Make butter un-fun to eat directly

[RenechCDDA]

Summary

Balance "Make butter un-fun to eat directly"

Purpose of change

Eating raw butter carries essentially no downsides. You can force-feed butter to your companions. What.

Describe the solution

Much bigger morale penalty, butter cannot be put into larder

Describe alternatives you've considered

-Eating raw butter should also make you nauseous

-Just make butter inedible, because eating butter by itself is extremely unusual, very much in the minority

Testing

Simple value change

Additional context

[anoobindisguise]

This is incredibly reductive and dumb.
One, people can eat plain butter without gagging or wanting to puke. You just can't have like, an entire stick, because that will make you super nauseous. But butter doesn't taste bad.

In addition, eating plain butter is a useful abstraction for "adding a bunch of extra butter to this bread" which there is presently no way to do in game. A boring sandwich is 2 slices of bread and 1/4th a tablespoon of butter, which is very little, you can pretty easily be doing 1 tablespoon per slice and not getting sick faster than you get full.

The solution is not to put a blanket penalty but track fat consumption and introduce malaise from eating too much too fast.

Banning it from the larder is also really awful from a gameplay perspective too. The npcs obviously aren't just eating the raw butter all by itself, they're adding it to stuff they eat. The fact that there's currently no check for "larder with literally only butter is invalid" does not mean "ban butter from larder", it means "make sure it's somewhat balanced before being distributed".

And even if you can get an npc to make a bunch of buttered breads to distribute instead of bread and butter separately that's still pointless extra steps.

[RenechCDDA]

In addition, eating plain butter is a useful abstraction for "adding a bunch of extra butter to this bread" which there is presently no way to do in game.

As I pointed out to you already, this is untrue. You can batch craft 50 (or more) of those crafts at once and never touch the damn thing yourself. This is as easy as it's ever been, use the camp crafting window and have an entire month's food supply done in a few clicks.

If you actually have the food, this is a non-issue. You will never have a problem. Your problem is that you don't have the food, you want to use a ton of butter directly. That is explicitly what we're preventing here.

[dumb-kevin]

Can we add a check in consume_effects() like:

• Count recent consumption of the same item from consumption_history
• If it exceeds some threshold, applies nausea with scaling duration
• The threshold could be driven by a JSON field on comestibles (e.g. "nausea_threshold": 5) so it's configurable per-food without hardcoding butter specifically

This would be a relatively small change: the consumption_history iteration, the nausea application, and a new optional JSON field. No no new data structures, no controversial changes to fun?

I agree that -1 -> -10 is too aggressive, butter + dehydrated meat is a great winter combo for surviving with a backpack.

---

UPD: implemented in #85579

[dumb-kevin]

Also, for more context: #78717

[keampe]

So, my niece is psychotic according to you? She eats butter by the stick, and she's not alone in this. There are people who do.

This PR is your opinion, not fact. An equivalent would be "Raw fish is gross therefore we should give a -10 joy malus to Sashimi!" There are people who would agree with that, just not me. Butter is fine the way it is - if you, personally, find it gross then don't have your character eat it. Don't force your tastes on others, please.

• Shane

[RenechCDDA]

So, my niece is psychotic according to you? She eats butter by the stick, and she's not alone in this. There are people who do.

This PR is your opinion, not fact. An equivalent would be "Raw fish is gross therefore we should give a -10 joy malus to Sashimi!" There are people who would agree with that, just not me. Butter is fine the way it is - if you, personally, find it gross then don't have your character eat it. Don't force your tastes on others, please.

• Shane

I changed the language. Mea culpa.

I would say your niece is very much in the minority. We can find people that enjoy eating all sorts of weird stuff. Just because someone, somewhere enjoys it (or at least eats it) does not mean it should have a high enjoyability value.... butter by itself is clearly not meant to be consumed in that form. Very few people consume it like that. It being unfun is perfectly in line with the gameplay mechanics and social expectations.

[past-simple]

Just wondering where -10 came from. That's the same as raw lung, fresh earthworms, and tainted bone marrow.

[keampe]

I changed the language. Mea culpa.

Thank you for that, seriously. I don't generally expect such courtesy on the internet, especially these days.

As to the PR, you are correct about it needing to be higher - my own Mea culpa here, I said it's fine where it is, but -1 is "my sports drink is warm" levels of bad and eating butter is probably worse than that for most people. -10, though, is quite high considering that when people get their characters to eat it, they don't just have the one, they have many and IIRC the malus stacks. So, IMO, eating 1 pat of butter is not as bad as eating a raw lung, but maybe eating several is?

Anyway, just my 2c.

• Shane

[sonphantrung]

Some stuffs I've found:
https://www.travelawaits.com/2560061/best-butter-tasting-experience/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/18g0hsp/is_eating_straight_butter_actually_a_thing_i_see/
https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/2mty3k/eating_butter_straight_up/
https://www.reddit.com/r/carnivore/comments/12yfood/eating_butter/

While butter isn't a nice thing to eat, -10 morale maluses in general is absurd. In addition to what past-simple said, a protein ration (which is made of god knows the protein sources), has a -2 debuff + Bad Food effect, which I think is a better approach.

P.S. Wonder if anyone can volunteer to do some butter diet :D

[Fris0uman]

Maybe put it around -5 or -7 like you suggested in #78717, one bite of butter is 13g, that's a decent bite but I don't think it's worth -10 (even though this enjoyability score is terribly wobbly and hard to pin down)