Let's get rid of hunger

[bio_hazard]

Hobbits should be always hungry. Semi-serious suggestion.

And sort of along the lines of Derakon's suggestion, hunger could be distracting, e.g. increase spell fail rate, to hit, and stealth.

[Carnivean]

Part of the problem with proposals like this is that they entirely discount the beginner player. They don't know what is good and what isn't and having to buy food rations before descending into the dungeon is a decent part of the immersion. Removing a "boring" mechanic discounts this immersion, which leads to my next point.

Another part of the problem is that you are reducing the Angband experience to which weapons do I use. Angband is a rich environment and that differentiates it from hack and slash games like Diablo. If you remove the complicating factors then you reduce the experience and you remove any differentiators between it and a more graphically rich experience.

Angband should not be for the speed runners alone.

[bunnies]

Ideas for modifying the negative effects of hunger are well and good, but I feel the key issue here is addressing the availability of food.

In Rogue, hunger was an interesting mechanic because food was scarce, and dying to hunger was a very real problem. I constantly had to make the decision whether to explore the rest of the level for food/loot or take the down staircase immediately.

Angband took the hunger mechanic, but greatly increased the availability of food turning it into an uninteresting and boring nuisance. For a non-ironman game, hunger doesn't translate well because of the presence of Recall scrolls. Regardless of whatever negative effects there may be, I can simply Recall back to town and remove hunger. For an ironman game, the drop rate of hunger removal items are so common that apparently you can just eat off the floor. Even then, in current stable version 5/6 classes have Satisfy Hunger in their spellbooks.

From the discussion in this thread, I believe I can say that most people agree that hunger adds flavour, but leads to very few meaningful decisions.

To "fix" it and turn it back into a meaningful mechanic, there are some steps that can be taken:

1. Limit the availability of hunger removal items. This might include food being an uncommon item in shops, and lowering drop rates in the dungeon
2. Modify the tempo of the hunger clock to make it interesting
3. Modify the negative effect of hunger

I believe the question then boils down to: is this the direction we want? Do we want to "fix" the mechanic, remove it entirely, or leave it alone in it's useless but admittedly flavourful state?

[Sphara]

Out of roguelikes I've played, NetHack and ADOM had more challenging food mechanic. Both games feature corpse-eating, negative/positive effects from eating, B/U/C status of food to name few. Food is also relatively more expensive in both games. In Brogue, which I haven't played a lot, food represents a bullt-in game timer. None of these features, except more expensive food, are realistically doable in Angband.

Food eating/nutrition lowering attacks for some monsters might be worth a shot if the community here wants to keep the nutrition timer around and wants it to have actual gameplay effect.

Satisfy Hunger scrolls come in big stacks for some reason and having it as an early spell for many classes doesn't help either. To top that, a ration costs 3gp which makes the hunger non-issue from turn 0 (if a player wants this).

Glutton ghost might be the only monster that can make a serious effect on a player if you have no way to detect it and you keep getting bad RNG out of its random movement.

[fizzix]

It has always been a feature that the aim of Angband is to kill Morgoth, but that there's more than one way to do that. I want to be broadening the space of possible game trajectories, and I feel that removing mechanics like hunger is narrowing it.

To me Angband has two main places where player decisions are important.

The first is in tactical battles. Mostly in whether or not to engage and when to run away. But also in consumable use and deciding how to defeat specific monsters. To me this is actually the bread and butter of angband, and we should be very leery about removing things that reduce tactical complexity, and strongly consider adding things that improve it. Luckily there are tons of possibilities here. Food (and fuel) have no effect on tactical gameplay.

The second area is in inventory management. What to take with you when you descend into the dungeon and what to leave behind. This, obviously, gets much harder in ironman and IMO is the main difficulty spike (secondary difficulty is lack of access to town shops, third difficulty is forced descent which to me isn't really an increase in difficulty at all except in cases of Deep Descent scrolls). Food (and fuel) do affect the difficulty here by removing a slot, really only in ironman though. Even then, fuel only matters until you find a good artifact light, and food is irrelevant once you've ID'd !salt water. Personally I don't find dying by hunger or lack of light interesting in any game, since it just means you were very unlucky in drops, but I can see why some people might find it interesting.

My recommendation is to prune back things that don't have a strong impact on tactical gameplay. And if the goal is to improve the difficulty of inventory management, I think there are better ways to do that. For example, reducing artifact spawn rate would affect that a lot more than the one slot you devote to satisfy hunger scrolls.

