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{{trope}}
{{quote|First off, the [[Ultima|Avatar]] is a junkie. He's addicted to two main substances, 'Food' and potions. Food is probably the most dangerous, since the Avatar is totally unable to kick the habit and withdrawal will kill him. Worse yet, the other party members will ... also become Food users simply by virtue of being in close proximity to the Avatar.
|'''''[http://www.it-he.org IT-HE Software]''''', ''[[Ultima]] V - Lazarus'' page}}
This is the practice of using a food resource as a time limit. It is sometimes implemented as a hard time limit, with running out of "time" meaning death, or other times it simply conveys various disadvantages, such as weakening stats or an increased chance of death. If you're lucky, actual consumption of food will be abstracted away. At other times, you'll need to explicitly eat the food. Being able to die from overeating isn't unheard of.
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Depending on who you ask (and on how the game uses it), this is either an enjoyable source of tension, a gentle prompt to keep a player moving through the game or [[Scrappy Mechanic|an unwanted aspect of the game]].
Trope named after the way the game ''[[Gauntlet (1985 video game)|Gauntlet]]'' tells the player that he's [[Critical Annoyance|about to starve to death]] if he's playing a wizard (or elf, or valkyrie, or warrior).
Probably related to [[Timed Mission]] but takes place over an entire game. Sometimes paired with a [[Hyperactive Metabolism]]. The inversion of [[Easy Logistics]]. Sometimes used in [[Roguelike
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* In every ''[[Digimon]]'' anime series, if the mons were too hungry, they couldn't Digivolve, and thus couldn't fight. Much time was devoted to finding food.
* In ''[[Flint the Time Detective]]'', the eponymous protagonist becomes very weak when it's hungry.
* In early [[
** At one point, it enables a much weaker demon to actually beat Goku in a fight. And hunger played a big role in Goku's inability to defeat Mercenary Tao in their first encounter.
* Luffy from ''[[One Piece]]'' often excuses his (temporary) losses to not having eaten.
** And large feasts are a favorite way to recover from his injuries after a fight. So much so that after a particularly brutal battle, he manages to ''[[Beyond the Impossible|eat while unconscious]]''.
* Implied in [[Lyrical Nanoha|Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]] that Modern Belkan practitioners (what with their [[Full
* [[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]: This was a trope made use of in some of the earlier episodes where the characters, including {{spoiler|their eventual powerhouse}} Simon, couldn't make use of their mechs or spiral energy when on an empty stomach.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* [[Iron Man]] foe Ezekiel Stane modified his own body to be able to do everything that Iron Man's [[Powered Armor]] could do, such as repulsor blasts and flight. Using his powers drains a ''lot'' of energy, so Ezekiel has to regularly consume a very high-calorie goo to keep his energy and blood sugar up.
== [[Fan Works]] ==
* John in ''[[
== [[Literature]] ==▼
* A literal example in ''Divine Hammer'', the second book of the [[Kingpriest Trilogy]]. An evil apprentice mage is trapped in [[Tailor-Made Prison|the abandoned underground base]] of his master. There is no physical exit, he's not skilled enough to teleport out (plus he doesn't know where he is) and every bit of useful magical paraphernalia has been stripped from the base except for a summoning pool. He ends up surviving off of {{spoiler|''the flesh of the (weak) demons he summons''}}.▼
* Mordred Deschain from [[The Dark Tower]] series suffers from something similar to this. The only way that he can travel long distances or fight or really do much of anything is if he changes into his [[Giant Spider]] form, which unfortunately for him has a metabolism that runs extremely hot and fast and digests food quickly, so that he is constantly hungry and looking for food while hunting down Roland and his friends. A good example of this horrifying metabolism is when he eats {{spoiler|Randall Flagg}}, who as any Stephen King fan knows is extremely powerful and likely very high in calories and other nutrients. (He had also just eaten a small-but very fatty and protein/carbohydrate-rich meal of peanut butter and crackers before being eaten himself.) Mordred blows through the energy that this (literally) magical feast affords him in about a day, and most of that day is spent sleeping. After that point the biggest things he gets to eat are a radioactive and half-dead coyote, a feeble old man named Rando Thoughtful(whom he had to share with over a thousand telepathically-controlled crows), and a diseased horse which gives him food poisoning and {{spoiler|ultimately leads to his death.}}.▼
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Kids' [[Game Show]] ''[[Knightmare]]'' had a life force clock which gradually counted down to nothing, and could be refilled by picking up food and putting it into a knapsack.
