A small change to a mushroom would be wonderful.

[Arcitc Cuddlefish]

TL:DR, cook a pot of fly agarics, grab the pot of soup (still toxic, water isn't changed) and set it back on the fire to cook again. Presumably you changed the water for second cooking, and the toxic effect is thereby removed, as is the case in real life. Additionally, a suggested change to the poisoning for a more true-to-life experience and better interactivity. Explanation below; this is my favorite (and also a very misunderstood) safe edible mushroom! 

I was very excited to see even a small a variety of mushrooms, because as a mycologist, I get repeatedly disappointed by games mishandling these delightful organisms. The best two I'd found aside from this are oblivion/skyrim and Kingdom Come : Deliverance.

I was super excited to find that I could pick A. muscaria (fly amanita) alongside boletes and field mushrooms, and happy to see that it had a different characteristic. Once I realized I could make stew in my cooking pot and I presumably just got water somewhere nearby, I immediately made a pot of fly agaric stew. I was a little disappointed to find that it was still toxic, and in fact much more so for my having made a 4-cap pot. Then I realized I could take the pot off the finished side and set it back to cooking again; brilliant! That would account for the normal two-stage cooking process!

But no such luck

A. muscaria is very frequently misidentified as a particularly dangerous mushroom.
Set aside that there aren't actually any confirmed deaths from this thing at all - yeah, a pot of kidney beans is more dangerous than even a raw fly agaric as far as mortality goes. Beans just won't get you high.

It's incredibly easy to remove the toxin, and it makes an incredible stew, which is the most common way I know people to first try it.

IRL, you just need to lightly boil the mushroom, skin, gills, and all if you please, and then dump that water out. The psychoactive compounds are water soluble and the boil treatment renders the caps inert. Actually, it's not uncommon in rural Siberia to do this and then keep the initial water as a sort of alcohol/stimulant! The mushroom caps themselves are still surprisingly meaty, and they have an excellent flavor, even if you boil them 2 or 3 times out of an abundance of caution! I like to dump the water, refill with clean water, and then blend a few of them into a thick soup afterward because it's easier than drying and frying them  The flavor is exceptional!

If you wanted to be even truer to the mushroom, it shouldn't kill you, but you could still have dire, and much more interesting consequences. The most penalized you should be if not properly prepared is that it takes some of your fullness (it often causes vomiting and sweating) and if you really wanted to do well by it your character can hallucinate and/or have a dizzy/drunk screen. I don't know if it's feasible, but given the twitchiness with temporal storms, I'd bet you have the skill needed to swap out in-game textures on some things for 2 hours, like, maybe your storage jars look like drifters and moan/swipe at you, but don't hurt. Maybe you see a yawning chasm on the floor but it's still solid ground. You could also give them a nice trip, like their food storage counts look to be overflowing, or their inventory has impossibly high numbers: 73 pieces of wood, 5 jars of stew (stacked), things like that. It'd be hilarious if people got excited and wasted resources thinking they had an excess, and certainly a plausible scenario XD

As an aside, it'd be pretty easy to make distinctive morels as another edible mushroom, and Chicken of the Woods and Oyster mushrooms would liven up the trees even more and be easy to identify

[Digitalr]

Agree. Also, IMHO, decorative mushrooms must present in game as well.

 

 

Spoiler

 

[Arcitc Cuddlefish]

Ah, yes! Things that either don't have their IRL uses in game or are otherwise not helpful. Jack-o-lantern mushrooms and Turkeytail are distinctive and interesting. You could also either do a tinder polypore and make it functional or instead include any of another number of conks that wouldn't really have a use in game.

For anyone curious, a tinder polypore is a hoof-like mushroom the sticks out of the side of a tree with a hard woody body. The underside has pores, rather than gills or teeth, and this particular species has been used for thousands of years for fire! It's terribly important in that you can scrape out the pores and they ignite very easily, OR you can mash them down, and in so doing, it actually becomes *fire resistant* and you can use it to carry a bowl of fire from one location to another. It's more stable and simpler than a torch, and it comes ready made poking out of the side of trees lol. Actually, the famous Ötzi "the iceman" was carrying a tinder polypore when he died over 5000 years ago! It's a good one

Edited March 28, 2021 by Casey Harris
-basic typo

[Thalius]

57 minutes ago, Casey Harris said:

Ah, yes! Things that either don't have their IRL uses in game or are otherwise not helpful. Jack-o-lantern mushrooms and Turkeytail are distinctive and interesting. You could also aither do a tinder polypore and make it functional or instead include any of another number of conks that wouldn't really have a use in game.

For anyone curious, a tinder polypore is a hoof-like mushroom the sticks out of the side of a tree with a hard woody body. The underside has pores, rather than gills or teeth, and this particular species has been used for thousands of years for fire! It's terribly important in that you can scrape out the pores and they ignite very easily, OR you can mash them down, and in so doing, it actually becomes *fire resistant* and you can use it to carry a bowl of fire from one location to another. It's more stable and simpler than a torch, and it comes ready made poking out of the side of trees lol. Actually, the famous Ötzi "the iceman" was carrying a tinder polypore when he died over 5000 years ago! It's a good one

Little stuff like this brings a depth to the game that makes it immensely enjoyable, to me at least. Would love to see this and more things like it work their way into the core game over time.

[Arcitc Cuddlefish]

My like put you up at 69 - nice XD