A food variety/nurishment bar

[SYDWAD]

(IDEA)
Have a mini bar like the "outdoors" bar on colonists that fills up when they consume foods and meals that contain different plants and meats. If they always eat the same thing have it slowly start to go down no matter how much they eat and when it gets low have the colonist start to get "malnourished" and other sickness caused by a lack of vitamins or essential fats and acids like scurvy and rickets (also maybe get rickets from never going out doors). Have different meats and plants give more nourishment, like rabbits not giving enough fats. Simple (kind of realistic) vitamin system. Have some sources of nourishment get numbed if that's all they eat like recreation sources do in 1.0/0.19.

[AileTheAlien]

By itself, that sounds like a good idea. However, it wouldn't really work in the game, because players don't have a way in the UI, to specify meal restrictions, or set food schedules. It could work if you just wanted to have simple diseases like for example "scurvy", that have simple solutions like "vitamin C pills" - the player would set the pawns to take one pill each X days, to avoid scurvy. That's not very interesting, though.

Personally, I think the drugs, food, etc needs systems are similar enough, that they could be generalized into one system. The drugs menu could be re-worked so that pawns could take any substance, based on more than just joy, happiness, or time - allow specifying any specific need. For example, pawns could be set to take Vitamin C when Scurvy was above 75%, or take Multi-Vitamins when Rickets was above 60%, or cannibals could eat Human Food when their Food Level was below 10% but eat Any Food when their hunger was below 5%.

[SYDWAD]

By itself, that sounds like a good idea. However, it wouldn't really work in the game, because players don't have a way in the UI, to specify meal restrictions, or set food schedules. It could work if you just wanted to have simple diseases like for example "scurvy", that have simple solutions like "vitamin C pills" - the player would set the pawns to take one pill each X days, to avoid scurvy. That's not very interesting, though.

Personally, I think the drugs, food, etc needs systems are similar enough, that they could be generalized into one system. The drugs menu could be re-worked so that pawns could take any substance, based on more than just joy, happiness, or time - allow specifying any specific need. For example, pawns could be set to take Vitamin C when Scurvy was above 75%, or take Multi-Vitamins when Rickets was above 60%, or cannibals could eat Human Food when their Food Level was below 10% but eat Any Food when their hunger was below 5%.

I was assuming it would be automatic that if a meal or food had something the colonists needed they would eat it, and all the player would have to do is grow and hunt multiple things and not just grow potatoes

[Limdood]

I have to agree with Aile that without some control it would be a mess.  Add that to the fact that if 3 simple meals, one with rice, one with berries, and one with chicken are stacked together, you end up with 3 simple meals that EACH contain rice, berries, and chicken. 

There are currently several systemic barriers to implementing this suggestion:

- no meal preference/selection tools

- stacked meals gain the entire contents of every meal

- there is a lack of grown options in the game to cover nutrition as in depth as you're asking...potatoes, corn, and rice are all starches, and generally don't contain the vitamins of other fruits or vegetables already.  Several new food types would need to be added and available to grow or hunt.

- each growable food has a gameplay niche, and food is clearly meant to be grown in the game based on its efficiency.  Potatoes in poor soil, rice in normal/good soil with small growing seasons or plant-lethal growing interruptions, corn in normal/good soil with long and reliable growing periods, strawberries for ascetics or non-food-prep colonies.  Asking players to grow all/multiple types of food subverts the reason the different niches were added in the first place, AND any new growables would have to have new, presumably unique ideal growing conditions as well.

- any new plants added would have their own native biomes, certainly.  Could i grow oranges in a boreal forest?  the summer temp hits 80F, but the rest of the year the temp is completely unsuitable.  Does this mean that settling in anything outside of warm temperate forests mean I end up with near permanent malnutrition or mood penalties?  Animals are even worse, since animals just do not spawn outside their native biomes.  You'll never get wild capybaras, monkeys, or chinchillas in a tundra.