** Particularly notable for the terrifying quality of said life clock (basically, ''a face which falls apart'') and the fact that it seemed to need refuelling [[Hyperactive Metabolism|every ten minutes.]]
*** Here's the specifics on the face. You started out with the knight's head in a helmet (green background). As your life force ran down, bits of the helmet broke off, until you had nothing but the face (yellow background). At this point, the skin started peeling away (no blood, but that didn't really stop it being horrific). Eventually, you'd get down to just the skull (red background). From there, the jaw came off, then part of the top of the skull, then (and here's where the ''real'' terrors happened) the ''rest of the skull flying towards the camera'' (it went through one of the eye sockets). Then the eyes rolled off the screen. When that happened... '''''[[Game Over|BONG!]]''''' [[Game Over|"Ooooh... nasty."]] It was used only in the first five seasons.
** For seasons 6 and 7, the face was replaced by an armored skeleton which slowly lost armor. When all the armor was gone, the skeleton would crumble, and that was it. (The skull from before made one appearance in season 6.
** And then season 8 came, and the life force was represented by, of all things, a ''cake.''
* [[Lexx]] had this for the titular [[Living Ship]], which needed to eat organic things (Like planets or large chunks of them) to survive. Kai, as an assassin for the Divine Order, needed a goopy substance called proto-blood to continue functioning. Sometimes, the search for food would be the plot of an entire episode.
* Maintaining and replenishing their extremely limited resources was a main plot driver in ''[[Battlestar Galactica
== [[Music]] ==
* Nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot features the backing vocals "Frontalot Needs Food Badly" at one point in the starving-artist-themed
* Ska band [[Five Iron Frenzy]] made a song of this, including the voice from ''Gauntlet'' saying "Wizard needs food, badly" at the start, and "Wizard is about to die" at the end.
* The [[Aquabats]] also referenced this in their largely-instrumental song Ska Boss; at the end, after what is presumably a fight with the band, the Ska Boss announces that he "needs food badly", and that "Ska Boss is about to die".
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Rarely a problem in ''[[Dungeons
** 4th edition has an item anyone with 4 levels, 840 gold, and the Ritual Caster feat can create, producing enough food for five people every day. Also, the rules specify that everybody can go without food for thirty days ''before'' they start to feel any adverse effects.
*** All of this assumes, however, that your DM is the type who keeps track of this sort of thing.
**** Hey, Bards can create not just food but a portable hotel for free!
* The ''[[GURPS]]'' ''Create Food'' spell would allow the caster to convert any non-metallic matter into edible food. [[Hilarity Ensues|Discussions and speculations]] that continue to this day point out that any character with access to this spell would be able to eat their way out of any dungeon that wasn't built completely of metal or otherwise given specific protection from this spell.
** 4th Edition dropped the "non-metallic" rule. Which makes Food College Mages into [[Extreme Omnivore|nearly unstoppable tunneling machines]].
* ''Ars Magica'' subverts the above: Rather than being able to eat ''anything'' this game's variant on the ''Create Food'' spell does exactly that. However, most such spells have a limited duration, after which the food vanishes, taking its nourishment with it. While you could make a spell that created food that didn't vanish in this way, it would be too expensive to be worthwhile. Worse, living off magically-created food would cause Warping if done for any extended period of time.
* The main tension in the ''[[Battlestar Galactica
▲== [[Literature]] ==
▲* A literal example in ''Divine Hammer'', the second book of the [[Kingpriest Trilogy]]. An evil apprentice mage is trapped in [[Tailor-Made Prison|the abandoned underground base]] of his master. There is no physical exit, he's not skilled enough to teleport out (plus he doesn't know where he is) and every bit of useful magical paraphernalia has been stripped from the base except for a summoning pool. He ends up surviving off of {{spoiler|''the flesh of the (weak) demons he summons''}}.
