cooking Expanded cooking pot mechanics (eternal stew, multi-step recipes, heat saturation bonus)

[ruecharli]

A lot of this borrows from existing mechanics and thus would not be particularly difficult to implement, save for multi-step recipes.

Prerequisites

Cooking pots should work like crucibles. To maintain the current meal saturation/ingredient limits, simply have a maximum of 24 ingredients total in a cooking pot. Recipes would then require ratios of ingredient types, just like alloy ratios. There is absolutely no good reason why I shouldn't be able to make a stew with 1 red meat and 23 assorted vegetables, no matter how weird it would be.

1. Eternal stew

Take a cooking pot with less than 6 servings, put it on a fire, and add ingredients until it is filled. Round down equivalent satiety values and number of total ingredients. Average perish time from there.

E.g., a pot with 5.1 remaining servings equates to 20.4 ingredients. Add up to 4 more ingredients as the game rounds down the initial ingredients to 20, therefore cutting ~2% of the original pot's satiety (evenly across nutrition types). Process the resulting dishes total satiety and perish timer.

2. Multi-step recipes

Idea 1 would also allow for multi-step recipes. Imagine making a roux with flour and fat and then cooking again with meat to make a meat/gravy dish. Or, instead, use that same roux with cheese, vegetables and dough to make a pasta!

This idea would open up so many possibilities, while also being completely optional!

+ When adding a non-empty cooking pot to a fire (or just adding a portion to an empty cooking pot), the contents of that cooking pot could render as a coloured liquid in one of the 4 cooking pot slots. This would allow multi-step recipe ratios to be more easily understood and visualised.

+ Meal "bases" like roux would make it much easier for the game to appropriately name resulting dishes and avoid confusion. Without such bases, it would be near impossible to add new dishes that have similar ingredients.

3. Heat saturation bonus

Heat up your food beyond a threshold for a small bonus to satiety and even a little increase in body temperature while it is still hot. It would cool down just like any metal. I just think a hot, steaming pot of food would be a nice addition for flavour.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums and game!

22 minutes ago, ruecharli said:

3. Heat saturation bonus

Heat up your food beyond a threshold for a small bonus to satiety and even a little increase in body temperature while it is still hot. It would cool down just like any metal. I just think a hot, steaming pot of food would be a nice addition for flavour.

To my knowledge, this is already a game feature, minus the extra satiety. Which in my opinion, the extra satiety isn't necessary, since the warmth bonus is enough. That being said, the warmth bonus is currently rather pointless, since it won't help you stay warm for a longer period of time, and in the time that it takes to warm up your meal you're going to be warmed back up by the fire itself.

 

24 minutes ago, ruecharli said:

1. Eternal stew

Take a cooking pot with less than 6 servings, put it on a fire, and add ingredients until it is filled. Round down equivalent satiety values and number of total ingredients. Average perish time from there.

E.g., a pot with 5.1 remaining servings equates to 20.4 ingredients. Add up to 4 more ingredients as the game rounds down the initial ingredients to 20, therefore cutting ~2% of the original pot's satiety (evenly across nutrition types). Process the resulting dishes total satiety and perish timer.

Eternal stew would be nice to have, but would require a special recipe. Currently, meals are rather specific, and while they may have the same nutritional output they don't necessarily qualify as the same thing. IE, a stew that consists of two turnips, a carrot, and an onion is not the same meal as a stew made with two carrots, a turnip, and an onion, despite both meals having the same general ingredients.

 

27 minutes ago, ruecharli said:

2. Multi-step recipes

This is basically what Expanded Foods does, and I daresay what most players would like to see given how popular the mod is. That being said, I'm not sure that everything that mod introduces is necessarily a good fit for the vanilla game. 

[ruecharli]

13 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

To my knowledge, this is already a game feature, minus the extra satiety.

I didn't know that! I've never noticed temperatures on my bowls.

14 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Eternal stew would be nice to have, but would require a special recipe. Currently, meals are rather specific, and while they may have the same nutritional output they don't necessarily qualify as the same thing. IE, a stew that consists of two turnips, a carrot, and an onion is not the same meal as a stew made with two carrots, a turnip, and an onion, despite both meals having the same general ingredients.

I don't know what you mean here. What I mean is to have eternal stew as something of a catch-all, with a generalised name beyond a certain number of unique ingredients.

I am aware that meals are currently quite specific - my idea hinges on changing that.

16 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

This is basically what Expanded Foods does, and I daresay what most players would like to see given how popular the mod is. That being said, I'm not sure that everything that mod introduces is necessarily a good fit for the vanilla game. 

