Nutrition

Your character needs to eat and drink regularly to stay alive. There are meters for both hunger and thirst showing your current level. The bars of both meters change their color depending on the long-term level of hunger or thirst - starting at green and gradually turning red when a level of alarming malnutrition or dehydration is reached. Without water you will die in couple of days, so remember to stay close enough to water or carry water with you. Without food you can survive up to a month, but poor diet and insufficient nutrition intake eventually leads to starvation.

Eating isn't just about filling your stomach. In order to keep yourself properly fed you shouldn't rely only on hunger cues as your character's feeling of hunger is based not only on stomach content, but also on your body's energy reserves. It's possible to satiate hunger by filling one's stomach with even the poorest food but that doesn't mean your diet contains sufficient amounts of energy or meets your character's nutritional requirements. Even though equal amounts of nearly any food will fill your stomach equally, different kinds of food will give you different levels of nourishment. Nutritional value of the food eaten affects your energy intake and the body's energy reserves. These factors determine how long you will feel satiated and have enough energy in your system.

It is possible to increase your character's energy reserve beyond daily needs by constantly eating food with high energy content. After practicing this kind of diet you'll find yourself not being too hungry the day after. When eating a light diet or at times of scarcity you'll notice that you need to eat more often as food with low nutrition and energy content doesn't keep you satiated very long. For the information about your character's nutritional status and body energy reserve you should refer to nutrition dialog box which tells you whether your nutritional condition is starving, malnourished or scarce - good, well-fed or abundant - or something in between.