▲* Mordred Deschain from [[The Dark Tower]] series suffers from something similar to this. The only way that he can travel long distances or fight or really do much of anything is if he changes into his [[Giant Spider]] form, which unfortunately for him has a metabolism that runs extremely hot and fast and digests food quickly, so that he is constantly hungry and looking for food while hunting down Roland and his friends. A good example of this horrifying metabolism is when he eats {{spoiler|Randall Flagg}}, who as any Stephen King fan knows is extremely powerful and likely very high in calories and other nutrients. (He had also just eaten a small-but very fatty and protein/carbohydrate-rich meal of peanut butter and crackers before being eaten himself.) Mordred blows through the energy that this (literally) magical feast affords him in about a day, and most of that day is spent sleeping. After that point the biggest things he gets to eat are a radioactive and half-dead coyote, a feeble old man named Rando Thoughtful(whom he had to share with over a thousand telepathically-controlled crows), and a diseased horse which gives him food poisoning and {{spoiler|ultimately leads to his death.}}.
== [[Video Games]] ==
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** ''[[Aetolia]]'' works similarly, but also has the [[Our Vampires Are Different|Consanguine]] who need to consume blood, and the [[Our Werewolves Are Different|Atabahi and Bahkatu]] who can eat the dead, including the things they kill.
* There was a shout-out to this in ''[[Tony Hawks Pro Skater]] 4'', in a mission to feed construction workers titled "Workers Need Food Badly".
* In ''[[The Black Cauldron (
** There was a "food wallet" under a bridge that had unlimited uses, and your water jug can be refilled indefinitely at any stream.
** The mechanic ''was'' used again, both in the ''[[Quest for Glory]]'' series, and in ''[[King's Quest V]]''. Also, the Black Cauldron's limits are generous, and the game overall is pretty easy.
** Actually, the mechanic appears in ''[[King's Quest III]]'', too. Manannan, to whom you are enslaved, periodically demands food. If you don't feed him within 3 game-minutes, you are killed. There are only four things in the game you can feed to him; if you feed him the fourth without special preparation, the game becomes [[Unwinnable
* Even older is Epyx's ''[[Crush Crumble and Chomp]]'', a turn-based strategy game that has the player play a [[Kaiju]] out to destroy a city. The player must regularly eat <s>food</s> people to sustain his monstrous self. Failure to do so would result in the monster going mad with hunger; this was simulated by having the game enter random commands, which tended to leave the player vulnerable to the humans' counterattacks.
** Actually it was not random. The monster would rapidly take the shortest route to an onscreen living human, crushing any buildings in the way, and entering commands much faster then you could normally. Which was fine, except when there was a nuclear power plant in the way, which would result in your monster trying to stomp it, and getting destroyed. Or simply going for the one on screen where it would be more tactically wise to switch screens, as the longer you stay on one screen, the more heavy artillery shows up.
* Food availability limits city growth in ''[[Civilization]]''. The AI will often pillage your farms, trying to cause depopulation and civil unrest through starvation. In earlier games, lack of food could even result in military units spontaneously disbanding! (Now they are supplied entirely with money.)
* ''[[Dead Frontier]]'' has it. You gain twice much XP when being completely nourished, but you lose life when you're starving. And the higher your level is, the rarer (or pricey) the food is. Newbiens can live on beer, potato chips and candies, but top-level players eat only caviar, red wine and fresh meat.
* Infinity mode in ''[[Dead Rising]]''. It's necessary in that game because Infinity Mode is timed with an online leaderboard. Without a timer, there would still be fools with their [[X Boxes]] humming away and Frank West just sitting on an awning that the Zombies can't reach.
