Why can't we cook vegetables?

[SnapJelly]

Hello friends,

As the title says I immediately upon playing tried just cooking vegetables in a fire and was a little shocked to see it didn't do anything, of course you can eat the veggies raw but wouldn't it make sense for it to be possible to cook them just as they are the same way you can cook meat or fish?

You can cook them in meals but not by themself, it always stood out to me as strange because it seems like such a standard next step to me.

[Atemo]

It has always seemed a little off to me as well, though I suppose one does not necessarily get nearly as many nutrients more from cooked vegetables than from cooked meat products.

On the opposite side, it has also been a surprise to me that one cannot eat raw meat, even if at the cost of less nutrition gained and higher risks of bad side effects. Having your own animals over multiple generations in a sane environment should also make said raw meat a bit less dangerous, though at this point in the game, why one would want to eat raw meat is beyond me.

These things are not really that important to the experience, and many similar games do not let you cook vegetables as well, or even worse, do it inconsistently (e.g. Minecraft which lets you bake potatoes but not carrots and the likes, but food in that particular block game is much more of a complete mess than Vintage Story). But I would still not mind seeing this being addressed in one way or the other.

Edited August 23 by Atemo
I had forgotten to finish my original phrase after the long parenthesis.

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

of course you can eat the veggies raw but wouldn't it make sense for it to be possible to cook them just as they are the same way you can cook meat or fish?

I wouldn't think so. Meat generally needs to be cooked both to make it easier to digest, and also to make it safer to eat by killing off any germs or parasites in it. Some vegetables do need to be cooked in order to really be edible, however, there's also a lot of vegetables that are perfectly fine to eat raw.

Mind you, that's not to say that players shouldn't have some more options for how to cook vegetables and food items in general. Just that it doesn't have the same importance as cooking meat. One option I would somewhat like to see is some sort of slicing mechanic, since generally you slice up things like certain fruits and vegetables before cooking with them. However, I'm not really sure what purpose it would serve, aside from cluttering files and giving specific ingredients like turnip greens. I guess it could be a case where, if the fruit/vegetable is left whole, it keeps fresh for a longer period but cannot be used for cooking, whereas slicing it up prepares it properly for cooking but significantly shortens the shelf life. I suppose in that case, you could have a meaty turnip stew with turnip greens as the side dish, but I could easily see it just amounting to a bunch of busywork as well.