Diet Setup

Human — generalist candidate

Provisional, inactive Human example

The Human candidate keeps all five nutrition capacities at 1.0, has no special food rules, and uses the neutral fallback. It is the reference diet: fruit, vegetables, grain, protein and dairy all count normally.

Race Framework's Human baseline is a 1× stomach and 1× hunger rate. Copy ModConfig-examples/candidate-diets/human.json to ModConfig/dietsetup/diets/human.json only if you want this opt-in nutrition model instead of the built-in profile.

Dwarf — preserved foods and fungus

Provisional, inactive Dwarf example

The Dwarf candidate favours preserved roots, leafy foods, fruit, meat and fish, with the preserved source rules taking priority. Fungus is nourishing, cooked grain and alcohol receive their authored responses, and raw meat is deliberately poor. A fish rule excludes shellfish and egg, so those identities do not accidentally become fish.

Dwarves have a stomach 30% larger than Human with the same hunger rate, giving about 1.3× full-stomach duration on the shared baseline. This is a candidate diet, not an automatic racial binding.

Elf — fresh foods and gradual spoilage

Provisional, inactive Elf example

The Elf candidate marks meat and standalone organ foods such as supported offal as Inedible. Fish remains permitted without the fresh-food bonus and declines gradually as it spoils; seed and nut foods are nourishing, preserved foods are Harmful, and the dairy capacity is zero. Its generic spoiled-food curve starts at the fresh value so the first spoil tick is not an artificial cliff.

Elves have a 30% smaller stomach and a 47.5% lower hunger rate than Human, about 1.33× full-stomach duration on the shared baseline, or about 1.57× with RF Mechanics installed. The candidate is inactive until an administrator copies and selects it.

Orc — meat and a large stomach

Provisional, inactive Orc example

The Orc candidate has no fruit or vegetable capacity, a reduced grain and dairy share, and a larger protein share. Cooked supported meat is Nourishing, raw meat is usable at a lower nutrition response, organs are Nourishing, and fish and insects are usable with a smaller nutrition response. Seeds and nuts fill the stomach poorly. The raw-meat grant is not active automatically: copy the example food-overrides.json as well, so the listed Orc and Goblin diets are allowed to eat supported raw red meat, poultry or bushmeat.

Orcs have a stomach 150% larger than Human and a 40% higher hunger rate, about 1.8× full-stomach duration on the shared baseline. Race Framework and RF Mechanics still do not select this Diet Setup profile unless the administrator binds it.

Goblin — age, insects and rot

Provisional, inactive Goblin example

The Goblin candidate makes supported rotten food nourishing, favours insects, and lets supported meat, fish and organ foods improve as they age before declining. Fresh fruit, leaves and roots are Harmful and poor; fungus is neutral; juice has its own souring curve. The optional raw-meat grants list Goblin with Orc, but the grants still require an administrator to install them.

Goblins have a 30% smaller stomach and a 15% higher hunger rate than Human, about 0.6× full-stomach duration on the shared baseline. The Goblin voice may say “Too fresh to do you much good”, “Half-spoiled: just how you like it” or “Past its best, but still good”, depending on the winning rule and spoil level.

Half-Giant — optional candidate

Provisional, inactive Half-Giant example

Half-Giant is not one of the six built-in profiles. The candidate gives agricultural and herding foods room to matter: supported dairy and grain are Nourishing, roots receive a smaller boost, and cooked meat is Nourishing. It uses demand-normalised nutrition so its very large racial food demand is measured against the Human reference scale.

Race Framework's Half-Giant value is a 7.3× stomach and ×5.31 hunger rate, about 1.4× full-stomach duration on the shared baseline. Copy ModConfig-examples/candidate-diets/halfgiant.json, and add rf-halfgiant-positive to the bindings file, only when using the Race Framework release that provides that trait. RF Mechanics is not required by Diet Setup, but use its Half-Giant-supporting release if you install it too.

Installation and race bindings

Server setup

Install the same dietsetup_1.1.0.zip on the server and every client. Copy ModConfig-examples/bindings.json.example from the ZIP to the server's ModConfig/dietsetup/bindings.json, removing .example. The supplied example maps rf-human-positive, rf-dwarf-positive, rf-elf-positive, rf-orc-positive, rf-goblin-positive and rf-halfgiant-positive to their matching diet IDs, with base as the default.

Copy a candidate diet to ModConfig/dietsetup/diets/<race>.json before selecting it. Run /dietreload, then /dietdiag to check the selected diet and snapshot revision/hash. A restart is not needed for ordinary binding, diet or tag reloads when /dietreload succeeds. The server sends effective diets, tags, bindings, configuration and grants to clients on join/reload; clients do not need matching local ModConfig files.