* In ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'', making sure that your dwarves keep well fed is vital to keeping them alive. Making sure that they have sufficient alcohol is vital to keeping them productive and non-homicidal. Yup, a dwarf forced to drink water will work more and more slowly and his happiness will decrease, making him more likely to snap and start murdering his neighbors or commit suicide. The later versions have made it harder to starve during your first winter, but it's still something that must be planned against.
** Sometimes more insidious, all of the dwarves have food preferences and keep track of what they've eaten lately, and get unhappier if served the same food and drink constantly.
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** In the remake, ''[[Avernum]]'', the significance of food diminished, then vanished until ''Avernum 6'', where the scarcity of food became a plot point again.
*** To be precise, the Avernum trilogy removed starvation, but required food for resting (restoring health and energy). Avernum 4 dispensed with this too, instead turning all food into low-level healing potions (as in ''[[Geneforge]]'', which Avernum 4's mechanics were based on in part).
* ''[[
* The aforementioned ''[[Gauntlet (1985 video game)]]'' abstracts its food away into a clock that gradually counts down. Said food counter doubled as a health meter, meaning it doubled as a [[Hyperactive Metabolism]].
** The blue sorceress still needs clothes badly though.
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]: San Andreas'' tied CJ's life meter to his hunger. If you go without eating for a long time, CJ's fat and muscle stats begin to deplete, and his life meter eventually starts draining. Luckily, you'd have to go a very long time without food before the game starts to remind you that you need to eat and you'd practically have to be starving CJ on purpose if he were to die from hunger.. Since food is the only way to recover energy while not on a mission, eating too much (except salads) would make CJ gain weight.
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*** And don't forget the fact that, since it is tied with your life bar, ''[[Hyperactive Metabolism|going for a burger heals the bullet holes in your body]]''.
* [http://www.mobygames.com/game/storm Storm], a 1986 Gauntlet-like by Mastertronic, uses food as the health meter. If it starts running low, the message ''"Storm needs food badly..."'' or ''"Wizard is about to die..."'' (depending on the character) will scroll on the top of the screen.
* While ''[[Rogue (
** Nethack has an explicit [[Shout
** Food is a similar resource in [[Alpha Man]], though it's a little more simplified.
** This is a key part of most [[
** ''[[Angband]]'' players must eat, though the mechanics are simpler than in ''Nethack'', especially with Satisfy Hunger scrolls or spells. It is possible, though unlikely, for the message warning about hunger to appear ''after'' "You die."
** ''[[Nethack]]'' lets the player #pray for food when fainting from hunger. It might work, if the player's god isn't angry with him, and the player hasn't prayed recently.
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* In the [[Advance Wars]] series, units consume fuel (or rations, in the infantry's case) with every step they take. If they run out, they cannot move until a friendly APC or transport unit picks them up.
** Unless it's a ship or a plane, in which case it falls down or sinks.
* The ''[[Harvest Moon]]''
** Luckily, any Harvest Moon game is full of lots of tasty free herbs growing in the forest behind your farm, and they all respawn daily or every other day (and can be kept in your 'fridge, or even your ''rucksack'', for fifty years without spoiling). The other versions (besides the Wonderful Life version mentioned above) only have you eating food to refill your stamina meter, which is depleted by using tools (so that a day of just running around talking to people won't leave you hungry, but a day of mining will).
** In ''Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness'', the fatigue bar has been replaced with a "fullness" bar that depletes with time, and seems to do so faster during particularly hot or rainy days. You will HAVE to eat (or use the kappa earrings) to keep it filled; if the hunger bar goes to zero, you WILL pass out even though you may have full stamina. Even if you don't let it run down, when the fullness bar starts slipping below half, you'll start waking up later and later in the morning, until about 20%, when you wake up at noon! Also, the "freshness" meter on food and flower items makes sure you can't keep them forever (unless you have a gold/mythic fridge); spoiled food fills you up less.
* ''[[
* You would die of starvation in the ''[[Quest for Glory]]'' series if you went too long without eating anything. (There was also death by dehydration in the second game since the setting was in a desert.)
** In the first game, you can't starve to death (although you still get the warnings that your character needs to eat) due to a programming oversight. In the third game, if you're wandering in the overworld and starving, a giant waffle will follow you until you eat it.
