Seasoning

[Catfoodbob]

Basically just the ability to combine certain items together via activation, not eating, with say garlic cloves and chunk of meat. to get a better moral boost.

[Rama_Tut]

Personally, I think that’s a better route to go for food in general than an ever-expanding list of thousands of craftable food items. There should be general categories of basic foodstuffs and then allow the player to combine them in whatever fashion he or she chooses. If my survivor wants to live on a diet of carrot and cookie dough burgers, why can’t he?

[Bidyhackier]

thats my dream since i knew this game,think about it,
“food cooking”(activating a pot)
1-insert food
2-mix
3-pour/place on dish

so you could like add,3 chunks of meat,1 bottle of water,3 garlic cloves,3 elf-a mutagens,a rock.then mix for 30 mins and the nutrition and effects of all foods would be summed up

[Soyweiser]

I think if you make a nice pull request with working code in it, people would not oppose it.

But yeah, the implementation of it is hard, and takes a lot of time.

[Miloch]

Instead of a rehaul of the current system I’d rather think of a modification to the current system. Recipe modifiers. Yes, they’d probably need to be added per recipe like the current recipes, but would take considerably less code, me thinks. (I’m not a coder, don’t ask me for a real answer on this.) If you add certain items to recipes the end result would be modified slightly. Adding a spice to some recipes to increase moral bonus like you said.

[Soyweiser]

Instead of a rehaul of the current system I’d rather think of a modification to the current system. Recipe modifiers. Yes, they’d probably need to be added per recipe like the current recipes, but would take considerably less code, me thinks. (I’m not a coder, don’t ask me for a real answer on this.) If you add certain items to recipes the end result would be modified slightly. Adding a spice to some recipes to increase moral bonus like you said.

Think you could abuse the mod system from weapons to also apply to food. But that will lead to some strange situations. (Make cooked meat, add ketchup, make other food out of cooked meat. Ketchup goes poof). Think keeping track of different food condiments after long crafting chains will be hard. Or lead to strange results.

[Miloch]

The system I was envisioning wasn’t being able to apply ketchup to everything. It was applied per recipe in ways that made sense. Aka a human check and still involves a lot of human labor.

[Soyweiser]

The system I was envisioning wasn’t being able to apply ketchup to everything. It was applied per recipe in ways that made sense. Aka a human check and still involves a lot of human labor.

Ow god you are one of those ‘no ketchup on pizza’ purists?

The system I was envisioning was a lot less human labor involved.

[Coolthulhu]

It’s actually harder to write properly than it sounds.

Those are out:

[ul][li]Giving spices a special use function that adds “tasty” flag to items. Too tedious to apply, too hacky and too hardcoded.[/li]
[li]Adding a special function with its own UI just for spicing. Even worse than the above.[/li][/ul]

The only option I see is adding optional crafting components and basing the result on those. But that’s just crafting flag inheritance system with all its requirements like informing people about the results BEFORE the craft is started.
Crafting system code is rather convoluted and updating it involves changing quite a lot.

[Miloch]

Is the crafting code due for a overhaul or something?

[Rama_Tut]

Crafting system code is rather convoluted and updating it involves changing quite a lot.

The crafting system is unsustainable. If you have a shelf full of recipe books, it’s already a painfully long wait each time you craft something for all those recipes to get read, and if we keep adding more recipes, the game will eventually just break. I’m guessing there’s a plan to fix this before it happens?

[pisskop]

cant we add an option to ‘favorite’ recipes? or hide some?

I dont think its too hard to search for things, and plus with the new memorization mechanics it shouldnt be an issue

[Coolthulhu]

The crafting system is unsustainable.

It only gets really bad with giant crafting inventories.
Upgrading item multiplicity code (so that you don’t have 100 separate “skewer” items, but 100x skewer, 100x rag etc.) would help that, but it won’t happen soon.
Until then, the only really sure way of limiting the time in menu is limiting the crafting area. If your crafting area contains thousands of items, expect it to take a long time, as all items in the area have to be cached.

You can try submitting a save with bad load times as an example. Those can help with localizing the causes of slowdowns.

[Gnorse]

what you are asking for is pretty much dwarf fortress’s cooking system which i very much like so +1

[Litppunk]

Something to just cut down on menus would help ALOT. Last time I played you had to manually scroll to that item WAY down THERE >.> or scroll up through all the recipes you can’t make. Some things that will help short term and maybe also long term:

1. toggle-able can’t craft view - basically if I can’t make it right now, I want the option to not look at it.

2. better search options - said this one before somewhere but make it so you can ALWAYS search by the skill and LEVEL instead of ONLY when its a non-main skill
   EX: cooking(4) should be a viable search option
   note: also allow more variants (with space, without, w/ or w/o parentheses etc.)

3. Sub categories/ ways to search via tags etc - We can search based on material, some sort of expansion on this would help

4.pg Up. pg Down in crafting menu & shortcuts - If I recall only way to navigate crafting menu is manually scrolling 1 item at a time. Let us do normal inventory style navigation, more or less, and let us move a page at a time with pgUp pgDown.

