http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU
It’s not about complexity, but depth. There’s not much depth to the current system. All that matters is eating enough, and you just choose the food that gives the most morale or is most convenient to make. Splitting food needs along 3 lines, and distributing those needs in a semi-realistic way makes player decision more meaningful, without it being mentally overwhelming. No one should have a problem with estimating whether they are probably overdue for salad or multivitamins.
Although I do agree with the fact that we may be making it too in-depth. While I do agree that implementing ideas such as protein and other stats would be more realistic (and I would like it more), it would still be overwhelming to many players.
Crafting system is already complex enough, I just listed all the flags of one single item and it took awhile 
Making a meaningful choice for a player is not there atm precisely because the best choice is the first one. Make player do calculations and come to a conclusion that “sausage” is better than “cooked meat” and you will have your depth 
But sausage is no better than cooked meat in terms of nutrition. They are both the same molecules in different shapes. Trying to justify complexity by saying that the same things are not equal doesn’t make sense. Even so, your system is impossible to balance, there will always be the overpowered easy to obtain food in that list. We might as well leave everything the same and say the added food items are for immersion.
Nutrition is just one of the variables - don’t focus on it.
Cooked meat = sausage in nutrition sense, but it doesn’t have to have other variables equal.
Sausage has more servings, it has better enjoyability, it’s unspoilable, it can have less weight for same nutrition (or more nutrition for same weight), etc.
Also, I’m not saying to remake system, I’m just saying to balance what already is. What you are proposing is more complexity, more code, more player learning for the same act of balancing items on a list. It’s fine if there’s easy to obtain items on the list - they should be, what I’m suggesting is balancing them against complex recipes in a way that gives depth and gratification for a player who chooses to make them using already available complex crafting system variables.
Except sausage spoils and it the quantities would have to be the same unless you are defying laws of physics (the only thing you do is grind it and add spices in a sack). Even if it takes longer to spoil, players usually cook food on demand, and if they don’t then they look into more long term solutions.
So basically we are just looking at enjoyability which is just a single factor. The more advanced recipes typically have greater enjoyability, but that’s not helping is it?
While I would really prefer working with the mechanics that already exist in game, if you’re going to add nutrition values to food, you need to make it very clear to the player. The blood analysis CBM is pretty rare, I’d prefer it if there was a visible way to track nutrition on the main menu, like Unreal World. If you must add nutrition mechanics, I’d prefer it to be based on one or two variables, instead of three, to keep mechanics as simple as possible. Splitting up meat into different organs also adds bloat to the recipes, and the crafting menu and inventory is fairly bloated as it is. If you must, maybe have one or two meat subtypes. Also, like I mentioned earlier, the main factors that govern food at the moment are ease of access, ease of preservation and, to a much lesser degree, morale. I’d prefer balancing food along these lines rather than adding in a new mechanic for the sake of it, but if you must add in such a mechanic, you can’t forget to balance out these other factors as well.
I also think this would be better suited to a mod than a main game mechanic, but to be fair I’d say that about just about anything.
I’m not necessarily saying that we need to add nutrition as another mechanic, but if we did I would like it URW style. I think if we added different qualities of products like I mentioned earlier that would be sufficient. Make 3 or properties such as “yummy” “bland” and “burnt.” For lesser qualities the morale bonus would be less or even negative. In addition the burnt meat could be less filling. The percentage of these qualities occur would depend on factors such as the cooking skill, type of cooking device, and what you’re making. For example, with cooked meat you would have a significantly high chance of the outcome being bland or burnt. Give the values a minimum also, because even someone with exceptional cooking skills cannot make a chunk of meat much better than bland.
I don’t know if I like that mechanic either. It seems like you’re projecting your own ideas onto the food. A person struggling to survive wouldn’t care what food tastes like. Plus as it stands seasoning isn’t easily replenishable. Anyway, the problem with this system is that it makes it much harder for new players with low cooking skill, and also adding an artificial limit to the food you don’t like isn’t the way to go.
Yes, I suppose that’s true. However, you aren’t forced not to eat burnt food. It just isn’t as beneficial as yummy food. And I wasn’t talking about using seasoning to make it good, it’s just a “nice cut of meat cooked over the fire.” The system I am detailing is basically how URW deals with cooking food.
I suppose breaking it down to lean meat, regular meat (which is assumed to be pretty fatty), organ meat, and tallow (without all the duplicate recipes) would keep it more manageable. I don’t see it being an issue if the crafting subgroups are implemented.
As for visibly tracking nutrition, of course show the numbers on the items. Maybe also have a random message about food cravings every time you wake up?
“You crave meat.” Prot<Vit
“You’ve got a hankerin’ for some greens.” Vit<Prot
"Where’s the bacon and eggs?"Prot<Vit
“Liver and kidney sound good right about now.” Vit<Prot with Carnivore)
“You’d eat a cow even if it were still mooing.” Prot deficient
“You’d KILL for a salad or some fruit.” Vit deficient
“You’d eat anything right now.” Cal, Prot and Vit deficient
“Ugh, no more chips and candy.” Prot and Vit deficient.
The cravings when one nutrient is less than the other would be enough information for a player with good supplies to alternate food groups and keep them both up.
Except even URW doesn’t have as harsh a cooking system as you describe. Even with no cooking whatsoever only a very small percentage of meat ends up bland. Furthermore, in URW preserving meat for long periods is fairly trivial after a while, and vegetables and seeds harvested from plants simply don’t rot unless you cook them.
Also, I’d prefer having a visible nutrition meter, in addition to craving messages. Four types of meat is a bit much, I’d prefer having two or three. Different chunks of meat from different animals already unstack, four types of meat from each animal would fill up your inventory extremely fast.
And not one idea about revamping veggies, although in all fairness I’m not entirely sure how I would go about that either. A good start would probably to have veggies stack, for one thing.
Except not. Bland meat is definitely the most common quality I receive in URW. Maybe that’s because I don’t make my starting cooking skill in URW to 90.
And I like the idea General Patton.
I don’t set my starting cooking skill to 90 either, and I hardly ever receive bland meat. What on earth are you talking about?
Whenever I cook about 100 cuts of meat, I get 60 blands minimum. Guess what? I survive. I didn’t realize we were going for what’s easy instead of realism. This is a roguelike.
Adding pointless mechanics and limitations doesn’t make it more ‘realistic’. By contrast, it adds to the level of simulation and makes it more ‘gamey’. It means you have to spend a fair chunk of the early game simply grinding cooking and managing meters to get good results out of your cooking. That doesn’t help the immersion, that breaks it.
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that 0 in a skill meant that you were a perfect chef. You can still eat the bland and burnt food, it’s just not as good. You have a chance of failing most of the other crafting in each category. If anything it will make the cooking skill just as immersive as the rest of the skills. It adds an actual feeling of progression for the cooking skill within the game, instead of “Oh I can make spaghetti….cool…I’ll never make that.” The cooking skill is not even that hard to raise in the first place anyway…
What if you started the game with all 3 nutrients maxed out? People have mentioned that we need to stop screwing new players/characters with the balance in favor of well-established characters. Having you enter the apocalypse perfectly healthy, because you just ran out of supplies after a week of eating good, would give you a nice buffer of stat bonus to make starting out easier, and you’d have like 10 days to get your food situation sorted out.
Yeah, I think that would help new characters a lot. I still think focusing entirely on the nutrition mechanics to balance it out does nothing to balance the mechanics that already exist in game, though. And not one word about veggies.
So I made a Mod. it can be found at: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=4466.0
Oh, and by the way. This is now the fourth most debated subject on this sub-forum ever. Who knew cooked meat was such an issue?