* Parodied by ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' with "[http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Glug%2C_Glug%2C_Glug the wettest water you've ever encountered]" which makes you "Ultrahydrated" to adventure in The Arid, Extra-Dry Desert.
** Also averted therein with a general consumable system which doesn't penalize the player for long periods without food or booze; in fact, the game rather generously rewards [[Self-Imposed Challenge|Self Imposed Challenges]] of the sort.
** Also also, a [[Shout
** If you're doing an [[Self-Imposed Challenge|Oxygenarian]] run, you may have an encounter in the pirate tavern where the tavern keeper [[Lampshade Hanging|raises the question]] of how you are even able to survive without eating or drinking. The player character responds that it's a matter of abusing loopholes by consuming stuff that can't be classified as food or booze.
* A variation appears in ''[[Fallout]]''. While the remaining time limit is a water supply, and passing 150 days (or 250 days if you buy water for them) gives you a game over, it is for the player's home, rather than the player himself.
** As well, the player character will randomly take (minor) damage from thirst if he doesn't have a decent outdoorsmanship skill. This can be avoided by the too-obvious solution of carrying a canteen. (''Fallout 2'' even gives you one to start, but under a different pretext...)
** ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' has an optional mode, dubbed hardcore mode, that plays this trope straight, as the player character has to eat, drink and sleep, or suffer progressively worse penalties, eventually leading to death.
* ''[[
** In the sequel, ''[[Video Game]]/Dark Chronicle'', "Thirst" is simply a [[Standard Status Effects|status effect]] that prevents the player from eating (presumably from dry-mouth) until a bottle of water is consumed.
* Several [[Infocom]] text adventures (notably ''Enchanter'' and ''[[
** Players found this so annoying, that very early in the sequel to ''Enchanter'' you obtain a magical potion that enables you to go without food and water indefinitely.
** This was especially annoying in ''[[
*** At least in ''[[
* ''[[Dungeon Master (
* Appears on most MUDs, and can be particularly annoying. If you're hungry/thirsty, you'll start taking damage and get an annoying little reminder every time you do. On more fantasy-based muds there's usually a plethora of ways of dealing with this thankfully. On the SWR codebase (a SMAUG derivative devoted almost entirely to ''[[Star Wars]]''), consider yourself lucky if the mud in question has any option other than dragging around a mountain of food.
** Food is a necessity in DikuMUD and CircleMUD codebases; the first consequence is usually that the player stops regenerating crucial health and stamina. In LPMUDs, food was used simply for healing, so players would clock-watch their digestion for the opportunity to eat more food. If possible it's best to go into the toughest fights on an empty stomach so you can restore the most HP by binging mid-battle.
*** [[Discworld MUD]] seems to avoid this altogether.
* ''[[
** [[Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots|The fourth game]] introduced the Psyche meter, which performed largely the same function, albeit by much more arbitrary parameters. Eating food did recover it, among other options.
* ''Magician'', an NES game by Eurocom(Taxan), integrated both hunger and thirst into protagonist Paul's status; keeping both up was necessary in order to recharge [[Hit Points]] and Mana, and the game only contained two sources of free ([[Grimy Water|safe]]) limitless water; all food had to be [[Inexplicable Treasure Chests|found]] or [[No Hero Discount|purchased]].
** Not only that, but if your food and water percentage drops to naught you begin losing health. A [[
* ''[[Dragon Quest Monsters]]: Caravan Hearts'' is practically based around this. It was only released in Japan, but there is a good fan translation going around, somewhere. Every step you take in the games overworld consumes some food, you start to lose precious Hit Points if you run out of food, and the first major "quest" you embark on even involves feeding a ghost-woman-thing some of the food ingredients you find. It's actually easier to just drag your caravan/camp, walk a few steps, and starve to death, and drag your base camp again though, since if you die they refill your food. Oh, and the more people and monsters you have with you, the more food you consume. This becomes a tedious process.
