Food, Satiety & Rations
Hunger and thirst are one number: satiety, from $0$ to $100$. Food fills it, drink fills it, time drains it. Two things you actually need to remember:
- Don't hit zero. Empty means food sickness — health bleeding away until you eat.
- Staying full pays off. The higher your satiety, the faster you heal. Coasting in the midrange is fine; staying near the top is better.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those two rules. (Synthetic characters don't eat — ignore the whole thing.)
Where you sit on the scale
Your satiety band sets a healing multiplier. Neutral in the middle, penalties at the bottom, real bonuses up top:
| Satiety | State | Healing |
|---|---|---|
| 0–5 | starving | 0.50× |
| 6–15 | famished | 0.75× |
| 16–30 | hungry | 0.90× |
| 31–60 | peckish / satisfied | 1.00× |
| 61–75 | content | 1.10× |
| 76–88 | pleased | 1.25× |
| 89–96 | happy | 1.40× |
| 97–100 | blissful | 1.50× |
The payoff curve is steep at both ends — starving nearly halves your recovery, blissful gives you half again on top:
Takeaway: keep yourself stuffed when you expect to take damage. That last stretch from content to blissful is worth chasing before a fight.
The slow drain
Satiety leaks away at roughly 0.07 per tick — a full meter lasts about a day of activity. Travel can cost extra: some routes are tiring and charge satiety as a toll on top of the passive drain.
You'll feel the slide before it's dangerous — rumbles around hungry, light-headedness around famished, sharp pangs when starving. Ride it to zero and you contract food sickness: a worsening affliction that chews through your health until you eat something.
Eating & drinking
Eat or drink and satiety goes up — by how much depends on the item's nourishment scaled by its quality:
$$ \text{satiety gained} = \text{base value} \times \frac{\text{quality}}{50} $$
Quality $50$ is the break-even point: better fare beats its base value, worse fare falls short. A few things worth knowing:
- Cap is $100$. Overeating past full is wasted.
- Only real food and drink push you above $50$ (the satisfied line). Everything below covers that.
- Drink feeds the same meter. Water and most drinks count — but some, alcohol especially, please you without actually hydrating.
Rations: your autopilot
Rations work as an abstract supply level rather than individual items in your pack: packed provisions you draw on without thinking. The supply does one job, which is keeping you from starving.
How rations work: when your satiety drops below 50 and you've got supply on hand, you auto-eat, topping back up to the satisfied line at a cost of 0.2 ration points per point of satiety restored. It runs on its own, but caps at satisfied. The content-and-above healing bonuses only come from eating actual food.
You build the supply by packing food into ration points. Spoiled or low-grade food converts badly, and anything under 25% fresh can't be packed at all:
$$ \text{ration points} = \text{base ration value} \times \text{servings} \times \frac{\text{freshness}}{100} \times \frac{\text{quality}}{50} $$
This turns foraging into logistics: stock up when you can, and a prepared traveller stays fed automatically instead of babysitting a hunger bar.
Spoilage & the fridge
Perishable food has a shelf life, decaying fresh → putrid over time. Freshness matters twice: it lowers both the nourishment you get and how well the food packs into rations.
- Below ~15% fresh = rotten. Eating it risks food sickness, worse the more spoiled it is.
- At $0\%$ it's just waste.
Refrigeration pauses the clock entirely. Food in a working fridge stops decaying; pull it out (or let the fridge break) and the timer resumes exactly where it stopped. So stockpile in the cold and pack rations from the fresh.
See also
- Skill Checks — survival and scavenging skills help you find and judge food.
- Sex — driven by the same ticking, over-time effects as hunger and food sickness.