IIRC, your characters will eventually start taking starvation damage.

This is actually one of the main issues I have with Ultima 7; food went from being something you don't need to pay too much attention to in Ultima 6 (only need it to rest) to something you need to constantly worry about; to make matters worse, the inventory system is *horrible*, and the food mechanic forces you to interact with it.

Serpent Isle adds a shortcut to feed a party member automatically, but I've heard that it can consume garlic (needed as a spell reagent) or items needed for quests, so it's not ideal.

There are better ways they could have handled food, like:
* Have food only be consumed when you rest, like in Ultima 6 and Nox Archaist
* Have food perform a different, non-critical function. For example, in Castlevania and in the SNES adaptation of Ultima 7 (which is a completely different game), food will simplly heal you the instant you pick it up; in the Paper Mario games, food items function as the game's healing items (you can carry them, they never spoil, and they typically restore some HP and/or FP when used).

I think the food system might be hated because some people might not realize that most food items are absolutely worthless. Vegetables, bread, drinks, they hardly increase your food meter. Silverleaf and alcohol don't fill at all.

Go with meat, which drop from animals you hunt, or can be bought very cheaply in Paws or that food market in Britain.
I always hunt deer: They drop 5 legs ('cause deer in Ultima apparently have 5 legs). Very easy to get a backpack full of meat for free, and it'll shut your companions up for a long time.
Mutton, ribs, chicken, and ham have the highest food values, except for green cheese, which completely fills you up. But green cheese is friggin' rare. Regular cheese is worthless.

See this page for details: https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Food_Values_in_Ultima_VII

As for garlic being used, I never saw this happen myself, but can imagine this happens when you don't have any other food.

Just in case you didn't know: JohnGlassmyers (pocococo on GOG) Ultima Hacks for Ulitma 7 adds Serpent Isle controls (including the F shortcut) to BlackGate

Check it out here: https://github.com/JohnGlassmyer/UltimaHacks

That's not the reason I have a problem with it, though it doesn't help.

The problem is that it's annoying to have to deal with feeding characters, and the game does not let you ignore it; even worse, the game's inventory system is horrible, and the food mechanic *forces* the player to interact with it more than is strictly necessary. Furthermore, food isn't even used as a balancing element, or something that serves a good gameplay function. People talk about how it's neat that the player can make bread or things like that, but the problem is that the game forces the player to manage food, and the game would be better if that weren't *mandatory*.

If you're designing a game, please do not follow Ultima 7's example. Ultima 6, where food is only consumed when you rest, and where you don't need to hunt through your inventory to find food, was *much* better in this regard.

(Well, you probably *could* avoid using food in Ultima 7; I believe starvation just does damage, so you could use healing magic to keep your HP up, and in the original engine you regain half your spent MP every in-game hour (something Exult got wrong last I checked), but you still need reagents for even the most basic of spells, so you still have to manage that (but at least you don't need to find the reagents in your inventory).) Which requires reagents to cast. I am always disappointed when RPGs have a hunger system that serves no real purpose other than "realism", which comes at the cost of the player having to do more busywork to work around it.

I could say the same thing about durability systems like the ones in TES games, where they don't actually serve as a meaningful limiting factor. If you're going to put weapon durability in a game, do it like Fire Emblem or early SaGa (and not SaGa Frontier 2, where there were too many escapes from that system). The hacks that I would need for the game to be more playable to me (though they still wouldn't solve the horrible battle system) would be:
* Food made unnecssary.
* Reagents made unnecessary, or as an alternative, only mandrake root is needed, and only for spells that require it originally.

Hmm, to be honest, you should perhaps consider to play another game. For one, rest assured, such cheats do not exist, but whatsmore: this kind of immersion and interaction with the player was one of the key features and brand new in games. It is a big part of what makes this series so unique: if your group does not eat, you starve. Magic does not come from thin air: if you lack the ingredients, you cannot cast a spell. If you don't sleep, you'll be knocked out at some point.

As well as: If you find paint and canvas, ofc you can paint a picture. If you mix flour and water and put it in an oven: ofc you get bread.

