ruecharli

Honestly, restrict it to the single selected hotbar slot (and have hot metal added automatically to that slot on item pickup, if available)

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

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.