Rainbow Fresh

How... how does achieving Steel solve food issues?

Why would you need to upgrade though? Why does an amphorae need to be an "inferior predecessor" to the barrel just because you can get clay going before copper aka. boards? The clay storage vessel has a reason to exist even when you have upgraded to a warehouse full of trunks, because specifically the earlier clay variant has the advantage to spoilage rate that the wooden chest doesn't. In contrary, the wooden chest has more storage than the clay vessel. Same could be applied to liquid storage. Using clay-based storage mediums could improve spoilage rates for liquids inside at the cost of having less capacity. 25L for an amphorae vs. 50 for the barrel. Otherwise, both could be carried if that was ever implemented in vanilla. Both could break or slowly rot away over time (as the current barrel recipe has no form of treatment against water damage to the wood in its current recipe) if that was to be an intended mechanic. One could reasonably argue that all in-barrel crafting mechanics (mixing), which require the barrel to be *sealed* could only be done with a wooden barrel, as secondary tradeoff. Making clay-based liquid storage vessels a small and simple form of early storage that, due to better spoil rates, retains value later down the line and the wooden alternative being the bulk cargo option with better crafting capabilities at a higher price and normal spoil rates. That said however, the reason why more interactions with fluid storage do not currently exist is probably because... there are no notable fluid interactions. The barrel serves more the purpose of a niche crafting table for specific recipes that you plop down and let sit there for a week. After all, the Seraph does not need to drink and as such alcohol is an optional luxury. Having Aqua Vitae handy for the highest grade of healing item could be handy but then again, according to the wiki that stuff never spoils anyway so the longevity bonus of clay vessels would be useless again. So the only liquids the base game has that you'd want to store are all bulk-based and don't really spoil anyway: Aqua Vitae, Water itself and many different barrels of color for your fancy clothing.

It is only decorative as it adds a decal layer to the original block underneath and such decal layers, to my knowledge, change nothing about the spawnability of certain blocks.

If I understand this correctly as "while you keep smacking things temperature goes down slower", I'm all for it. How many times did I need to spend a whole additional coal to fire the forge back up and wait for the heating to resume just because I couldn't finish the last 2 or 3 swings in time...

Aww, I was already eyeing Expanded Foods and up to this point it sounded great, but these features would just clash with mods I already have.

As I have pointed out before, the OP post is titled "Meal variety" and "Meal preparation" both. The opening post brings forth both suggestions for new meals (pizza, cake) aswell as new mechanics for food preparation (pizza oven [which I agree is superfluous] and frying pan). I have also both pointed out how a rework akin to this would solve all the issues brought up here (as well as in multiple other threads about the same topic) and how a rework like this would be necessary to get much more out of the currently very limited system that is also officially to be deprecated in the future in favor of in-world interaction. That sounds pretty on-topic to me. What I have, however, not mentioned at any point is that a cooking system like PZ's has anything to do with your criticism on the OP's selection of suggestions, nor the criticisms everyone else here had with yours.

See, and that's what references are for. All those UI interactions could be in-world interactions. They couldn't be in PZ, because it's - correct - different game that played differently. It's a mostly UI-driven 2.5D thrid-person shooter. You are not really playing the character and you do not have the option to interact with the world. You tell the character what to do via UI interactions. Vintage Story has the options, as a primarily first-person voxel based game, to make every single step of that process an actual in-world interaction. Add water to pot? rightclick water source/container (already exists) with pot in hand to fill (like you could already with a bowl). Add noodles? Rightclick on the placed pot with the noodles in hand. Cook properly? Oven mechanic of 3-stage cooking progress without UI bar. Take noodles from pot into bowl? Literally how food currently works. Add sauce? Would work all the same, except that bowls needed to be completely re-coded to allow for manipulating a dish after it was done cooking in the pot. The general approach of PZ is good. It is the foundation of a very modular system that can allow as many or few steps to get from "raw ingredient" to "nutritious meal" as you want. Variety built-in. Complexity on-par of many other features of the game already. But applied to Vintage Story, not PZ's UI.

