Nutrition system

[Boartato]

This is something a friend mentioned when I started playing and I'm somewhat confused as well. All plant matter seems to destroy your nutrition, regardless of how it's cooked or eaten. Admittedly I haven't progressed to stews quite yet, but raw/soup for turnips, mushrooms, berries all do the same thing. It's bad enough that I'd rather take the 2-3% starvation penalty and not bother gathering them. Even making pike soup out of my turnips trashed my nutrition bar.

This is half and half question and discussion. I'm wondering if I'm missing something (certain plants or berries being good, that I just haven't found?), or if it's a design choice I don't understand with regards to how nutrition works. Any links to previous posts/discussions on this topic would be very much appreciated!

[koteko]

Nutrition is, as far as calories are concerned (forget about vitamins and nutrient imbalances), simulated realistically enough. Each task as a certain energy cost which vary with difficulty (eg, easy tasks should cost 2 kcal/minute) and each food has a certain energy content as determined by its carb, protein and fat content.

You have two relevant bars: hunger and nutrition. If you eat 1lb of food, you are going to reduce your hunger regardless of food type (I believe). However, that lb of food will have maximum calories if made of pure fat. 1lb of fat is more than 4000 kcal, and that's really a lot.

However, 1lb of turnip is only 145 kcal. It's immensely less than 1lb of fat. And if you only eat turnip, even if you have an infinite quantity of them and do nothing but eat them, you'll slowly starve.

Why? Because eating is itself a task, and thus consumes calories (even doing nothing consumes a small amount of calories, like in real life). And also, since your stomach will be full (hunger bar empty), you won't be able to eat more turnips until you wait a bit.

So, in short: you need foods with high nutritional density. A good way of increasing the density of your food is to smoke or even better dry your meat/fish. Let's take the turnip example: you can't dry them, but if you could, one turnip would weight 0.1 lb for the same 145 kcal. So you'd be able to eat 10 of them for the same hunger bar depletion corresponding to 1lb. That'd be 1450 kcal, which is not bad at for 1lb of food.

[Boartato]

Did find a nice source about that math https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/urwforum/a-little-disappointed-nutrition-t7400.html

I think the issue comes down to frequency of eating, vitamins/minerals, and psychology.

The amount you can fit in your stomach per day doesn't change much in real life. If you're eating under your nutritional needs, even if you're physically filling your belly you'd still accumulate "starvation" as the game has. Trying to replicate this in game would probably make the system more obtuse than it already is. The simplified system makes being under nutritional requirement a real pain, which makes it worthwhile to starve rather than to eat bad foods from a player's convenience point of view.

Vitamins/minerals are not represented in game, nor is the game typically played in a time frame where they would matter. This element of eating leafy stuff in this sense isn't represented in game, despite many leafy things being edible and that being why we'd eat them.

Psychology is the last reason why humans eat some plants, because they taste good and make people happy. This is why many of our crops are cultivated. Psychology isn't majorily represented in game, with it tying only lightly to the spirit world.


I think the big reason that confused my nooby self is that there's no real good foods in the early months other than meat. Starting in spring or summer, your options are all not really worth eating with how the game represents nutrition (basically since we ignore vitamins). This gets compounded when villagers start selling turnips, which are a food basically in game for immersion and no real mechanical reason. It makes sense people like myself throw their hands up when even village vegetables suck. Faced with those stumbling blocks, I can see why I got frustrated and so do others even though good plant foods do exist in some instances.

There's also the issue that our cooking options don't really help us here. Soups make things less calorie dense, but because filling our hunger bar depends basically on how calorie dense our food is it's counterproductive. Even if you fill more now, you're damaging the amount you fill later. Also cooking foods doesn't (to my knowledge) liberate calories like it's thought to in real life either. And as mentioned, our character doesn't really care how it tastes. I think if our cooking options allowed us to make more calorie dense foods out of our low density vegetables it might help, but we'd quickly hit another roadblock of it being hilariously difficult to gather enough of those foods to actually make something out of them.

Thanks for taking time to reply

[koteko]

I don't think you really got what I wrote, or maybe I'm misunderstanding you

The amount you can fit in your stomach per day doesn't change much in real life. If you're eating under your nutritional needs, even if you're physically filling your belly you'd still accumulate "starvation" as the game has. Trying to replicate this in game would probably make the system more obtuse than it already is. The simplified system makes being under nutritional requirement a real pain, which makes it worthwhile to starve rather than to eat bad foods from a player's convenience point of view.