Sorry if any of these are out of date.

[monocata]

maybe just to make cooking easy?

can just set some kind of general type material~
like melon, berry the take a randomly Nutrition, Quench, Enjoyability, and Spoils time.

and result will be only few of the list
like sandwitch with meat, vagetable.
noodle with meat, vagetable.
boiled rice with meat, vagetable.
bread or cookie with jam.
fried meat and salad make deluxe sandwich as so on.

maybe there are some strange one for some people.

i think it can even reduce the list to a small one.
and cooking skill can make a random bonus or Penalty(if fail) if you add seasoning.
and add all bonus or Penalty to result.

[Litppunk]

That actually sounds like it might be a good idea… except we have all those nutrients and stuff now that are getting fleshed out and amazing. The seasoning side should definitely work though.

[Pantalion]

If it was possible to work on a system from scratch, I think simplified cooking would be very desirable, and would work well with a vitamin system:

Food Ingredient: Jack’s Leg

Uncooked
Material: Human Flesh
Taste: 5
Vitamins: Iron 5%, Vitamin A 20%, B12 5%, Calcium 10%, Vitamin C: 50% (that’d be the phelloderm),
Calories: +25
Quench: +5
Special: Cannibal’s Prion 10% chance, Parasites 5% chance.
Spoilage Time: 24 hours

Cooked Taste/Vitamins/Nutrition/Quench/Special
Material: Human Flesh
Taste: 15
Vitamins: Iron 10%, Vitamin A 10%, B12 15%, Calcium 15%, Vitamin C: 20%
Calories: +40
Quench: +0
Special: Cannibal’s Prion 5% chance.
Spoilage Time: 48 hours

Some vitamins are destroyed by cooking, some food needs to be cooked to release vitamins more easily, or make it easier to digest.

Cooking would then unlock recipes into which ingredients could be added:

“Cook” - Nothing fancy, just turn 1x raw ingredient into cooked ingredient.
Needs: Heat Source, Food Cooking 1.

“Salad” - Needs: Cutting 1.
Adds: 5 Enjoyability.
Minimum Ingredient: 1 Leafy Vegetable.
Possible Ingredients: 5 of any salad compatible type, plus three seasonings.

“Soup” - Needs: Boiling 2, Food Cooking 3, Container, Heat Source.
Adds: 5 Quench.
Needs Ingredient: 1 Water per 2 ingredients added.
Minimum Ingredients: 1 Vegetable/Animal/Mineral/Egg/Rock/Bone
Possible Ingredients: 6 of any soup compatible type, plus three seasonings.
Cooks all ingredients added, and produces 2 servings per ingredient. Divides the total nutrition/quench/vitamins among the total number of servings.

“Jerky” - Needs: Heat Source, Food Cooking 2
Adds: x100 spoilage time.
Needs ingredients

So Jack’s Leg Soup would be:

Two Jack’s Legs
1 Water

4 Servings:
Material: Water, Human Flesh
Enjoyment: 15 (Enjoyment becomes the average of all ingredients, water has no taste and we used no seasonings).
Vitamins per serving: 5% Iron, 5% Vitamin A, 7% B12, 7% Calcium, Vitamin C: 10%.
Calories: 20
Quench: 15
Spoilage time: 48 hours (Shortest lived ingredient).
Special: Cannibal’s Prion 5%.

Do you want to save your recipe? Y/N

“Shia Souprise” was added to your favourites!

So cooking in a soup would be a convenient way to cook a large number of items at the same time, include gross, healthy items that are good for you, and let you create a balanced, tasty meal with the ingredients you had available.

While certain “transformative” recipes could remain - Flour into bread, for example, or Seeds into fried seeds, there could still be variety:

“Bread” - Needs 1 flour per 3 ingredients.
Possible ingredients: Seeds, nuts, dried fruit.

Fried Seeds + Flour + Acorns + Dried Orange

“Granary Loaf” was added to your favourites!

The options would be endless to the player, while potentially being less labour intensive than the current “create one recipe for every possible subvariant” system, which makes sense for electronics, less so for making a hot pot.

[Litppunk]

Definitely mod worthy though, and if it works well it WILL get mainlined.

[Kedryn]

So cooking in a soup would be a convenient way to cook a large number of items at the same time, include gross, healthy items that are good for you, and let you create a balanced, tasty meal with the ingredients you had available.

Just like real life!

Though I do think many of the old recipes should still be found in cookbooks because 1) it adds flavor to the region (pun not intended) like New England clam chowder and 2) so players don’t have to create and/or name their own recipes to avoid something named “Fish Potato Celery Milk Soup”.

I like your cooking system wishlist; I’d be able to cook the things that I do irl without having to mod in a recipe. Though I am ‘this close’ to modding in okra (which grows terribly in that region) just so that I can make gumbo.