Read the title again then. The opening topic is about adding more variety in meals and the *making thereof*. The current cooking system in VS would barely allow for more variety without adding "pointless clutter", as you previously complained about so rigorously, and any form of additional variety in meal preparation would require the whole system to change anyway, because the only form of meal preparation that lies outside of "put 2-4 items of equal stack count 1-6 in slots of cooking pot" is turning item A into item B with tool X to have a different item to put into the cooking pot slots. Major changes to the whole food and preparation system would be needed in any case whereas the system were to be expanded and the devs have stated on multiple occasions that getting rid of UI crafting is one of the ultimate goals they have. So any proper cooking system that works solely in-world would be close to the system Project Zomboid already has, which is why I am bringing it up time and time again as reference example of how such a system could look like in action because I personally think it would be a much more enjoyable experience to have a system like that over the system we currently have. There is no unreasonableness going on here,

It's less the quantity of items and more the depth of interaction. Instead of putting 4 items in equal quantities into the UI of the "cooking pot" inside the UI of the "campfire", putting fuel in, lighting it and waiting or doing something else, you have multiple individual steps of preparation. Take a pot, go to sink, fill with water, go to stove, put on stove, put in noodles, turn on. Watch carefully to not overcook/burn. Take off stove when ready. Put noodles into bowl. Add tomato sauce. Add salt. Add other condiments or ingredients as seen fit. Have a dish. Eat while hot for maximum bonus. Let it cool or reheat after it has been in the freezer once, less bonuses. That is a much nicer system to cooking that I think would fit, in terms of pseudo-realistic complexity, right into VS. What makes it fun and engaging is the wide variety of options to detail the dish with a wide variety of condiments, spices and mixable ingredients. Even though at the end it all just (on a top level) influences two number "calories" and "mood", it makes for fun times preparing different dishes, adding variety, experimenting. Especially since some recipes aren't quite "Look at ratio in handbook" and more "Figure out the steps you can do".

Pretty sure you can grab forest floor from the creative inventory and place it. Mushrooms will not spawn on it, however, those spawn regions are generated at world generation and stored independently from the actual blocks in a chunk.

Especially the latter sounds very interesting atleast to me. I very recently had to chisel some chairs for tables (the clutter tables do already exist, but the 4 chairs to go with it not) and had to experiment alot to get something looking nice, symmetrical, reasonably sized but having enough space to actually "use" the chair and the sitting surface at ass-height.

Yes grandpa, it's ok, we get it, you have your one opinion in the world and nothing else could possibly ever compete with that or convince you otherwise. Now take your meds and go to bed. I'd say considering every story chapter so far had a boss fight and the existence of a discussion about how to make these fights better not remove them, aswell as plenty of other discussions about potentially more enemies and ways to deal with them (what to you is turning everything in the world into a tower defense game) are pretty solid evidence that there is intention from the devs to keep adding more bosses to the end of chapters, that there are people outside of your YouTube bubble who would like to see such content more and that there is alot more potential for adding DOTA2 to your Stardew Valley.

Does your harbor or general town have a big, cramped warehouse? Could also try designing some sort of primitive/medieval kind of mechanically powered crane to the harbor for loading and unloading ships. Herbalist maybe playing into fantasy alchemist living in a wizard tower vibes. Or maybe just some watchtowers sprinkled around the perimeter; like the primary guard tower you have but smaller/simpler and (seeing as I don't think the tower is on the screenshots?) made just from cruder wooden material. Less for defense and more just for watching the horizon for incoming trouble, weather, fires. Since you are using the rivers mod and have a little upstream rivulet up north, maybe build a dam and terraform the area into a big artificial lake for your town's water supply. Optionally sprinkling water wheels over it (if only for the looks). You said you have (a) barn(s) but what about a fancy, dedicated stable? Maybe attached to a training parcour for horses or some other form of large horse-themed outdoors area. That'd be some random ideas I have that don't require endless effort just for looks or mods that greatly alter the game beyond this point. All around lovely town you have there already.

If I can make two personal suggestions: - How to balance function and design in interior space cramming - How to solve the lack of any meaningful furniture in the game through chiseling furniture that *could* be functional still