* Food is an important factor in ''The Magic Candle''. Each party member consumes one "unit" of food per day from his inventory (characters have separate inventories in this game). A character whose supply drops below 5 is "hungry" and must be told to eat, or else he can't sleep. A character with no food at all is "starving" and incapable of taking any action until he eats. (It's safe to keep starving indefinitely, though, as you can't die outside of combat.) You can refill food by buying it or hunting for it, but it's easy to forget.
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* (In?)directly referenced in ''[[Army of Darkness]]'' / ''[[Xena: Warrior Princess]]'' crossover "What, again?" by Ash with "Warrior needs food badly"
* In the ''[[Lone Wolf]]'' series, every so often you'll be prompted to "eat a meal or lose 3 ENDURANCE points, which can't be healed until after you've eaten. You can avoid this by having the Hunting skill of your tier.
* In ''[[Mount
* ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2|NeverwinterNights 2: Mask of the Betrayer]]'' has an interesting take on this: {{spoiler|it's not food you need to eat, but ''souls''}}.
* ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]''. Especially annoying in dungeons that you're not allowed to bring outside items into, as you're essentially at the mercy of the random item appearances.
* Used in ''[[
** Similarly done in the Mort Myre swamp area, though not as severely: If you don't have the proper protection from the swamp's decaying effect, you'll occasionally lose a handful of Hitpoints. The ghastly denizens of the swamp will also swipe at you and try to steal more Hitpoints out of you, unless you have another protective item, or food. If you have the latter, it protects you because the creatures somehow attack ''your food'' instead of you. Thankfully, the damage done by these is a good deal less than that of dying of thirst in the desert, so you can ignore it if you're not staying in the area long.
* ''[[Sheep In Space]]'' requires you to graze periodically in order to avoid starving to death. You can die from overeating, and grazing is the only way to recover shields. Land on anything other than grass, however, and it's instant death. Makes for a surprisingly interesting resource management puzzle for a Shmup.
* ''[[The Sims]]'', although in the second and third instalments, at least they will make themselves food if you have a fridge and their hunger is critical, rather than starving because you won't tell them to make lunch. Unless you have turned off "Free Will" in the game options.
** Hunger is one of the only two needs from the original series that was kept in ''[[
* In ''Space 1889'' your characters had to eat every day. The days passed [[Time Keeps On Slipping|ridiculously quickly]].
* In ''[[Spore]]'''s Creature and Tribal stages, at least, your creature can starve to death relatively easily if you don't remember to get it some food. Can cause some unfortunate snags in making friends if you're playing a carnivore creature.
* While food and drink items can be used to restore some health in ''[[STALKER]]: Shadow of Chernobyl'', there is a hunger indicator that serves no apparent purpose other than to pop up after some time and force you to consume food or else you health will suddenly start to decline.
* In a brief part of ''[[
** And your sidekick Tricky has a meter for using his special abilities, such as digging and [[Dinosaurs Are Dragons|breathing fire]], that's refilled by feeding him mushrooms.
* ''Superfrog'' had to keep drinking bottles of his power source [[Product Placement|Lucozade]] to keep him from turning back into an ordinary frog.
* The Yoshis in ''[[
* ''[[Time Stalkers]]'' gave the player a stomach gauge that slowly drained while in dungeons; when it was empty, the player's HP would drain instead. Nearly all the recovery items were "fruits" of some kind, so it was relatively easy to keep it above zero (and there were some dedicated food items that filled the stomach a lot), but in the longer dungeons it was rather easy for it to reach zero. Still, it was one of the more minor threats, all things considered, and running out of HP [[Non-Lethal KO|just kicked you back into the overworld anyway]].
* ''[[Ultima]]'' I-V used the abstracted away variety, with a unit of food being consumed every several steps, by increasing orders of magnitude depending on the size of your party. ''Ultima VI'' and ''Ultima VII'' did away with the point system in favor of discrete units of food that had to be explicitly eaten, and also made it impossible to starve to death - in Ultima VI, without food, the characters couldn't recover HP or MP by resting, and in Ultima VII, Hungry characters got gradually increasing stat penalties instead.
