Malnourishment kills too fast

[Chicken Plucker]

So I only paid proper attention to malnourishment in a current playthrough, and it's gotten me upset that a prisoner died within the space of less than 24 hours, their malnourishment went to severe and they just died. Another colonist had a mental break and almost died as well, but she made it fine.

There's challenges, and just unecessary hardship. Game goes out of its way to make things realistic in terms of surgery, body parts or how pawns can have this illusion of free will with social behaviour, but people can't go on for 24 hours without starving to death immediately?

Can we look at Ramadan in real life please, I don't think people die of malnourishment so fast in the space of 1 day, or how about stories of people surviving being lost in the desert without food and getting back out alive?

Please discuss, I have some hope this gets changed in-game, but I highly doubt it will.

Edit: Sent an email at Ludeonhelp, looking forward to the response.

[Ilya]

It kills too fast and it happens too fast too. In reality, humans can survive on their own fat reserves until they are depleted. The way nutrition works in Rimworld right now is basically how my grandparents think that it works; that if you spend 12h without eating, you're starving.

https://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/fp/tale-angus-barbieri-fasted-year-lost-21-stone/

[jpinard]

So I only paid proper attention to malnourishment in a current playthrough, and it's gotten me upset that a prisoner died within the space of less than 24 hours, their malnourishment went to severe and they just died. Another colonist had a mental break and almost died as well, but she made it fine.

There's challenges, and just unecessary hardship. Game goes out of its way to make things realistic in terms of surgery, body parts or how pawns can have this illusion of free will with social behaviour, but people can't go on for 24 hours without starving to death immediately?

Can we look at Ramadan in real life please, I don't think people die of malnourishment so fast in the space of 1 day, or how about stories of people surviving being lost in the desert without food and getting back out alive?

Please discuss, I have some hope this gets changed in-game, but I highly doubt it will.

Edit: Sent an email at Ludeonhelp, looking forward to the response.

Lol. You do realize 1 day is just a fictional time stamp right?  Since people age years in just a few months.  Always cracks me up when people want "realism" in games where fantasy is the rule.  I'm not sure I'm a good Rimworld player, but I've never lost a person to starvation after hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay. 

[Chicken Plucker]

Lol. You do realize 1 day is just a fictional time stamp right?  Since people age years in just a few months.  Always cracks me up when people want "realism" in games where fantasy is the rule.  I'm not sure I'm a good Rimworld player, but I've never lost a person to starvation after hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Lad, nobody was asking for 100% accuracy on physics or biology here. That was your own assumption.

And the fact that you bring up being a "good Rimworld player" here is irrelevant, I don't care, its not part of the conversation and you're trying to rile me up for an argument.

The fact is, malnutrition shouldn't kill so quickly, it doesn't work like that. Nothing else in the game can kill so fast in terms of scaling it to it's effects in reality. If you have no real argument besides throwing some insults and assumptions, you have nothing to bring to the discussion.

[5thHorseman]

Both this and colonists need to wait the 3 seconds it's going to take me to cook them a meal when they're peckish before they decide to go for the raw meat pile.

The stove is in the freezer. You walked past it to grab that meat. COOK YOURSELF A FRICKIN' MEAL YOU BOZO.

Sorry. Back to your scheduled topic. Yes. They starve too fast and die too fast from it. They shouldn't start resorting to raw veggies until their food bar is empty, and raw meat or dead bodies should be only if they're say a few hours from death. And if they have cooking turned on at all they should attempt a path to a cooking job and if that's possible, they should do it instead of just wolfing down that dead guy's head.

[Limdood]

as long as plants grow from seed to mature in ~4 days or less, malnutrition will need to kill as quickly as it does in order to be accurate to the time scale.

[Boston]

RVERYTHING is accelerated in Rinworld. From the growing of crops, to the yearly cycle of seasons.

I dont have an issue with it

[Firestonezz]

So I only paid proper attention to malnourishment in a current playthrough, and it's gotten me upset that a prisoner died within the space of less than 24 hours, their malnourishment went to severe and they just died. Another colonist had a mental break and almost died as well, but she made it fine.

There's challenges, and just unecessary hardship. Game goes out of its way to make things realistic in terms of surgery, body parts or how pawns can have this illusion of free will with social behaviour, but people can't go on for 24 hours without starving to death immediately?

Can we look at Ramadan in real life please, I don't think people die of malnourishment so fast in the space of 1 day, or how about stories of people surviving being lost in the desert without food and getting back out alive?

Please discuss, I have some hope this gets changed in-game, but I highly doubt it will.

Edit: Sent an email at Ludeonhelp, looking forward to the response.

Malnutrition doesn't kill at the "Severe" level; it kills at "Extreme (100%)". Your prisoner must have been injured and/or sick which brought his consciousness to 0% combined with the additional debuffs from severe-level malnutrition.

[vzoxz0]

I have also never experienced malnourishment as a killer unless my colony starves for days or there are complications like brain damage. This really isn't a problem unless you have severely mismanaged your colony.

they should do it instead of just wolfing down that dead guy's head.

When you're starving you'll eat just about anything. Including dead guy's head.

[5thHorseman]

I have also never experienced malnourishment as a killer unless my colony starves for days or there are complications like brain damage. This really isn't a problem unless you have severely mismanaged your colony.

they should do it instead of just wolfing down that dead guy's head.

When you're starving you'll eat just about anything. Including dead guy's head.

Okay the guys head thing was an exaggeration. If your colonists are eating dead people you're obviously totally out of food.

But there is *1* and only 1 reason that someone should go into a freezer full of raw food and a working stove and eat the raw food instead of cooking a meal. Even an aesthetic should cook at least a simple meal. "Incapable of cooking" is that only reason. And "incapable of" skills are a whole other issue with me

RVERYTHING is accelerated in Rinworld. From the growing of crops, to the yearly cycle of seasons.

