Cataclysm-dda: "Auto-eat" zones: Snack while you study.

[I-am-Erk]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Stopping what you're doing to eat or drink is mundane. It would be nice if while reading a book / practicing (https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/28283) / doing maintenance (https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/30414) / crafting, your character would automatically eat and drink food a bit.

Describe the solution you'd like
The ability to designate "auto-eat" and "auto-drink" zones. Items stored in these zones will be eaten or drunk by the player if they are doing an ongoing action and within range.

The trick would be when the player would know to eat. I'd suggest that the default behaviour be that the player eats up to 200 kcal of food each half an hour if they are peckish, 300 if hungry, 400 if famished or worse. Maybe later we could make an unbound options menu you could open to adjust the settings to your preference. Alternatively we could leverage whatever hungry/eat AI we give the NPC but I think that NPCs are going to have a different digestive tract so that might not work.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Keeping the current system is fine, it works... but this is something that could be automated for smoother play.

Additional context
See my notes on practice actions and maintenance actions for more things that could and should be a bit more automatic.

[Mecares]

I would like if we could use the favourite mechanic to mark food for auto consumption maybe only while safe mode is active.

[Yunatan]

Looks like this resonates with what Kevin said about managing leisure\studying\maintenance activities.

I feel like this and what you described in the #30414 should all be integrated in one menu. Ideally you would be able to designate what activities you want to perform and what items you want to use to take breaks to rise falling morale\hunger\thirst and then just let the game to fast-forward the time.

[JeanLucVanDamme]

I quite often find myself doing this stuff manually - and yeah, it's tedious. I'm 100% behind all of these ideas.

[Mooses2k]

Obviously, it should eat the item most soon to spoil that is safe to eat (not uncooked or tainted meat).

[I-am-Erk]

Well, you shouldn't put tainted or uncooked stuff in your auto eat zone

[Mooses2k]

Maybe I misunderstand, but say I was in an RV and my minifridge was an autoeat zone. Sure, for mutagen crafting I could not store stuff there, but it would be a fairly shortlist of things we could blacklist: tainted* & *mutagen, *serum, anything <-negative 20 quench, maybe marloss?

You at least agree it should eat the soonest to spoil?

[I-am-Erk]

It should eat the soonest to spoil as default behaviour, yes.

I don't think specific foods should be blacklisted, because we have all kinds of traits that make certain foods edible. If, for example, we blacklist marloss berries then we need to make exceptions for fungal characters. The easiest answer is "don't put it in your auto-eat zone if you don't want to automatically eat it". Just like you shouldn't leave hand grenades in your firewood pile.

[nexusmrsep]

This would be also handy in long-lasting crafting jobs.

[I-am-Erk]

Yeah. I'd like to be able to set a character to craft chain armour sheets for a week, or hand sew their custom clothes for a few days, and have them eat and sleep automatically the whole time

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