Varied food and cooking suggestions: Mixed nutrition, nuts and more!

[Monkeylord]

Hi! so after playing more than 150 hours, both modded and vanilla, I've had some thoughts and ideas about food and cooking. A lot of my suggestions have probably been made before and I know some mods like Expanded Foods already include some of them, but here I'm talking about things that (as a botannist) I suggest could be nice to have in the vanilla game. I hope you find some of my suggestions interesting at least!

1-Cooking: Bushmeat, pies and mixed nutrition

So, first of all, something that I think is a must: We should be able to put bushmeat in a cooking pot. Yeah, it's chewy and gamey and you get it by killing raccoons and bears and things that most people don't think of eating, but I really can't fathom why it cannot be used in meals. It has a far lower satiety value than all of the other meats (including fish), so I think that it's "bad quality" is already accounted for in terms of nutrition and survival. Even if you could use it in mealmaking you are still encouraged to seek other meat and protein sources for better nutrition. If you want to nerf it even more, bushmeat could take longer to cook than other meats to account for it's chewyness.

Another thing is pies: Why can't we mix different food categories or add mushrooms to them? meat and vegetable or meat and mushroom pies are a staple in real life, so I don't really get why they cannot be mixed. "It's too OP for pies to have multiple nutrition types" no, I'ts not, trust me. I have mods that allow for meat and vegetable pies and, while they are nice and come in handy, they do not make you OP by any means. Also, let us make quiches by adding eggs (and milk if you want to be really accurate) as the base in a pie.

Then there's mushrooms.This is maybe my weakest suggestion in this group, but mushrooms are really different from plants and are quite rich in protein IRL. I think they should have a mixed nutrtion value: maybe something like 60/70 vegetable sat. and 20/10 protein (or even make some of the bigger ones like puffballs or bolettes more nutritious: 80 vegetable sat and 20 protein sat). Somehting like that could make them different from true vegetables and give us a new (although weak) source of protein. Also, mushrooms IRL spoil really quickly but dry (and rehydrate) really well: Make them decay rapidly when raw (maybe a perishability value between meat and berries) but give us an option to dry them so they can be stored for a long, long time.

Continuing with the mixed nutrition and vegetable protein thing, I think there should be more options in these fields: legumes such as chickepeas, fava beans or lentils could be added as great sources of vegetable protein (or at least mixed vegetable/protein nutrition) and the same thing goes with nuts: Walnuts should drop more frecuently form walnut trees (maybe differentiate between "dry walnuts" as seeds and regular walnuts as the food item if you want to keep walnuts a rare tree) and other nuts such as chestnuts, hazelnuts, pecans  or almonds (or even pinenuts ar a rare drop form pine trees) should be added either as regular trees or as fruit trees. I'll delve into nuts and fruit trees deeper later in this post.

2-Doughforming: Breads and muffins. Maybe sugar too.

This has been suggested a hundred thousand times, but working with dough should work simillary to clayforming. This would allow us, the players, to make not only bread and pies but also make things like tartlets, muffins, pasta for meals, poundcakes or even just bread with different shapes to keep us entertained and make things prettier.

Of course, dough and baking could be made more complex:

-To make true bread and a lot of other bakeables you could need yeast, wich could be extracted from fruits or previously fermented foods like ales or pickles. Bread without yeast would just be flatbread, wich could be more shelf-stable but less nutritious as it is more dense and difficult to chew/digest.

-Some doughs and batters could need eggs or sugar, the latter being extracted by processing new crops such as beets or sugarcane. Some could even need molds, but those could me easily be made with clay.

-Some doughs could need a resting period or even kneading, but that may make things too complicated.

3-Fruit trees: Make them more rewarding

So you were foraging in the forest and found a nice apple tree. You cut off the branches, take it home and plant them. After a winter and some months only one of them establishes and then takes a LOT of time to produce fruit. The apples are finally ripe, you harvest them and...the whole harvest has the same satiety and yield as a bunch of blueberry bushes you can just yank from the forest.

