Nerf Cooked Meat

[Inadequate]

Yeah, I’m not saying we should follow the Unreal World model directly, just that it’s funny in comparison. Also nobody seems to be considering revamping veggies in the thread, which really should be at least half of the equation when talking about basic food.

[JanBlair]

The only reason I mentioned Unreal World earlier was to compare the food qualities. In the newer versions when you cook you get qualities like “bland,” “burnt,” or “exceptional” (Something like that). Typically the thing to do is if you have 100 cuts of meat (which would go rotten before you finished it all) you would cook it all and throw out the burnt portions and keep the exceptional portions. The better qualities would also be more filling and more nutritional. I think that is what we should do with the actual cooking in Cataclysm. In addition, Patton’s proposal would rebalance all food, not just meat or veggies.

[Heruedhel]

Well the thread has deviated from its original purpose, and the suggestions being thrown about now deal with veggies, fish, Cerelac …etc.

I still maintain that cooked meat should be nerfed even under these systems, but I’m more interested in where this new line of thought is going.

[Ratinod]

@Ratinod: one thing I didn’t see in your formula is how FAL increases. Can you explain table 1 in more detail please?

I made a more detailed example. I hope it is more visual.
[URL=http://radikal.ru/fp/d3aaf1c617af45fc8f6ef2db26451127][/URL]
http://s017.radikal.ru/i400/1311/60/92ac3ab59f6b.png -fullscreen

[General_Patton]

I just realized that having the Prot+Vit:Cal ratio low enough that being healthy requires eating more than it takes to avoid starvation would screw over players that don’t have Gourmand. You can’t normally overeat, so that wouldn’t pan out well at all. I suppose having the total Prot+Vit in most foods be at at least a 12:7 ratio with Cal would allow players to maintain a net influx of nutrients without overeating, they just have to balance their food groups. Gourmands would have the advantage of just shoveling nutrition down their gullet indiscriminately.

[JanBlair]

I think with all of these proposals the cooked meat would be nerfed some way or another. With my idea cooked meat would be nerved because a chunk of rat cooked over a fire would be disgusting, bland, and full of disease if not fully cooked. Others want to make the veggies stronger. This would make more appeal in veggies. But then we might have a “nerf veggies” thread. The reason that I like Patton’s proposal is because it makes all food strong. That cake that is never getting cooked? It will get cooked because it is full of carbs which you need. Although Patton’s proposal would need to be more detailed and tested more than he has done, I think it highlights the importance of a diet.

[Inadequate]

I don’t know if I’m entirely on board with his idea. I think I agree with Heruedhel that it’s a little too ‘gamey’ and focuses too much on punishing a certain playstyle. If you had to focus on rebalancing the food items, I’d prefer to stick with the mechanics that already exist in the game. And right now the main factors for cooked meat being the overwhelming staple are ease of access, ease of preservation and the morale bonus.

That said, I’d take Patton’s proposed nutrition system over Ratinod’s near-incomprehensible one, no offense to Ratinod. At the very least it keeps nutrition and morale separate.

[Heruedhel]

@ratinod: Sorry, I still don’t understand, kinda drunk.
Where are you getting +4 for cooked meat and +6 for bully beef. is this a value that every food item should be coded with? or is it a value you deduce from the values already in the food item?

[Ratinod]

every food item should be coded with

Exactly. It was mentioned on the “page1”.

[Dominae]

I just always assumed an easy way to do it was that your cooking skill would influence the morale bonus. Better training and practice can turn mediocre ingredients into better foods.

Have zero cooking? You get a “meh, it was edible” bonus to morale, since all you did was char a strip of dead dog until you were sure it wouldn’t give you food poisoning.

Have 5 cooking? That chunk of squirrel gristle you found actually gives a decent morale bonus, because you’re better skilled at making it actually edible.

