Scaling hunger and dehydration debuffs, gradual penalties
Instead of the full penalties of hunger and dehydration hitting all at once when it passes 0, break up the debuff into 4-5 stages (and make the later stages even worse) where the first stage is fairly minor
for example, currently thirst is -10 well being, -25% move speed now
could be split into something like:
-1 well being, -5% move speed
-2 well being, -10% move speed
-5 well being, -20% move speed
-10 well being, -30% move speed
this allows temporary things to impact less (like for example distribution post workers on a very long travel)
(similar effects for bots too please, they're arguably worse about it when they run out of their primary power source)
Comments: 37
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30 Jun, '25
Jcheung SystemHighlighted comment
"Split the hunger and thirst system into multiple steps instead of a boolean" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2025-06-30), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion. -
23 Jul, '22
Chandarin MergedBeaver's don't get food until they are literally starving. With the Experimental mode changes, this means that finishing any task they've started when they cross into starving (from perfectly fine) leaves them way slower to finish that task, then way slower to walk themselves to food stores, and overall just ends up being unrealistically disruptive. There shouldn't just be green and red, but a yellow area in between where beavers aren't negatively affected yet but will choose to eat between tasks. The same of course should be true with thirst. It's also just more realistic.
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28 Jul, '22
Gin Fuyou Admin MergedBeavers are supposed to eat at the end of the work day, so it shouldn't come between tasks, and with adequate working hours it is not an issue.
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29 Jul, '22
FuryoftheStars MergedActually, Gin, I think what Chandarin is referring to (though I could be wrong) is that once the green section of the meter runs out, it switches to yellow, then later/further down the meter it's red.
I kind of agree with this concept (if I'm interpreting it correctly), though I feel there should still be penalties in yellow, just not as severe.
And I feel as though this should be applied to other negative meters as well. IE, overheat, rather than having it's full affect just from 1% of the meter, it should have stages where it progressively gets worse if not taken care of (with perhaps penalties worse than now?). -
06 Aug, '22
Chandarin MergedWhen you say "Adequate working hours", what do you mean? I never saw a beaver with yellow but was still getting a lot of "starving" beavers who were still finishing tasks during the work day.
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06 Aug, '22
Chandarin MergedHere is what I mean: When beaver no longer has green "fed" bar, it immediately turns to red. There is no yellow, so if you intended a yellow section then you overlooked something. This is early in the day, if beaver ate at night or in morning he wouldn't be hungry right now. But he didn't even though he clearly must have been low(ish) on the hungry meter. His grilled potato score is very high so maybe he did eat potatoes but that didn't fill hungry meter? I dunno.
That said, the problem I tried to illustrate is that it goes from "well fed" and no apparent motivation to eat to suddenly deathly sick and only able to move at 25% speed. This is a problem when I put a lumberjack flag out as far as I did and, despite the food being available, the beaver allows himself to become starving and now has to walk back (carrying logs) at 25% really far which will take him about 75% of the day. -
07 Aug, '22
Gin Fuyou Admin MergedOk, I'll re-open it for consideration for improving feeding behaviour
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20 Sep, '22
Nate MergedStarving beavers should prioritize eating when food is available. While playing today I had a beaver starve to death while transporting a crate of food which seems kind of silly. Maybe if a beaver reaches a certain hunger level it should stop whatever it is doing to eat any available food. I've noticed other similar scenarios where a beaver will starve because other more well fed beavers were faster to eat the little food that was available. It seems in general that there is no real urgency from starving or dehydrated beavers to fill their needs.