Ultima is and was a lot about this kind of realism. And sure, it can be tedious at times...(as can life be) and most games who took inspiritation from Ulitma afterwards got rid of a lot of this demands and freedom to make it less of an effort to simply "stay alive" and hence my initial suggestion (which by no means were meant offensive): maybe another game that concentrates solely on its story might be the better and more rewarding choice for you :-)

John

Pretty much what Sir.John said.
I like running after deer for meat, and feeding my party now and then. Once you figure out that a certain food fills more than other food, just keep using that food. Back when I was a kid I didn't need a wiki to find out which food fills you more. (Good thing too, due to lack of an internet.)

I also like the ridiculous inventory management. Sure, there are a LOT of items, but you don't have to grab every single rock from the ground or rob every house blind.
It's not for everyone, sure, but every single game out there has at least something someone somewhere dislikes.

In my opinion, the realism really detracts from the game.

The reagent issue combined with the combat issue works very poorly:
* You can't really control combat.
* About the only thing you can do to significantly influence combat is to use spells.
* Using spells requires reagents.
* You have to buy reagents, as enemies don't drop them.
* Even worse, not all the stores sell all the reagents.

(Also, Serpent Isle has these same issues, but even worse it's a while before you even get the spellbook in the first place.)

Another thing: I play games for the gameplay, not the story, so your suggestion about looking for a game that focuses solely on story is not suitable for me. (There's a reason I live Final Fantasy 5 and hate Final Fantasy 7, a reason I like FF5's "Project Demi" mod (which removes the cutscenes entirely), and a reason that I tend to gravitate toward old or old-style RPGs (like Nox Archaist).

I note that Exult has a cheat that does remove reagent requirements for spells, but it doesn't quite suite my needs for 2 reasons:
1. It removes MP costs, and I find managing MP, which is limited but regenerates every hour, to be fun (unlike reagents).
2. It is only for Exult, which in many ways is not faithful to the original. In particular, last I checked they got HP and MP regen wrong. (Original: 1 HP and 1/2 used MP per hour. Exult: random amounts up to 1/3 the maximum for both HP and MP per hour.) And, perhaps that bread could have an optional, but useful, effect. Perhaps have it restore HP, or even MP, when used.

In other words, reward the player for making bread, rather than punishing the player for not doing so.

(Also, it's perfectly reasonable to have a shop that will buy bread for more than the price of flour and water.) Breath of Fire (1) does the whole "running after deer for meat" thing without making it required; instead, doing so gives you a nice consumable item that might heal your entire party or restore AP (the game's MP equivalent.)

(With that said, BoF's hunting still did have 2 issues:
1. The hunting was real-time in an otherwise turn based game.
2. If you get into a random encounter, any animals that were on the screen will disappear. There is a cheap consumable that will eliminate random encounters, but that feels more like a patch than a real solution, and it can also trivialize dungeons.) Actually, I think that Ultima 7 focuses too much on story for my tastes.

(Forgot to mention this earlier.)

The combat hasn’t really aged well. Just move and double click enemies to strike, unless casting spells. Especially if you run it at a higher speed, combat becomes uncontrollable and you are kind of forced to let the AI control the Avatar.

As for food systems, I suppose that is a matter of taste. (Get it?! Wohoho!)

I would say that Ultima 6 has the best combat in the series, and it was sad to see it thrown away in Ultima 7. (Ultima 6 combat is better than earlier games because you start closer to the enemies, so melee weapons are not at as much of a disadvantage as in earlier games.)

Since casting spells is about the only interesting thing you can do in Ultima 7's combat, making it needlessly cumbersome by requiring reagents for even the simplest of spells feels particularly bad here.

(Incidentally, the problem with reagents does date back to Ultima 4, where said requirement made spells like Missile and Open rather pointless.)

Advice to game designers: Let mages be mages! Allow mages to use spells regularly without having to do extra work, and without having to worry about running out of resources when casting simple spells.

Just saw this tweet that is relevant to this topic:
https://twitter.com/yulo_tomorrow/status/1358916502179700736