Everything would have a base bonus (and a maximum bonus), then get a boost based on your cooking skill.
Cooked Meat = +5 morale base, +2.5*N where N= cooking skill, or whatever.
So with 5 cooking skill, the base “cooked meat” recipe gives 17.5 morale bonus, plus whatever for (hot) and/or (fresh) or what-have-you.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

I’d rather see nutrition as a much more long-term concern than ‘I MUST REACH VEGGY REQUIREMENTS NOW’.
So I’d widen Patton’s range value by a couple factors & have it check for ‘nutritional status’ much less frequently.
Also allow it to build up much faster than it decreases- the point is to make people feel like they are paying attention to their diet, when in truth they only need to eat some pickled veggies or take a couple vitamins every other day. We don’t need to suffocate them with managing their hidden values.

I agree, veggies need buffing. Question: are they replenishable? I’ve only ever seen wild veggies when I deliberately truck away from the cities looking for them. Meanwhile, wild strawberries go bad within a day or two of spotting them.

I’m not really feeling ratinod’s suggestion; I don’t think we should flat out prevent players from eating foods.
Also, less math more writing- putting your ideas in formula format puts an extra barrier between the audience and your ideas.
It’s good to have it, but describe it step-by-step as well.

[General_Patton]

Longer term nutrition system does sound better. I also think it might be good to have butchery products split up into meat, lean meat, fatty meat, and organ meat. Each animal would have a certain ratio of odds for each chunk you get from butchering. I remember there being general approval for the ability to use fat for certain crafting purposes. If we actually split things up into Calories, Protein, Vitamins, and have Fullness/Appetite be separate from that, then we avoid the complicated ratio/overeating balance issues. You’d just have to take in all 3 things without killing your appetite too quickly. We could let starvation or malnutrition override Appetite so that it’s not too difficult at the lower end of things.

So, the only way to avoid the implicit rabbit starvation would be with enough non-lean meat, and you may get too full to eat enough unless it’s fatty or organ. Organ meat would be the only serious carnivore source of Vitamins, unless you have the actual carnivore mutation. We could include a cookbook of traditional native/exotic recipes that would be the only way to make organ meat palatable. We then flesh out the farming system and add more fruits/vegetables, including protein-rich staples of the healthy vegetarian diet, and make herbivore boost protein value of veggie.

Finally, if we make the fancier recipes reduce your appetite less than basic foods, because it’s easier to eat delicious stuff, then we automatically get something similar to the food-bored-ness that others have talked about. It’s harder to force down enough food to be healthy if it’s all bland and boring. Make spaghetti or something like that and you’ll be happy to have seconds without puking.

Edit: This also adds a realistic opportunity cost to junk food. Your parents were right about ruining your appetite before dinner.

[JanBlair]

The thing I would most like added is cooking quality that I mentioned earlier. By adding different types of meats such as fatty or organ we may be overcomplicating it. Full realism isn’t everything. I do like the values that General Patton is speaking of though, take a look at this:

http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/37254/?

I think the same type of ideas can be implemented into Cataclysm.

[General_Patton]

Cooking quality is definitely a big plus.

If the recipe menu subgroups suggestion gets added, then it wouldn’t be too unwieldy having extra types of meat and recipes. We could just copy-paste all of the meat-based recipes and do a CTRL-F find & replace to make lean, fatty and organ variants and adjust the numbers to fit the different kinds of meat. Having a meat subgroup in the crafting screen would remove all the clutter.

The extra variety would definitely make player decisions more interesting. Do I cook up the pile of nasty-looking deer liver/heart/brain/etc or go forage up a salad? Oh, but I know how to make a non-descript fancy pâté out of various assorted parts. Apocalyptic dining never felt so extravagant.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

huh, meat subgroups- do you think that kind of a system could be implemented in the inventory screen? Thinking of the hard 60-ish item limit- more items = more clutter

[JanBlair]

ehhh. You made me think of rat organ pâté.

