Hunger Difficulty Setting

[Lagmawnster]

Not having played the beta and hearing about the hunger difficulty settings two days ago, I waited for the update to hit and couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I generally play at all difficulty settings maxed. I like the fact that most of the difficulty settings, while changing your way to approaching the game, they give a substantial net increase in fun, because they don't really add annoyances, but rather challenges.

Now with the Hunger setting I initially thought this was a great idea. Being required to generate more food for the same amount of dupes sounds like a great challenge. But the problem with this setting is that it is really more of an annoyance than anything else. Once you have enough mealwood/berries up, you notice some of the problems arising.

Dupes need a lot more time eating the kcal. Ideally, you don't just want to have one longer eating break, because you will still run into hungry and starvation notifications and potential problems for dupes that were on a longer duty away from the colony. With more eating breaks you run into more cases where random clutter is dropped as a dupe goes to eat which also means more slime/pw bottles being dropped in farms or other environments where invading po2 is really not enjoyable. Not in a "hey, this is a challenge, I can work around this by employing this" kind of way, but rather a "oh come on, really? that's just unnecessary" kind of way.

With the additional time spent eating, harvesting food, fertilizing all plants, cooking sufficient high-quality meals, you barely get to do anything else in the colony which would *actually* qualify as playing the game. I'm on cycle 150 with all difficulty settings on max and hunger on max as well. I will probably not return to the colony, because it's just not feeling like fun. Instead I'll go back to the other settings maxed and hunger maybe cranked to one higher than default, but really not more than that.

I'd love to hear opinions of other people.