Food in sandbox games

[stu-est-sup-int]

I'm probably nitpicking over personal taste but I still want to discuss this.

Do people like having food as a mandatory obstacle to overcome? As in you start the game struggling with food and build things to deal with it? Do you think this is a good survival formula that adds the spark of utility to the things you create?

Or do you want to make a fancy dish of inedible pasta and display it on the dining room table? (and then realize you now have 25 you have nothing to do with)

For the record I do appreciate the spark of utility and the only reason I would select the second option is bias that every complex dish the player can create has "equal" or rather "unique" utility.

But if I were to make a luanti sandbox game myself I would probably avoid the first unless I was confident I could execute it well. And I might tend towards a third option where food provides healing with a variable cooldown but is not the only or main source of healing. However this is not the cleanest option in my persception. For example it blatantly encourages you to avoid the mechanic to preserve resources which is a thing I very much hate.

Even if my entire perspective (especially if my entire perspective) is difficult for you to associate with I would love to hear your opinion.

[Blockhead]

I couldn't tell you much about what I do like in terms of video game food. Probably the most important thing is that it's not always a chore but rather somewhat fun or relaxing to cook. Basic 3x3 crafting grid doesn't cut it. What I could definitely say though is that adding random utensils like frying pans and chopping blocks to the grid as well as the ingredients is not fun. It occupies more inventory space and mental capacity in terms of remembering the recipe.

I also want to answer in terms of the words you used. In a "sandbox", play isn't so much towards an end goal or an inherent goal, but done for fun, aesthetics and the feeling of it. Unlike a "sandbox", a "survival" game would make it hard to acquire food in the first place, so that the player feels they've overcome a challenge. So in terms of food in a "sandbox", the most important thing is fun. People may like to make familiar and popular dishes, or feel like they have agency over the outcome of the dish by varying ingredients, cooking times, that sort of thing. And being able to serve it up onto a table and show it off to other players or online, roleplay eating it, that sort of thing. I'm looking at the kitchen here as like another part of the "doll house" in this "sandbox" experience.

[bgstack15]

For me, the struggle to get enough food early on in a survival game is the fun part. But once you get a solid farm going, food becomes just a mere chore, and then you have tons and tons. So it's good for the first ~10 hours of survival gameplay, and then it gets repetitive.
I wouldn't mind the ability to display a single instance of a neat spaghetti item I crafted. We need better options for that actually.

[Astrobe]

Hmmm.. What if I were to remove the healing effect of eating in my game?

Foods (apples, mushrooms fishes, honey, berries) would still be useful had they are used to trade with NPCs. I would probably have to increase the number of ingredients in recipes since they've lost their primary use. I would consider going for more complex foods and replace some of the item-for-item NPC trades. This would probably please those who like the "cosmetic" aspect of foods; but I don't share the fascination for food other have, so I don't really like this direction.
It would impact somewhat multiplayer games, as this double-use (healing and trading) was making them more valuable.

Then how to heal ? Possible solutions:

No healing. This would be like old shoot-them-up / beat-them-all games in which you had 3 lives and sometimes a "1 UP" drop. I would make it a lot cheaper to set a respawn point. I would have to remove the "respawn fee" because players cannot avoid dying.

Healing over time. This would slow down the fights, which is not be too good, because in some situations players already have to wait for their mana bar to refilled in some situations. Can be mitigated with a large HP pool. An evil plan would be to merge the HP pool and the mana pool, like some MOBA heroes that use their health to deal damage.

Healing pads/spots/fountains. Would be very difficult to tune if they are mapgen'ed. So I would probably go for craftable ones. Limited throughput of course. This would be more computationally expensive, as the node would have to look for nearby player characters, or player characters would have to look for nearby healing nodes. An upside is that it provides an incentive to build outposts. That said, currently this incentive already exists with healing foods because most biomes are food-depleted, or become depleted over time because of player activity (esp. in multiplayer games).

Heal on mob kill. This would make the game more or less hardcore depending on the ratios. a priori falling damage would need some mitigations.

Last 3 are not mutually exclusive.

I would not consider "medkit drops" or any healing item, because of course it would be equivalent to food.

[freshreplicant]

I think it depends on how gritty you want the survival to be and maybe the audience you want to attract.

If you want it to be 'realistic' wilderness survival, food is essential, but complex meals are probably not going to be a thing at all. It might just be foraging, trapping and hunting and then eating most food raw except what must be cooked to consume safely. Food (and water) in this type of scenario/game might not actually add to health, but prevent loss of health from conditions like starvation and dehydration. In these kinds of games, maybe you never progress past that stage of foraging and trapping, and it's just about getting by until you make it out of the wilderness by yourself or get rescued.