As a botannitst, I really like how complex and indepth the fruit trees are. They are very close to how real trees work and I would actually love for all trees to have similar (although understandably shallower) mechanics as them, specially the trunk and branches structure, the seasonal changes like fruiting and flowering and them being actually leafless in winter, but I understand that I may like plants too much and that those mechanics for ALL trees could be too resource intensive for the game. Coming back to the original subject, I think tree fruits should either have a greater fruit yield (real fruit trees can yield hundreds of kilos of fruit) or tree fruit should be more nutritious than berries, at least the big fruits like mangoes, apples or oranges. 

Also, treenuts! give us almods, give us hazelnuts, give us chestnuts and more! they could be just regular trees with a high nut drop rate when you break their leafs (although I would preffer if you could pick the nuts or wild fruits from their leaves without breaking them) or just more fruit tree types, but tree nuts are IRL a great source of food and could come in really handy for survival. Just imagine how great could it be to pick up some chestnuts from the forest as the first snows come in when your winter prep has been lacking that year.

 

Aaand that's it. Thank your for reading through all of these. I truly, truly love this game and I want to see it keep growing!

[Forks]

Fantastic suggestions, personally I agree with all of them.
Doughforming is something I've never even thought of, but now I feel like I desperately need it.
And all your points about fruit trees are disappointly accurate, we're almost done with our second winter on my server and really the only benefit I see in the orchard I have slaved over is that the fruits last significantly longer than berries.

[LadyWYT]

It's the kinds of things I do expect to be added to the game at some point, but most likely as a small part of a larger update. As it currently stands, food and cooking is one of the more fleshed out gameplay loops, with plenty of variety available.

2 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

We should be able to put bushmeat in a cooking pot. Yeah, it's chewy and gamey and you get it by killing raccoons and bears and things that most people don't think of eating, but I really can't fathom why it cannot be used in meals.

I think the main reason for this bushmeat decision is to help push players to make better choices about what they spend their time hunting, as well as push them to acquire livestock. Bushmeat is good in the early game because food is food and it does keep a while when cooked, but it falls off rather quickly once the player is able to properly cook. Don't get me wrong; it's fun to use in meals with Expanded Foods, but I think if it were a meal ingredient in the base game it would be too easy for players to survive exclusively off subpar prey.

 

2 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

Another thing is pies: Why can't we mix different food categories or add mushrooms to them? meat and vegetable or meat and mushroom pies are a staple in real life, so I don't really get why they cannot be mixed. "It's too OP for pies to have multiple nutrition types" no, I'ts not, trust me. I have mods that allow for meat and vegetable pies and, while they are nice and come in handy, they do not make you OP by any means. Also, let us make quiches by adding eggs (and milk if you want to be really accurate) as the base in a pie.

I do agree with adding eggs and mushrooms to pies, but I'm not completely sold on multi-nutrient pies. Yes, it's a thing in real life, but I think the idea in gameplay is that the player needs to vary their ingredients from time to time in order to keep their nutrition levels up. Having a food option that covers three different nutrient groups as well as keeps for a while and stacks conveniently is likely going to mean that many players opt to make nothing but a single type of pie and ignore everything else.

 

2 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

Also, mushrooms IRL spoil really quickly but dry (and rehydrate) really well: Make them decay rapidly when raw (maybe a perishability value between meat and berries) but give us an option to dry them so they can be stored for a long, long time.

I don't think the split nutrients would be a good change, as I think it's better to keep things simple when it comes to the nutrition type of raw ingredients. I do, however, like the drying requirement idea, as that could easily be applied to fruit and meat as well. A good preservation method for the early game, as well as very handy if you don't have access to salt for some reason.

