Food and Consumption

So, did anyone else find it annoying and weird that in Spore, although in tribal you could build a fire, you never cooked your food? Bothered me alot. So here's a thread about food.

My thoughts are simpler is better here. Something along the lines of bread, meat, plants, eggs, and dairy products.

Meat, plants and eggs are self explanitory.

Bread requires a starch, have it round into flour, mix with water and bake. Done. Nother more complex.

Not sure how dairy might work.

I think you should be able to cook meat, but cooking is probably going to take a while for the player to learn, trial and error.

Bread might be difficult, if there is no water on the planet or something. Eggs could evolve poisonous. I'm not sure about diary, either. Milk could be replaced by whatever is produced for feeding the young on that planet. But that would mean the whole food-group would be different.

Cooking will be completely different on other planets, making it work correctly for every material in-game... Maybe we could keep to just the simplest: plant, meat, and egg cooking, for the beginning at least.

The Uteen wrote:

I think you should be able to cook meat, but cooking is probably going to take a while for the player to learn, trial and error.

Bread might be difficult, if there is no water on the planet or something. Eggs could evolve poisonous. I'm not sure about diary, either. Milk could be replaced by whatever is produced for feeding the young on that planet. But that would mean the whole food-group would be different.

Cooking will be completely different on other planets, making it work correctly for every material in-game... Maybe we could keep to just the simplest: plant, meat, and egg cooking, for the beginning at least.

Hmmm... The meat, plant and eggs seem a little too sporeish. Maybe they could be automatically named after the species you take them from e.g Space cow meat or Space apple fruit. You get the idea. I'm just not great when it comes to names. Also, each meat or plant should be randomly assigned traits so that you learn that if you farm potatoes you get more health than turnips. Although you would have to be careful what you harvested or it could be hit by a famine or go extinct.

Hmm..

This is actually going to be more complex than I thought.

Well, about plants, I'm thinking; plants are organisms, as they're alive but might be tagged with the tags necessary to classify it as a general plant, not sure which. But for plants as a source of food, they can be tagged 'edible' or 'inedible' to your species, which you'll find out the first time you try to eat one, likely out of curiousity, or maybe it emits a funny-smelling vapor or somehing. Same with your species if we can program that in their AI.. or if one of them is around you, observing you. Available to omni/herbivores.


Meat is what you get when you kill organisms, by causing enough damage to their bodies. It's basically flesh, and available to omni/carnivores. It can harbor disease or the eggs of a parasite that can prove fatal, which is scary to think about, but if your species, after reaching sapience obtains enough medical research they can find cures for it.

Eggs are laid by organisms and will, after developing enough turn into young organisms themselves. They might have hard shells or soft shells, can be poisonous, and can come in basically any color, shape or size, and even sport a pattern. Some are held internally, basically, and organisms that go through this process of gestation (that's the word, right?) are classified as mammals.

Some unearthly animals may have stranger diets, such as rocks or minerals that are sufficient in nutrients, or maybe they strive on a diet of only.. some.. liquid-ish substance. This is something we'll have to get to.

Just my rambling..

The Uteen wrote:

Bread might be difficult, if there is no water on the planet or something.

It's impossible for life to exist on a planet without water.

As to most everything else, Plant and meat names would be based on the species they come from.

Milk is iffy. I know that many critters feed their young a honey-like substances.

Or if you had a flying critter they could regurgitate their food like birds do. Wait what?

For cooking meat, creatures might not evolve to eat cooked meat. We did but maybe not alien carnivores or omnivores.
I'll point out that cooking meat takes away nutritional value wich is it's downfall but it reduces the chances of getting any digestive parasites or harmfull micro-organisms. So the organism will evolve to eat cooked or raw meat depending on it's needs to be safe or not. Same for plants and eggs.

Albalrogue wrote:

For cooking meat, creatures might not evolve to eat cooked meat. We did but maybe not alien carnivores or omnivores.
I'll point out that cooking meat takes away nutritional value wich is it's downfall but it reduces the chances of getting any digestive parasites or harmfull micro-organisms. So the organism will evolve to eat cooked or raw meat depending on it's needs to be safe or not. Same for plants and eggs.

True. Creatures in Thrive may not have to look at fire as a milestone or even discover it. Like you pointed out, it reduces risks of poisining but in Thrive, the creature could be immune to the poison, or be underwater where fire isn't possible.

2creator wrote:

Albalrogue wrote:

For cooking meat, creatures might not evolve to eat cooked meat. We did but maybe not alien carnivores or omnivores.
I'll point out that cooking meat takes away nutritional value wich is it's downfall but it reduces the chances of getting any digestive parasites or harmfull micro-organisms. So the organism will evolve to eat cooked or raw meat depending on it's needs to be safe or not. Same for plants and eggs.

True. Creatures in Thrive may not have to look at fire as a milestone or even discover it. Like you pointed out, it reduces risks of poisining but in Thrive, the creature could be immune to the poison, or be underwater where fire isn't possible.

Precisly!

Tenebrarum wrote:

It's impossible for life to exist on a planet without water.

For Earth life, for Earth life...

Think strange blobby life, or thin stickman life, or flying turnip life... You get the point.

Another planet could have an ecosystem developed around different substances, they may still need glucose, or water, or something in their bodies, but we don't eat pure glucose, do we? They may not eat/drink water directly, they might make it in their body, if they need it at all, and aren't compose entirely differently to us, in a way that uses liquid methane or another substance.

The Uteen wrote:

Tenebrarum wrote:

It's impossible for life to exist on a planet without water.

