rant incoming: I realized I bitterly hate an aspect of Crawl, which surprised me because I am a mild sort.
I hate food.
Why is it there?
In nethack, food was an interesting minigame, it was scarse, you could starve (I did at least three times in my memory), and better yet, when you ate enemies, occasionally you would get an intrinsic. As you got better, you zero'd in on monsters that were good eating (floating eyes for telepathy, giants for strength, dragons for surviving dragons). You even had interesting situations when you would desperately try to eat (or better yet, can) one fresh corpse before it rotted while getting swarmed.
It also limited spellcasting which was otherwise completely overpowered and easy. It also prevented camping a layer indefinitely for spawns.
Now, DCSS. Food does nothing and adds no intrinsics.
It is so plentiful that I end up dumping piles of fruit and rations into my stash. Edible monsters are everywhere. Starving only happens when harpies attack before you are ready. Of course, then you inevitably starve because apparently a hardened adventurer needs to eat a full steak every 20 minutes.
Food does little to prevent camping, because, as i mentioned, it is plentiful. On the other hand, there are functions in place to prevent camping, since layers will spawn out-of-depth monsters when you hang out too long.
Food apparently manages and restricts spellcasting. Spellcasting is thus managed and restricted by A. mana, B. Food C. Intelligence and D. Spellcast failure rate. It is so nerfed compared to Nethack, most people seem to use 2-3 spells: namely Haste, mephitic cloud, (fire/poison/frost) cloud. Every other interesting spell is not viable because A. you won't ever succeed in casting it. B. if you do, you will be out of mana C. you'll be starving. again.
Conversely, melee is "managed and restricted" by hitting tab a lot. and sometimes drinking a potion.
Why does spellcasting need the added restriction of hunger when it is already nerfed by mana and other factors that make it hard for newer players?
Why does it need food, the least nerfy or nerfs, which basically means that casting interesting spells is not just mana draining and difficult but also makes you hungry. Which means you have to eat something. Which is all it means.
Why the hell does crawl need a repeptitive "minigame" consisting of periodically consuming an item in your inventory to delay the next time you need to consume an item in your inventory?
Does anyone enjoy any aspect of food, or find it enriches their game?