 

2 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

Continuing with the mixed nutrition and vegetable protein thing, I think there should be more options in these fields: legumes such as chickepeas, fava beans or lentils could be added as great sources of vegetable protein (or at least mixed vegetable/protein nutrition) and the same thing goes with nuts: Walnuts should drop more frecuently form walnut trees (maybe differentiate between "dry walnuts" as seeds and regular walnuts as the food item if you want to keep walnuts a rare tree) and other nuts such as chestnuts, hazelnuts, pecans  or almonds (or even pinenuts ar a rare drop form pine trees) should be added either as regular trees or as fruit trees. I'll delve into nuts and fruit trees deeper later in this post.

I do agree with this, excluding the mixed nutrition part. It would be nice to have a few more sources of plant protein to make the vegetarian playthroughs more interesting, but having multi-nutrient raw ingredients is just overcomplicating things.

 

2 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

The apples are finally ripe, you harvest them and...the whole harvest has the same satiety and yield as a bunch of blueberry bushes you can just yank from the forest.

In this case, I think perhaps the easiest fix is to require fruit tree fruit to be prepared before using it in a meal, and perhaps up the satiety value of the raw fruit a bit as well. After all, while it makes sense to eat a raw apple as-is, when was the last time you heard of someone shoving whole apples into a pie/cookpot? The raw whole fruit could keep for a long time in most cases and serve as a handy snack as well as be the type of fruit suitable for juicing. To use the fruit in a meal though, the player would need to prepare it with a knife first, yielding more servings of raw fruit that have a bit less satiety than the whole fruit and spoil quite fast, but allows such fruit to create much more food than berries can.

[Monkeylord]

Thanks for the feedback! These are also things that I see being implemented in the long run, but I just thought of them and had to write them down haha

47 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I think the main reason for this bushmeat decision is to help push players to make better choices about what they spend their time hunting, as well as push them to acquire livestock.

I can see that, but as I said I think that the really low satiety of bushmeat compared to every other meat already pushes players to hunt other prey. I myshelf only eat bushmeat when I'm desperate for food in winter or if I've happened to kill a wolf or bear. That's the other thing about bushmeat: Most animals that drop it are much more dangerous to hunt than those that drop redmeat or poultry (at least in the early game)

 

49 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

don't think the split nutrients would be a good change, as I think it's better to keep things simple when it comes to the nutrition type of raw ingredients.

I can agree, split nutrients may be reaching too far (although I still would like a system like that to be implemented). Regarding mushrooms, I do think that at least some of them should be more nutritious and medicinal ones like reishi or bearded tooth should maybe heal you a little when consumed just like saguaro fruit does. 

 

51 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

do, however, like the drying requirement idea, as that could easily be applied to fruit and meat as well.

It actually kind of surprises me that drying is not an in-game option seeing how in depth the game is with these kind of things. I hope we see some drying racks in the future!

58 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

In this case, I think perhaps the easiest fix is to require fruit tree fruit to be prepared before using it in a meal, and perhaps up the satiety value of the raw fruit a bit as well

Nice idea actually, having the abbility to cut up fruit before cooking it could be nice (Actually cutting up food most food items before cooking would be great). I would still ramp up the satiety of most tree fruits by a good amount. It just doesn't sit right with me that a whole mango has the same satiety as a blueberry. Even lichis and cherries should be more sating than wild berries, even if just a measly 10 points.

[jerjerje]

6 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

3-Fruit trees: Make them more rewarding

So you were foraging in the forest and found a nice apple tree. You cut off the branches, take it home and plant them. After a winter and some months only one of them establishes and then takes a LOT of time to produce fruit. The apples are finally ripe, you harvest them and...the whole harvest has the same satiety and yield as a bunch of blueberry bushes you can just yank from the forest.

It's interesting how much our opinions on fruit trees differ. I feel that they are too powerful for how much work you put into them.

Yes, each piece of fruit gives the same satiety as a berry item, but their main benefit is storage time. If you want fruit nutrition in winter, then you either pre-cook many crocks worth of jam (requires also getting bees) or porridge (but porridge would need to be sealed to last the entire winter, so requires either fat or bee wax), or you just harvest a few fruit trees that you found in the wild. With a cellar, fruits will last well over an entire year! That is where I currently see the main benefit of fruit trees (though some fruits don't last very long either).

