May 10 - Eating and You
Hey there, it's time for your weekly check-up. How are your triglycerides doing? Tell them I said hi.
There's a new alternate survival mode when starting a new game. It's per-save like permadeath, and it changes how food works. With it enabled you'll no longer gain hunger or thirst and thus won't need to eat or drink in order to stay alive. Your fatigue will also cap out at about 1/3 of your stamina, so you don't need to sleep in order to avoid passing out. Instead, eating food will cause you to gain the Satiated buff, which will gradually restore health over its duration. Enemies will also deal more damage, so you'll need to eat in order to heal during tough fights.
Now I know you're chomping at the bit to get started on that webcomic where an injured person eats a bunch of food to get better. Maybe with a tasteful title like "Videogame Logic" but hear me out a moment.
I know some players don't like having survival stats and managing their needs, so I wanted to add an option for them while still making it fun and balanced. Games like Skyrim use food to heal, but you can just pause the game and chow down on several tons of food to heal yourself back to full, which really means you have as much health as you do food which really screws around with the difficulty. I wanted healing to be a risk that fits into the flow of combat, so while food heals you, you'll still need to find a safe opening to eat, and then you'll need to stay safe long enough for the gradual healing to tick your health back up. Once the kitchen and proper cooking goes in you'll be able to cook food for buffs, which will be another consideration in fights and something you'll need to think about in both systems.
In order to celebrate this alternate survival system there's a new default outfit option. It's a loincloth! Now you can start completely from scratch in the wild, and hopefully fashion some better clothing before re-integrating into society. Or go full Tarzan, I'm not the boss of you.
