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Food & water

The food & water system is an optional survival layer written by Flugente and merged into 1.13 in 2012 (SVN trunk r5413, GameDir r1472). When it is on, every merc on your team has two extra needs — food and drink — that tick down every hour. Neglect them and your mercs get miserable, then weak, and eventually die. The system only affects your own team; enemies, militia and civilians are not simulated.

It is disabled by default. All current GitHub builds include it.

Turning it on

The switch lives in Ja2_Options.INI (in your Data-1.13 folder), section [Tactical Food Settings]:

[Tactical Food Settings]

; set this to TRUE to play with food.
FOOD = FALSE

Set FOOD = TRUE and start a new campaign. See the Ja2_Options.INI tour for how to edit the file safely.

Decide before you start a campaign

Food cannot be switched on or off once a campaign has started. If you regret enabling it mid-game, Flugente's suggested workaround is to set FOOD_DIGESTION_HOURLY_BASE_FOOD and FOOD_DIGESTION_HOURLY_BASE_DRINK to 0 — mercs then stop getting hungry and thirsty, which almost works like turning it off.

A related switch, ALWAYS_FOOD (default FALSE), controls whether food items appear in the game world when FOOD = FALSE. Some players like seeing meals at restaurants for roleplay reasons; others find the extra items clutter. With the system off, food items have no hunger-related effects either way. When FOOD = TRUE, food items always appear and ALWAYS_FOOD is ignored.

Hunger and thirst

Each merc has a food value and a drink value. Every hour both are lowered ("digested"). How fast depends on three things:

  • a base rate — by default FOOD_DIGESTION_HOURLY_BASE_FOOD = 20 and FOOD_DIGESTION_HOURLY_BASE_DRINK = 130 points per hour, so thirst is by far the more pressing problem;
  • the merc's current activity, via these multipliers:
Activity INI key Default multiplier
Sleeping FOOD_DIGESTION_SLEEP 0.6
Traveling by vehicle FOOD_DIGESTION_TRAVEL_VEHICLE 0.8
Working an assignment FOOD_DIGESTION_ASSIGNMENT 0.9
On duty FOOD_DIGESTION_ONDUTY 1.0
Traveling on foot FOOD_DIGESTION_TRAVEL 1.5
Combat FOOD_DIGESTION_COMBAT 2.0
  • for water, the temperature of the sector you are in — hot sectors make mercs drink more.

You can watch the two values by hovering the mouse over a merc's health bar. Since r6024 they are shown as a percentage from 0% (starving — about three weeks without any food) over 100% (the optimal, well-fed value) up to 200% (completely stuffed). When a merc starts running low, small indicator icons (for example an empty glass for thirst) appear on their portrait, and since r7858 the strategic screen tooltip spells out the exact penalties the merc is currently suffering.

What starvation does to you

Low food or water brings escalating penalties. From the feature description and the INI comments:

  • maximum morale is capped — a starving merc won't cheer up over a nice gun find;
  • energy regeneration from sleeping is lowered, so the merc needs more sleep;
  • breath (stamina) regenerates more slowly;
  • performance on assignments (repairing, doctoring, militia training …) gets worse;
  • when seriously deprived, the merc starts losing strength and health stat points every hour — this can and will kill the merc if you let it continue.

With stock settings a merc survives roughly 3–4 days without water and about three weeks without food — but suffers long before that. Stat points lost to starvation can be restored by doctoring (surgery, under the new trait system), but only once the patient is well-fed again: feed the merc back above 100% first, then put a doctor on the job.

Eating and drinking

Eating works exactly like using a canteen always has: in the inventory screen, pick up the food item and drop it on the merc's body. Details worth knowing:

  • Mercs feed themselves. Once hungry or thirsty, a merc automatically searches their own inventory and eats or drinks at the next full hour. In practice you just keep some food and a filled canteen in everyone's pack and forget about it.
  • You cannot force-feed. Mercs refuse food beyond their limit, and since r6024 food intake is non-linear: the more saturated a merc is, the fewer points each meal gives. Eat when hungry instead of "stocking up".
  • Portions. Most items are consumed in several bites — each use costs a percentage of the item's status (the <usPortionSize> value in Items.xml; a canteen, for instance, gives five drinks of 20% each).
  • Food affects morale. A fine wine can lift spirits; forcing down rotten meat does the opposite. On top of that, individual mercs have personal tastes defined in FoodOpinion.xml — in stock data Blood enjoys wine and really doesn't appreciate being fed cat food.
  • Food can double as drugs. Items can be both food and drug — stock energy drinks and coffee quench thirst and give a mild stimulant effect through the drug system.
  • Mercs make eating and drinking noises; turn this off with FOOD_EATING_SOUNDS = FALSE.