For a server without Race Framework, an administrator with controlserver privilege can use /dietassignrules <id>; /dietassignrules clear returns to trait/default selection. Changes to the definition of an edibility grant require a world restart. The master switch can suspend or re-enable existing grants immediately.

Nutrition options and stomach changes

Opt-in versus shared behavior

• nutritionModel: demandNormalised is opt-in per diet. Nutrition gain is measured as if the eater had the 1500-point Human stomach and appetite, divided by nutritionRequirement (default 1.0, with optional per-category values), and supported bars decay on the Human curve while cold and other hunger effects still apply. Diets without this field keep the legacy model.
• overflowNutrition: proportional is opt-in per diet and changes the default whole-item nutrition credit only when the mouthful offers more satiety than the stomach has room for. The share that fits receives the corresponding share of nutrition. Bowls and pies already cut a serving to available space, so their fitting fraction stays 1.
• A mouthful that starts on a full stomach gives no nutrition, even though vanilla may still allow the eating operation. The 12.5-health-point nutrition bonus cap and the stomach-size reconciliation apply to Diet Setup nutrition generally, not just the examples.

When stomach size or a diet changes, each bar keeps its share of the old stomach only when both old and new diets support that category; a newly unsupported or newly supported bar starts empty as appropriate. Excess satiety above a smaller stomach is removed on the next hunger tick, attack or meal, not when a world loads. Separately, after a race change the new stomach size only applies once the world is reloaded.

The Human, Orc and Half-Giant files under ModConfig-examples/nutrition-pilot/ demonstrate the three opt-in fields. The six candidate race diets also opt in, but remain inactive until copied and selected.

Food identity, meals and spoilage

What gets resolved

Diet Setup follows ingredients where the game exposes them. A heated pot meal treats its raw ingredients as cooked. A pie uses the pie's baked state and age for its fillings; a mixing-bowl food stays unheated. Filled drinks use the consumed liquid's facts. Expanded Foods rows can contribute additional nutrition categories, while an outer bowl or pie label cannot honestly summarize a mixed meal whose ingredients disagree.

Mappings are partial, not blanket support. The shipped tags cover selected vanilla foods plus selected items from Expanded Foods (aged meat, sausages, pemmican, fish nuggets, broths and lime eggs), Butchering (offal, blood, sausages, black pudding and blood bread), Cannibalism (hearts, meats and smoked meats), Primitive Survival (fish, crabmeat and cooked roe), A Culinary Artillery (egg portions and expanded-food rows), and Wet Crops (selected grain, flour, dough, bread and root foods). A heart is treated as meat, and shellfish remains distinct from fish and egg.

Some prepared foods have no per-ingredient quantities available. assets/dietsetup/config/food-composition.json therefore declares recipe-based satiety shares for selected sausages, pemmican and blood foods. Those compositions are explicit approximations; a supported mod does not mean every food from that mod is mapped. Hydration is not part of this compatibility.

Diet Setup's rot-intake tracker records a bounded, decaying dietsetup:intake:rot attribute for actual rot intake; fresh, failed, cancelled and zero-serving operations add nothing. /dietrotintake inspects or sets it for testing. RF Mechanics currently responds to literal game:rot consumption and does not read this attribute, so the two systems should not be advertised as an automatic integration.

Commands and diagnostics

Server commands

Players with the commandplayer privilege can use /dietdiag (player state or an item code), /dietshow <id>, /dietfood held, /dietfood target, /dietfood last and /dietfactsqueue. /dietfood requires a player; its reports distinguish preview facts from an actual consumed mouthful and show ingredient portions where available.

Administrators with controlserver can use /dietreload, /dietassignrules, /dietdrainsatiety, /dietsetnutrition and /dietrotintake. The client-side author checks /diettags and /dietresolve <dietId> inspect the active hotbar item without applying anything.

For a useful bug report, include the mod version and ZIP SHA-256, Vintage Story version, packaged build identity, other food mods, spoilage state, consumed quantity, bowl/pie/drink type, singleplayer or dedicated-server context, and the relevant /dietdiag, /dietfood held or /dietfood last output.

Development and AI use

I've been a developer for about five years, and for the last two years I've worked closely with advanced AI models. C# is a language I have much less experience with, so I use LLM coding tools to supplement my knowledge of the language and Vintage Story's modding API.

AI has a substantial role in this project, including generated code, debugging, research and documentation. I direct development, playtest as work progresses, and handle release decisions and maintenance. Not every situation has been tested. The source is available for inspection, contributions and forks.

Licence and credits

Original work is MIT-licensed. Fork, modify and redistribute it while retaining the included license notices. Third-party material remains under its own terms; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and CREDITS.md.

Thanks to Anego Studios for Vintage Story and its modding API, and to the creators of A Culinary Artillery, Expanded Foods, Butchering, Primitive Survival, Wildcraft and the other food mods studied during development. Those projects informed food-format research; this acknowledgement does not mean every combination has been tested.