Edible cursed dust (was Re: CF: question?)

[David Andrew Michael Noelle <dave@Straylight.org>]

Doug wilder wrote:
> 
> Yesterday, I was playing and testing out new formulas for alchemy. Now this
> creates a lot of cursed items. But, what happened was my character got
> hungery and instead of eating known food good or bad, he ate a cursed magic
> dust (Blindly Grabs some food).
>
> My question is this:
> Shoudn't there be some sort of priorty marker for using an item
> automatically like this. I mean, why grab something that i have no idea what
> it is if i have good food available and i already know what it is

    There was nothing blind or random about that choice.  It was the most
recent edible object you picked up, so it was assumed to be the first thing
you pulled out of your pack.  The penalty for not eating until you're about
to start losing hit points instead of food points is just grabbing
whatever's on the top of your pack.
    It's inconvenient, when you're using up food quickly to regenerate or
because of some cursed item, but I guess remembering to eat is just part of
the game.  If you don't, by the time you're hungry enough to just reach into
your bag and eat whatever's there, to keep from dying of starvation, you
might not remember which orc chop was the one you identified as poison.


> and that it is even food. I dont consider dust food do you?

    Dust isn't food.  Dust isn't even edible.  What you ate wasn't dust.  It
was Food of Hideous Poison that your alchemical accident polymorphed into
something resembling a magical dust.  As far as I know, those particular
anomalies can only be created by alchemy.  The problem, therefore, is not
one of preventing non-foods from being chewed on, but rather a question of
whether alchemy-accident poisons should be created in forms other than
potion.


> Also, what are the consiquences of drinking a cursed potion or using a curse
> 1 shot item?

    "Cursed" means different things for different object types.  For
equipment like weapons, armour, amulets, and rings, it means you can't
remove it.  For potions, it means the magic of the potion will be reversed. 
For food, it means you lose an amount of food rather than gain it,
presumably from throwing up the poisoned food and whatever else you'd eaten
recently.  For arrows, I think all it means is you won't get any money for
it.


> Shouldn't the blindly grab be set to grab for whatever has the highest food
> value?

    That probably wouldn't be too hard to code, and it wouldn't happen often
enough to make much of a performance hit, but I honestly don't see a need
for it.  In every possible case except the one you mentioned, of having a
poisoned food item that you don't even know is edible, it shouldn't matter
what food item you grab.  If you happen to have picked up something barely
nutritious, like a cup of water or something mildly poisonous that you
hadn't noticed yet, it won't help, so you'll just grab something else a
couple ticks later.  If you can't survive that accidental poison, you
shouldn't be risking it by neglecting to eat carefully chosen food.  If
you're carrying good food and identified poison in the same pack and not
bothering to pick one until you're too hungry to think about it first, then
you just deserve whatever you get.


> I mean if im starving and i have 2 items that are considered food say an orc
> chop and an orc corpse (disgusting though it is). Wouldn't it be better to
> stave off hunger longer by sorting the items according to food value and
> eating the corpse rather than the chop that way i wouldn't have to do it
> again so soon after i did it the first time?

    Actually, if I was so hungry it was starting to get physically painful,
I'd do exactly what the game already does.  I'd grab the first thing I could
find and maybe worry about eating my fill after I'd solved the immediate
problem.

-- 
            -Dave Noelle,                 dave@Straylight.org
            -the Villa Straylight,  http://www.straylight.org
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email  ==  http://www.cauce.com

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