If so, the player may still need/want to specify how to group them into food categories. Shellfish is an extensive category made of several unrelated groups, for example (aquatic exoskeletal and aquatic shelled creatures, but not close relatives of the same). The question of whether an aquatic creature descended from a terrestrial creature (such as whales) should be the same or a different category of food from its land relatives could be chosen by the player, perhaps. Or, perhaps some food group naming rules could be developed, if they can be agreed upon and that if found easier.
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Maybe the player would have the option to specify the groups if they wish to while the algorithms would be able to differenciate the distinct classes of food so that it isnβt necessary for the player to intervene most of the time?
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Yeah, that was more or less what I meant. I do wonder though if it should default to combining Shelled Aquatic creatures and Exoskeleton Aquatic creatures, or if the default should be for those to be distinct and let the player combine them if they choose. Shellfish is a large and diverse category.
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I think they should be distinct, Iβm pretty sure crab meat and oyster meat are greatly different
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I have never actually eaten either, but I would assume they are very different, so yeah, agreed. For whatever reason, Homo Sapiens group those together as the same type of food, so I suggested it, but it really is a weird thing to do.
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Probably because they have a similar origin, both and overall being seen as seafood
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Ah, in that case I agree that could be good (itβs not that far off from what I suggested).
If the game generates these food groups then it will have to name them by necessity. Whether those names will be any good is a separate question.
Letting the player manually create resource categories would be pretty handy, but I wonder if that would be practical to actually try and implement. And even if it would be, you would need some kind of fallback/default for uncategorized species.
Perhaps it could by default just let every species be its own separate category of food (like my original idea) and the game or player could group them together into broader subcategories as they see fit.
Another thing that I think would need to be represented by foods would be the (rough) nutritional needs of your species. My food groups idea could help, but I feel itβs inherently kinda anthropocentric (grazers can get all their nutritional needs from what we would label as vegetable/fiber, for example), which is part of why it would struggle to represent non-human diets.
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Iβm pretty sure they need to supplement their diet with things like shed antlers and rocks from time to time
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Grains. Also called Grasses or Cereals. Includes Rice, Wheat, Rye, Oat, Barley, Millet, Maize (Corn), Amaranth, Buckwheat, Quinoa, Sorghum, Sugarcane, and the grass that grows in your yard as well as the taller version in Savannas and Prairies.
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I wonder, would grazers be interested by fruit?
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Peak Science Fiction!
What if fruit equivalents donβt evolve on a world?
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Also wasnβt there a problem with grazer civs being that the vegetation is usually a low energy foodsource that may not be enough to sustain a sapient brain?
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Arenβt Elephants an exception to this due to being very smart despite being vegetarian?
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They do, salt licks and whatnot, my point was just that their diets are far more narrow than ours.
Grain is specifically the seeds Iβm pretty sure, when referring to food groups.
Grazers naturally love fruit (theyβre filled with sugars/carbs and water) but will have digestive issues if they eat too many.
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I think it may also have to do with the overall size of the creature
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