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*** Also, special talents and glyphs allow the pet to gain happiness just by fighting or getting healed with the Mend Pet skill, bypassing the pet feeding mechanic completely.
*** Finally averted in a recent patch that eliminated the happiness mechanic altogether. The ability of hunters to feed their pets is still available, but is now a powerful heal only usable when out of combat.
* [[
* The browser-based game ''[[Improbable Island]]'' encourages you to eat by giving you Stamina rewards for meals ''and'' a great Stamina penalty if you allow yourself to starve. Starvation can't kill you, though, and the penalty for being too fat ''seems'' to outweigh the penalty for being underfed.
* Yoshi's Story has a sort of inversion. In all of the non-boss levels, the point is to consume a certain amount of fruit. When you hit the mark, it's on to the next level.
* Two instances in ''[[Breath of Fire]] 3''. In the faerie village [[Sidequest]], you have to keep the food supply up (by assigning the "hunter" job to faeries) or no new faeries would be born and those you had could die of starvation. The second instance is in the [[Endless Corridor|Desert of Death]], where you have to drink when prompted to avoid getting a penalty to you max [[Hit Point|HP]].
* While [[Giants: Citizen Kabuto]] didn't use food as a time limit is a resource for your builders and they will refuse to use work without being fed.
* Averted by 8-bit adventure game ''[[The Hobbit]]''; Elrond gives lunch to you (Bilbo), but you don't need to eat it (or anything else). You can choose to do so, in which case Elrond will in time give you another. Eat too many of them, however, and you get the message "Your foul gluttony has killed you"...
* In the Cossacks series, units drain food at a steady rate and if you run out, they die of starvation.
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* Used to special effect in [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''[[Edifice]]''. One level requires the PC (an early human just learning how to use tools) to use a weapon, kill an animal, and cook its meat before dying from starvation.
* Also played with in ''[[Savoir Faire]]''. The PC gets hungry, though he can't die from it (going hungry for a long while causes him to start hallucinating, though), but he is required to prepare a meal (a rather ludicrously elaborate one, at that) in order to progress in the game.
* ''[[Betrayal
** Try telling your party to "rest until healed" when the party has a dead member. It causes the entire party to starve to death.
* ''Spellforce'' has a [[Command and Conquer Economy|variety of resources to collect]], including food, but food is not directly necessary for your individual units. Instead, it's spent to increase your unit cap, so you can recruit more units.
* Used as part of the game mechanics of Windham Classics' Below the Root and Swiss Family Robinson in slightly different ways. In [[Bt R]], your character needs to rest and eat occasionally. Failing to do so will cause them to collapse and be teleported to their home, losing a day's worth of game time (you had 50 days). In the other one, you had to eat once and drink twice per "season" [[The Many Deaths of You|or perish]].
* Running out of food meant instant death in Legacy of the Ancients. There was no excuse for it, as food was ridiculously cheap, many monsters could be added to your food supply (at the risk of illness), and the player could carry 1000 units at a time.
* ''[[Baroque]]'' uses an variation. The PC has both a hitpoint gauge and a 'vitality' gauge. Hit points can be restored by eating meat, Vitality goes down over time and can be restored by eating fruit. As long as your vitality is above zero, you regenerate hitpoints slowly, but once it reaches zero, you start losing hitpoints.
* In [[Dynasty Warriors]] Vol.2 for PSP your army's food supply in measured in seconds. By capturing enemy's supply depot you're gaining another 5 minutes to play, losing supplies decrease your time. Out of <s>time</s>supply is one of the lose conditions.
* In ''[[
* The Bally Midway arcade game ''Blasted'' has a variation of this trope. Your character starts without a [[Life Meter]], but the first time you're shot by the killer cyborgs you're sniping, your power supply is damaged, and you acquire a [[Life Meter]] that gradually ticks away. Certain actions can refill it, and you don't automatically die when it runs
* ''[[
* The titular [[Worker Unit|worker units]] in ''[[
** Unfortunately, getting food overrides any other commands they have been given, meaning that getting a Rock Raider any further than his hunger meter will allow requires you to follow his progress manually, stop him and feed him when he becomes hungry, and reassign his goal until he reaches it. One solution is to put the unit in a vehicle, where hunger won't bother him.
