Sugary candy as energy source when starving

[thethunderhawk]

First off I just wanna say this is my first issue submission, and I apologize for any formatting errors or etiquette issues you might find here.

I suggest that a mechanic be developed that would allow sugary candy to temporarily reduce hunger penalties upon consumption. It would not affect actual hunger level, it would only reduce existing penalties for being Famished or Starving.

I recently found my grandfather’s US army field manual from his time in Vietnam. It suggests candy as a survival supply in case of being lost behind enemy lines. The idea is, should you go a couple days without a meal and then have to exert yourself, your body can convert pure sugars into fuel extremely quickly, giving you a temporary burst of energy. In game terms we would model that as a “sugar rush” effect that would reduce stat loss to high hunger levels, possibly followed by a “sugar crash” perhaps an hour later that would temporarily increase those same penalties (or, the crash could cause fixed penalties, thus penalizing well fed characters for binging on candy).

This would give candy an interesting and fun effect, and give an early player a reason to craft and gather stockpiles of candy for emergencies beyond the simple morale boost, which can already be achieved quite a few different ways.

I appreciate your feedback!

[FulcrumA]

My feedback is simple - if it's indeed a thing of effect considerable enough to be included in manuals, I am not against it. It's certain that it'd be nice if a role of sweets would be expanded beyond morale boosters.

[Maddremor]

Well, since candy is calorie dense they should be a valuable consumable given that providing calories is kind of the primary point of food. If you want to ease the feeling of an empty stomach after your caloric needs are filled you could eat mushrooms, leaves, drink a lot of water or something like that.

[FulcrumA]

To be honest, it may be good to consider upping somewhat how filling candies are. Not only they're a limited resource that can be only scavenged and with exception of few items, not crafted - we do have vitamins and other such nutrients as well as general healthiness stat junkfood affects negatively to balance it out and require for one to consume other things as well.

[Maddremor]

I think we could look at how many calories candy typically contains IRL and use that. This assumes that the nutrition stat represents some multiple of calories, although if not I don't know what it is supposed to be.

[FulcrumA]

I believe nutrition is largely arbitrary currently. Nutrition based on caloric content would require rebalancing of all foodstuff but is intended for faraway past. I worked with @mrkybe a tiny bit on it already, but - at least on my end - it was going slowly. Feel free to help out by providing charts of caloric content and possibly other nutrients per 100g of equivalents of ingame edibles, that'd help out a ton because it's not hard, but time-consuming and mind-numbing.

[Zireael07]

@FulcrumA: I attempted to pull it off in https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/13857 a long time ago (I used a site called Calorie King as source)

[Maddremor]

@FulcrumA I had a look at itype.h, and saw that 1 nutr ~= 8.7kcal. As a bonus, you can use calories: instead of nutrition: when defining a food item, which makes makes the process of balancing a bit easier. I will try to make some kind of table as time and mental fortitude allows.

[FulcrumA]

@Zireael07 Pretty interesting. I'll take an in-depth look in a few days. Did you use the same conversion Maddremor uses (1 nutr ~= 8.7kcal)? Because some of the values I see there are very high per portion of the product. Kybe was already tagged so hopefully he'll take a look at it himself if he'll be around.

@Maddremor

I will try to make some kind of table as time and mental fortitude allows.

I've made some table on majority of liquids (including food like soups), with comments. The list may require adjustments, updating and conversion if you want it to be exactly 8.7kcal per 1 nutrition. Also, the more mind-boggling thing is checking nutritional value of each (vitamins, iron, calcium) which I didn't do yet nor I took care of thirst-quenching values. Still, it may be of some help.

Edit, linking pastebin cause github absolutely destroyed the formatting. Pastebin link should hang around for a week or so.

[Shoes01]

While I am not at all in the loop of the calories/nutrition discussion, the website Wolfram Alpha might help too. I can search "100g of marshmallow" and it returns calories, fat, sodium, protein for a specific brand of marshmallow. Searching "100g of meat" gives me a ton of info, as well as a dropdown list to specify exactly what kind. Sources are provided at the bottom, too.

[DegenerateGroundState]

Candy also has the (short term) advantage for the malnourished in that it contains very little to no protein, which means it is non-thirst provoking. Protein metabolism requires a certain amount of water, so it is mostly excluded from things like lifeboat rations.

Not only is candy included in military manuals, but in actual military emergency rations. For a time after WW2 it was actually the main component of said rations. See the following videos:

Post WW2 RAF emergency flying ration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjyURQcaKpo

US AAF emergency ration (ww2 era) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0KRF7jvvV4

Three different generations of the modern US military Food Packet, Survival, General Purpose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mGF3N2J1FM

The 1992 US Food Packet, Survival, Abandon Ship is ENTIRELY candy, presumably because of the expected lack of water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r628XwZBQO0

[Maddremor]

I've made a spreadsheet where i added all relevant items from consumables.json and added kcal values for the low hanging fruit. Mostly used Wolfram Alpha as a source (thanks @Shoes01 ). Some things do look kind of strange, but thats because weight per serving is off. I used in-game weight per serving and IRL kcal/100g.

[FulcrumA]

@Maddremor Awesome. If we'd also include different nutrients (vitamins, iron, calcium etc values) we may have all the data now to do full nutrition revamp. Though we lso need to cover some of the items that do not have data (using close approximation, I doubt that human stomachs are very differetn from stomachs of other creatures in how nutritious they are at the same portion size/weight). Possibly also averaging out data from several sources (for example, while usually not big, there are differences compared to some values in my list so likely at the end, @kevingranade or some other dev would have to decide on final stats).

[Stone94]

MyFitnessPal has a one of the largest food databases on the net, and also a custom recipe calculater that will take alot of the guess work out of micros and macros.

[Night-Pryanik]

No discussion in over half a year, closing.