcome addition.

As for a fourth difficulty setting, I personally think it'd be better to see customizable difficulty... But that's another topic for another thread.

 

This is Starbound, not terraria. Hunger is a feature Terraria doesn't have, and it works well in Starbound, and creates further immersion in the earlier (and sometimes later) parts of the game.

 

This. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the removal of the hunger bar was just a knee-jerk reaction considering the part that made it an issue to begin with (a limited variety of food available to collect on each planet, forcing one to roam the stars to get a useful meal) is now eradicated thanks to the revamp they started testing immediately afterward. Honestly, I actually like the old buff system slightly better because stuff like Blackcurrent Crumble was a good source of healing on higher tiers, where you have a ton of health and no other forms can keep up. Seeing as they still haven't given us much in the way of options for healing that far up...

 

The dev team has had alot of knee jerk reactions, once upon a time they would give release dates then people got mad they no longer do it. Then they used to wipe every update to make development easier then people got mad that their beta characters were wiped and now they never wipe anything. So in conclusion the dev team react to the people too quick.

 

Frankly, I enjoyed the early bow hunts (then again, I love archery).

However, not too long after getting the Iron or Steel Bow, Hunger becomes a minor nuisance at most.
By that point, I have huge stocks of edible food on my person at all times and always well before I got off the starting planet.
Once I found a decent food vendor (not hard at all), hunger becomes a non-issue entirely.

Late-game, there is zero reason for me to even bother with recipes and higher end cooking when I can just load up on cheap stackable meat
Essentially, the hunger mechanic becomes an irrelevant nuisance for 99% of the game; it might as well not even be there after the first hour or two.

Incidentally, that's why I actually like food granting buffs. It gives food an actual purpose in late game beyond this brief ritual you perform every 20-30 minutes.

 

Except certain foods in stable that can be found later on actually grant buffs like Regen 3 and increased speed while also completely filling up the hunger bar, so just loading up on meat is actually not as useful as setting up a farm to grow what you need and getting a pile of something more potent. Yes, the hunger part becomes pointless, but that's kind of what happens when you're established enough to stock up on food. However, food itself never becomes pointless.

Honestly, as it stands the food system got nerfed.

 

That's really the point. Hunger didn't play much of a role beyond tedium. I didn't hate it, but it didn't really add much to the game either.
FYI: I never found any food with buff effects; granted, I haven't played very far into Starbound for months due to university and work.

 

You have to look for the recipes in Stable, but generally speaking the more ingredients needed for a dish the more likely it is to have some positive effect. Humburgers, for example, give a Regen bonus and are available right off the bat for humans. Things like Pinapple Upside-Crown Cake and Black Current Crumble both offer much stronger regen and a relatively brief movement speed increase, and in the case of the latter even gives a little bit of energy back. So the buff system existed back then too, it just wasn't obvious like it is now.

Edit: Generally speaking recipes can be found in racial settlements, so avian recipes can be found in Avian Villages, and Glitch recipes can be found pretty much anywhere the Glitch have settled down in large numbers. Same with Florans and their food, and human recipes can be found in USCM Bases.

 

Honestly, I don't want hunger to be a huge struggle.

If you look at Starbound (or, indeed, many sandbox games with a hunger mechanic, such as Minecraft), hunger can only really be a nuisance.

In a non-sandbox game with a hunger mechanic, the player has to somehow manage resources. The player might find food as part of their normal scavenging (in a survival game), or maybe they have to buy it from merchants (say, in an RPG). The important part is that getting food follows directly from actions the player would be doing anyway. The challenge becomes managing resources so that you have what you need when you need it.

But in a sandbox game where I can set up my own farm to be as large as I want, it becomes polarized. You either have enough food, or you don't.

If you don't have enough food, the game becomes entirely about finding food. Food becomes a top priority. If you don't get food very soon, you will die. This means that you need to focus entirely on getting food, ignoring any other pursuits. When starting a new game, this can be frustrating. You're being forced to find food, but you have neither shelter nor decent equipment. In essence, you start out by being faced with a pretty sizable challenge, more difficult than many of the things you might face later in the game. That's hardly a good difficulty curve.

Luckily, in Starbound, you're given seeds to start off. You don't need to search for them. You can just hop off your ship and start planting right away.

However, once you have that farm established, you can very quickly duplicate your crops over and over again, and soon you've got massive yields. Hunger is no longer an issue because you can very easily have a functionally infinite amount of food, and at that point, why even have it as a mechanic? Instead of making gameplay more interesting, it forces the player to open their inventory once every n minutes to eat some corn because the game told them they have to. And then occasionally I have to go to a chest to fill my corn slot back up. It's not engaging, it's just tedious.

Are food as a source of buffs a good thing? Maybe. Farming now allows me to have a tactical advantage. You do run into a similar problem as before. When I can have a functionally infinite amount of food, I can essentially have any given buff on my character constantly (or almost constantly if there's a cool-down, but that's not exactly relevant to my argument). I do think, however, that for food to be useful in the long run, end-game food must give significant buffs, and possibly include some non-renewable, or at least non-farmable, resources.

