Change cooking skill

[system]

Seriously, studying cookbooks teaches me how to make meth? And chemistry textbooks tell me how to prepare pasta?

What the fuck? We need a separate skill for chemistry. I prepose a science skill!

Basically a generalization of electronics, chemistry, computers, and first aid. We already have general skills for construction (fabrication), melee attacks (melee skill), and ranged attacks (ranged/firearms).

So what I’m proposing here is that we take chemistry stuff out of cooking and move it to the new science skill or separate it into its own skill entirely.

[Heruedhel]

But that would make the cooking profession almost completely useless. We had a pretty long discussion about how most food recipes are made redundant by cooked meat (a level 0 skill) in http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=4368.0.
Also it would make the Science skill insanely good.
If we were to reshuffle skills, I’d suggest merging electronics and computers into a “techie” skill, since the computer skill only does one thing right now AFAIK.

[Cherry]

I vote we keep everything the same until:
A- We get a new nutrition system that makes cooked meat only diets unviable
B- People make ideas and create objects/ THINGS that need computer skill. (I’m pretty sure you need computer skills to program an mp3 or PDA from scratch.) Imagine if you need 1 computer skill to program a phone alarm. lmao. I’m pretty sure medieval broadsword characters couldn’t do that!

[Taraq]

I would avoid generalizing more skills. I feel like the skill system could do well with some parent “skill groups” like “science,” “mechanics,” etc, and then have skills in those groups default to a lower group value - maybe the average of all skills in the group - and then be individually raised to higher levels. Otherwise we end up with way too many, specific, little skills, or a few hugely general skills that seem to apply to too many different things. So your skill with “broadsword” would be helped by your “melee” and “cutting weapons” skills, but you could still increase broadsword and specialize.

[Cherry]

Wait, you just said that we don’t want to end up with alot of mini skills, but you also suggested that we have weapon masteries.
Give me ALL THE MASTERIES.

Basically martial arts unlocked for weapons. You can’t power swing until you get lvl 3 broadsword lmao.

[Taraq]

[quote=“Cherry, post:5, topic:4265”]Wait, you just said that we don’t want to end up with alot of mini skills, but you also suggested that we have weapon masteries.
Give me ALL THE MASTERIES.

Basically martial arts unlocked for weapons. You can’t power swing until you get lvl 3 broadsword lmao.[/quote]

I meant that we shouldn’t need to know all of those mini skills. You don’t need the “watched lots of breaking bad” skill to make meth, but you would need a higher “chemistry” skill than the requisite “watched lots of breaking bad” skill to make it. Like how the melee and marksmanship skills work now - you can do fine using a nailbat even if your bashing skill is 0, if you have a really high melee. The mini skills are there to let you specialize, but you don’t need them for anything, and there’s no reason for the game to show them to you unless you have them.

[Anonymous]

[size=8pt]The skill system as a whole could be reworked. As it stands it is rather easy to farm your skills up with little effort and some skills could be merged. In my opinion, of course. Take fabrication for instance. With a simple cutting tool, you can raise your skill from 0 to around five or six just by dismantling the benches in the starting shelter and making wooden arrow shafts. By doing so, you magically become better at knowing how to make a ton of other stuff, just by sharpening sticks.[/size]

[Cherry]

I can’t wait till we have to experience 500 years worth of life and experience to be able to use everything in the crafting recipe lists.

[system]

Well it’s pretty shit, I can cook meat a couple of time and suddenly I can make pasta. I make some pasta and suddenly I can make meth. Like what the hell?

This makes no sense, tie chemistry into some other skill like survival or fabrication. This breaks my immersion to no end.

[Taraq]

It would also be nice if there was a threshold for improving skills - you can only improve your cooking ability so much by cooking meat over and over again, maybe a maximum amount of XP gained per recipe, with a multiplier based on complexity/difficulty.

[system]

Yeah, craft is basically as broken as NPCs. It barely functions within the realm of possibly.

[Cherry]

It would also be nice if there was a threshold for improving skills - you can only improve your cooking ability so much by cooking meat over and over again, maybe a maximum amount of XP gained per recipe, with a multiplier based on complexity/difficulty.

The coders basically have to consider and program the skill gain limit of every single item and recipe.

[Marduk]

If you want to spare coders some work, just make that a blanket rule based on the item’s crafting difficulty.

Like, if your skill level is 2 or more levels above the crafted item’s difficulty, you get no xp for it.
This way cooking meat could only get your skill up so many levels, and no more.

[ComputerWarrior]

Hmm, if we change Marduk’s suggestion (hope you don’t mind, Marduk) a little, maybe we can have all regular food-cooking recipes only bring the cooking level to a certain maximum while most chemistry-related recipes would need a level above that maximum to make.

For example, by cooking food continuously, your cooking skill would be merely increased to 6 before stopping. Every form of drug or chemistry-related things would require at least a cooking skill of 7, so that would prevent someone who is only constantly cooking meat from knowing how to make grade-A meth after some time.

By no means perfect, but just an idea.

[Cherry]

Banana guy actually has a pretty good idea.
Looks good on paper, but it doesn’t cover people learning how to craft a recurve bow by using a slingshot alot.

[Bonevomit]

I’ve been playing a very cooking heavy character. Making tons of mutagens, and also eating lots of home cooked meals, which is pretty fun.

I think there should be a chemistry skill separate from cooking. Not a “science” skill because cooking does not cover electronics or anything like that. The electronics skill covers more “physics” type stuff like fusion blasters and rail guns.

But cooking could be buffed. Add more recipes and make a morale penalty for eating the same foods constantly.
Add qualities to foods based on skill to increase morale gain from eating them.

Most drugs you can make with cooking are unhealthy, expensive, and addictive. and Adderall(which seems to grow on trees in Cataclysm) can easily substitute any bonuses they provide. The only real use for the “Chemical” part of the skill is mutagen, which you can make in large quantities using it. Otherwise, I don’t see what the point is.

[Cherry]

We are in the sciencetastical future, so we need some real life chemistry major or science fiction writer to come up with some realistic/imaginary prototype chemicals that we could use to our benefit. Other than mutagen.

Also Bonevomit you need to read the “Nerf cooked meat” thread. Many arguments there about that penalty that you mentioned. Someoe also made a mod that makes that exact penalty to try it out.

[Bonevomit]

Well, I was just thinking reducing the morale bonus for eating only one food and giving a “reward” for having a high cooking skill(kind of like how you can reinforce cloths with tailoring). I don’t think nutrition of the food should change or that there should be a punishment.

This isn’t really about the cooked meat imbalance, but rather finding a reason for a separate cooking skill to exist in the first place. I think morale is the best reason. No other skill currently caters directly to keeping up morale. Cooking could possibly fill that gap.

[Zireael]

Bonevomit - well, there’s a lot of people who think chemistry should be separate from cooking, but GlyphGryph says no.

[Taraq]

There could be a “quality” statistic on food too, possibly tracked like normal item damage. So if you try to cook your moose meat without any cooking skill you might end up with a ton of burned meat - which would give a morale penalty and maybe a chance of sickness, or undercooked meat, etc. But if you have 13 cooking skill and make meat it might end up being very nice cooked meat - and give a bigger morale bonus than normal cooked meat.