However, I'll also note that pressuring inventory is directly opposed in a way to improving tactical options. A player who can carry tons of status effect wands has a lot more options on which battles to fight and how to engage than one that has to drop them because their inventory is full. Since I think that tactical gameplay is really the bread and butter of angband rather than the inventory management, I'd much rather see an increase in tactical breadth rather than tightening inventory controls.

[AnonymousHero]

+1 to removing hunger. Outside of the very few first games, I don't think I've ever died to it. (I have once or twice in T2, but that was due to forgetfulness, having a full inventory and try to lug a 15000lbs corpse around the wilderness... Not an issue in vanilla.)

(I'd also argue for removing all the "boring" food which doesn't have any side effects when eaten.)

[Pete Mack]

Yes! Solve hunger forever. Also, world peace!

[fizzix]

Yes! Solve hunger forever. Also, world peace!

The alternate reading of the title was not lost on me

[Sky]

...hm, what if we still had a food clock, but you couldn't starve? Just make Weak apply some substantial debuffs (a flat -5 to all stats, maybe), but ditch the HP damage and periodic paralysis. It'd still be something you'd always want to avoid if at all possible, but running out wouldn't be an immediate death sentence. That would also open up space to play with how common food is, or how quickly the food clock runs down.

I do agree that having monsters that drain your food level is also worth exploring. Green Glutton Ghosts at minimum, Vampires too (gotta replenish that lost blood!), but possibly any monster/effect that drains XP could also make you hungrier.

A very reasonable request. Starvation should be only there when you dig through rock at 500turns/square.

Different races (troll,hobbit) would react differently to hunger.

[Rydel]

Since hunger doesn't have much impact on non-ironman play due to ease of getting food, scrolls, and spells, but does affect ironman since those are less available, would it be possible for hunger and items that only affect hunger to only be there when playing ironman?

[mrfy]

Since hunger doesn't have much impact on non-ironman play due to ease of getting food, scrolls, and spells, but does affect ironman since those are less available, would it be possible for hunger and items that only affect hunger to only be there when playing ironman?

I find it does affect the early parts of the game, what with limited gold, rarity of food items in the shallow levels, etc. I'm all for keeping it like it is, or making it more interesting, with different items. Why can't I find pints of ale in the dungeon or flasks of whiskey?

[Pete Mack]

I agree with mrfy. It's a useful lesson for newbies: always keep sufficient consumables. And it's a lot less subtle than cure wounds and phase door.

[Huqhox]

I agree with mrfy. It's a useful lesson for newbies: always keep sufficient consumables. And it's a lot less subtle than cure wounds and phase door.

Agreed. It is a useful object lesson to those learning the game that keeping an eye on consumables is a vital part of the game. And it's hardly tedious to manage.

[Grotug]

I've been playing a lot of ironman games these days and often die to hunger (HT/Warrior and all). I keep forgetting that it's not just glutton ghosts I need to be careful of. I've died numerous times because I forget that rot jellies eat food. A couple hours ago I had a nice start with 5 !speed, a decent weapon and an amulet of magi and then I starved to death. I cursed food in that game as a stupid mechanic that ruins good starts. And then I remembered how I used to curse traps and acid up and down as so annoying and aggravating that they surely made the game less fun. But I now feel that these annoyances are sort of a necessary evil to keeping the game from becoming boring/too easy. So, I can't say I support removal of hunger from the game.

I wouldn't be opposed to hunger having a longer period of affecting @ before he dies. Not sure that weak should affect all stats equally, but probably should hit STR the hardest. Not sure I agree that you shouldn't be able to starve, but make the transition from weak to starvation a little more drawn out (and dangerous with debuffs). Please don't remove the periodical paralysis; this is one of the greatest things about starvation!

[Voovus]

Hence the request to make no-hunger a birth option.

I switched from Moria to Angband about three years ago, and for me the top selling points were: (i) no selling (no pun intended), (ii) shops always stocked CLW/PhaseDoor/Light/WoR and (iii) removal of cursed equipment. These are things that were fun in Moria for a little while and added some atmosphere, but quickly became tedious (does anyone remember bargaining for a price?). I feel the some way about hunger. I have already drunk salt water and eaten a mushroom of purging while not having food in my inventory. Keeping track of food has now become a pretty mindless chore for me, which I'd like to have the option to switch off.