Cooking Balance

Who says you still wouldn’t be able to cram a can of cold beans in your mouth? The nutrition’s still there but you probably won’t like it for long.
Try eating nothing but uncooked wares for a week. Pretty depressing.

Being depressed is an important part of post-apocalyptic survival.

Let’s not mistake the mood effects of food for being pivotal. After all, there are other ways to improve your mood, like music and reading and drugs/alcohol. And being in a bad mood isn’t the end of the world. The complaint is that right now there’s a semi-complex cooking system and no actual incentive to use it. Cooking anything other than the very basic is basically a huge waste of time. Implementing systems which penalize repetitive eating only serves to incentivize resource collection, which is sort of the name of the game. As long as you’re collecting food and getting some food variety, you’re good in terms of mood. The nutrition of stuff doesn’t change - food will keep you alive and repeatedly eating cold canned corn won’t depress you to the point of suicide. It’s just one more factor to consider, and one more way to improve your character’s performance by investing in the cooking skill - even if just a little bit.

On a related note, I really feel like there should be a temporary mood bonus to any food that is eaten when you are very hungry, and diminishing returns on food eaten when not hungry at all. This should apply to drinks and thirst as well. The difference between the experience of eating a meal while starving and the same meal while satisfied, is like night and day.

I’m all for this as well. If something like this gets in, Im hoping that we’d see ingredients become a bit more common as well. As it currently stands, my character generally eats meat and strawberries cause thats all I can find (Aside from junk food)

Regarding recipes, one thing in particular that comes to mind is the fact that right now, you can easily tell healthy mushrooms apart from poison/drug mushrooms. It’d be cool if you could craft with mushrooms, without necessarily being aware whether or not you’re poisoning your food or not in the process; after having survived eating a given type of mushroom, you’ll know what it does in the future (y’know, the standard roguelike potion-identifying mechanic).

Re mushrooms: if you can easily tell them apart, I’d love to hear the method. Back in 02Feb all mushrooms look alike. (I’m guessing that the one I took off the druggie’s corpse was Hallucinogenic though.)

There is currently a visual difference between the good and bad mushrooms, but not a difference between the types of poison. If you don’t know what that difference is, a spoiler is in the comestibles section of the wiki.

Not much of one–marginally darker?