an entire thing with savory/salty/herbal/floral/sweet/oily/acidity/bitter/disassociation/morale(focus?)
and have different ratings of it ranging from 1 to 50 and various interactions
Technically… flavor types… savory, salty, spicy/sour (on the same rating, ranging from -50 to +50), sweet/bitter (on the same rating, ranging from -50 to +50), disassociation, floral, herbal, fruity, oily/fat content.
Disassociation is important because it’d go up the more you try to mask flavors with other flavors, like deliberately adding lots of sugar to try to mask bitterness for example.
If it gets too high the food always would taste unpleasant
Primarily spicy/sour which would enjoy having a certain amount of disassociation, which would actually enhance it.
Was going to replace sour with acidic, and then have oily be the medium for spicy and herbal.
Spicy and acidic (sour) foods would like having a disassociation of about 5-10, but more than that means you’re trying to smother things with other things or making it more complicated, and disassociation rises when you try to counter one flavor with another (for example, adding acidic to oily - one ‘counters’ the other, but they both go up, so disassociation rises). Disassociation will be the closest thing to a measurement to how ‘bad’ a food tastes, and people won’t like your food if it rises too high.
Bitter, herbal, and salty will also cause massive disassociation once they push over a threshold, and humans will have specific ranges they prefer. Could also do it for other species too (since there might be different preferences there?).
Humans would have specific tastes (and if there are other races, they’d have specific ‘ranges’ they would like). Could also toss a small randomizer in there and leave it in people’s internal score so you can tell them ‘they like bitter and prefer less fruit’, for example.
The major mechanical effect (if there is one) would be a bump to motivation. Things with a lot of depth (and very, very low disassociation) would have a long-term motivation bump. You work slightly faster on everything and it’s easier to resist… I dunno, stuff. Minor bonuses everywhere. You could get a bump to motivation from things that ‘taste good’ but have a really low disassociation. A bag of potato chips crammed with artificial flavors (which would immediately crank up disassociation) would have a shorter time.
I think disassociation as a value should be saved to a player and slowly build up
so you could get to the point where you devour a bag of chips and… it does nothing for your motivation, and in fact makes you feel worse
and it’s hard to eat anything because your disassociation value is too high.
Age. The longer a food sits uneaten, the higher it’s disassociation goes up. Things that are sealed in bags don’t have that happen until after the bag is opened.
Things with TONS of preservatives will by default already have a high disassociation, so the difference between an unopened tube of disgusting food paste and a closed one would be pretty much moot.
There’s a couple of mathematical ways to do this, with (Motivation/Disassociation) * (stamina regen)
being one of the simpler ones
and disassociation resets once a week
And just give motivation a flat cap
And eating the same thing doesn’t create more motivation, just builds disassociation?
“You already had this once… so it’s not very interesting.”
And don’t bother hiding it from the player, just show them their disassociation/motivation.
so… eating a tube of paste would give you 5/4, but eating a second tube would give you 5/8?
Basic: Soy pastes, water, soft drinks, batter, soy sauce, rice, mushrooms, anything we can think of that hydroponics grows a lot of.
Superior: Fruits, limes and lemons, nuts, common spices, syrups, vat meats.
Specialist: Rarer spices, real meats.
which I guess if you wanted to go full crazy you could have the horseradish type be flagged as mildly toxic and do damage to you or decrease your stamina, and have it be the “cheaper” variety of spice
and you could straight-up replace horesradish with, IDK, something called rat venom
which increases the motivation/allows manipulation for better meals, but hurts you
but is cheaper than capsican
we’re already doing this sort of with the spices, where I’ve made all the cheap artificial flavorings pretty bad for you but you can still do stuff for them
but I think the biggest mistake I made with them in the doc was not making them strong solitary primary flavors
with having like, a clear-cut description of what each one does “this is a strong flavor of x” and explaining how the system works
it could open it up for players to figure out how ingredients work and properly mix them up
all the cheap artificial poisons don’t have low motivation/high disassociation necessarily, they’re just hard to work with and each have drawbacks natural spices don’t
that way you don’t have to fiddle with every ingredient, it’s just (motivation - disassociation) * whatever numerical value in money (edited)
so food paste would have a value multiplier of 1, but richer foods could be x5
although honestly x5 seems low for that sort of thing
basevalue^(motivation - disassociation) maybe