Suggestion: Recipes require the books they are learned from until the player crafts the recipe X times.
So the steps to be able to craft something would be:
Get the related skill levels (Fabrication, etc) to the appropriate level
Find a book with the recipe, read until you learn it.
The book must still be nearby to make the recipe, unless the player has crafted it X times.
(I wouldn’t mind if X was 1)
We now have craft recipes locked up in books to avoid characters becoming omniscient from doing the same task over and over again. But it’s still silly that one reading is enough to master all recipes. This would cover that. Plus, the crafting menu wouldn’t be so cluttered with items you’re never going to craft!
I am pretty sure that you read the recipe more than once in the time taken. Reading and crafting are similar enough that they probably both occur in the same location. Skill books are not the most common books, so it is doubtful that they need to be torn up for paper. They are also handy to have around due to skill rust. All things considered, leaving your recipe books behind seems sort of pointless, so this seems unnecessary, and would just mean that your book pile would need to be within your crafting zone. I imagine that this would effectively add a “times crafted” value and a new ingredient to every recipe, which seems like a hassle for craft menu navigation, which is already a little slow, and a bit of tedium to precisely where you store things. I can imagine that this might add a bit of immersion to some situations, but seems like far more hassle than it is worth to force people to do something that they are probably already doing… This can also be abstracted away by assuming that the survivor carries a notebook with diagrams and brief instructions in it to refresh the survivor’s memory.
But yeah, I think that the read-a-book action is far more intensive than just reading it once…
Even reading a recipe multiple times doesn’t amount to actually understanding how to make something. You can read all the chemistry books you like, you’re not going to be able to make crystal meth on your own without having tried the recipes a couple times, and learning from your mistakes. Complicated crafts also likely wouldn’t be cemented into your memory until you’ve made them once or twice.
If the developers wanted to get fancy, knowing certain recipes could make it easier to learn others by simply reading about them. But my suggestion in the OP would be a good starting point.
This dovetails with how I want skill development to work in the future, you can get knowledge from books and such, but skill comes from practice.
Can probably do this sort of thing in a shorter timeframe though, and it’s a good step in the right direction.
As for accumulating recipes aiding your ability to learn new ones, that’s what skill level is for I think.
Having to learn the recipe through random draw AND then grind it with the book handy? Seems downright punitive: I kinda prefer letting the player just pick a recipe from the book, refer to it, and if desired, grind that way.
does not have to read Joy of Cooking to find the recipe for X food, quasi-memorize the recipe, and then refer to JoC throughout the process. Just refer to it and learn by doing.
[quote=“KA101, post:5, topic:6289”]Having to learn the recipe through random draw AND then grind it with the book handy? Seems downright punitive: I kinda prefer letting the player just pick a recipe from the book, refer to it, and if desired, grind that way.
does not have to read Joy of Cooking to find the recipe for X food, quasi-memorize the recipe, and then refer to JoC throughout the process. Just refer to it and learn by doing.
Sheesh![/quote]
Good point. If this were implemented, it would make sense to drop the random draw mechanic. So it could look like this:
Books can increase your skill level to a certain level. They have a number of recipes available as well which show up in your crafting menu when you’re close enough to the book. Learning the recipes requires having the parts handy to make the craft, and making it.
Yea, this would replace random draw with a check to memorize the recipe every time you use it. It would actually make things significantly easier in some ways.
Indeed. I don’t know how many times I’ve learned every recipe in a book just because I wanted one recipe from it (which was, inevitably, the last one I would get. Thanks Murphy.)
This is mostly ready, we haven’t come to an agreement whether to remove learning recipes directly from books yet, so I’ve split that off, but the rest is good to go.
In the end, this is what I ended up doing:
You have to peruse a book to discover its contents (all those notes about skills and recipes that are displayed with the description), this is just reading it for one cycle.
If there is a read book in crafting range, it enables crafting all the recipes in the book you have the skill requirements for.
When you successfully craft something, you have a chance of memorizing the recipe permanently, meaning you no longer need the book to craft that thing. The chance is based on recipe difficulty vs the appropriate crafting skill, and is also adjusted by intelligence. It’s normalized for crafting time, meaning if it takes 2x as long to craft something, you have 2x the chance to learn it. Time spent is the important thing, not number of times you’ve crafted the thing. You can see the basic breakdown in the PR: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/7814
Halved chance of learning a recipe when reading a book.
I have a separate PR that disables learning recipes directly from books entirely.