What about making the favourite food hidden so the player has no choice but to deal with what they were given?

well, sooner or later they'd figure it out. of course by then they'd probably have a number of hours invested in their charcater and would probably not want to start over just because their favorite food wasn't nuts. On the other hand, if they concentrated just on figuring that out, it would only take 1-2 game days, which they could probably breeze though in about 30 minutes accelerating time as much as possible.

Note that favorite food would be the ONLY random stat. You get to pick everything else.

Well, if there was an inventory penalty for staple foods to counterbalance their easy access, you might rebalance it with basic food taking much space and giving few bonus.

Well, if there was an inventory penalty for staple foods to counterbalance their easy access, you might rebalance it with basic food taking much space and giving few bonus.

There are both weight and container rules in the game, but all weights are realistic. The game has an emphasis on realism, its really a simulator - like a flight sim - except you control a human during the Paleolithic era, instead of an F-22 Raptor or whatever.

So i can't jing the weights or space required by foods. Fact is you can live a long time on a backpack full of nuts. Just one jar of peanut butter is close to 2000 calories - more than 3/4ths of a days worth of food. And a backpack full of rice - you have a couple weeks, if not a month's worth of food.

When it comes to balancing, games where you make up the rules and sims where you don't are a bit different. With sims, its all about accuracy, and let the chips fall where they may.

So all I have to work with are the incentives and disincentives you would have in the real world for not eating the same food all the time. Things like you get sick and tired of it, and it may not be a balanced diet, leading to malnutrition.

If realism is #1 priority , malnutrition and giving bonus to variety makes sense. Maybe you can still counterbalance it with making easy food unaccessible all the time.

Like in AoE , bushes are quick food source but depletes after first stages. In Don't Starve, berries are quick dirty food source but takes time to replenish and not available at winter forcing you to other sources eventually.

Like in AoE , bushes are quick food source but depletes after first stages. In Don't Starve, berries are quick dirty food source but takes time to replenish and not available at winter forcing you to other sources eventually.

Caveman does the same sort of thing. Exhaust-able resources have replenishment rates. Entire fields of fruit bearing plants can be barren in winter. I ended up having to track almost a dozen different kinds of resources.

Maybe instead of 'Favorite Food' you would have a Goal food of the day :

we're short of nuts - a storeable food - for the winter - it would be good to increase that supply

I feel like some nice tasty brains today I feel a bit sluggish and cold (brains are mostly fat - important energy ...)

Need herbs - we have all that tasteless dried meat (or stuff so tough we boiled it until it became soft but its now tasteless)

I gots a toothache - need something soft to eat

I want something sweet (honey would be good) to give to X (for prestige, or bribe)

Need something instantly eatable (many foods you have to cook/process to make them edible)

Im so $%^&ing sick of fish - I want some red meat (lewis & clarks men on the columbia river mouth had this happen - they ate a horse)

This all could vary across time with contrived reason for the specifi things targeted

Maybe instead of 'Favorite Food' you would have a Goal food of the day :

too contrived for a simulation.

in a non-simulator you can do more or less what you want.

in a simulator, if you the designer want the player to do something, you must model and simulate the real incentives and disincentives that would lead to that behavior. and if they are not sufficient, the desired behavior is not realistic, and should therefore not be part of the "game" (the simulation software).

So for example, nuts spoil slower than other foods, which means they are one of the few foods that will keep through the winder snows of colder regions. Which gives players wintering in colder regions strong incentive to stock up on nuts. But to achieve that, i can't arbitrarily make up a rule that you have to gather nuts every so often. I have to simulate everything:

first, you need Nuts in the game. weight, trade value, size, chance to find, time to find, skills required, etc.

then you need harvesting stuff - IE resource gathering

and the nuts should have an effect: food boost by food type - and a variable food stat of course.

and food that never spoils isn't very realistic, so you need to model food spoilage.

and of course, spoiled food should have some effect: Getting sick from eating spoiled food.

and if you can get sick, you need to model Illness and recovery, including medicinal plants.

to make it winter, you need a weather engine including change of seasons

to make nuts scarce in winter you need: temperature effect on presence of nuts (and other resources)

to make them actually have to go around gathering nuts you need: nuts resource levels for every 5x5 mile area on the map.

to make other food scarce in winter you need: weather effects on chance to encounter game

and to make it all unavoidable, you need a world big enough that just migrating to a warmer climate might take all winter!

