The Great Comestible expansion

[Tilion]

Some great additions already suggested (love the list by Jericoshost and the options outlined by jimbob), maybe I’d be thinking of a few new items but also ways to make the most of the resources available.

Get those big bags of oats already proposed by KA101 and add some cartons of UHT milk as well as the powdered stuff (why is all milk in C:DDA fresh and in glass bottles to rot before you can get to it?- surely some people have a stock of long-life milk that doesn’t need to be stored in a fridge) - this in conjunction with all the berries, apples and even honey comb etc. that are all in the environment means you could get a half-dozen porridge recipes that are very filling and give a nice morale/health boost. Same could be said for the drier granola/energy bar possibilities as mentioned by Fengfirth, if you were to have recipes for them rather than just available as loot, they’d need more honey and maybe the addition of some bags of nuts (which would make for a fairly healthy snack in itself)?

On the fruit line, we’ve already got pies and the ability to can/vacuum pack apple slices, so why not add preserves for the berries you collect in the wild and the occasional citrus - they could need 3 sugar and 5 total fruit, put 'em in a normal glass jar but they hold 10 portions or so of Strawberry, Blueberry & Mixed Berry jams, Marmalade and Lemon Preserve; add 'em to your porridge, make a sandwich or enable the ability to toast bread and spread 'em… You could add grapes to the fruit and peanuts to the collection of nuts available to get you some Grape Jelly & Peanut Butter too!

Love some of the other ideas mentioned - we really need a more generic big bag of pasta to go with those grains & rice - get the pasta baking with those underutilised tins of tuna and corn, also rabbit with wild vegetables and mushroom risotto anyone?

I’d like to see a few more additions - extra tinned fruits & veg, stews & casseroles; all those packet food varieties (noodles/cup-a-soups etc.) that just need hot water, some type of cookies or biscuits for when you can sit down with a cup of tea/coffee would be nice too - even better if we’ve got the hot chocolate going on. Final thing I can think of is some sort of cheese segment in waxed paper and smoked cheese in plastic along with a variety of crackers - they’d also go great with the grapes not turned to jelly and a scavenged bottle of jimbob’s wine! You might even drop-on lucky and find a full cheese wheel with 16 portions…

Hope some of that is useful and maybe even gets implemented - the last thing I suggested to add to C:DDA was the public works building and that kinda turned out O.K.

P.S. - please forgive my rambling stream-of-conciousness writing style.

[Zireael]

Powdered milk + water = milk? Count me in!

[kevin.granade]

Powdered milk + water = milk? Count me in!

Have you tried em powdered milk biscuits?

[Tilion]

Have you tried em powdered milk biscuits?

“Made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know they’re not only good for you, but also pure, mostly… Give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Heavens, they’re tasty and expeditious.”

Nope, I for one’ve never heard of 'em - but I’m sure they’re just terrible, imaginary as they are. Besides which, in the Cataclysm there’ll be no Norwegian bachelor farmers left, the wheat’ll be irradiated, the powdered milk is sure to be just as off as the fresh stuff and who - in a world-destroying invasion of horrors - wants to take any risk with a foodstuff that describes itself as ‘expeditious’? Any survivor’s intestines are sure to be traumatised enough without ‘expediting’ anything through 'em…

[drake1storm]

Yeah, The Darkling Wolf wanted full-on MGS3 healing interface back in the day. I’m not sure why a sewing kit & heat source (sterilize the needle!) couldn’t work OK for survival suturing. (Probably some reason, but I don’t know it.)

The thread itself wouldn’t be sterilized. This could be rather readily done, however, using a small amount of water that has been saturated with iodine tablets, vodka, moonshine, disinfectant(duh), or radiation (as in a high powered UV light).

[JohnnyB715]

Nuts!! All manner of nuts. Can easily find pecans all over… can craft trail mix from nuts + berries… Nuts could also be in many other recipes including with meat/fish. Creating peanut butter would also be nice and jellies with various fruits, sugar and jars. Which would allow you to make a PBJ sandwich. Nuts also add in the ability for someone to add a nut allergy trait that would not allow you to eat nuts and give u 1 or 2 points on character create.

[fishy1234555]

Good ideas everyone. Keep it up. I like all of it and will have some add-ables soon

[Pthalocy]

Onions.

Would mostly be useful for cooking recipes as already explored in previous posts, but if you eat it raw you gain the smelly trait for a while. Only stave off starvation with these if you’re desperate XD

On the plus side, I don’t see them going bad very quickly.

[Sheb]

Recently translated onions into French, so they must be in the game somewhere, maybe the dev version.

I’d like to see eggs, maybe powdered eggs too put in. And some giant, mutated chicken we could harvest eggs from.

