This might be why you're having trouble. IIRC, there should be a book around that teaches you how to cook the stuff you find off the land. With just a fire you can find a pretty good steady supply of meat and other ingredients while adventuring to eat without spending the money. You can roast rat meat by itself, for example. Chicken? That's imported and probably should be more on the expensive side anyway.

I mirror meldiocre's sentiments. I absoutely love the feel in the beginning of the game of needing to forage/hunt for food and then occasionaly having to think twice before splurging on one of those "fancy" ready-made dishes when in town.

Exactly. It's so immersive! *high five Eltrane*

With "Basic Cooking", you should be able to roast Rat or Hound meat. If you have Abot's Water Life, you can catch and roast fish as well, and small crabs are plentiful along the shores (raw crabmeat). A pinch of Salt and some suitable vegetables (Bittergreen, Marshmerrow, Hackle-lo, etc.) and a pan should give you some added variety. If you ever make it to the East Coast of Vvardenfell, the plentiful Saltrice and Marshmerrow should provide you with more than enough food supplies, especially if you happen upon the more advanced cookbook. For my current character, eating is all but free (aside from some Salt and occasional Yeast for baking), and I can sell a few fish and crabmeat to cover that modest cost. It won't get you rich, but you can at least get by without too much trouble, with perhaps enough left over for the occasional "splurge", as has been mentioned.

When I start a new game with NoM, I get a fire kit, a waterskin, and a bedroll as soon as I can afford it; it saves me lots of money in renting beds and buying food. I will also frequently steal the Basic Cooking book from Arille as I never intend to sell it back and I might as well take it, while I'm procuring the two other nice "freebies" in that room. You can gather ash yams and corkbulb to roast directly in the fire, as well as roast rat and crab meat. As Kovacius has also mentioned, Abot's Waterlife is a wonderful companion to NoM, as you can always learn to fish for your dinner. Just as ebony armor is out of reach for the new player, so too should be haute cuisine. I know that Taddeus has spent many hours making NoM as balanced as possible; lowering the cost of local foods in the regions where they are plentiful and raising the cost of imported foods.

Do remember there are also configuration scripts which will make it feel as if you need to eat more or less often. An Adventurer at the triple duration setting has a lot more play time between meals. Someone on a day or night schedule at regular day duration will find him or herself getting hungry after less playing time. Also, you can set it up to eat raw foods in the configuration script.

As I have observed many times and not to offend, but to educate, it is not a modders job to make up for the role playing ability of the player; however, two modders who frequently bend over backward to do so are Taddeus and Abot. If a player thinks of something that should be added in one of their mods, it behooves him/her to make sure it isn't already there before asking for it. If you're sure after looking, both modders are friendly and willing to accommodate as far as they possibly can.

I'm not so sure I agree with that sentiment entirely, but it may be possible due to my mod combinations + character type, Anyway I might just go and restart then (I could gift myself money, but I prefer to use the console only for true debugging circumstances, like being unable to get out of objects).

I have a question about the foods, how much food do i need to eat each meal? It seems i go through 3 or 4 grilled or roasted fish and meats each meal. Is this normal? also when i turn off the script for eating raw food, i still end up eating the crab meat automatically that i meant to use for fishing

It depends on how often you eat. If you eat at every lunch and dinner, you'll need fewer food. But if you skip one or more meals (because you're sleeping, or fighting) then hunger adds up and you may need to consume many things at once.
As for the crab meat, it is not considered a raw food. Raw foods are fishes and meat from many animals, but for some reason it looks ok to me eating crab meat without cooking it. Maybe a list of foods considered as "raw" could help.

I have several ideas to update a little the hunger scripts (and possibly even the thirst and sleep ones), but I'm not sure about them and I'd like some feedback.
The first one is following. If a person doesn't eat for 1 day, he/she'll need to eat a certain amount of food (let's say 10). But if a person doesn't eat for 5 days, will he/she need to eat 50 at once to recover? Or something in between, for example 30-35, would be enough? The same question applies for thirst and sleep.

Other ideas will follow...

Also i noticed a issue, i had Vurt's groundcover mods installed before i installed NOM, but after installing the NOM specific groundcover esp's i lose about 5 FPS all around. I noticed the NOM versions are from 2010, cant figure out why the drastic difference...

Do you mean in the vicinity of NoM edited ground like the Food of the Gods restaurant or Fort Frostmoth? Or it happens in areas untouched by NoM?

Areas untouched by NOM, also takes about half the time to generate distant land and way less total VRAM in MGE XE with Vurt's newest non NOM grass ESP's

Fixed MGE problem, disregard

I would suggest however creating new groundcover esp's based on vurt's latest ones, there has been a lot of cleanup of missplaced grass which i see is prevalent especially in balmorra in the NOM version. Also that lush Solstheim version i believe is out of date as well, it creates a massive fps hit. Just suggestions

I would say definitely don't make it so that you eat that much at one time. I think it would work best if you could script it so that the cumulative negative state that has built up over, to use your example, 5 days simply takes longer to reverse than if you had skipped eating for only a day, where all the negatives go away with one good meal. So in order to get back to full health you'd have to eat properly for 5 (or even a little less, like 3) days to get back to zero ill effects. Just as in real life I would imagine that if you starved for 5 days that it would take more than a happy meal, or even binging several happy meals at once, to gain full strength. With sleep perhaps be a little more forgiving. Usually after lack of sleep it only takes one good session of sleep to pretty much recover in real life.

