Thanks for being so constructive, and apologies for the crashes.
Hunger is one of those things where I feel like the game is better for the friction. I'm trying to capture the friction from survival games while not having it be a traditional survival game. I want it to be an action game with survival elements. Though I can definitely add a difficulty setting to make it not a thing for players. I am wondering, did you find the other food items that gave you different buffs?
Yeah I've also been thinking about the EXP loss thing. Right now it's set so you can protect yourself from losing EXP by eating kalo poi, but you're right that it still feels like a fairly large punishment early on.
For the balancing, yeah, you're right about the difficulty. It's simply something I haven't touched in a while due to working on other aspects.
Bizarre crashes. I'd be surprised if trying to load the game constantly gave you that error, because while I have seen it, it's pretty rare in my experience. I don't suppose you'd be able to get me that save data, would you? It should be some place like C:\Users\sleepl\AppData\Local\Moku, assuming you're playing on Windows and not on Linux with Wine or something.