Science Skill

Game Talk The Drawing Board
21

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t alot recipe difficulty based on how “good” they are, but on how hard they are to make. A good salad isn’t all that hard to make, but if you have the right ingredients, it’s healthy, tasty, and has a decent amount of nutrition (I’m assuming it has some meat or more substantial stuff than greens in there). Same as anything else, some crafts might be easy to make, but very useful, others might be hard to make and not that great, that’s fine.

I’m fairly strongly against making poisoned food out of good ingredients, yea it’s quite realistic, but it’s a HUUUUGE PITA for the player. You should already be able to fail and destroy ingredients though, unless something is broken? On the other hand, there are various ingredients that are bad for you in their natural state that you can make good food out of, haggis and chitlins come to mind. Mmmm, chitlins.

I’m pretty adamant about a food quality stat just improving its morale bonus, not sure if you were implying that or not.

@GlyphGryph: “not having cooking” even if it’s a low-range skill (say no recipes require higher than lvl 6) is a failry absurd stance to take, of course it’s worthwhile (essential even) within it’s range, but it just caps earlier than some skills, because there is no use for advanced cooking skills in the cataclysm. As I already pointed out, if you don’t want it “stealing” focus, you can toggle its advancement off, meaning using it polishes away rust but doesn’t use focus.

Driving has a similar situation, advancing it past lvl 5 or so is pointless except in some fairly extreme self-created scenarios, but you haven’t made a case for why that’s a problem.

22

Kevin, I think we’re on the same page (or close enough). I’m not sure where the poison thing came from though, that wasn’t my idea.

My point about big recipes isn’t the quality or difficulty of them, it is more about what you are putting into the recipe versus what you are getting out of it.

If the ingredients have a nutritional and morale value combined that exceeds or only equals the output of the recipe then then there’s an issue. The larger the number of ingredients combined in a recipe, the more of a bonus you should get.

A really good example of a recipe is the Johnnycake.

The recipe gives you 6 portions of johnnycake; each portion gives 20 nutrition and 2 fun.
The ingredients are 1x cooking oil and 2x cornmeal or flour.

Taken alone those things give almost no nutrition and actually give negative fun. That is perfect. That is how cooking can be useful. You are taking ingredients from the environment that have zero use to the player with no cooking skill, and are turning them into a valuable food item.

But not all recipes work quite this way. Take Meat Soup for example:

Meat Soup grants the following: Nutrition 160, Enjoyability 2(more when hot and fresh obviously). One portion.
It is made using 2x meat chunks, 2x broth, and 1x Optional Item, which includes raw pasta and potato. Let’s assume potato because it best exemplifies what I’m talking about. I’m going to leave out the water/quenching aspect of the recipe for the sake of staying focused.

If, instead of making meat soup, you ate the broth and simply cooked the meat chunks and potato (neither require any additional ingredients to make).

This would give you:
50 nutrition and 8 Fun per cooked meat (plus stacking fresh+hot bonuses) for a total of 100 Nutrition and 16 Fun.
30 nutrition and 1 Fun per broth (plus stacking fresh+hot bonuses) for a total of 60 nutrition and 2 Fun.
20 nutrition and 3 Fun for the baked potato (plus fresh+hot bonuses)

In other words, you just turned 180 nutrition, 21 Fun, plus whatever Fun you get from stacking Hot+Fresh modifiers, into a single huge item worth 160 nutrition, 2 Fun, and only one hot+fresh modifier (I admit I am not sure how the hot+fresh modifiers work across multiple food items).

This is sort of what I am talking about. There are quite a few recipes like this. For the most part the baking stuff is great because you get multiple portions and the benefits always vastly outweigh simply not cooking those ingredients. But then you have recipes like Meat Soup where you are actually, objectively wasting resources.

With recipes like that, I ask again; Why Cook.

It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to rebalance recipes to make them more attractive, but it would certainly be tedious.

Personally, I would give the soup more than one portion and make the portions (combined) worth more than the items it uses.

23

I was replying to vache and got ninja’ed by both you and GlyphGryph, that’s why the poison thing doesn’t match up.

You’re totally right about a lot of the recipes being counterproductive, and of course they aren’t marked as such, so it’s up to the player to figure that out. I agree that generally a cooked dish should be better in some way than its ingredients (it might sacrifice nutrition for fun, but still, better in some way).

(side issue)
I’m also wondering if butchering could use some more refinement, perhaps producing different types of meat chunks. If you really make a hash of it (literally), you can still make a hash or stew with moderate enjoyability, but the current “cooked meat” is more representative of a decent cut of meat.

24

My idea wasn’t so much that you would randomly get food poisoning if you eat anything cooked at a low skill level, there should be some way to tell. Maybe the cooked meat recipe has a chance to give “undercooked meat (warm)”, “cooked meat (hot)”, or “burnt meat (very hot)”. Maybe the undercooked meat would have a description like “The meat is still very red and drips a lot when you touch it.” Anyone should know that eating that has a chance to be bad for them. The burnt meat gives slightly lower nutrition than the cooked meat, but comes with a modest morale penalty.

The more you level your cooking, the lower the chances are for undercooked or burnt meat. Essentially these are still failures crafting results, but they are a tangible and realistic and not really detrimental to gameplay.

25

I think a lot of the cooking issue just comes back to balancing the rewards of raw food vs. cooked food.

This relates back to the practice rework, but why not do away with focus? The “units” of focus are pretty much time * morale. If we balance the time stat and somehow scale skill gain directly from morale, there is no need for focus. We have sort of “overfit” the parameters we are trying to model by including it.

Focus has been good in-game thus far because some very brief tasks (i.e. interacting with computer terminals, sewing, fighting) give really high skill bonuses per minute, and the focus pool dampens that effect. It would be much more direct to make that specific skill gain (i.e. computer terminals) give diminishing returns when spammed. Frankly, stepping away from fighting for a while to cook should be refreshing and help my skill gain in fighting once I return to it. Morale can capture that kind of IRL synergy; focus can’t.