Vitamins, Nutrition, and Food Balancing System

[Grendalsh 9]

Overall, the Nutrition management system needs to be a long term system, not something that can be manipulated over a span of minutes. It should take time and effort to either suffer malnutrition or overdose, but it should also take time and effort to recover from letting nutrition get that bad. The Balanced Nutrition buff should be a benefit for actually managing nutrition over time, not just over a single play session. Hunger and nutrition need to be marginally related, but avoiding starvation shouldn't cause overdosing, and avoiding overdosing or maintaining Balanced Nutrition shouldn't require starvation death.

1. Vitamin levels should decrease naturally at about 1% per hour. Given a starting point of 50%, it would take about 4 days of ignoring a vitamin C to get the scurvy debuff. You can ignore vitamins for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you, and it will be a pain to restore, so it's better to maintain than to ignore. 
2. The Deficiency debuffs should have several stages. based on bands of nutrition. At 20%, you might cough once per 5minutes. By 10% you might cough once per minute. Vision might have periods of blurring at 5% Vit A, increasing to periods of partial blindness at 1%, and periods of full blindness at 0%.
3. It should be possible to maintain food levels in any given day without overdosing on a vitamin. 
4. Low Vitamin levels should persist through death. Dying to reset your food is fine, but that scurvy isn't going away until you nosh on some citrus.
5. High vitamin levels should lower when dying, by perhaps 1%, until about 75%. If you overdose, dying should prevent the overdose debuff from triggering again immediately at respawn.
6. The vitamin value that food gives should be based on a sliding scale. As an example: Got 0% Vit C and Scurvy? Any Vit C food will give .01 Vit C value/food value until you hit say 1% Vit C. So scarfing an entire stack of Berries or a couple Bubble & Squeek would be enough to stop the Scurvy debuff for an hour. From 1% to 5%, Vit C food gives .005 Vit C/food value. After 5%, Vit C food gives .001 Vit C/food value. 
7. Cooked food should average out vitamin pairs. ie, Pork Pie should raise or lower the A/B values based on which is higher and the current Vit/Food band.
8. Buff foods should cost vitamins. For instance, Ale gives the Combat buff, at the expense of increased Vit A reduction rate for the duration of the buff.
9. Balanced Nutrition buff only occurs while all vitamin values are within the 45% to 55% range, and within 5% of each other. eg Having all values at  60% wouldn't count as Balanced.

 

Edited February 1, 2019 by Grendalsh