Even small Fruit trees produce a lot of fruit every year. Finding a few smaller fruit trees is enough to harvest enough fruit for an entire year. In my world, I easily found enough fruit trees before the second winter, that I never had to bother with berries again.

Also, berry bushes have to be harvested multiple times a year, while fruit trees only need one harvest. So, I would argue, that fruit trees also require less maintenance than berry bushes.

The only downside fruit trees have, is that they cannot be moved without a very large time investment. But, since you only need to visit each fruit tree once a year, I don't mind a little travelling for that.

I do agree on the point, that planting your own fruit tree is not really rewarding. But not because the fruits are not good enough. It's just easier to collect the fruit from wild trees. (Unless you plan to keep playing on one world for a very long time).

I really don't think fruit trees need a buff. I would even suggest a (slight) nerf (i.e.: dropping less fruit per harvest, somewhat shorter spoilage times).

[Monkeylord]

12 hours ago, jerjerje said:

I feel that they are too powerful for how much work you put into them

I see your point, but it's not the effort for me: It's the time. You can get more fruit nutrition in a year from planting a bunch of berry bushes than for plating an orchard. Fruit from trees lasts much longer, yes, but the time it takes for you to actually get your hands on the fruit is (at least for me) not really worth it as things are right now. I still plant fruit trees because I like them, but I think their fruits need to be more nutritious (As I said above, why the hell does a mango have the same satiety as a measly blueberry). 

However I do agree that fruit trees should require some work. Maybe fruit trees could require some maintenance such as fertilization or pruning. Something that is not super time or labour intensive but that doesn't allow for you to just leave the tree completely unchecked until the fruit ripens.

[jerjerje]

53 minutes ago, Monkeylord said:

but the time it takes for you to actually get your hands on the fruit is (at least for me) not really worth it as things are right now

As long as you harvest the trees wild without cutting them down, you can have all the fruit you need in your second year.

1 hour ago, Monkeylord said:

(As I said above, why the hell does a mango have the same satiety as a measly blueberry)

I mean, all the berry items do show multiple berries at once, so I always interpreted it as a handful of berries. Not one singular berry. Still, I get, that it seems a little strange to have the same satiety for both.

1 hour ago, Monkeylord said:

However I do agree that fruit trees should require some work. Maybe fruit trees could require some maintenance such as fertilization or pruning

I quite like that idea. If fruit trees required some pruning in spring to get a large harvest, I think that would alleviate the issues I have with fruit trees. This would require the player to visit each tree more than once a year, and would thereby give more of an incentive to actually try to plant the trees close to your base.

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, Monkeylord said:

However I do agree that fruit trees should require some work. Maybe fruit trees could require some maintenance such as fertilization or pruning. Something that is not super time or labour intensive but that doesn't allow for you to just leave the tree completely unchecked until the fruit ripens.

I would actually say the opposite: berry bushes are what should require some work in order to cultivate them at base. Fruit trees are fine right now, since they take some effort and quite a lot of time to get going. But like you said, fruit trees are easily outclassed by berry bushes simply because it's easy to scour the countryside of bushes and relocate them to your base in the time it takes to get a small orchard vernalized.

Wildcraft has a pretty good system for handling berry bushes, in my opinion. Breaking bushes will actually break the bush and drop sticks; to grow berry bushes the player needs to take a cutting and plant it. The cuttings will dry out, so the player needs to plant them somewhat quickly(within a few hours) or else they won't be viable. Likewise, the player also needs to make sure they're planting cuttings at the appropriate time, since if it's too cold(or even too hot, maybe) the cutting will die. Depending on the berry species, some bushes can self-propagate via vines or suckers.

Basically, the player should need to put effort in for both fruit trees and berry bushes if they want to be harvesting things in the safety of home.