Legacy:FEP

Food Event Points (FEP)

Your Attributes (Stength, Agility, etc.) are increased by eating various foods. Most food provides a number of Food Event Points (FEPs) towards various attributes, detailed in the FEP Table.

By placing the cursor over the bar below the statistics on the character sheet, you can see a Bar showing how many FEPs you currently have, in total and by attribute, and how many you need. To increase a stat, you must initially accumulate a number of FEPs equal to your highest attribute (ignoring modifiers). Accumulating FEPs that contribute to different attributes, however, will lower the total number required. E.G. If you eat food that provides only Strength FEPs you will need X total FEPs to increase an attribute, but if you then eat food that provdes Dexterity FEPs, you will need <X FEPs. This only applies the first time you eat a food that contains FEPs for an attribute not in the bar.

Which attribute is increased is probabilistically determined by how many FEPs you have towards each attribute. For example, if you only eat Bear Salami, then upon accumulating enough FEPs to increase a stat, you will have a 57.14% chance of Strength increasing by one, and a 42.86% chance of Charisma increasing by one. After an attribute is increased, your current FEPs are reset to zero, so any overflow is lost (though it still affects the determination of which attribute increases before the current FEPs are reset).

See the Survivalist's Quick-Reference for a list of FEP foods available to those without access to higher tech things, such as a Meat Grinder.

FEP Requirement Reduction

FEPs that you need to fill a food bar are reduced for each and every unique food that you eat while filling that FEP bar. The first food you eat on a completely empty bar will reduce the required FEPs by 30%. The second type of food that you eat will reduce that bar by another 21%, and it continues to be reduced less and less for each new type of food that you eat.
NOTE: The FEPs given by the food do not matter, as long as the type of food if different. So, for example, if you eat Roasted Fox Meat and Blueberries (both give 1 INT), the bar will still be reduced.

FEP and stat gaining

Although new players start out having issues keeping their character full on food, it quite quickly reverses as a settlement gets set up. Eventually emptying the food bar becomes a chore that must be done in order to gain stats. Eating a variety of food makes this go much more quickly, but often involves introducing the possibility of gaining stats of a type you're not currently interested in. Obviously there's a balance of eating as many food types as possible and eating only the FEP types that you want. Better quality food helps too since it increases the quantity of FEPs a food gives without changing the amount of fullness you gain from it.

NOTE: If you "overfill" the bar with FEPs, ie eating a food worth 10 FEPs when you only needed 1 to level, they will be included in the proportions that determine which stat is gained. It's a waste in the sense that you didn't need to eat that high a quality of food to fill your bar, and none of it slops over to the next FEP bar.

Example

Joe has 15 in all attributes. So he needs 15 FEPs to get his next attribute increase. He eats enough bear meat to give him 10.5 Strength FEPs, and his Strength goes up by one. Wait, he needed a total of 15 FEP's didn't he? This is an example of the "variety bonus" that's applied to eating. The first item he eats reduces his required FEP's by 30%, to 10.5 from 15. Because he ate only STR giving FEP's, his STR went up to 16.

Joe now has 16 STR, so he'll need 16 FEPs for his next attribute increase. He eats some bear meat, reducing his needed FEPs to 11.2 (30% reduction). Later that day he decided he'd like to eat blueberries. Upon eating blueberries his total FEPs required drops to 8.8 (21% reduction from 11.2). The variety bonus concerns food types, not the FEPs they give. Both cooked perch and blueberries give pure INT FEPs, but they are two items as far as the variety bonus is concerned.

At the end of the day, he's eaten only cooked bear meat and blueberries, giving him 4.0 STR FEPs and 4.8 INT FEPs. When the food bar is full, the proportion of the whole that an FEP type represents of the food bar becomes the chance that he will gain that stat. As a result, Joe has a 45.5% (4.0/8.8) chance of gaining STR and a 54.5% (4.8/8.8) chance of gaining INT. Despite having more chance of getting INT FEPs, Joe gets another STR point and his total STR goes up to 17.

If INT had gone up to 16 instead of STR getting another point, his total FEPs required to level would not have changed. Because his STR went up though, he'll have to eat more FEPs next time around to get another stat point. This of course could be compensated by the variety bonus if he has more food types around to eat instead.

Notes

As per the example, since increasing FEPs is based on your highest attribute, increasing your highest attribute is not recommended, since it will affect how many FEPs you require to raise every other attribute. Before letting one stat get completely out of hand, considering raising your other stats for a while so you'll have more of them when you want them. Raising a lvl 10 stat when you have 200 strength is just as difficult as raising strength another point.