Sensible Nutrition – A Food Overhaul
This mod aims to improve upon the balance, worth, and viability of all food items by reworking the nutrition and cost of each item based on a four-tier quality system, enabling craftable rations, adding meat drops to all animals, and tweaking a few recipes.
Each food item has been rebalanced using a tiered system (See below Full Features for more info) that determines its nutrition per slot and cost per 1 nutrition. With this system, cost efficiency (Nu per cat) goes down as space efficiency (Nu per slot) goes up, creating a balanced array of food ranging from "Most Cost Efficient" to "Most Space Efficient".
No longer is any food item unquestionably good or bad; it comes down to whether you prefer to pay more to maximize how much nutrition you can cram into a few slots, eat as cost efficiently as possible without care for space, or anywhere else in-between those extremes.
While the prices of individual items have changed radically in some cases, the highest and lowest prices of food are about the same, but prices have been evened out across the board. Depending on the its quality, food will cost anywhere between 6-12 cats per 1 nutrition before regional modifiers, as opposed to the vanilla 5-36. Yes, fish used to cost 36 cats per nutrition. Why? Nobody knows, because nobody buys it!
- Every Meal Viable: All food items now have a sensible amount of nutrition based on the item’s perceived quality and size, and a new cost that reflects its nutrition and space efficiency, all calculated using a consistent "Quality Tier System". Every player will still have their preference when it comes to the type of food they buy, but every meal purchased is now worth its cost.
- Quality Tier System: Each food item has been assigned a "quality tier" that determines its Nutrition (Nu) per slot, and Cats/Cost per Nu. As an item’s quality goes up, so does its Nu per slot, but its Cost per Nu also goes up alongside it. This create an array of food where every item is viable and worth the cost, leaving it to the player to decide if their preference is highly-compact rations, cheap dried goods, or anywhere in-between. This tier system does not complicate or add anything to the game, it is only used for calculations. See the full calculation info, as well as which foods are assigned to each tier, further below.
- Tweaked Recipes: Gohan is now a simple combination of Cooked Vegetables and a Rice Bowl. Meatwraps now require 2 Bread and 4 Raw Meat – Don’t worry, it’s far more filling. Cooked Vegetables now require 10 Greenfruit and 1 Water, mimicking the Rice Bowl’s recipe. Bread now only needs 1/2 of a Strawflour sack and 1/4 of a Water, increasing the Bread-to-Flour Ratio.
- Food CUBES: Foodcubes are now 2×2 instead of 2×3. Yes, I know the model is a rectangle. But the icon is a cube, and "cube" is in the name.
- All Animals Have Meat: All animals now drop some raw meat, and/or foul raw meat.
- Craftable Rations: A new research has been added that will enable you to create Ration Packs. "Ration Cooking" will be researchable at Tech Level 2 after researching Advanced Cooking, costing 3 books. Both items will be craftable at a Cooking Stove.
Tier 1 (Best Storage Efficiency):
Nutrition = 30 * Size.
Cost = Nutrition * 12.
- Ration Pack
- Ancient Nutri-Rations
Tier 2:
Nutrition = 15 * Size.
Cost = Nutrition * 10.
- Gohan
- Meatwrap
- Foodcube
Tier 3:
Nutrition = 7.5 * Size.
Cost = Nutrition * 8.
- Cooked Vegetables
- Rice Bowl
- Dustwich
- Grand Fish
- Thinfish
Tier 4 (Best Cost Efficiency):
Nutrition = 4 * Size.
Cost = Nutrition * 6.
- Bread
- Chewsticks
- Dried Meat
- Dried Fish
- Raw Meat
See the charts in the image gallery above for a visual comparison between all food items, both in Simple Nutrition and Vanilla.
All of these changes were based on the observation there there was seemingly very little balance and consistency to food stats. Some items, like Fish, Meatwraps, or Vegetables, had a stupidly high cost per nutrition and weren’t worth purchasing no matter the size. Other things didn’t have such ridiculous prices, but hardly offered you anything for the space that they take up, such as Rice Bowls or Chewsticks. The typical choice was between Ration Packs for space efficiency, or Dried Meat for cost efficiency. Nearly everything in-between was a waste of money or a waste of space. This mod remedies these problems by giving every food item value, worth, and viability.
