Flavour: emergency foraging.
This is an idea completely off the top of my head while looking over FOE's quick-start guide and trying to decide if I could improve it for completely naïve players. This idea might improve the game itself for them, just a little bit, and add a touch of balance and believability otherwise.
The Foraging skill is one of two skills that the player always possesses at the beginning of the game (the other is Hunting). As a forest kid, you are well versed in foraging and generally acquiring nutrition from the environment around you. The mechanics of the skill involve simply using the search command; if you find something edible, you'll pick it up. The more skilled you are at foraging, the more likely you will be to find something in a given search. In local view, this normally means you'll be more likely to find a fruit or mushroom in a turn spent searching. In overworld view, several fruits or mushrooms might be collected, but skill will improve the quality of the forage (i.e. they'll be less rotten or bird-pecked or worm-inhabited).
What if you were playing stupidly, starving yourself in the wilderness? The idea I just came up with builds on your foraging ability. It's absurd to suppose a skilled forager would knowingly starve themself in the wilderness where they can easily make their living, unless they were on a hunger strike, which the hero of Mirth is certainly not. So if the player has ignored the starvation to that degree, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose that the character, a little out of control (i.e. out of the player's control) with the hunger pangs, would just decide to eat some random berries or grubs or, failing that, dirt.
Basically, if you were starving extremely (with a hunger status of Starving!, i.e. with 50 or fewer nutrition points) while travelling in the overworld map, the game would prompt you, something like:
"You are *really* starving. Forage? (y/n)"
If you say no, the game will basically prompt you every turn until you either eat something or die. And death wouldn't be much longer, given only 50 nutrition points.
If you say yes, the character will scramble to shove just about anything in his/her mouth. This will yield a varying amount of nutrition, which may or may not usefully satiate the character beyond starvation; in fact, it would come with a corresponding risk of poisoning and disease. The most basic food will simply be dirt, in the hopes of swallowing a few protists and half-digested fecal materials. The next step up will be tree bark, leaves, grass, or flower heads, depending on location. Then handfuls of worms, grubs or slugs. Then, finally, real food, in the form of the fruit and mushrooms you would normally forage. The distinction from normal foraging is really in the speed and urgency of the forage; normal foraging takes a number of turns, while this emergency foraging yields literally the first thing you can get your hands on in one effective turn. Still, your Foraging skill will dictate the quality and quantity of the food you acquire; the skill will train your forager's eye for an emergency situation like that, so that even while desperate and irrational you'll still be able to identify good food quickly.
This mechanic as it stands is for the overworld view, which is a zoomed-out view where the timescale of your activities is protracted to a degree; one effective turn in the overworld view is really many actual turns in general. Normal foraging amounts to a leisurely search and gathering which would take many turns, but for a skilled forager it would yield profit in nutrition points (that is, the nutrition value of the foods gathered would justify the turns spent gathering them). In this case, the emergency forage might only take a few actual turns. Even so, this makes it unsuitable for local view, including in the dungeons, where timescale is 1:1. Think of it this way: in a zoomed-out, granular view, you don't see all the details of the character's motion but you understand they're doing something. In this case, although you see no motion, if you were to zoom in, you'd see them desperately scrambling in a wild search for food, maybe running quite a distance in the process. In local view, this isn't possible because the resolution is already as fine as possible. You can still forage manually, of course, and I'm hoping the emergency foraging will serve to inform or remind players of Foraging's existence and underline the absurdity of starvation considering it.
This shouldn't be as useful to an experienced player, since staying fed is an elementary skill; you cannot progress as a player if you cannot keep your characters fed, because it really is the foundation of everything else and your most primal concern aside from not getting beaten to death. However, the scenario may occur for novice players, because if they've only read the quick-start guide, they won't know about Foraging and Hunting or how to use them. This mechanism would at least introduce them to one of the gameplay options at their disposal, and I wouldn't have to clutter the quick-start guide more than necessary.
The Foraging skill is one of two skills that the player always possesses at the beginning of the game (the other is Hunting). As a forest kid, you are well versed in foraging and generally acquiring nutrition from the environment around you. The mechanics of the skill involve simply using the search command; if you find something edible, you'll pick it up. The more skilled you are at foraging, the more likely you will be to find something in a given search. In local view, this normally means you'll be more likely to find a fruit or mushroom in a turn spent searching. In overworld view, several fruits or mushrooms might be collected, but skill will improve the quality of the forage (i.e. they'll be less rotten or bird-pecked or worm-inhabited).
What if you were playing stupidly, starving yourself in the wilderness? The idea I just came up with builds on your foraging ability. It's absurd to suppose a skilled forager would knowingly starve themself in the wilderness where they can easily make their living, unless they were on a hunger strike, which the hero of Mirth is certainly not. So if the player has ignored the starvation to that degree, it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose that the character, a little out of control (i.e. out of the player's control) with the hunger pangs, would just decide to eat some random berries or grubs or, failing that, dirt.
Basically, if you were starving extremely (with a hunger status of Starving!, i.e. with 50 or fewer nutrition points) while travelling in the overworld map, the game would prompt you, something like:
"You are *really* starving. Forage? (y/n)"
If you say no, the game will basically prompt you every turn until you either eat something or die. And death wouldn't be much longer, given only 50 nutrition points.
If you say yes, the character will scramble to shove just about anything in his/her mouth. This will yield a varying amount of nutrition, which may or may not usefully satiate the character beyond starvation; in fact, it would come with a corresponding risk of poisoning and disease. The most basic food will simply be dirt, in the hopes of swallowing a few protists and half-digested fecal materials. The next step up will be tree bark, leaves, grass, or flower heads, depending on location. Then handfuls of worms, grubs or slugs. Then, finally, real food, in the form of the fruit and mushrooms you would normally forage. The distinction from normal foraging is really in the speed and urgency of the forage; normal foraging takes a number of turns, while this emergency foraging yields literally the first thing you can get your hands on in one effective turn. Still, your Foraging skill will dictate the quality and quantity of the food you acquire; the skill will train your forager's eye for an emergency situation like that, so that even while desperate and irrational you'll still be able to identify good food quickly.
This mechanic as it stands is for the overworld view, which is a zoomed-out view where the timescale of your activities is protracted to a degree; one effective turn in the overworld view is really many actual turns in general. Normal foraging amounts to a leisurely search and gathering which would take many turns, but for a skilled forager it would yield profit in nutrition points (that is, the nutrition value of the foods gathered would justify the turns spent gathering them). In this case, the emergency forage might only take a few actual turns. Even so, this makes it unsuitable for local view, including in the dungeons, where timescale is 1:1. Think of it this way: in a zoomed-out, granular view, you don't see all the details of the character's motion but you understand they're doing something. In this case, although you see no motion, if you were to zoom in, you'd see them desperately scrambling in a wild search for food, maybe running quite a distance in the process. In local view, this isn't possible because the resolution is already as fine as possible. You can still forage manually, of course, and I'm hoping the emergency foraging will serve to inform or remind players of Foraging's existence and underline the absurdity of starvation considering it.
This shouldn't be as useful to an experienced player, since staying fed is an elementary skill; you cannot progress as a player if you cannot keep your characters fed, because it really is the foundation of everything else and your most primal concern aside from not getting beaten to death. However, the scenario may occur for novice players, because if they've only read the quick-start guide, they won't know about Foraging and Hunting or how to use them. This mechanism would at least introduce them to one of the gameplay options at their disposal, and I wouldn't have to clutter the quick-start guide more than necessary.