Malnourishment kills too fast

[vzoxz0]

Your body still needs to burn energy when it's sick, it is the sensation of hunger that is diminished, due to whatever trickery the body and the illness plays on you.

[Shurp]

Even weirder is that *sleep* doesn't slow down hunger.  That's a biggie.  It's annoying how a pawn can stuff his face right before bedtime, sleep for 8 hours, then wake up famished.

As for sick people, yes, they need as much food as healthy people, but they *can't* eat because the sickness gets in the way.  Which is why they have a bad habit of wasting away if they don't have any fat stores to begin with.  But given that a Rimworld pawn starves to death in three (!) days I don't think there's any hope of implementing long term weight loss due to illness.

[b0rsuk]

I think the old starvation rate was... more dramatic, and more likely to produce interesting stories. -25 mood penalty is massive. Unless your colony is highly developed and dripping with comfort and beauty, you're going to have breaks left and right. Miscalculating the amount of food needed meant terrible times. Now it feels like watching a fuse burn...actually, a couple of betas ago it could take as long to bleed out to death.  Also, longer starvation is not exactly a blessing if it also takes longer to recover from the weakened state.

A Rimworld season is 15 days. 5 Rimworld days are equivalent of 1 Earth month. But colonists die in 3 days, which is exactly 3/5 of a month. 5 days (1 month) would be more accurate - and as I attempted to show above - more fun to play.

[vzoxz0]

Even weirder is that *sleep* doesn't slow down hunger.  That's a biggie.  It's annoying how a pawn can stuff his face right before bedtime, sleep for 8 hours, then wake up famished.

This would be a pretty easy fix on Tynan's side -- you could just check if sleeping and then apply a coefficient that slows the decline. Maybe a 15% reduction of how fast it depletes (fairly realistic number).

It's not a big coding change but it might appease some of the people annoyed with malnourishment in the morning.

[Shurp]

Yeah, lots of other things affect hunger rate (smokeleaf is a biggie), it's probably possible to mod sleep so that it reduces hunger rate. 

[zizard]

I wonder if you can use extremely terrible beds so that pawns only have to eat once a day when they wake up, going to sleep a little after they reach 'hungry'. Since mood doesn't go down during sleep, hunger while asleep doesn't matter.

[krampe]

In Rimworld one year is a quaddrum, consisting of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, each taking 15 days.
In reallife one quarter of a year are 3 Month, each 30 days for easier calculations.
So 90 Earthdays are 15 Rimdays which equals to 6 ED = 1RD

You die rougly after 3 RD which equals 18 ED, not enough considering that you collapse around 30-40 days of no food in reallife, dependng on you physical condition before hand, but if you take also water into account its quite realistic because you die of organ failure after 10-14 days without.
So 18 Days is a good middleway due to "meals" are a mix of food and water.