I've just looked at the mod's wiki, and IMO it takes it way too far outside of vanilla. It's cool as a mod, but absolutely not what I am suggesting.

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, ruecharli said:

I didn't know that! I've never noticed temperatures on my bowls.

The food should be hot as long as it's been over a fire recently. The only reason I know it's a thing is a friend found a snippet of code accounting for that when working on a mod. So I suppose the more accurate statement is that it's already a feature, but not one strong enough to really a make a difference, or it's a feature that's planned but not fully implemented yet.

 

3 hours ago, ruecharli said:

I don't know what you mean here. What I mean is to have eternal stew as something of a catch-all, with a generalised name beyond a certain number of unique ingredients.

I am aware that meals are currently quite specific - my idea hinges on changing that.

That was basically my point--a "catch-all" is a little difficult to account for with the current system. Personally, I think I would lean a little more towards more specific "general" recipes, such as puddings, compotes, dumplings, sausage, etc., rather than a single "catch-all" general meal. That pushes the player to experiment a little more by making specific choices, rather than giving the player incentive to just dump everything in a pot and call it a day.

There is a mod for perpetual stew though: https://mods.vintagestory.at/eternalstew

3 hours ago, ruecharli said:

I've just looked at the mod's wiki, and IMO it takes it way too far outside of vanilla. It's cool as a mod, but absolutely not what I am suggesting.

I mean...

4 hours ago, ruecharli said:

+ When adding a non-empty cooking pot to a fire (or just adding a portion to an empty cooking pot), the contents of that cooking pot could render as a coloured liquid in one of the 4 cooking pot slots. This would allow multi-step recipe ratios to be more easily understood and visualised.

+ Meal "bases" like roux would make it much easier for the game to appropriately name resulting dishes and avoid confusion. Without such bases, it would be near impossible to add new dishes that have similar ingredients.

This is basically what Expanded Foods does, as I said. You can cook certain things down into stock, and make soup from the result. It's just that the meal itself isn't relabeled to anything special. Some recipes require the player to cook/prepare other ingredients first in order to make certain foods, such as needing to cook bones into gelatin and fruit into syrup to make fruit bars. Meat can be cooked as-is, or it can be aged or tenderized to make it tastier, and breaded before cooking to get a fried dish.

[Rainbow Fresh]

What I think the game needs is to move away from the fixed ratio slot based recipes. And yes, add multi-step recipes. What if, instead of having 4 times up to 6 items worth of ingredients, they have a value/volume and you add them to your pot? Let's say the cooking pot can hold a total of 10L. You could add 6L of water and then throw in something like 1 slab of readmeat (cut into chunks), 2 carrots and 2 potatoes. Maybe some salt. Maybe something else. Like how you'd actually go about making real world soup/stew.

Maybe spruce it up into a multi-step process. Fill with water, heat to cooking temperature. Then throw in the meat, boil for a bit (cause meat takes longer to be just right then the veggies). Finally add the veggies and make sure not to overcook.

Yes, implementing these kind of "free-style" recipes would be much more work than the current 6 "allow list" placeholders with name-merging; but it would be a much more immersive, much more actively engaging mechanic compared to the most simplistic calculator cooking we have right now. Using this would also break up the way portions work. You don't need X of everything for X portions, the amount of portions is defined by how many portions of 1L volume you can scoop out of the result.

And both the multi-step processing aswell as the volume-based dish sizes would allow for fancier dishes that aren't just X times Y ingredients. Combining a boiled potato and a cooked carrot with a fried ("cooked" but actually just charred/fried on the campfire without pot) piece of readmeat for a plate of steak with sides.

Edited June 24 by Rainbow Fresh

[Heegrim]

I think they gotta overhaul how the cooking pot UI/inventory slots work so liquids are easier to interact with. This way you could keep adding ingredients to the pot as the stew cooks. 
The 4-slot system is annoying and you should be able to add whatever you want to the pot, even if it ends up as a sloppy pot of gruel in the end.

Also, candles should be made by melting wax in the pot then clicking on it with flax fibre in your hand to dip it and add 1 layer of wax at a time. This would be more immersive and remove the weird 4-slot recipes from the game. 

[Cedric the Silent]

1 hour ago, Heegrim said:

Also, candles should be made by melting wax in the pot then clicking on it with flax fibre in your hand to dip it and add 1 layer of wax at a time. This would be more immersive and remove the weird 4-slot recipes from the game.

Count down till we get a immersive candle making mod begins now. I don't know if  there is one already I don't know about, if there is I bet it would be way out of date with current game build.