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Caloric Countdown

Gradually increases hunger drain over time.

After playing Don't Starve Together for a while, I noticed that by far the most interesting part of the game was always the very beginning. A friend summed this up well by saying "the goal of the early game is to become self-sustaining, after which point the game becomes boring because survival gets easier and easier." The basic problem is that as you play through Don't Starve, you acquire more and more tools and loot and become stronger, but the game doesn't really get any harder. There are only 3 ways in which the difficulty of the game scales with time:

- Hound attacks become more frequent and in larger numbers
- Treeguards are more likely to appear
- Vargs are more likely to appear

Unfortunately, almost all of these are trivial if you play the game well. Hounds are easily dispatched by tooth traps or neutral creatures, Treeguards are easily kited or pacified, and the Varg can be avoided altogether by simply using the sewing kit to repair your puffy vest instead of killing more Koelafants. Essentially, if you can survive the first 40 days or so, it is very unlikely that you will ever die and surviving a long time is more a matter of patience than anything else.

This mod aims to fix that by gradually increasing the rate at which your hunger drains, thus forcing you to eat more to stay alive. This ensures that the difficulty of the game keeps going up, as you must continually increase your food production or you will starve. This also means infinite survival is now impossible, which means that how long you can survive is actually tied to your skill at the game again.

For the math nerds out there, the way that this works is that the function to calculate hunger drain is modified as follows:

Hunger Drain = Hunger Multiplier * Character_Base_Hunger * (1 + Days_Elapsed / Days_to_Double)

The last bracket is added by this mod. Days_to_Double is a configurable parameter that controls how fast the hunger drain rate increases. If it is set to 20, for example, by day 21 you now need to eat twice as much as you did on day 1. It keeps going up, so by day 41 you'd now need to eat 3 times as much, and so on. The default for this parameter is 40, which should be enough not to drastically change the early parts of the game, but it will become noticeable towards the end of winter.

In Version 1.1, a new option is added. You can now set the Hunger Growth Rate to Logrhythmic, which causes it to take 1.5 times longer to double each time. So if the base rate was 40, the first time would take 40 days, the next would be 60 days, then 90 days, and so on. This should make long-term survival slightly easier.

Incidentally, this mod has good synergy with my Recipe Rebalancer mod, which aims to weaken easy strategies of staying well-fed indefinitely.