Hope that makes sense.

Yes, I know. I should do it sooner or later. Maybe I could remove the compatibility patches from the main NoM package. Maybe even host them on a different PES page, something like "Necessities of Morrowind - Compatibility Files". This way I could update the patches without having to release a NoM update.

This makes definitely sense, but it can be confusing from a gameplay point of view. Can you imagine all the "hey, I've eaten but my penalties don't go away" complaints?
What I was talking about is reducing the cumulative hunger one gets after the first day of fasting or, maybe this is clearer, making foods more nourishing if you're very hungry. So for example, you may need 3 apples to go from hunger level 1 to 0, but only 1 apple to go from level 9 to 8. This would effectively reduce the need for mega-meals after prolongued fasting. Note that this has no effect on how rapidly hunger penalties are accumulated.

Heh, true. Though perhaps a message popping up along the lines of "You begin to recover from the effects of starvation. Further recovery will come with additional time and nourishment" would make it clear.

Simpler than what I suggested for sure, and simpler is usually better. This is all hypothetical to me, as my characters have never been hungry for more than maybe a day or two. I think it would be amusing to watch a character eat more than maybe about 10 items in one meal, wondering how he gained a bottomless stomach otherwise.

I really wish it worked in a manner where your food intake filled a "reserve", and that reserve went to satisfy your hunger as it occurred, instead of hunger creating a penalty condition that needs to be corrected immediately by eating. The reserve itself should have a maximum limit, so you couldn't over-eat and gorge yourself on 10 meals at one sitting. If the reserve was enough to cover about 3 "normal" meals (with the familiar stomach "rumble" letting you know that your "reserve" was low), you would recover at about double the speed at which you weakened (one portion to cover current needs, and the other two to recover from the "backlog"). It would also mean that actual hunger penalties wouldn't kick in until you missed your third regular mealtime (about 36 hours).

I'm still getting situations where I get the usual warning that I should start looking for food and water, and so I stop at the next convenient point to eat. The "full" notification comes up and I get a "well fed" icon. About an hour of in-game time later, I get a message that the character has auto-eaten something from inventory (often an ingredient that I didn't want eaten). You shouldn't get "desperately hungry" in an hour, and I keep wishing there were some sort of a delay to the penalty effects, so the first missed meal didn't actually cause "automatic" behaviour or penalties. In any "pre-industrial" society, missing one meal shouldn't be anything out of the ordinary. Eating, and then getting such behavior even before the next scheduled mealtime, is a bit "quirky", in my opinion.

Despite the oddities of its behavior, I still wouldn't want to play this game without all of the incredible additions that it makes. Thanks again, Taddeus, for continuing to support and improve this work of art.

Yeah, that would be awesome, as of now i have to decide between some fps loss and rogue grass everywhere, or floating grass in the NOM areas.

Anything that isn't cooked or preserved would be raw, Taddeus, but as I think we talked about, in extreme hunger situations, people will eat raw foods. Uncooked crabmeat and uncooked eggs would be great examples. In societies where food is eaten fresh and livestock living and slaughtering conditions are fairly clean, people eat raw eggs, milk, and even meat with no harmful effects.


I would say if you were going to change something, the frequency of eating would be the thing to change. Someone who has been going without food, who just sat down to a big meal and gorged himself, would almost immediately throw up. His system wouldn't be able to handle it all. If he was to eat a little at a time, but say every three or four hours, with frequent naps, he could re-build his strength slowly and without causing more problems. I don't know how complicated it is to mod this, but if someone has heavy penalties, and they really wanted to roleplay it realistically, then requiring more frequent meals and sleep to remove the penalties would be more accurate than eating and sleeping to make it up all at once.

Anyone who complains about the heavy penalties or whatever method you decide is best to alleviate them, might just need to turn the hunger and fatigue scripts off. As for thirst, I think there should be a maximum of water a person can consume in one sitting, especially if they have no food, because this can cause a fatal metabolic breakdown. Alcohol would come with it's own hazards. However, fruit juices and milks would be safe to drink in large quantities to remove heavy penalties, but it would still take some time (a few hours) to reverse the effects of dehydration.

I really like Elaura's idea!

Seconded. It'd be a hell of a lot of work (I think), but the finished product would be absolutely incredible. Then all NOM would need is hypothermia that freshly cooked guar can warm you up from

This is pretty much along the lines of my suggestion -- drawn out recovery. The frequent small meals is an interesting idea but wouldn't it be simpler, less additional coding, to just use the regular meal time table, only double or triple the returns of each meal once the character qualifies for a starvation status. Depending on how you set it up you could make it so that it took no more than two or three daya to recover from having been one step away from death, proportionately less for those that didn't go quite that far.

