Crop Diversity

[Noph]

A couple of ideas to encourage players to grow different crop types:

Blight only affects 1 type of crop at a time

Just as it sounds - the Blight event only affects one type of crop. Every field you have growing that crop type is affected. This way you are encouraged to diversify food types. Wiping out your year's cotton or beer supply in cold climates would still be a pain in the ass but it wouldn't be as disastrous as it is atm.

Debuff for eating the same food type

If a pawn eats the same food type 5x in a row (ie simple food rice x2, raw rice x2, fancy rice-based meal x1) he gets the "Ugh Rice Again" debuff -3 mood penalty until he eats something different.

I mostly just like it because I think getting bored of the same foods all the time would be a genuine thing in a real life survival situation, but it would force players to plan their growing seasons better.

An addition to this could be giving a +3 mood boost for 24 hours if a pawn eats 5 different food types (fancy meals count as 2) in 5 days. call it a "5 a Day" buff or something.

A mod where you need to research different crop types before you can grow them would play quite nicely with both of these ideas.

Apologies if these ideas have been suggested before - I haven't been playing long so if it isn't on the first 3 or 4 pages of the Suggestions then I haven't read it

[OFWG]

"Ugh Rice Again", I love it. 

+1

[Penguinmanereikel]

A debuff for just including a long-lasting food item?

[asanbr]

There is diversity already and up/downsides with each crop as designed.

Mostly focused on growing time / yield / biome / hydro growing possibility. Not so much on eating.

Looks to me like you are mostly asking for more micromanagement guised as "realism". I don't see how it would make anything more fun.

[PatrykSzczescie]

Some of the food types give a significant mood penalty when eaten raw, such as the rice.

I think it's a bad idea.

[Kubouch]

Blight only affects 1 type of crop at a time

I like this one. A lot of people are complaining about blights being too powerful. This way player could avoid blights by growing more types of crops. I would make the blight destroy only a crop type already growing on the map. If you grow only one crop, it would mean that the blight destroys that crop every time. With two crops, you have 50% chance, etc. (Not counting naturally growing crops.)

The same-food-in-a-row buffs/debuffs sound kinda meh to me.

[MajorMonotone]

Maybe instead of having mood debuffs we have increased protection against diseases? By having more variation in our diets we have more vitamins to help our body grow stronger thus making it harder to fall to disease.

[enfo]

I'm not sure if the food debuff is needed, but the blight affecting 1 type of crop at a time is a great idea. Another poster pointed out that there are different niches and roles for crops.. but there is always an optimal crop, and most people sometimes just plant what is optimal for their zone (usually corn for fertile soil, and rice for hydroponics). If crop diversity is something that the devs want in the game, having blights hit 1 crop is still an improvement.

The reason why the food debuff as a support to diversity might not be needed is that diversity is easily achieved towards meat. And the hunting-style gameplay of having different meats, or even the different types of manhunter packs that come would change the type of food they eat. Also, it would also introduce another micromanaging aspect where you would need to control what meals your colonists eat. For example, people might delegate it to a colony manager mod where they make each colonist eat the same thing 4 times if possible, and then choose something different the 5th time.