Some things are accelerated more than others. You can swap out a heart in the time it takes to cook 3 simple meals. I've never woken up malnourished because I skipped dinner. I'm not saying people shouldn't suffer from not eating. I'm saying it's a bit TOO accelerated right now.

[Chicken Plucker]

as long as plants grow from seed to mature in ~4 days or less, malnutrition will need to kill as quickly as it does in order to be accurate to the time scale.

It isn't accurate to the time scale, because the game doesn't have a consistent one.

In Rimworld, pawns sleep for 8 hours, just like the average human does. I press 3 on my keyboard, and time flies by 8 hours in-game. Pawns wake up, lo and behold, they have slept for 8 hours in-game.

Someone goes through surgery, it takes a few seconds or a minute for us but to the pawns it takes hours depending on the surgeon's skill, including the outcome chance.

So we scoot over back to malnutrition, and we can't at least extend 24 hours (minor) to (extreme)?
I've gone fasting in 24 hours once (just once cause I'm fat) and I'm feeling very alive. What more the other hundreds of thousands if not millions of people out there who have gone beyond that?

The own game doesn't follow it's time-scale, and it needs to make up it's bloody mind.

Yes crops can grow 3-4 days, but I didn't post this thread to defend that didn't I? I started the thread to moan about why on earth people are dropping bodies when they forgot to nibble for a day.

Malnutrition doesn't kill at the "Severe" level; it kills at "Extreme (100%)". Your prisoner must have been injured and/or sick which brought his consciousness to 0% combined with the additional debuffs from severe-level malnutrition.

Okay, it killed at extreme 100%, I didn't get to see it go to extreme because all I saw was "severe" right before Sally's eyes left me.

She did have several debuffs, that's correct. I ran a test obviously before starting this thread and preparing for the intense keyboard typing against people ready to defend their beloved game.

Pawns without much debuffs can still die within 24 hours, it's not consistently 24, it can reach 42 but that's just not gonna cut it for me. Still find it too soon.

I have also never experienced malnourishment as a killer unless my colony starves for days or there are complications like brain damage. This really isn't a problem unless you have severely mismanaged your colony.

they should do it instead of just wolfing down that dead guy's head.

When you're starving you'll eat just about anything. Including dead guy's head.

Yes, I get this, just like the other person said that had a bloody go at my Rimworld skills, it takes effort in failing to lose someone out of malnutrition.

That's not the topic though, I am hitting at malnutrition itself, not the solution of "Don't have malnutrition in the first place", yes that's a no brainer I shouldn't starve my colonists to begin with, but some of us here who don't want to consider cannibalism at all want more time.

I've gone through situations outside of the game where the fridge is bloody empty, my wallet is empty so Tesco supermarket kicks me out and I am out of food. If someone walked up to me and gave me 24-42 hours only to find food and I didn't bite off someone's head I'd be bloody gone by now.

[Shurp]

So I ran a test just to see what was going on here.  I dropped a pawn on an ice sheet, barricaded her in, and watched her starve.  Here's the results I got:

1) It took only 12 hours to go from fully fed to 20%.  That seems excessively fast.  But we all know pawns are ridiculously hungry critters.

2) From there the starvation slow-mo kicked in, and it took another 10 hours to reach 0%.  So it takes about a day to run out of food after they've stuffed their faces.  That's workable in gameplay terms.

3) It takes another 12 hours to get to 25% malnutrition, again, not so fast... and another 12 hours to 50%.  So that's 2 days without food before any serious penalties (only 20% consciousness)

4) 12 more hours gets you to 75% and a 30% consciousness penalty... oh, and at 80% your pawn goes down.  So... from fully fed to passed out from starvation takes only 60 hours.  That's a little fast   12 more hours results in death.

So it takes 3 days for a pawn to die without food, and 2 days from when the "Starvation" alert pops up before he dies.  Obviously it's not even close to realistic, but it's certainly playable.  If you have any food and you see a pawn starving it's easy to get him fed in time. 

As for your prisoner, he died as a result of his injuries (probably involving lots of blood loss) plus a little bit of hunger, not from starvation.  That seems accurate; you have to take care of someone who has had a bunch of bullets put in him.  A blood sugar crash really is enough to push him over the edge and kill him.

In the interest of realism it would be nice to see the starvation spread out a bit more, perhaps 4 game days after 0%, but with heavier penalties so that after 3 days without food your colonists have a 50% penalty and are wandering around like zombies, with the less healthy ones dying first, along with anyone stupid enough to drink beer while starving.

[5thHorseman]

If you have any food and you see a pawn starving it's easy to get him fed in time. 

The problem is pawns some times wake up "starving" and when you see that alert a hundred times and each of those hundred times you check and they're sitting at a table eating, you start to ignore the alert.

[Shurp]

Because of how I play the early game, I have a completely different habit.  In order to conserve food, on day one I forbid all food and manually force pawns to eat when the "Starvation" alert shows up.  So any time I see that I'm on it right away, I never ignore it.

And I rarely see it during ordinary play.  My pawns usually grab a meal before they go to bed; they wake up hungry but not starving.  But yeah, if you ignore the "Starvation" flag, you're going to have pawns die on you.  That'll happen whether it takes 2 days or 10.

[b0rsuk]

Something that has been neglected is hunger rate of sick people. Most common diseases make people NOT hungry. They should SLOW hunger rate in Rimworld. You already pay the price with worse stats. Naturally, people recovering from disease are more hungry because the body needs to make up for that. Seriously, it's odd that sick people are a food problem. It's enough they can't work to provide for anyone else.