Some example items from the stock Food.xml (higher points = more filling; the two values use the same scale as the hourly digestion rates above):

Item Food points Drink points Spoils?
Canteen 0 2000 never
Beer 0 2200 never
MRE 1200 0 never
Canned vegetables 600 0 never
Steak 920 0 quickly
Cow meat (raw) 2000 0 very quickly
Water drum 0 100000 never

Canteens and refilling

With the food system on, canteens no longer vanish when emptied — they stay in inventory at 1% status ("empty") and are truly refillable:

  • In current builds, Ctrl+. opens the tactical Action Menu, which includes the canteen actions; the Skills Menu (A or Shift+4, or Alt + right-click) also lists Fill Canteens. In the original SVN-era implementation Ctrl+. refilled canteens directly. See the hotkey reference.
  • If the sector contains fresh water (a river, or the water supply of houses), all canteens in the sector and in your team's inventories are refilled.
  • Water quality is defined per sector (<sWaterType> in SectorNames.xml): no water, drinkable water, salt water (undrinkable), or poisoned water (swamps and polluted sectors). You can fill canteens from a swamp, but drinking the result poisons your mercs. Underground sectors have no water source.
  • If there is no water in the sector, canteens refill from a water drum — a huge barrel item made purely for this purpose. Fill one where water is available and store it at your HQ to replenish your squads' water supply — even in a desert.
  • Refilling only works while there are no enemies in the sector, and only items with drink points can be refilled.

Getting food

  • Merchants across Arulco serve a wide variety of meals and are your primary source of food and water; the thread names the Santos brothers as the best source. Expect fresh restaurant meals to spoil within days — eat them, don't stockpile them.
  • Bobby Ray's sells military rations and conserves (MREs, canned goods) that never spoil — ideal travel food.
  • Enemy drops. Some food drops as random loot from enemies.
  • Field dressing. You can gut dead cows and bloodcats for their meat. It is very nutritious but raw, spoils fast, and your mercs will not be happy eating it.
  • Facilities. Some facilities let mercs eat as a strategic assignment. In stock data the Army Barracks Cantina in Alma (which has no food merchants) feeds a merc for $10 per hour once you control the barracks; per FacilityTypes.xml there is also a chance of a morale boost — or of getting drunk.

Spoilage

Perishable food decays over time — each food type has its own decay rate in Food.xml (canned and military food has none). A colored bar on the item shows its state, from green (good) to brown (bad), and the item description gives a hint too. Decayed food restores fewer food/drink points, can negate its morale bonus, and rotten food can poison the eater.

Two INI settings control spoilage globally:

; allow decay of food in every sector?
FOOD_DECAY_IN_SECTORS            = TRUE
; a global modificator to the speed at which food decays. 1.0 is normal, values between 0.1 and 10.0
FOOD_DECAY_MODIFICATOR           = 1.0

The food system also feeds into the (separately optional) disease system in [Disease Settings]: with DISEASE = TRUE, spoiled food is one way to catch a disease, and a merc carrying disease #0 contaminates any food they eat from (DISEASE_CONTAMINATES_ITEMS = TRUE).

For modders

The data lives in Data-1.13\TableData (see XML files):

  • TableData\Items\Food.xml — the food type list: <uiIndex>, <szName>, <bFoodPoints>, <bDrinkPoints>, <usDecayRate> and optional <bMoraleMod>.
  • TableData\Items\Items.xml — an item becomes food via <FoodType> (index into Food.xml); <usPortionSize> sets how much status one bite consumes. (The portion size originally lived in Food.xml as <ubPortionSize> and moved to Items.xml in 2015.) Item flags mark water drums and cow/bloodcat meat.
  • TableData\Items\FoodOpinion.xml — per-merc morale modifiers for specific foods.
  • TableData\Map\SectorNames.xml — <sWaterType> per sector (0 none, 1 drinkable, 2 salt, 3 poisoned).
  • TableData\Map\FacilityTypes.xml — facilities with a FACILITY_EAT assignment, such as the Alma cantina.

Should you enable it?

Food & water is a logistics and immersion feature, not a tactical one. It shines in slow, roleplay-heavy campaigns: planning supply runs, filling water drums for a desert push, and deciding whether that three-day-old stew is still worth eating. Thanks to auto-eating the day-to-day micromanagement is low — keep a canteen and some non-perishable rations in every pack and mercs handle the rest. The money cost is trivial; the real cost is attention during long marches and sieges, and the early game before you have a supply routine.

Skip it if you want a purely tactical experience — and remember lockie's advice from the original thread: "Is it too much micro management? If so, switch it off!" If you do enable it, consider pairing it with the disease system for the full survival package, and stock up before long trips through hot or swampy terrain.

Sources