[Pthalocy]

Ohgood! And I am always up for giant, wrestler-sized chickens.

[vultures]

Yeah, grinding 8-feet tall mutated turkey colonies of New England for eggs only to mutate yourself with some feathers and a peck. Then we’ll get all sorts of grains in game.

[keldoclock]

Recently translated onions into French, so they must be in the game somewhere, maybe the dev version.

Yep, onions are in the latest experimental build. The description mentions cutting them up for cooking, but theres no recipes that use them ( and I set my cooking to 10 to check)

[youtoo]

long lasting items:

Spam (years)
Twinkies (shelf life is supposed to be long)

[KA101]

[quote=“youtoo, post:33, topic:2647”]long lasting items:

Spam (years)
Twinkies (shelf life is supposed to be long)[/quote]

Spam/SPAM already exists in-game, what with Rivet frying it up.

[keldoclock]

Yeah I think really what the game needs in terms of comestibles is to just flesh out all the long-lasting staples of New England kitchens- Rice, oats, cereal(maybe 2 or 3 kinds, like, cornflakes/chocolate puffs/crisped rice), maybe eggs (eggs could last 3 days or so, then you could have powdered eggs), UHT milk and powdered milk, butter, and you’re basically done. Between all of those and what’s already in the game you could easily have like 40 cooking recipes. Just Eggs+Milk+Flour+Butter can give you 30 recipes right there, crepes, cookies, all the different ways to cook eggs, custard (which could then be made into desserts), dumplings, the possibilities aren’t endless but you could easily make enough that it’ll take the wiki years to record them all.

Many of those recipes require refrigeration which wouldn’t be possible in the game now, but maybe after gas station ice machines are added you could do dumplings or ice cream or lemon merengue, that sort of thing.

[zapheai]

New England is on the east coast and the rivers most likely come from there / empty into the ocean so surely river water would be salty, so why not make the ‘water’ when you boil it give back like 1 unit of salt? and to balance the salt farming you could make the preserving recipes require a few units more of salt.

Another idea would be being able to plant your rotten vegetables in the spring and have them grow in like 30-40 days with a percent chance of whether or not they contain any radiation or if they will even grow? it would give more use to tilling the ground besides tripping the zombies

Also so that you don’t need to completely rely on powdered eggs sometimes you could find small crows eggs in the wild to add to recipes? granted you would need more but im unsure of if the eggs would be the same as chicken eggs as they might have different properties in real life by means of cooking.

[Inquisitor_Dust]

[quote=“youtoo, post:33, topic:2647”]long lasting items:

Spam (years)
Twinkies (shelf life is supposed to be long)[/quote]
But Twinkies should be extremely rare with Snowballs being fairly common
But nobody likes Snowballs.
[size=4pt]I like snowballs…[/size]

[Pthalocy]

I see what you did there Inquisitor. With all this food, Rule #1: Cardio becomes even more important. Heheh.

[keldoclock]

find small crows eggs in the wild to add to recipes

Yeah, wild bird’s eggs would work. As far as cooking they are all more or less the same, its just a question of how many you need to get the equivalent amount of egg. If you’ve ever been to a large pan-Asian supermarket you probably found quail eggs there.

Inquisitor is right, Snoballs are way better! Twinkies don’t have chocolate, marshmallow, or coconut!

If you want to make the rivers salty thats fine, but then you would need to add more streams and ponds (something I feel the game should already have) to solve the problem of drinking water.

[vultures]

Well, wider city areas have enormous storage facilities, it is so throughout the world. Their position is shifted accordingly, mainly due to reposition of residental areas, also some industries. This is strongly dependent on the total population count. Another thing could be looking to the actual county’s (NOT country) needs, as small, agricultural settlements tend to have multi-purpose distribution centers, which is to my knowledge the only case when it’s actually “plural”. When the panic stikes in its full, the essentials and basic resources are planned for en-locale equal splitting amongst those that are expected to stay resident. This raises an actual question relevant to the game - if the civilians are evacuated in a very short notice, what spot-on action is made to ensure “their” supplies somehow end up with them? My best guess would be - none. The main factor for that matter is prioritizing, and a blissfull fact that underground storages of the kind have their own rail access. And the ports, and river docks, also share a rail connection. So go imagine where your dehydrated eggs went to.

++…just wanting to add, if we (the Players) had some traces of military activity on a perhaps small-to-mid scale, their improvised bunkers, fortifications and posts could’ve had some sort of temporary storages for the troops. Since the army more than once symphatised with the common folk surrounding them, this could be your source for an ocassional keg or two of powder milk; for your latte, that is.