When “crafting” food I’ve often ended up with something that has a much shorter shelf life than intended because some secondary ingredient wasn’t fresh.
Currently the game prompts you for each ingredient for which you have more than one alternative (e.g. crow egg/reptile egg/chicken egg), but the staleness is not shown. I’d suggest that in addition to splitting alternatives according to type, it would also do so according to staleness so I can select the old chicken eggs for the food I intend to eat right away or isn’t perishable, but the freshest ones for things I want to leave on the shelf.
Something along these lines:
- Reptile eggs (old) 2 of 5
- Reptile eggs 2 of 2
- Reptile eggs (fresh) 2 of 3
- Chicken eggs (fresh) 2 of 4
with the same color coding as for when shown normally.
An issue with this is that the current selection logic doesn’t allow you to use 1 crow egg plus one chicken egg for a recipe that requires two eggs, but both eggs will remain unavailable, and that would probably have to be addressed so you don’t end up with the situation that you’ve got two chicken eggs, but one is fresh and one is from yesterday, so they’d stack with the current system, but wouldn’t in a straight stack splitting implementation for staleness.
(There’s a similar issue with adding items to vehicles, where it seems that the equipment in the best shape is used automatically, but the cases where you explicitly want to use the poorer equipment (because you want to save the good stuff for where it matters) are probably not that common (and can be worked around by moving the equipment you don’t want used out of pickup range), and doesn’t change by itself over time).