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Sensible Balance: Food and Drink, Nutrition, and Water Weight

December 2024 Note: Tested on Build 41 only, may still work on Build 42.

Fixes all food item nutrition discrepancies (calories, carbs/fat/protein) based off real-world (NCCDB) values. Optional fix for water containers. Optional file to make salt, pepper, etc. more common.
Items reweighed, some had their 'hunger reduction' values changed, so some (like butter, salt, coffee) can be used more times before they are depleted.
Some can dehydrate the player (dry or overly salted goods), strong alcohol dehydrates, more happiness from alcohol and less from sweets (the player is not a child).
Player-created pickled goods in jars last much longer (120 days to go stale, 400 to spoil, vs 30 and 90 default).
Added a penalty of unhappiness for boring, 'easy mode' foods like farming and eating raw cabbage should carry the unhappiness debuff - the game already applies this to plain unseasoned boiled pasta and rice which are far more palatable in real life to eat than a whole raw cabbage. Go and make some soup, it nullifies the penalty.
Some items cannot be eaten directly (e.g. teabags, salt, also dried beans that are toxic unless cooked in real life), nutritional differences between rice/pasta in pot vs when placed in bowls corrected, wild foraged herbs can eventually go stale and spoil, can freeze milk (not sure why it had a "CantBeFrozen" tag, etc...

Ensures compatibility with other related mods, even those which affect these items. Note when installing upon an existing save, the items that you already have will still have their old values. This sadly is a game limitation, discover more of the map or harvest more.

Fixes the weirdness with the game's interpretation of water containers, e.g. holding a larger volume of water in a glass bourbon bottle somehow encumbers the player less than a plastic bottle holding less. Also changes the water containers such as cooking pots of water to be more cumbersome to carry around to simulate inconvenience (how do you fit that in your backpack anyway?).

Overall, it rebalances the water availability (e.g. vanilla: plastic water bottle 10 units = 100 thirst recovery, nobody cares and everyone always picks the High Thirst trait. Modded: 5 units). Larger containers like the wine bottle are more cumbersome but you can store more water. This way the water scarcity aspect of the game should hopefully be taken more seriously.

Improves the ProceduralDistribution (container spawns) of various food items to enhance player immersion. Some items are now more common such as salt and pepper, which is expected, and vinegar and sugar, which makes the preservation mechanic more useful.

Overall, the variety of food loot is slightly increased where appropriate. There is also more alcohol, and foraged herbs such as basil may appear in refrigerators, etc.

Does not conflict with other mods, cooking-related or otherwise, adding to the ProceduralDistribution of items, and being vanilla items, chances are heavily dependent upon the custom settings for loot. I personally play at insanely low settings for food, but I have tested my mod at default ‘apocalypse’ settings as well. I can't imagine what the game looks like when you increase the loot above that.

As I was editing all the fish item values I could not figure out why nothing was changing in-game. The entire hunger reduction/calories/weight, etc. were all assigned through the fishing menu script files! For compatibility's sake, if you're using any fishing mod, this is likely to conflict, so I am keeping it separate.

All the fish now restores an appropriate amount of hunger for their calories (vanilla: hunger restoration was very little so fishing was mainly a way to get fat), much lower encumbrance both raw or filleted, have more realistic world model size when dropped.

'Trash' items no longer just include socks or shoes alone, but twigs, plastic bags, dirty rags, scrap wood, unusable metal, and any other objects one may commonly expect to encounter whilst fishing.

Fishing being an idle fast-forward session of the game is somewhat more difficult now as a whole, with general sizes of each fish caught being smaller to compensate for the increases in hunger reduction values. You also will encounter a greater proportion of bait fish when you catch something, however the bait fish (minnow) now has been expanded as a 'lure' to all the larger fish as in real life, not just the pike as in vanilla code. Save your tackle and use it as bait.

It is a little bit more difficult to fish with a spear now, and generally the abundance for all sandbox 'Nature Abundance' settings is very slightly reduced. Winter also has a bit more of an effect on fishing. If you are fishing during dawn and dusk (4-6AM, 6-8PM as defined in vanilla code), you will receive a larger boost than before, so you can overcome the described increased penalties.

Ability to craft cracker dough to make crackers. Requires no skill or previous recipe knowledge, and only requires flour and water. This is to avoid a scenario which I encounter on occasion where you are somehow going hungry if you don't have salt/yeast or recipe knowledge but you have bags of flour. This yields less hunger reduction and calories per 'unit' of flour than a bread.


-Update the mod for Build 42 when the time comes.

-Create a caloric deficit moodle. It is easy to satisfy hunger penalties in the game by e.g. farming and eating raw vegetables whereas in reality your character is rapidly losing weight due to a high caloric deficit. I aim to implement a penalty for this using the MoodleFramework mod at some point when I have the time.

-Evolved recipes and hunger reduction values: It is hard to get this balanced as the value of a hunger reduction is used in an evolved recipe. E.g. if a food is -20 hunger, evolved recipes may be set to use 5 hunger max so 1/4th of the item and its nutrition is added when you click "Add to Soup" (unless you have less than 5 in which case the whole item is used). I've increased the amount of times you can e.g. mix a drink with bourbon or use butter as cooking fat by increasing their hunger reduction. If you start messing with the proportion used, you have to edit the "evolved recipe" parameter which, if you're using a cooking mod like Sapph's, I'd have to make a custom version where the parameter includes the lines for Sapph's new evolved recipes for every item. It's a lot of work for not much more gain. One thing I will definitely do is allow the player to add rice, oats, and pasta to soups and stews, and add rice/pasta to their own "pot of rice/pot of pasta" evolved recipes so that you may meal-prep larger amounts than 1/6th of rice or pasta the game currently allows for.

-Of course, if there are any issues or imbalances I will try and correct them. I use all my mods myself.


In the vanilla game, you cannot use items as bait in traps if they have less than 5 hunger reduction, which is why a lot of the insects had -5 hunger when eaten. I have reduced this to an appropriate amount, however this does not affect trapping because these insects have a zero chance of catching animals anyway! I highly recommend this mod, Advanced Trapping, to fix this, - it will allow you to use bait with less hunger reduction and they will actually catch something.

Please do not mod-pack or reupload this mod anywhere else, just share the link to this page.
I hope you enjoy this mod.

Workshop ID: 3287678031
Mod ID: sensiblebalancefoodnutrition
Mod ID: sensiblebalancefoodnutritionfishing
Mod ID: sensiblebalancefoodrecipes
Mod ID: sensiblebalancefoodspawns
Mod ID: sensiblebalancefoodwater