Only once all those factors come into play will the player do as expected. They won't leave, as it takes too long to get someplace warm. They will have to stock up on nuts because there are none when its cold. They want nuts because they don't spoil quickly, which is important because they can die from food poisoning. And there's not a lot of other food around in winter either. And nuts are not available in unlimited quantities. A 5x5 mile area (a map square) can support one or two cavemen at most long term, and that's only during the warm season. So if they are smart, before the snows come, they will range far and wide from their winter camp, gathering nuts to stockpile for winter.

with 0% arbitrary or contrived rules, and 100% emergent player behavior driven solely by the things modeled in the simulation.

In the end, i added favorite foods. You get an extra mood boost when you eat them, get less of a mood nuke from eating them often, and don't get a "tired of eating" message as quickly. I decided to let the player choose their favorite food. If they choose nuts all the time, they just cheat themselves out of gameplay - and that's their business. The same way the full version will include all testing cheats and tools. if they want to cheat themselves out of gameplay, that's their business. Its a single player game, no harm done.

And with favorite foods done, all gameplay code is done. I decided to hold off on rock toss using the combat engine, and a quest editor. rock toss was a lot of work for a mini-game, and the quest editor would require a full blown scripting language.

So now i'm shopping for a new PC to do final graphics with. and then do the help system, and release! Finally!

Nuts and berries are common and trade for low values

got that part already! <g>

Nuts are bland and as such your tribe can tire from them quickly

You can actually get 4 food types from nuts: (plain) nuts, spiced (salted) nuts, roasted (plain) nuts, and spiced (salted) roasted nuts. You tire of eating all foods at the same rate. IE -5 mood per time eaten out of the last 10 meals. that's for non-favorite foods. its -2 for favorite foods.

berries have lot's of poisonous types making it dangerous for unskilled workers to harvest just any berry bush.

That's reflected in the minimum plantlore skills required - although you can proceed with no skills. It also reflected in the chance of success for finding (edible non-poisonous) berries. So low plantlore means you will find very few edible berries. Once you learn the basics - about 50 exp in plantlore - you'll do much better. as your plantlore increases further, you'll get better at finding more berries faster.

Nut's and berries don't have many uses outside eating,

Dyes and poisons would be about it. I didn't add the dying skill as it would require dyed versions of all objects. And there's already a separate "poison plant" object which is representative of all poisons.

Also how does food work? Do you feed each member of the tribe or is there some kind of cooking pot that feeds everyone for the day?

Like a cross between The SIMs and Skyrim. Like The SIMs, you have a food stat, a "cook food" action, and an "eat food" action. Like Skyrim, food is just another inventory item. So one band member can make 5 or 10 units of meat soup, then share them with other band members.

Typically, when the band gets food (meat, veggies , whatever), they will cook it to retard spoilage (raw meat), and to get a wider variety of foods from the basic ingredients, raw veggies (carrots), spiced veggies (raw celery, turnips, potatoes, etc with salt), cooked veggies (plain baked potatoes), spiced cooked veggies (baked potatoes with salt, pepper, etc), veggie soup (such as minestrone), spiced veggie soup (spicy minestrone), veggie stew (vegetarian chili), and spiced veggie stew (hot vegetarian chili). They can also combine meats and veggies in soups and stews - both plain and spiced. The game includes cooking actions, and cooking objects like grinding slabs, grindstones, boiling bags, and boiling stones. being a simulation that includes "realistic needs and diseases" so to speak, food was one of the first things implemented in the game. I think the general order was make them walk, make them drink, make them eat. and then came monsters and combat.