In URW it already works like this, as I mentioned in my previous reply.

The HUNGER meter limits in how many lb of food you can ingest in a certain amount of time. It has a few other effects, eg it can wake you up at night, and the hunger meter rises faster when you are Starving rather than when you are Abundant. But mostly it's the limiting factor.

I don't get your last sentence: how is it worthwhile to starve rather than eat bad foods? It's actually the opposite. It's better to eat spoiled foods than starve in URW - you will be more hungry but retain some of the nutrition. I never need it though, so I'd have to test this.

I think the big reason that confused my nooby self is that there's no real good foods in the early months other than meat. Starting in spring or summer, your options are all not really worth eating with how the game represents nutrition (basically since we ignore vitamins). This gets compounded when villagers start selling turnips, which are a food basically in game for immersion and no real mechanical reason. It makes sense people like myself throw their hands up when even village vegetables suck. Faced with those stumbling blocks, I can see why I got frustrated and so do others even though good plant foods do exist in some instances.

Villages should have plenty of other veggies. Turnip is really the worst.. there are plants that can give you enough nutrition to keep you going. Barley, rye, nettle, hemp, broad beans, peas, and also the great lake reed root that can be found around. Some can be eaten straight, some can be ground into flour and then made into flatbread, some must be threshed to get something useful out of them, and the products can be used either as vegetables or as seasoning in the cooking recipes.

The turnip is a great bait for herbivores, from the rabbit to the elk. So I always get some for traps. I also usually buy turnip seeds and plant them, just a few, and then thresh the grown turnips to get new baits, and turnip seeds to be used in recipes as seasoning.

There's also the issue that our cooking options don't really help us here. Soups make things less calorie dense, but because filling our hunger bar depends basically on how calorie dense our food is it's counterproductive.

Just to make sure it's clear, I'll reiterate. It's not the "hunger" you are filling, but your calorie storage. I believe in URW the maximum you can accumulate is 5000 kcal, while Abundant appears when you are at about 3500 kcal. If you eat anything when you are at the maximum, you are wasting food. So I try not to eat when "Abundant", but only at the level below.

Now, it's true that soups are really not that helpful unless you have very little stuff to eat. I believe stews, instead, are better than roasted meat for example, because the stew lasts longer and should have less water content, so it should have higher nutritional density. I'd need to double check this though.

I think if our cooking options allowed us to make more calorie dense foods out of our low density vegetables it might help, but we'd quickly hit another roadblock of it being hilariously difficult to gather enough of those foods to actually make something out of them.

Some of the plants I mentioned before are very caloric. If you don't want to use meat, you should to subsist on high-nutritional vegetables. Barley flour porridge with hemp seeds is crazy nutritious and my no-meat preferred option, but I've built a log cabin substisting only on raw lake reed roots and the occasional trapped bird.

Nettle is great: seeds and leaves are nutrition enough to make better stews/soups, and the leaves have also great medicinal use. I try to always cultivate a bit of nettle (I have a mod that allows me to make nettle clothing, and cords from nettle, so that's how I use it too)

Some berries are also worthwhile to eat, most notably Cloudberries but also a few others are not too bad.

You can see a lot of info here: https://www.unrealworld.fi/wiki/index.php?title=Plants

[caethan]

Note that turnips, mushrooms, and berries are all on the pretty-low end of nutritious. (145 calories / pound for turnips, 132 for mushrooms, and 73 to 222 for berries).

I spent a bit of time collating all the nutrition of foods to figure out what was worth gathering.  A summary:

Crops
Barley and rye are both highly nutritious, at greater than 1000 calories per pound, and hemp seeds are nearly as nutritious.  Hemp seeds can be used as seasonings, but barley/rye need to be ground into flour to be eaten, so will take a bit of extra processing.  Broad beans and peas are decent, at 490 and 367 calories per pound.  Of the two, broad beans just produce a lot more weight per plant, and so I usually grow those for preference.  Turnips and hemp leaves are filler - it's worth keeping them on hand (turnips are good trap bait) but very hard to live on them.

Of wild plants that can be grown, nettle, yarrow, and sorrel are all low-nutrition (36-186 calories per pound), but clayweed is up with barley, rye, and hemp for being fairly nutritious (1125 calories per pound).