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20 Sep, '22
Kal Veedo MergedMy town of 30+ beavers died after the drought ended because they were hauling water to something instead of drinking it
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20 Sep, '22
FuryoftheStarsI think this other thread I'm going to link may be similar, though this one I feel has a better description.
https://timberborn.featureupvote.com/suggestions/317992/hungerthirst-meters-and-behaviors -
21 Sep, '22
Gin Fuyou System Merged"Starving Beaver AI" (suggested by Nate on 2022-09-20), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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21 Sep, '22
Gin Fuyou System Merged"A way to prioritise jobs Globally" (suggested by Kal Veedo on 2022-09-20), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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22 Sep, '22
Jcheung Adminhmmm. reading through, that one's become more of a *when* to eat thread. though this suggestion would neatly help with the other. i'll get another viewpoint and maybe it'll get merged :D
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22 Sep, '22
Jcheung System"Hunger/Thirst Meters and Behaviors" (suggested by Chandarin on 2022-07-23), including upvotes (7) and comments (9), was merged into this suggestion.
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06 Nov, '22
Kiranos MergedA beaver that is going far for a job is going to be crippled if he's near to get hunger/thirst malus.
Is it possible to make the game compute something that will make the beavers understand if they are going to be crippled for too much time from hunger/thirst and get them to eat/dring BEFORE the job ?
If you're at the end of the day, this will affect their sleeping time too. (coming in and back very slow, then, eat, drink, night is already finished).
I also noticed that those beavers are not going for the closest available drinking point. That's really frustrating. -
12 Nov, '22
Gin Fuyou System"Hunger/thirst optimization to avoid long trip with a crippled beaver" (suggested by Kiranos on 2022-11-06), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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27 Jun, '23
Alguy1I think a slightly alternate approach to this suggestion would be better. I think the best option would be to move the well being debuff to a sliding scale. For example, when hunger is above 75%, no penalty. Going from 75% to 25% the well being penalty gradually goes from 0 to -10. When hunger is below 25%, apply the -25% movement speed debuff.
This would make beavers slightly hungry/thirsty not so punishing on the player but famine/water shortages still problematic. -
24 Apr, '24
Itsme MergedI have 45 beavers, 8 water pumps, and a large water pump, population is dehydrated somehow for 5 days with workers in each station, It's like the beavers take the first drop pumped out then run off for a day staying dehydrated, and the workers at the station refuse to drink the water they are pumping so they all work SUPER INEFFECIENTLY. I know it's a game but you're telling me any creature wouldn't drink unfiltered river water and risk sickness before just dropping dead of thirst, and the pump workers wouldn't naturally be hydrated? Also can I delete multiple strips of paths, I see I can place strips of paths, but cannot seem to delete more than one path at a time.
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30 Apr, '24
Gin Fuyou System"Dehydration" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-04-24), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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05 May, '24
Trey MergedHow slowly beavers work when hungry is way over tuned. It takes like an entire day to harvest a single crop and is extremely frustrating when you are walking the knifes edge after a bad tide and even though you get your food back up and running, the beavers are literally useless so everyone still dies.
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08 May, '24
Gin Fuyou System"Hunger nerf is way too strong" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-05-05), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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04 Jul, '24
Postguru MergedWhy do beavers that produce immediately usable food starve? The same thing happens to those that pump water; they can die of thirst. It's a vicious circle. Those that produce something that can be consumed immediately starve/get thirsty and produce less and less. I noticed this at a difficult level... you think you've survived the drought but then things go downhill rapidly.
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12 Jul, '24
Gin Fuyou System"thirsty and hungry" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-07-04), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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14 Jul, '24
Methos MergedHad the population fall to zero after a Mismanaged badtide. Long after the effects of the contamination subsided, all my hungry thirsty beavers would continuously walk away from their jobs to go looking for water and food, but their jobs were to make the water and food. Besides avoiding the shortages in the first place, there is no way to pull up from this population crash.
Make it so if a beaver has a need and is currently producing the thing that would satisfy that need, they will stay at work and create then consume that thing and not get distracted.
Witnessing all those dehydrated beaver corpses in the clean river water and starved beaver corpses amongst the ripe carrot fields has scarred me for life. -
15 Jul, '24
Jcheung System"Avoid Death Spiral" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-07-14), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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17 Jul, '24
Doug MergedIt is very easy to death spiral in the game when you have the issue that the water pump beaver is thirsty and so they can't work as hard - pumping water to drink. There are similar issues with haulers and farmers.
