Utility of cooking vs brewing and poultices

[Olinoob Snail]

Hello! I apologize if this has been suggested before, I haven’t seen it anywhere yet. This is a suggestion I made a long time ago for TFC, and I thought it could be improved upon here

As we have seen, poultices have been added to the game, and herbal brewing will soon be too (If I’m not mistaken, it will give potion effects? Or cure diseases maybe?).

Currently however, I find the use of poultices quite limited compared to food (why bring a stack of bread and a stack of poultices on a journey, when you can just bring some turnips ang get both benefits?). The easy solution would of course to remove the healing effects of food. This however would mean that except for porridge there would be no use in cooking. Just cook a stack of bread or eat raw vegetables. Well, to remedy this, and make cooking great again, I propose a correlation with tiered tools and hunger depletion: using iron tools would make you more hungry than using copper tools, and copper than stone tools. This means that in the early game when foraging is the only option, the player is not penalized by constantly being hungry, since he is using stone tools. However the more he progresses, the more the game will require him to cook the raw food, then to make  basic recipes, then eventually complex meals. This means that a player fully geared with iron tools could no longer just walk around munching on berries, and would need to prepare himself for expeditions by preparing cakes, pies, sandwiches, whatever. (Stackable of course, there is no use in exploring if you inventory is full of food). Maybe extremely complex meals like pies or roasts that require ovens and pans could also give slight buffs or healing, this could be discussed.

I would like to add that hunger needs not be associated with tiered tools if this is too much of a hassle. When player levels/skills are implemented, the hunger could be linked to those. That way a very skilled/high level player will require more food (the same way a body builder requires more food than a normal person for example).

Please tell me what you think for this suggestion

Also as I side note, I read somewhere on the forums that people were annoyed that poultices took valuable inventory slots. I propose: a poultice pouch! Just a simple linen pouch in which you could store only the 4 types of poultices.

[redram]

My understanding is that eventually no foods will have any healing effects.   The real gripe on healing was when honey bowls were the best, because using them left you with a bowl cluttering up your inventory.   I have no problems with poultices at all.   That's part of the decisions one should have to make: spend an inventory slot on better healing, or leave it open for more loot?   There are indeed a variety of specialized containers planned for the future, that only hold certain items.   And a healing specialized one would be a good one.

5 hours ago, Olinoob Snail said:

why bring a stack of bread and a stack of poultices on a journey, when you can just bring some turnips and get both benefits?

The cooking update also introduced nutrition, which you may or may not have noticed (hit 'c' key to see it).   Similar to TFC, if you don't maintain all your nutritions, your max hp will go down.  My understanding of how it is intended to work, is that cooked food provides more nutrition per ingredient, or it lasts longer or something.  But the idea is that eating just raw foods won't allow you to maintain all your nutrition bars very easily, so your hp will be sub-par.  I've found it to be generally true so far, at least in my somewhat limited testing.  Fruit seems to be hard to maintain even through cooked food.  I've been pleasantly surprised how the system seems to motivate me to make different kinds of dishes to cover the food groups.  I was expecting to simply make one all the time.    I think down the road, there will be higher tier food that will make it even easier to maintain.   So that's supposed to be the bonus of cooking.  Plus with bread you double the satiation for basically only the cost of the cooking fuel (water is free, though locked behind copper, via bucket). 

[Olinoob Snail]

Yes I had noticed the nutrition bar, though currently I haven't found it to be too penalizing, even though my stews always lack meat and fruit. Besides dealing with wolves, low HP is no that much of a problem in the game, and there is no clear incentive for me to raise them. This is why I suggested to correlate hunger with cooking,  so that if the player wants to move on with levelling up/tiered metals, he would have to also be sure he can maintain his hunger.

If this nutrition aspect will be improved upon, and higher tier recipies help to cover more fully the nutrition needs, then I guess my suggestion is not that needed.

(I really hope we will get more cooking options! Can't wait for ovens and preserves and such!)