The food you put in your stomach.

All right, this keeps coming up, and I realize that it might have been lost over in planetary at the concept for biomes and niches.

Current Concept:
Organisms are tagged as food resources. Producers are tagged as [General Food Type: Plant] while anything else [save, say, decomposers] are tagged as [General Food Type: Meat]
Size will matter - a T-rex could eat worms, but not realistically live off of them - but only because relative bodymass = the amount of food. Nothing like this spore "Must kill 4 enormous pony-sized caterpillar things, even though I'm the size of a large rat, because each organism is exactly 3 bites regardless of its size."
Though we can afford to generalize this into weight classes, such as those listed over in biomes for niches.

Your generally available stomach types will be as follows:
[Accept: General Food Type: Plant]
[Accept: General Food Type: Meat]
[Accept: General Food Type: Meat
General Food Type: Plant] (These would be omnivores, obviously.)

Plants of varying types will have the following flags, depending on what structural parts they have:
[General Food Type: Plant: Woody Stem
" " : Leaf
" " : Root
" " : Fruit] (This last only if there are flowers/fruits available...)
Stomachs may either [Accept All] or [Accept x,y,z] [Accept w,x] etc.

Plants may also be flagged as
[Toxin] Toxins can be in one part (leaf, root, fruit) and not in another. Basically, that item would be flagged with a toxin type. I will do research on that eventually.

Current concept for Meat has meat resources on a timer - depending on how long it's been dead and sitting there, your stomach may accept it... or not.

Please feel free to help me out with meats and toxins, here. Or ask questions. I like the bit on top of the question mark. It's crunchy.

I stand firmly with my material/compounds idea. If the animal/plant/rock contains it, and you have the mouth to chew it, you should be able to eat it. Basically, the player can eat whatever he/she wants, but may or may not get nutrition from it.

What materials you can or cant eat will be determined by the sets of rules we program into the game. (Your stomach can turn material A which is some type of meat into material B which happens to be a building block for your species.)

Do we also add the stone-proof stomach? When you swallow stones to grind the food in your stomach?ttp://www.interesting.vaty.net/2006/10/stomach-stones.html like this?
Just an idea and I don't know if it's already been said.

@ Roadkill - This was primarily about what you can digest... whatever your little toddler organism sticks in their mouth is your problem. Though, having teeth / a mouth that can tear meat, grind plants etc would be helpful too. Building blocks would be good... but ultimately, a lot of the same things are edible for a lot of different species. *Shrugs* Hey, I don't know what would be easy to program, but I know what will work well with the niches CCon. Blocks would take a little more poking, but I could get it to fit.

Gario: Um, I'll poke Scio about gastroliths in a bit. I don't remember them coming up in the current OE concept, but knowing him he's got something squirreled away somewhere that will deal with them.

the rotting of food i covered on one of my threads https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t555-the-differences-from-eating-a-tree-or-the-cow-dog-thing-with-2-heads-or-both -here you can try to work with mi or make up your own

what about eating a poisonous life form (plant or animals) some animals on earth like the koala and the poison dart frog ( i know these are very different animals but they both eat toxic materials) how would an animal build up an immunity to that toxin or use it to benefit itself. I think if are creature eats small amounts of the toxin unless its really deadly then it would build up an immunity. but how would a creature use it to its benefit?

Toxin = poison produced by an organism.

I wasn't going into animal toxins here, as that's more of OE territory - some will be created in special organs etc. - but the easiest way I can think of to do that is to have a creature adapt to it's primary food source.
So for every generation that we have Eucalyptus:
[Eucalyptus: property: leaf: toxin A]
Then the most desirable mutatio for the Koala is
[Koala: stomach: property: accept toxin A]

However, if for some inane reason the Koala tries to eat a poison dart frog:
[Poison dart frog: property: skin: toxin B]
then
[Koala: action: reject toxin B = Death.]

Toxins wouldn't suddenly pop up as deadly agents - and not all of them would be deadly - so, for a lower level "new" toxin, there would be pressure for a consumer whose primary food resource was that plant or animal to adapt to accept that toxin. Creatures for whom this critter was only a supplementary food source will most likely stop eating it. The creature remains tagged as [General food Type] but comes as a nasty surprise if you swallow. Also, I'm being generous to the civ people here, as in civ if they want to hunt the critter for only the non-toxic meat, or only use the leaves and not the toxic berries of a plant, my tags here wouldn't be in the way in the least, because they confine the toxin to a specific part.

Toxins used in predation/defense aren't going to be much of an issue here... by the time we're concerned with "does the stomach accept, Y/N" then we're assuming the food is dead or otherwise helpless.

Gastroliths can just be a stomach mutation.

~sciocont wrote:

Gastroliths can just be a stomach mutation.

But is there any way we can indicate to the player that they just got this mutation? With most mutations there is a visible change, but unless the player is going to be experimentally swallowing rocks, I don't see a way they could tell. But then maybe that's realistic and they'll find out in time. Eventually, though, when there creature has gone from a rat to a squirrel... In the game they don't have the millions of years to notice the change...

Maybe we could have an 'edible' cursor or something... Edible and grabbable... And carve-able. Maybe I should stop making my suggestions before I get into the realm of right-click menues...

Well... what's wrong with experimentally eating rocks? So long as it doesn't kill you, it can only make you stronger...

If/when we have mineral edible resources figured out, I'm thinking that the capability of using gastroliths could evolve quite handily for an herbivore in search of salt, but not to good at determining whether a rock was salt or just a rock. Carnivores usually don't need them. Most herbivores, come to think of it, don't need them, just the ones who don't have four stomachs to ruminate the stuff with more celulose.

Submitting multiple stomachs (ruminant variety) to the OE, in case no one's thought of it before.

For the rock-eating case, you could see other members of your species doing it, so you would do it too. Too bad if you are a hermaphroditic lone wolf.

That gives me an idea. There should be an "examine" function, where the player would select a thing/animal and the player's creature would try to sniff/grab/take a close view of that thing. Basic information would then be given to the player. Of course, examining things like beehive might not be the best idea...

It might not be even perfectly accurate, sometimes labeling poisonous things as healthy.

Commander Keen wrote:

For the rock-eating case, you could see other members of your species doing it, so you would do it too. Too bad if you are a hermaphroditic lone wolf.

That gives me an idea. There should be an "examine" function, where the player would select a thing/animal and the player's creature would try to sniff/grab/take a close view of that thing. Basic information would then be given to the player. Of course, examining things like beehive might not be the best idea...

It might not be even perfectly accurate, sometimes labeling poisonous things as healthy.

Or, when you think about mimicry, healthy things as poisonous... I like this idea already. We could even tailor it to the creature's more dominant senses. (Humans: Sight, hearing, touch, other creatures perhaps something like smell, sight and hearing, or maybe even heat-vision, smell, and hearing... etc. ad infinitum.)

Commander Keen wrote:

For the rock-eating case, you could see other members of your species doing it, so you would do it too. Too bad if you are a hermaphroditic lone wolf.

That gives me an idea. There should be an "examine" function, where the player would select a thing/animal and the player's creature would try to sniff/grab/take a close view of that thing. Basic information would then be given to the player. Of course, examining things like beehive might not be the best idea...

It might not be even perfectly accurate, sometimes labeling poisonous things as healthy.

I really like that idea as a gameplay element. It reminds me of the Myst series, some of my favorite games.