And I agree we need more reasons to step foot on planets, but that should be done via unique features, like cities, ruins, things to explore and mobs, rather than merely "This grows better here". Substance over what I think would be considered "meta".
Slower or faster growth... whatever. Honestly, I think food growth should be almost trivial on planets and difficult in space. It just makes sense to me gameplay-wise that way.
5-10 per person per... what? Per hour? Per day? Keeping in mind activate factions would have a person running around their base or surrounding area, allowing to plants to grow even for offline players, who's hunger would not deplete since they are offline (Imagine a bot just sitting there 24/7, even dead the sector would be loaded). Would also kinda render 'slower growth' more or less moot, cause it's still always growing, and it wont take more then a few hours to grow at most.
I wouldn't worry about that at the moment. This is all theoretical as no one in starmade has ever played with a food system. The closest thing is probably people playing Minecraft survival, but that's a far cry from Starmade to say the least. Don't forget configurability - individuals and servers can adjust food growth rate and player needs. Honestly we just need to get something in-game that works reasonably and decide on better defaults after people have figured out what works well.
Quick, simple, way to put in food. There'd be a hunger bar on your person, and when it reaches zero you'd slowly loose health. To keep it up, you would walk to a food block and press r.
Okay, this idea just kind of exploded out of my brain a little bit ago. Let's kill the cliche, add a flake of realism, and contribute to gameplay. A very simple "nutrition" system might be nice, but beware that making it too complicated will make it unenjoyable.
The food bar could have three stages: Buff, normal , weakness, crippling weakness
- Buff: Blue, top 20% of the bar: Increases a particular stat based on the food group(s) most recently consumed. Eating a variety of foods allows this to become quite strong.
- Normal: Green, middle 60% of the bar: Does nothing. Your needs are satisfied.
- Weakness: Sickly yellow, bottom 20% of the bar: Gives a debuff based on food groups you have not consumed recently.
- Crippling weakness: Dark red, empty bar: Weakness debuff doubles and maximum health begins to be debuffed. By default, you lose 2% max health every 60 seconds, meaning it takes 50 minutes to starve to death AFTER you health reaches zero. This prevents the use of medical supplies to recover from starvation.
These would not have to be descrete "steps" either - the effects could "fade" in and out in the 5% above and below each boundary. i.e. Buff begins to fade at 85% full bar, but isn't gone until 75% while crippling weakness begins to affect the player at 5% but doesn't reach full potency until the bar is actually empty.
As far as balancing, I think it should take anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes to reach zero from a full hunger bar, but that's just me. All of this should be as configurable as possible. Everything from drain speed to the size of the "fading effect" regions of the bar should be exposed in the configs for players and server owners to balance to their liking.