[Ratinod]

more writing

I try to describe my idea with words. But do not think that will come of this something good. :\

1)Nutritious foods in my system is not affected. Reasonably current mechanics of cooking.
(Nutritional product does not change depending on your attitude to it)

2)At the heart of building my system is the idea of ​​the diversity of food. If you eat “roasted meat” every day (and only him), eventually you will lose all the joy of eating it. At the same nutritional value will not change. But if you eat not only “roasted meat” but such “meat with spices” and “meat sausage”, they do not bored you so much.

3)Incentive to abandon everyday eating only one type of product is to change the “default enjoyability”. If you abuse one kind of product, “calculated enjoyability” will change to the lower side (in extreme cases “calculated enjoyability” = 0). For “new flavors” gives a small increase in enjoyability. If you eat a narrow range of dishes, the “calculated enjoyability” is comparable to “default enjoyability”.

[size=8pt]P.S. I wonder how my system would have looked if the parameters of “Nutrition” and “enjoyability” and “FA” changed under the influence “product quality”.[/size]

[JanBlair]

Ratinod,
You’re idea sounds a lot better than it did initially. I thought you said at one point that nutrition would also be affected. If we could implement that and food quality that would be great.

[Kardas666]

Yeah, sorry but this is survival zombie game, not a cosmo guide to good health - the vitamin/protein idea is over the top for a SUBsystem, and would bloat already bloated crafting, while the list one is just plain too complex and “mathy”, and will raise questions on how it works and where can you find info on hidden values/formulas from all players. The right way to do it IMHO is through the system that is already implemented, as someone already said. There’s plenty of complexity in it already to juggle stuff around. Slapping more and more flags on same items is NOT fixing it.

So we have quite a few properties on food items already - nutrition, enjoyability, quenching, weight, volume, recipe skill requirement, recipe rarity (book/common), spoil time, tool requirements, charges per item, ingredients rarity, and ingredients quantity.

Trick here is to balance it so “cooked meat” item is a low level recipe as it should, but is not overshadowing “sausage” in long term play using above variables.

cooked meat: moderately nutritious, enjoyable, neutral on thirst, light, small, easy to make, common, relatively long-lasting, single use, from common ingredient and no complexity.
sausage: nutritious, very enjoyable, abit quenching, light, small, moderate skill, common, non-spoiling, multiple use, rare ingredients, complex recipe.

It’s easy to see why theres no incentive to make sausage if you break it down like this, and not hard to imagine how to fix it.
It’s so OP atm because most of it’s negative traits are missing - it should be inferior to sausage in every way considering it’s so easy to make and skill/tools/complexity req. for sausage is a lot higher.

I think higher level recipes that are essentially upgrades to their components (cooked meat>sausage, cooked fruit>pie, raw veggie>pickles, grains>breads) should be superior in ALL categories, not just nutrition, morale, spoil time and charges. Volume, weight and component count is where it’s lacking balance.

So IMHO “cooked meat” should be as follows: 20 nutrition, 0 enjoyability, -5 quench, 500g, 2vol, very quick to spoil, single use, multiple meat chunk req, long cook time. This will definitely give incentive to make sausage, while still having it as an entry level into cooking with it’s extremely powerful combination of almost no tools and huge availability. The {hot} and {fresh} would still be available for something that was cooked, and not eaten as a raw ingredient.

TL;DR just balance the current cooking system - its already plenty complex.

[JanBlair]

Welcome to the forums,

Meat is going to be just as filling regardless of the form it takes though. It is stupid to make a sausage more filling because it is in a cylindrical shape compared to a strip of meat cooked. Less satisfying maybe, but same nutrition. I’d rather just cook 20 pieces of meat regardless of nutrition, than have to scavenge much rarer sacks of flour or grow my own wheat. The wildlife is outside everywhere (EVERYWHERE). Acid rain indicates a feast. It is easier to make the character need grains, meat, and veggies. So they must scout for all of these things. Instead of the player focusing on base items such as cooked meats or cooked veggies, more advanced meals that include veggies, grains, and meat would be sought after.