Another planet could have an ecosystem developed around different substances, they may still need glucose, or water, or something in their bodies, but we don't eat pure glucose, do we? They may not eat/drink water directly, they might make it in their body, if they need it at all, and aren't compose entirely differently to us, in a way that uses liquid methane or another substance.

Some Earth desert animals never drink water in their lives. They just eat so much food that it gives them enough water to live.

Creating water in organisms would probably kill them, because water is a very stable composition and requires quite a lot of energy to be made. Most probably, the water could be mixed with some other chemicals, altering it's physical properties.

By the way, methane's boiling point is -161 degrees Celsius, and at that temperature life would have problems to exist at all.

The Uteen wrote:

Tenebrarum wrote:

It's impossible for life to exist on a planet without water.

For Earth life, for Earth life...

Think strange blobby life, or thin stickman life, or flying turnip life... You get the point.

Another planet could have an ecosystem developed around different substances, they may still need glucose, or water, or something in their bodies, but we don't eat pure glucose, do we? They may not eat/drink water directly, they might make it in their body, if they need it at all, and aren't compose entirely differently to us, in a way that uses liquid methane or another substance.

Yes, but for simplisty's sake, we're trying to stick to a semi-terran life system.

Tenebrarum wrote:

Yes, but for simplisty's sake, we're trying to stick to a semi-terran life system.

Also true. Or we might as well try to program the whole universe from the smallest particles to largest galaxies.

The Uteen wrote:

Tenebrarum wrote:

It's impossible for life to exist on a planet without water.

For Earth life, for Earth life...

Think strange blobby life, or thin stickman life, or flying turnip life... You get the point.

Another planet could have an ecosystem developed around different substances, they may still need glucose, or water, or something in their bodies, but we don't eat pure glucose, do we? They may not eat/drink water directly, they might make it in their body, if they need it at all, and aren't compose entirely differently to us, in a way that uses liquid methane or another substance.

Micro-organisms (begining of life) cannot be created in gas or solid components, it will have to be in liquid at a certain temperature knowing that, on earth, underneith -18°C, all MOs are steril and cannot reproduce, therefore life cannot be created under that temparature (I say on earth but that's everywhere on earth therefore any where in the cosmos, no microscopic life can live under that temperature) and die at over 120°C in the extreme cases. Therefor water is probably the best option (if not the only option) to create life in.

EDIT : Belgium, I went off-topic, sorry.

Hmm... this could be tricky. My idea:

Pick up an object, be it a dead animal, part of a dead animal, a plant, or a rock, and put it in/over a fire. Eat once you feel like taking it off. Whether or not you were intelligent in the way you cooked it would be pretty important- did you leave the little potato on the fire for ten hours? Did you place it on the fire for a split second and chow down? Every object would have different traits, and the way they react to the fire could make it edible or make it... horrible.

Now, that's just for cooking on your own. The species as a whole would learn to cook through trial and error. There could be a "Cooking" research that slowly increases as your species learns more ways to cook and how to preserve food. Now, tracking all of that would be a pain in the Belgium, so the progress through the Cooking research would slowly increase the overall energy and morale of your species.

The research would be started randomly at an early point in the game, during very early sapience. This would signfy some random person who decided to put a dead rat over a fire and eat it. The research would randomly increase along with the species as a whole's understanding of chemical properties and all that jazz. It would not grow at the exact same rate as the chemical research- the rate that the cooking research increases would just be multiplied a bit more every time the chemical research grows.

Well, that was my idea. Hope I didn't lose 'ya.

I think you should be able to do the food you want. Mix, cook, bake, freeze, etc the ingredients and shape them, color them. Food could attract tourists to your nation, and could add energy, happiness,etc

That's far too much detail for our scope. The only type of preparing food is just the generic "cook". You have no control over the recipes, the appearances, etc. All that happens is that you transport resources to your cities that your species considers food, and then it gets consumed. It affects happiness, and possibly health.

NickTheNick wrote:

That's far too much detail for our scope. The only type of preparing food is just the generic "cook". You have no control over the recipes, the appearances, etc. All that happens is that you transport resources to your cities that your species considers food, and then it gets consumed. It affects happiness, and possibly health.

Exactly.
I also suggest to your civilization might be scared of eating certain food which is discovered, like how europeans feared of tomatos, and thinked withces are sumooning werewolves with them.

No thats too much.

NickTheNick wrote:

No thats too much.

You think, food will be shown on bar in corner of screen, and if heres no enough food resources, your people will start starving?

I'm not sure about it showing as a bar, but food will be stored as a compound (as any other material/resource/usefull thing) that the population needs to consume in order not to die.

Daniferrito wrote:

I'm not sure about it showing as a bar, but food will be stored as a compound (as any other material/resource/usefull thing) that the population needs to consume in order not to die.

It would be useful for it showing in bar, so player can know how much food they have.

Supply vs Demand will be shown on a Supply-Demand Chart. The compounds displayed on the chart could be filtered by tag, and one of those tags could be food. Btw, I should add that to the Compound Tags thread.

What about a little minigame where you get to construct different foods based on what's available in terms of what evolved and what culinary technologies are available to that particular civillisation. Nothing that particularly effects gameplay, but a nice little side show for the gamer?

There won't be anything that in-depth. At this point food will be categorized into the different compounds it can be extracted as from nature, such as fruit, plant matter (vegetable), meat, bone, etc. How your species evolved in the earlier stages will determine which of those materials are considered foods.