What Should I Do About Food, Water, Shelter, Etc.?

I didn't know how to title this, but this is a problem GMs run into sometimes. They realize something: no one ever has to eat, drink, sleep, etc. in their games. But these are very real concerns in the real world. What happened?

This is a fairly simple question to answer. Your #1 priority as GM is fun. If you find a more realistic campaign to be more fun, do the old D&D style thing of rations and such. If you want a campaign with more crap to blow up, then you might want to skip that sort of stuff. I personally prefer to do it based on the power and influence of the character. At the beginning of adventures, finding places to sleep, drink and eat may be adventures in and of themselves. We see this in Outlaw Star, where Gene and Jim struggle to break even, despite a successful business. Lower power characters will have a major hassle finding a place to eat, making it there, avoiding getting robbed, eating (whether this involves sitting down in a restaurant and getting the money to afford it, or killing an animal and eating), and then continue. Finding shelter will either require money or exploration, and getting the money to pay for a hotel trip will not be inconsequential. Furthermore, as the characters get more and more equipment, they will also have to spend money on cleaning kits, repairs, and other various forms of maintenance. If you find characters are amassing money too quickly, take all of this into consideration.

Of course, there comes a point where acting out these things gets boring. When you're level 100 and you have power armor that can annihilate the city, you won't have any trouble reaching the restaurant, you sure as hell won't get mugged (and such an encounter, when it happens, will be more of a pathetic amusement), and payment will be easy. If you needed to, you could teleport back to your special vehicle or your own town which you are the Dictator of. Paying hotel costs will be easy. This doesn't mean that roleplaying these things won't be worthwhile. Sometimes, going to the restaurant will yield a meeting with an unexpected friend, or going to the hotel is part of the travel package and allows you to meet your new partner. Think about in terms of the X-Files. In the X-Files, do they show every meal that Scully and Mulder eat? No. But do they show every meal they eat in which they're discussing the case? Yes. Do they show every time they come to a hotel room? No. But do they show every time they meet a new agent in a hotel room? Yes. The analogy of the GM being sort of like a manager of an interactive TV channel is adequate. You need to tell the story to get things going, but you should omit scenes no one cares about, just like in shows.

Maintenance remains a problem for longer than food, but it actually can be mostly autoed through for much of the game. Once the character has purchased his maintenance kits, he can just automatically do all of the cleaning and repairing he needs to do at appropriate times: downtime on a vehicle,