Other games though might encompass a wider spectrum: perhaps you start off like above, but the experience branches out more into homesteading, e.g. planting crops, raising animals for food, combining ingredients, using more complex processes and tools to produce high value meals. If so, then food can become more than a source of 'health' or preventing loss of health and start giving you a reason to engage in the whole homesteading/farming lifestyle at all by giving you something to strive for. Depending on how gritty or forgiving this experience is, it might also progress to a 'cozy games' atmosphere in the late game, in which you're not scrambling to survive any more but just making a cozy home and then making exponential improvements to it.

I totally agree with Blockhead, I find crafting grid cooking (where you combine food and tools on a crafting grid) quite boring and unimmersive. Multi-stage recipies with unique cooking stations that need to be crafted, then set up in the physical game world, maybe fuelled or maintained in some way, like say, a wash basin, chopping board and knife, mortar and pestle, brick oven, etc. can be a more satisfying game loop for those who enjoy the food aspect of survival games. It also gives you more of a reason to progress away from just four dirt walls and one big room, as it might make building a designated kitchen worthwhile. It doesn't have to complicated though - even if it's quite rudimentary I always enjoyed the cooking and general crafting experience of Runescape, where you have ovens, forges, anvils and so on and this sense of progression and being able to make higher tier items.

[Astrobe]

I think it depends on how gritty you want the survival to be and maybe the audience you want to attract.

There's also the important consideration of how long you want your game to be, especially for offline games; for online games, the "chaos" introduced by interactions between players can make the game last forever or so.

This is also a characteristic that separates "creative" games from "survival" games, I think. In creative games, players set their own goals (building The Enterprise, a train network, ...), and redefine them when they are achieved. In survival games, setting goals is unavoidable and less flexible because you have to have progression, and progression brings in the notion of time and ending; making the last step of progression both means reaching a goal and if the game doesn't have other goals, the end of the game (and of the story; e.g. single player RPGs like Zelda or Final Fantasy; it also happens in MMORPGs in which players max-out, quit after a while, then come back when an extension is published, which usually adds a progression step which leads to power creep).

Making a survival game generally consists in defining goals, or assessing the goals the design of the game creates (typically armor, weapons, abilities, stats upgrades), and then throwing things in the way of the players to these goals, i.e. "challenges". Some can be fast to overcome but require a long preparation, like beating a boss. Some can be long term support tasks, like gathering food.

In my experience, it is difficult to create a significantly large, consistent and coherent set of goals and challenges, so the it's hard to say "no" to food.

That said, considering food as either a source of healing or a cosmetic item is a false dichotomy. For instance, as a mentioned earlier, in my game food is both the sole source of healing and a trading token, and there's room for improvement.

[kuboid]

Food is essential. In creative as well as survival games. In creative games, as Blockhead wrote before, food has decorative and presentational character. Because? You don't need it, it's fun, it looks nice.
In survival, you need food to, well, survive. And it's great to control game flow:
Make nice, green, areas (biomes) where food grows plenty, easy to pluck, easy living for a beginning. Don't disencourage new players. Make barren, hard-to-survive regions, maybe with bad mobs, so there's challenge for those who have grown into the world. But with great, rewarding resources you will almost never find elsewhere.
Make food that's easy to pick in the greenlands but you need to find frequently. Make food that's hard to obtain, maybe by killing strong mobs only, or that need great efforts to cook, but which are rewarding in terms of nutrition. Nutrition and/or healing is something you need in ice- or sand-deserts, vulcano-wastelands or when traveling deep underground (where you find the really precious items/ores).

In short: I can hardly think about a long-running (maybe infinite) game without food. In a competitive game, you need a limited resource to compete for, and which must be consumed. Especially if killing everybody else is not the primary goal. Food is an ideal candidate for this.

I disagree that you need specific goals in a survival game. All you need is challenge. All infinite survival games I played became boring at the point where there was no challenge anymore. That was true in Elite, in Minecraft, Minetest games.

[ShallowDweller]

Depends on the game.

For example, in Pixel Dungeon and similar games, I wish hunger wasn't a thing at all due to the gameplay loop: if you wish to get past the boss (which you have to fight and can't sneak through), you have to explore the entirety of each previous floor for loot and experience alike with a tiny inventory and the need to worry about thieves who may steal your food (among other things), forcing you to chase after it wasting precious hunger points in the process when you can only get 1-2 pieces of food per floor (not counting those sold in shop floors). Combine it with the need to identify potions and scrolls which might be required to reach the single piece of food present in a floor (potentially locking you out of it) and what you get in the end of the day is just a gamble fest on a time limit imposed by the food.