I would like to suggest: If a worker is performing a "pump water" task they benefit from drinking water (either as a freebie or some kind of task add) automatically at the end of their shift for the day (this would prevent people trying to cycle the pump worker so everyone can benefit from working the pump).
With a similar suggestion for farmers or bakers/grillers that produce an edible food.
Or possibly for haulers as well, but this may be to much of a stretch. -
21 Jul, '24
Nerzul MergedI've realised that beaver productivity will lower by at least half when they're hungry or need water, I don't know what that number is telling me exactly.
What I do know is that beavers are constantly abandoning their workplaces the moment a single drop of water or Kohirabi becomes available, forcing me to triple production for a short while in order to get over the bottleneck and stop the vicious cycle of all my beavers rushing to the farm or water pump all at once.
I've been playing in Hard mode and trying to optimize everything as much as my brain can manage but I've found some bottlenecks to be inevitable at early stages of the game and it has made it almost a disaster I never can fully come back from.
Not cause my beavers are dead but cause they all have to spend a day without water or food, which I think shouldn't be that big of a deal as to lower the productivity of my colony by such huge margin.
Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk. -
13 Aug, '24
Gin Fuyou System"My Issue with Bottlenecks" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-07-21), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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13 Aug, '24
Gin Fuyou System"Worker interactions with water and food" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-07-17), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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21 Dec, '24
Quax MergedUsually give food and drink to the beavers is no problem. But in the cases it becomes a problem, it often leads to a chain reaction for two reasons:
A hungry/thirsty beaver becomes a heavy buff. If in a short situation the farmer get's this buff, he will become much less effective and usually the situation became worse.
It's not really clear in what order the beaver became fed, as often a little hungry feed while the the starving get nothing - I would guess it has something with distance, but it may be another thing.
Both situation would be more milder / smooth, if there would be too conditions of ressource lack hungyr ("I meal would be nice") and starving ("I'm gonna die for hunger!"). The same is true for thirst. In the nature of bot-energy and energy storage-cells I think it's plausilbe if they will not have stages of energy lack.
In the seservation order first would be served beavers in the "servere lack of..." order, then he mild ones. This would fix some things :) -
24 Dec, '24
Jcheung System"hungry vs. starving, thirsty vs. dehydrated" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-12-21), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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30 Jun, '25
ElWabblo MergedI think it is weird that your beavers go from perfectly healthy to "starving" and "dehydrated" in a moments notice. It would make way more sense if there was a step in between those where the beavers would seek out food and drink, but don't get a debuff yet.
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27 Aug, '25
Althim MergedNow if a beaver wants to drink in the middle of the workday, he will immediately receive a -10 penalty to morale and therefore a penalty to productivity/speed. I suggest making a delay between when the beaver wants to eat/drink and when these penalties are applied.
This way the beaver should have a little time to complete the current task (construction/delivery) and will return for needs at full speed.
The current mechanic is too punishing in the early game and has little impact in the late game when beavers have high morale. -
03 Sep, '25
Gin Fuyou Admin MergedBeaver seek to fill needs long before it hits debuff level, so this approach doesn't really change anything but slightly delay problem.
There are other suggestions like scaling debuffs so punishment doesn't throws you straight into death spiral. I suggest approaching more from that side. -
04 Sep, '25
Jcheung System"The needs of beavers and the punishment for them must have a time lag." (suggested by <Hidden> on 2025-08-27), including upvotes (1) and comments (1), was merged into this suggestion.
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29 Sep, '25
Yep MergedGotta do something about everyone dying at the same time. One slip up, and the game ends. All beavers either starve or dehydrate simultaneously, ending the game. Hours of development lost to a single mistake with fluid dynamics.
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29 Sep, '25
Gin Fuyou System"Everyone dying at once" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2025-09-29), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
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