This is a very… Strange thing, questioning the balance of pasta, but…
Spaghetti Bolognese and Lasagne have essentially the same inputs. Both types of pasta are, if manufactured raw by the player, made from 4x Flour. However, raw spaghetti has 2 less nutrition than raw lasagne. This only gets considerably more pronounced when you turn them into a finished good.
Again, they have the same inputs - exactly the same inputs. Hell, spaghetti requires Food Cooking 3, whilst lasagne only requires Food Cooking 2. The outputs are wildly divergant, however; spaghetti and lasagne both produce 8 portions. Spaghetti yields Nutrition 25, Quench 0 and Enjoyability 12 (I’m checking these numbers on a Gourmand character,) whilst the Lasagne yields Nutrition 38, Quench 5 and Enjoyability 45.
Why in the world would anyoneever make Spaghetti Bolognese when they could make Lasagne? If they have a pasta extruder, they can make whichever they prefer from flour, and even if not, raw lasagne’s not hard to find.
Looking on the item browser the only reasoning I can see is that your character lacks a pasta extruder or flour to make more pasta and only has spaghetti on hand. I also noticed that the spaghetti while inferior in every way also requires a cooking vessel with a higher cooking quality than lasagne does.
Exactly. It seems kind of absurd; frankly, it seems as if whomever plugged those numbers in was a huge lasagne fan but not a fan of spaghetti.
Which, I mean, yes, fair enough, but the problem is that CDDA does not model characters having preferred foods. Also, bite-for-bite, I would think that, having the exact same inputs, spaghetti and lasagne should have the exact same nutrition and quench values.
Lasagna should have a cheese component to make up for the difference, and a little nerfing. They are relatively the same except for the addition of cheese…
I gotta say from personal experience that a good lasagna requires a lot more time and effort, and is trickier to get right than spaghetti. Neither one is remotely like rocket science, but spaghetti ought to be the easier one of the two – it’s pretty hard to make a poor spaghetti.