 

I don't really care if hunger stays or goes, as long as it takes a long time to die from hunger if it stays... I think as long as it takes a long time to starve from hunger in normal mode then I don't really see any problems with it. If it takes for example 30 in-game days or more to start starving, then it's fine really because you won't be feeding yourself every in-game day / constantly.

And also keeping in mind that you would pause / delay the hunger by resting your character, sitting / sleeping / etc. I agree that there's not really much depth to hunger right now, at least in the stable version. Maybe you could become fat or skinny depending on how much you eat, and such. So if you get fat you run slower. And could die from overweight. Either overweight or starving to death, a rather slow process, but also interesting. From being skinny you could jump higher, fat, lower jump.

Edit:

Oh and also, if you are fat you are more resistant to cold, so you get a warmer stat boost, and if you are skinny you get colder than usual. Something like this maybe...

 

Thanks for the clarification - I hope it is still on the Dev team's 'to think about' list. I reckon an extra difficulty setting would be easier to implement than custom options...but yeah, already quite extensively debated that one

Agree that hunger should be unobtrusive. It shouldn't be a pressing issue beyond 'the first night' phase - just trigger new players to look into the food system then be part of the scenery. Last I heard, farming was meant to be a route you could take to make money so there will be a purpose to it beyond feeding yourself. Maybe as part of that they'll add more involved farming mechanics to make the best crops difficult to grow, or require non-renewable fertilisers to mature - helping to limit access to the top buffs. Trading the needed resources and the difficult ingredients could then be something to drive interaction on multiplayer servers.

These would be fun things to see as a mod another reason to keep the hunger mechanic in I feel - something modders and mod-lovers can be creative with.

 

As far as i concerned, leave it out for easy, put it in for hardcore. And if they flip a coin and decide normal that way I'll be cool with it. That said. I find the lack of hunger bar gives me more freedom with what foods to take and how to go afk, I like that. But if hunger does get done away with, could there be other survival mechanisms thrown in for different biomes? I would like something to spice up certain planets, the only threats shouldn't be mobs, traps, and weather.

 

What? No hunger system? Are they mad? It was one of the things, i bought this game. I wanted a good feature-packed survival game. And hunger is one of the main survival aspects. It can still give buffs, when you eat. And noone restricts you from eating to get those buffs. But hunger bar MUST be present. In fact, they could go further and make a system, where at differen % levels of hunger character gets weaker and weaker. The more survival features the better. Don't go hand in hand with casual industry, so popular these days One more thing that i mentioned - you don't have to melt ores now. Instead you get them instantly in furnace. That too ruins the immersion of adventure and accomplishing something. And the first build, when upon death you lose pixels and ALL your things were the best. Not permadeath, but still encourages you to value your life and think about strategy. Even if you die, it's an epic adventure to get back your things.

 

I believe @Tiy mentioned in his recent reddit AMA (I'm too lazy to find it and post a link) that hunger will someday return for higher difficulties.

 

Yeah...survival feel in general is waay down. Feels like part of the game is missing and sapping at motiviation to get out there. Found pretty much all I need and now dump most food and seeds on the floor.

Look forward to getting hunger back, thanks for the info Dinoyipi.

 

I think Chucklefish aims for simplicity with Starbound Mechanics. That's why we don't have ammo for ranged weapons, no elaborate mechanic for different kinds of survival elements (you could only die of freezing and hunger before. No elaborate temperature or nutrition systems), combat was mostly bash'n'jump, and even with the new combat system, it is still pretty straightforward. Monsters were pretty generic, only requiring you to watch them attack once or twice to figure out their patterns, if you don't just kill them straight away.
Anyone seeking complex or intricate systems are probably going to be left wanting with vanilla Starbound. But that's also why it is highly moddable. So you can add anything you think the game lacks to it.
So if you want hunger on casual, I think a mod will be available very soon, if not already.

Though I'll say, Casual it is not. NPCs can still kick your tush unless you have a very good weapon. I ran into some avian guards on a sacrificial temple right at the earlier game and I pretty much had to turn around after dying four times there. Lost many pixels too...

 

I don't understand why hunger and cold were removed. Seemed to me it would've been fairly doable to simply add a check box that says "Survival on/off". Those who want Terraria in space can simply turn off the survival part and their character is unaffected by hunger or cold.
Supposedly its still cold on certain planets, but I remember when every planet could be to cold, such as during the nights or during bad weather. Removing these mechanics and handing out O2 systems so early on in the game has essentially killed the survival part that Starbound once had. And has contributed to the overall over simplifying of the game and I dare say, dumbing down.

Some would argue things like Hunger are only going to end up being a nuisance. But that applies to other mechanics, such as fuel and the entire gear progression as well as many resources you gather. This is simply staple to the genre that Starbound was in.

 

The most ironic thing about all the difficulties is how meaningless they are. One punishes you by making you farm more while the other punishes you by making you have to start over. None of them are actually more difficult since you will be doing the same things, you will just be doing them more. Unless there is some A.I. improvement to the enemies or ores are found in different locations or something along those lines.

 

Funny you should mention that, since in the aforementioned AMA (if I remember correctly) Tiy also mentioned that there will eventually be more differences between the difficulties than just hunger and death punishment. And, in hindsight, the "difficulties" are currently called "game modes"; so there's that. Maybe they'll be separate someday...?