Real life recovery from such a state would involve gradual increase of daily calories, starting with a couple tiny meals per day and then increasing slowly from there over a period of weeks. But we're talking about just a game here.

Now I think I'm going to do a test run of extreme lack of sleep/food/water just to see what the penalties will be.

Edit: And by test run, I mean in game and not real life. *is not that crazy*

Ok, so listen to the idea I had tonight about the whole thing.

• First, remove the distinction between hunger and thirst penalties and replace them with an unique penalty (starvation? deprivation? denutrition? help me find the best definition that includes both food and water). I'll call it simply "penalty" for now. Note that I will remove the difference in penalties, but hunger and thirst will still be calculated saparatedly, only in a different way. The penalty will be similar to the current ones: burden, weakness to diseases, slower recovery for health, magicka and fatigue. At higher levels, health, magicka and fatigue could be drained to low amounts as well.
  
• The character needs to eat and drink a fixed amount each day, let's say 100 food and 100 water. That amount can be changed by several effects. For example there's a tisane that halves the need for food and water, bringing it to 50. Or, every time character's fatigue reaches 0, hunger is augmented a bit, which can lead it up in a noticeable way after a very tiring day. I want to put a maximum on how much hunger can go up, let's say 140 or 150.
  
• Now, if at the end of any day (midnight) the character hasn't eaten or drunk what he needs, penalties apply. If the character hasn't eaten enough, the penalty level goes up by 1, if he hadn't enough water the level rises by 2. This is cumulative, so lack of both food and water means +3. This means that you can go on for let's say 12 days without food, 6 without water and 4 without both.
  
• For each day in which he eats and drinks enough, the characters not only doesn't get penalties, but his penalty level (if any) is lowered by 1. This means that a penalty level of 6, halfway between full health and death, will require 6 days of healthy nutrition to be fully recovered.
  
• The hunger and thirst reducing tisane can be scripted with the additional effect of lowering penalty level by 2 instead of 1 when active (eating and drinking only 50 mind you), thus making it a great recovering tool.
  
• Note that in any case the scripts will prevent the character from eating and drinking more than the set amount each day. This will avoid gorging.
  
• Also note that to avoid confusion, effects increasing hunger or thirst will be calculated not for the day in which they occur but in the following one.
  
• A written message will tell when the character has eaten AND drunk enough for a day.
  
• When to eat and drink? With manual eating everyone can choose freely. Stopping to eat and drink at 1am or at 11pm is up to the player. Automatic eating will remain like it is now, with a configurable lunch and dinner schedule; the scripts will eat/drink 50% at lunch and 50% at dinner. If lunch is skipped than everything will be consumed during the dinner. If dinner is skipped, the script will still try to eat each hour till the day ends, at which point the penalty will kick in. Notice that this means only one manual meal is needed every day (but you can RP two or more meals, too).
  
• Using any water source (well, barrel, pump, ...) will satisfy thirst for a whole day.
  
• This will need a rework of the well fed effect. An idea could be: if you are without penalties and eat and drink regularly for enough days (5-10?) the well fed buff will kick in and remain there until you miss one day of nutrition.

What do you think? It seems intuitive enough and it should hopefully remove the "I ate but penalties are still here" misunderstandings. Moreover, it should simplify the scripts which is never bad. It should prevent the odd behaviour reported by Kovacius.
Note that this will make behaviours like "Ok, i'll press the wait button for 15 days" very dangerous -- read: instant death.

Edit: typos.

Very yes. I would call it "malnutrition" over starvation, but that's beside the point.

Which is that is an awesome idea.

Wow! I'm impressed, Taddeus. That system is brilliant! Will there be carryable (lower quality) tisanes, or will they still have to be brewed fresh to have any effect? I have no problem with the latter, just wondering if you'd thought about it. It is especially good that you have decided to combine the hunger and thirst scripts. May I suggest that the PC be granted some minor hunger alleviation by drinking certain liquids other than tisanes? Animal milk, for instance, has nutritive value beyond alleviating thirst, however, saltrice milk would likely have less protein. Fruit juices and alcohols have some as well, though juices have more vitamins and less other adverse effects than booze. EDIT: nvm, you already addressed that. I should never post before my second cup of coffee.

I agree with Mortimer, the word you're looking for is "malnutrition" Lack of water can be called dehydration from day one to the day of death, but starvation is usually a term reserved for the "dying of" stage. As in, "The entire village would have died of starvation had the hunters not managed to bring down that guar."


One last thing, can the original script configuration have a button that allows a person to exit immediately for testing purposes? A button on the first message box that will allow you to exit out of the configuration and possibly a configuration ring to re-start it would be a boon to me. I like to create a new test character when I try out a new mod, but sometimes I don't need to run NoM to do what I need to do. I don't want to un-check it from my load order, I just need to not have to run through the whole thing every time.

Ok, so I'll use malnutrition to indicate the combined hunger/thirst penalty.

No, tisanes must be consumed immediatly, I don't want them to become some kind of potions. I think that being unable to carry them around makes them somewhat unique.

Yes, I can definitely add such a button. Something like "Skip configuration (keep default settings)" should work.