Size and Quality

[ Return to Game Mechanics ] Implemented on Apr 27, 2004, the mechanism by which food and booze grant adventures is (usually) governed by two intrinsic qualities of the consumable: size and quality. The information on this page comes from a forum post where Jick explicitly discusses this mechanism. He also notes that there are exceptions to this formula.

Size

Size is a representation of how much space the consumable takes up. It is always equal to the fullness or drunkenness the consumable takes up, and thus always an integer.

Quality

Quality is a representation of how good the consumable item is for its size. Unlike size, it may not be a whole number. If the item is obtained through a recipe, its quality is based on its components' qualities.

Adventure Gain

The adventures gained from consuming the item are determined in the following manner:

• A range of numbers is determined.
  • The minimum of this range is the item's Size.
  • The maximum is the product Quality * Size.
  • If the difference between min and max is greater than 7, it is lopped off on either end.
• An integer is chosen from the given range.
  • It's quite likely that the maximum is not a whole number. In this case there is an X/20 chance that 1 is added to the result, where X is the tenths place of the maximum.
• This result is the number of adventures gained.

Notes

• For an extremely long time, there was a bug in the calculation of food gains where there was a non-integer maximum value. The decimal portion of the number was used directly, so that, for example, a food with size 1 and quality 3.6 would be calculated as (1-3 adventures, plus a 0.6 chance of an extra adventure), meaning that it would, on average, give 2.6 adventures; whereas a size 1, quality 4 item would simply roll (1-4), giving only 2.5 adventures on average. This was silently fixed sometime in May 2010 by halving the percentage chance of the extra adventure.

• Although the majority of consumables introduced during NS11 use this formula, Jick has stated that it is no longer a strict rule, as a few crafted booze items were tweaked to make them provide more adventures than their ingredients.
• The majority of consumables introduced during NS13 do not follow the S/Q paradigm. New consumables often have hardcoded adventure production.