Wild Edibles
As above, wild mushrooms don't have many calories (132 / lb), but they can be worth gathering since it doesn't take much time for a reasonable weight of mushrooms.  Berries are comparatively lightweight (10 bushes for most to gather a pound) and take a long time (5 minutes per bush) so that in many cases you burn more calories gathering the berries than the berries are worth.  Cloudberries are the best - they're large, so they're twice as heavy (5 bushes per pound) and have the best nutrition (222 / lb).  Other berries I only gather if I want to use them to bait birds into my traps.

Lake reed is up there with the grains as a nutritious crop, at 1089 calories / pound.  It's also wildly overabundant in the vanilla game (1 lb reed per plant, due to an error with the coding).  Well worth gathering a bunch in autumn for the winter.  It's also grindable into flour, and can be eaten as a vegetable.  Marsh calla and bogbean are decent (939 / pound) but have to be boiled to be made palatable.  Other wild plants vary.  Some like meadsweet, goldenrod, and heather have almost no nutrition (18 / pound) and are only useful for their medicinal properties.  Others vary around the lowish to midrange of plant nutrition (~200 to ~600 calories / pound).  Milkweed isn't half bad, and mother and bear pipe are both quite useful both for calories and for their medicinal properties.

Fish and Meat
Fish vary a fair bit, but are in the middle range of nutritious.  The least nutritious fish is the pike-perch, at 290 / lb, and the most nutritious is the salmon, at 585 / lb.  The biggest benefit of fish is that they are generally pretty big, and so you'll get a fair bit of food with just one decent size fish - a whole pike is 2433 calories, enough to sustain a man under not too heavy exercise for a day.

Meat varies quite a lot as well.  The most nutritious meat is bear, at 1057 calories per pound, and several tie for least nutritious at 395 (including squirrel, dog, lynx, and badger).  Elk and forest reindeer, the most likely catches, are middling at 503 and 581 / lb.  Fat is by far the most nutritious (raw) food available, at 4082 calories per pound. 

The other benefit of fish and meat is that you can dry or smoke them, which not only preserves them, but concentrates the nutrients as well.  It is actually slightly non-physical right now, but dried meat is 1/10th the weight and 10x the nutrition, while smoked meat is 1/8th the weight and 8x the nutrition.  You can get all the way up to dried bear meat, which has 9934 calories per pound (twice that of raw fat!)


So in summary, plants are among the most nutritious foods in the game (barley & rye flour in particular), but not all plants are equal.  Things like turnips, berries, and mushrooms, while easier to gather, are really only worthwhile for stretching out the supply of more nutritious foods.

[Boartato]

Thanks for the detailed explanations. Also someone added calorie counts to a lot of plants within the last week or two and that is super helpful!

[Dungeon Smash]

Very impressive!  Thank you for your detailed research.

I do think, however, that turnips are still worth it... iirc, you can get several plantings in one year of turnips, they're cheap to use as "loose change" when trading, they last forever, and they can be used to basically stretch your larder by adding mass to stews (and some of the other recipes from mods).  I could be wrong, but I think basically:
adding turnip to stew saves more important crops/ingredients for other meals.  It may not give much dividends in terms of nutrition, but helps make your character feel full, making it worthwhile to add to high-nutrition stews like bear, to basically make the bear meat last longer.  of course, in times of starvation, it's better just to eat roast bear meat, but in certain situations it could be useful.

It's just a gut feeling, maybe my rough calculations are wrong.. Maybe it still isn't worth it... but what's a stew without turnips??

[tedomedo]

Boartato, molto scusi / compromiso, but it seems you are vegetarian.

[werepacman]

It hard to survive as vegetarian in ancient world with primitive agriculture level. And completely impossible as vegan, due to B12 vitamin difficiency.

If you could marry and have a wife from neares willage she could help to save time by cooking and getting more nutritions from low caloric food. But it is better to invest time with more  callorie effective outcome.

Interesting if you could had a child and resume game in case of parent death. But it is worth only if you get good rolls genes from parents.

[tedomedo]

Fruit and vegetables don't make you ... opposite word for hungry You have to eat fat. If you are vegetarian in real life, eat milk food, like cheese, milk fat yogurt... In the game you can buy cow and drink milk. Cow doesn't give milk in winter season. Because there's snow above dirt and no grass. My game suggestion: we could cut grass in non-winter seasons, keep it somewhere and feed cows with it in winter in order to get milk.

[werepacman]

Preserving grass for cows can give new game strategies.
Now the only reasonable place for a settlement is near the rapid.

With cow you can satisfy thirst and build home on the top of the hill or deep in the forest and other locations.