Cooking/Crafting improvements

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

As an amateur chef myself, I don’t often follow a specific recipe, especially when it’s any kind of soup, stew, casserole or stir-fry. I think cooking should be more “open ended,” allowing players to cook without a specific recipe. For example, making a soup with broth and canned vegetables. There should also be a way to add seasoning “to taste,” providing a higher morale bonus when eaten (and to help cover up the taste of food that is going bad or otherwise unpleasant.)

Here are some ideas for how it could work:

Under the cooking menu in crafting, have an option for “no recipe”

This will allow you to select ingredients and a method for cooking, and provide the ability to process individual ingredients separately (chopping up things, tenderizing meat, boiling pasta etc.)

After cooking you can optionally add seasoning.

Also, allow a “set and forget” method that allows you to do other things while they are being prepared (and have it burn or overcook if you leave it too long)
Maybe you can take a page from Unreal World’s book and have players be able to “smell” when things are done cooking.

This system of individually processing different components in a recipe can apply not only to cooking, but all crafting as a whole. For instance, when making some new clothes, you can work on it for a certain amount of time (a certain number of hours or “until done”), leave to do other things and come back to finish where you left off.

I think that there would also be a benefit for having a specific “crafting area”. The quality and size of work surface (like a table compared to the floor), the comfort of seating (or if you are forced to stand), and having tools easily accessible. I think you should either be able to designate a crafting area manually, or have the game recognize when you are near a suitable surface and ask if you would like to make that area a crafting area. Comfort should play a role in crafting, as well as environment. It would be rather difficult to concentrate on making something when there are piles of rotting corpses in the room.

Some of the more easily made things (like a makeshift crowbar, lockpicks, a 2-by-sword etc) wouldn’t need a crafting surface, while repairing/cleaning a gun, making clothes or making something with electronics would require some sort of work surface. On the note of repairing guns, you should be able to take apart broken/damaged guns and take the usable parts, using them to repair a gun to working order.

2

The reason to have recipes is there’s no simple way to evaluate the results of combining arbitrary ingredients. There are a huge number of rules implicit in cooking, instead of trying to analyze cooking well enough to make this evaluation, we can just enumerate recipes.
Putting down in progress crafting tasks to pick up later is something we’re looking into, it’s trickier than it looks though.
Crafting surfaces is doable too.

3

Given that this touches upon the subject a little, are there any plans on expandig the crafting quality system?

So far, it’s a simple ‘Either requirment is fulfilled or not’, while I would think the game would really benefit from a system like the one in UnrealWorld. In that game, you could for example attempt to cut down a small tree with nothing else than a knife, but it would take much more time than using an axe. So far, there is no real benefint in using tools that are better suited for a job. One might argue in favour of the hoe, however.

To come back to OP’s subject of cooking, I could really see the benefit of using a pan over a hollowed stone pot or an extra sharp kitchen knive over a machete.

4

[quote=“Malaxxor, post:3, topic:13401”]Given that this touches upon the subject a little, are there any plans on expandig the crafting quality system?

So far, it’s a simple ‘Either requirment is fulfilled or not’, while I would think the game would really benefit from a system like the one in UnrealWorld. In that game, you could for example attempt to cut down a small tree with nothing else than a knife, but it would take much more time than using an axe.[/quote]

Yes, this is planned.