In survival sandboxes, however (which is what you actually asked about) it tends to be way better, since we can go hunting and/or farming for food. Would be cool to have a crafting station where we can store the ingredients to cook something with them without having to remember their positions in a grid. Maybe the crafting station could be upgraded with items that allow the player to cook a wider variety of food. Being able to select which item to use when multiple different ones are valid for the same recipe would be nice as well (eg. a recipe that accepts any grains so you can pick the least useful one for it and save the ones required by recipes that ask for specific grains). It's also a good idea to have more complex/expensive recipes provide the player with some kind of buff (faster weapon swing cooldown for games that use it, for example) to make up for the extra effort needed to cook them (filling up hunger points past how many you need to lose to get weak isn't as useful).

There's also the issue that as soon as you can farm for food (which you should be able to, in my opinion) the food aspect stops being a challenge and becomes boring, so having something to serve as a food sink (NPC quests that require you to bring them some food, either specific items or enough to fill up X hunger points). Personally, I like the way it works in Don't Starve Together, where the food spoils over time to prevent hoarding and encourage live stocking and mindful resource management, on top of also making spoiled food useful as soil fertilizer so it discourages the player from hoarding food without punishing them for it. That said, i would also like to see other types of anti-hoarding mechanics that don't punish the player (like the aforementioned quests OR encouraging a varied diet by nutrient stats or reducing efficiency of eating the same item several dozens of times, which should be configurable).

The challenge of managing your food is nice, but there are times when you want/need to stock up and go do something else where you don't want to worry about managing your food (like a long mining or exploration trip, where you want to be able to fill a single inventory slot with a stack of food and call it a day) so you want to take that into account when balancing your anti-hoarding mechanics. Regardless of balance aspects, being able to place down food as decoration is something a lot of people would like to be able to do in sandbox games (specially in creative mode), as that makes houses look more lively. You can delegate that function to a 3rd party mod and it idealy should require a 2nd item placed down to display the food so you don't risk placing down the pie slice you were trying to eat, but up to you how to implement that.

I hope this wall of text is of use to you

[Hume2]

The survival sandbox games are usually built upon one principe, namely that nothing should be more complicated than it needs to be. You shouldn't ask the question "Why can't I just...", while getting an answer like "because the game said NO", or even "because there is an arbitrary magic spell which said NO". An example of that is, how mushroom stews work in MINECR~1. You have to combine red and brown mushrooms, exactly in the ratio 1:1, in order to eat them. Why can't I just eat a raw mushroom? Because the game said NO. (I'm not even considering that red mushrooms are poisonous IRL.)

This may look like there is no place for more complicated foods. Well, there may be place for them, but they need to be handled correctly. Namely, these principes should be preserved:

• All food ingredients must be edible even as raw, even if that should be ineffective.
• If a recipe provides a valid output, then a similar recipe should also provide a valid output, if that change is not substantial. For example, providing two brown mushrooms instead of one brown and one red should also work.
• There must be an actual reason to craft more complicated foods, other than aesthetics. The reason that some items wouldn't be edible otherwise, is insufficient and too lazy.

What could be the reason of crafting more advanced foods? This is tough, indeed. I can think of two reasons: First, that some advanced foods give certain boots to the player. That is especially good, if you want to introduce potion effects without introducing witchcraft. Second reason is that some quests may require the player to cook a specific advanced food.

I can also think of cooking in a cauldron, which brings certain advantages over crafting-grid cooking:

• If you have different food sources, each giving you a different item, you may mix them together to get a single kind of food.
• If the items in the cauldron are close to an existing recipe, it may result into cooking a certain kind of food. Otherwise, it can get a generic name based on the prevalent food item. That way, the game gives you no limit on what you can mix together.

Regarding the concern whether food is still necessary later in the game: It is indeed less important, but only as long as you stay close to your own base. If you want to go on a longer adventure, then you can take with you only a limited amount of food. That could be further limited by limiting the item stacking in inventory. That way, the player has to invest time into transport or setting up more farms in the distant areas.

[Linuxdirk]

If it is a building sandbox, then no. If it is a survival sandbox, then yes.

If it is an automation sandbox, then it depends. Can you make it part of the automation or is it just a mundane chore? If you can build a complex machine that automatically plants, harvests, and re-plants, and processes the harvested goods into edible food: Absolutely yes, please! Also optimize it to 100% efficiency!

Otherwise I’d rather say no.