** In addition, depletion of a Rock Raider's health lowers his maximum food capacity. Thus, any units with below 25% health become essentially useless, constantly stopping to catch their breath and returning to the base for food, and usually must either be placed in a vehicle or <s>euthanized</s> teleported out.
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* ''[[Shadowgate]]'' in its many itinerations used light rather than food as a limited resource. You started the game with a burning torch and had to replace it regularly by gathering unlit torches from wall holders and light a new one every time the one in your hand was about to burn out. And because your idiot character hadn't had the foresight to bring a tinderbox or something, the only way to light a torch was using the active one, and if that one burned out it was back to the last save point. So about every five minutes you had to open your inventory, find a torch (and they all looked different too), select it, use it with the one in your hand and put it in your hand after discarding the old one. And you thought having to click the Eat button was annoying?
** The NES version, at least, put all torches in a single inventory slot.
* ''[[Super Mario World (
* ''[[
* In [[
* Parodied in one of the messages shown during loading screens in [[
* Implied in ''[[Galactic Civilizations]] II'' where the game won't let any of your ships pass the maximum range of their life support system. If one does go beyond the redline, the crew goes into cryo and the ship is set on autopilot to your nearest planet.
* In the first [[Avatar: The Last Airbender
* Referenced in ''[[
* [[Minecraft]] has a food meter that gradually drains over time. If your food meter is at least 90% full, you regenerate health. If it drops to 30%, you can no longer run. If it reaches 0%, your health meter starts draining instead, to a different extent depending on how high you've set the difficulty. On easy, your maximum health is effectively cut in half. On normal, you become a [[One-Hit-Point Wonder]]. On hard, you'll eventually starve to death. Fortunately, several kinds of animals are reliable sources of food, and it's easy to passively stockpile a large supply once you learn how to grow edible mushrooms, wheat, or watermelons. You can also go fishing, which is considerably faster if you give it your full attention. In an emergency, you can even eat zombie flesh to fill a fifth of your food meter, although it has an 80% chance of causing food poisoning, which drains a fifth of your food meter over thirty seconds. Switching to Peaceful stops the hunger meter from draining but you still need food to refill it if it wasn't full before.
** Unlike a lot of games where you get hungrier at a constant rate, [[Minecraft]] actually uses a more complicated system based on your activity level. You become a little hungrier every time you receive damage, break a block, or move around. A running jump is equivalent to two regular jumps, or running four meters, or walking forty meters, or sneaking forty-five meters, or breaking sixteen blocks. Combat demands the most energy; if you swing your sword around like an idiot, you may end up succumbing to hunger instead of monsters.
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* Every few in-game hours in ''Super Hydlide'' your character starts to lose health because of hunger, so you gotta always have three or so food items in your bag. The character also has to sleep well or else he will start to die too.
* Likewise in [[Pathalogic]] you must eat and sleep reguraly. Exacebrated by the fact that the game takes place in a plague-stricken town, and the food is ''ungodly'' expensive.
* The ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy
* ''[[Ehrgeiz]]'' has a dungeon-crawling quest mode that has a similar mechanic. Below your health bar is a "hunger" bar that depletes constantly and is refilled by eating food that you find in the dungeon. When that bar goes down all the way, you'll start hemorrhaging health as your character starves to death.
* In ''[[Task Maker]]'', one of the player's stats is Food. If this hits 0 due to lack of eating, the player's stats drain ''very'' fast until he finds food or dies from his Health falling to 0.
* ''Don't Starve'' obviously comes with a hunger management mechanic, although the hunger meter has no other effect than draining health when it's empty. Unless you play as Wolfgang, who gets sizable increases in damage, health, speed, but also hunger drain when his belly is full, and decreases when he gets hungry.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0224.html This] ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' strip is a blatant [[Shout
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[
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