So what is the difference to having a million different block types + extra tedious and extra expensive chiseling mechanic and beams when just having dirt as a single block fulfils the exact same purpose in building? You can make a cube out of dirt which the game recognizes as a room. As such you can make a functional house that gives you all the benefits the game is willing to offer for house building without needing to clutter the game with a million more different blocks, some of which are extra tedious to obtain for no further gain. In fact, dirt as soil-type block also counts as cellar. Everything in one, the perfect block, the only thing you need. Why add more blocks? And more importantly, why do people still go out of their way to specifically obtain some of the most obnoxious to gather materials just to build fancy houses? The same can be said for meat. Or the whole food system, as suggested in the OP. I am growing tired of the lack of variety in the game's food department and have already commented on plenty a similar topic here that is suggesting how to spice up the food system of the game, and in my personal opinion the solution always boils down to more variety. I always bring up Project Zomboid as a game reference because the in-depth cooking system would fit in levels of realistic complexity right into Vintage Story and was one of my favorite mechanics of the whole game. So yes, why not add different items and different ways to use these items to make different foods? Who cares if the the "special cut whole-roasted meat slap with salt" and the "rib-eye steak with spices and butter" give the exact same amount of nutrition than adding 2 or 3 "readmeat" into a "cooking pot" to make a "meal"? In fact, because they do the same none is better than the rest and it is solely up to you to engage with it - or not. The Butchering mod already does part of the previously mentioned additions by giving you meat, fat, hide, blood, offals and - depending on animal size - up to two out of four different types of bones/sinew. Don't need any of that fancy schmancy stuff because blood and offals are solely used to turn meat into more potent meat? Happy with just cooking readmeat? Don't harvest the blood by not putting a bucket under the bleeding hung-up corpse. Don't need chicken bones as they only craft one very specific thing? Throw them away. Don't need strong bones as they, too, only craft one very specific thing? Throw them away. Offals? Onto the compost, or throw them away. Or, you know. Since this is currently based on an existing mod and the actual imlementation - if the devs would every consider it, which they don't, official statement of being "against gore"; make the process of obtaining those resources opt-in. Need only the hide and fat? Only skin the animal. Always want some more meat? Butcher the animal. Maybe make different types/cuts of meat available by choice of tool used to butcher. Need bones? Collect them. That way you have the same amount of inventory management problems as with vanilla, where it is your choice to take these items off of the right-clicked corpse; or not. And at this point we haven't even added cooking variety. As Kulze already said, up to a certain degree more complexity and more required effort to achieve a goal makes the goal more rewarding to achieve. And the cooking system of the game is so unrewarding and so simplistic, there is a long long way to go before overshooting the mark. Aforementioned butchering mod already turns "holding right click on a dead animal" into "Making sure you have a free backpack slot or bring a butchering bag to even pick up the corpse because ripping it apart on the ground vanilla style yields almost nothing useful. Haul it home. Hang it up on a previously crafted hook. Skin it. Wait for it to bleed out. Move it to the previously crafted butchering table. Chop it up. Break the bones. Put all your items away. Planning on making sausages or blood bait for fishing? Better have placed a bucket." Every so slightly more complex and inherently tedious, but a more rewarding experience. Both in the emotional sense as it feels much cooler hauling a big-ass ancient cow (from another mod) back home as loot and turn it into something useful in an immersive, engaging multi-step process with each step yielding a specific part of the rewards allowing to potentially skip some steps you don't need, and from a functional point because going through butchering yield much more per hunt than just wildly slicing the corpse with a knife on the forest floor.

Could the barrel be more expensive? Yeah, I guess. Logically it makes sense, gameplay wise it makes no difference. You still need planks which means no barrels till you learned to liquify shiny rock. The base material is still just wood of which you just need to shop down one mega oak and be settled for days. It really makes no difference. However does it need to be more expensive? Not really. Barrels are a thing you will always need more of than you think, especially if you have hoarder tendencies, but eventually you will have more than enough and never need to craft one ever again. It changes nothing other than ever so slightly increasing the minimum tedium required everytime you "Oh boi, time for yet another barrel to make/store XYZ". As for metal hoops being added as requirement... No thank you. People before me already explained how that is not realistically necessary and having mods like Hydrate or Diedrate which add iron-age+ tuns and stuff have already proven to me mechanically that that extra bit work and resources made me really uninterested in investing into it for simple liquid storage. So if the baseline barrel already costed metal... It would just be a pain. Either the pain of investing way more precious resources for something so basic, or the pain of living off of one barrel for everything and just storing/moving around everything else in a million buckets instead.

If this is actually the case for the forge's current fuel's base temperature then I agree it should be looked at. An item shouldn't start cooling immediately the second you take if off the forge just because it sat there waiting for its turn for a while. However for everything else I don't really agree. The only way the item is "already significantly cooled" is when you use a bellows to temporarily heat the forge past the fuel's base temperature. So if you put in black coal (for base 700°) and use the bellows to heat it to 800° for iron smithing, it will eventually drop back down to 700° if you do not re-supply the air necessary to boost the coal's temperature. But it will never go below 700° for as long as black coal is still burning. This is intended and everything else would make no sense. If you'd just need a bellows to give it 2 pumps and be done for the remaining 2.5h of fuel there is no point to have reworked the forging system like this in the first place. It is also not how it works IRL, timing balance not accounted for. Maintaining the right heat for smithing is a conscious effort. I don't know if you have a mod that messes with things or I do, but that is how it already work from my experience. Had two iron ingots on the forge simmering in the black coal's 700° base temperature. Put a third, fresh, cold ingot on there as it didn't fit with the original stack of 4. The entire stack on the forge changes color from "glowing hot" to "just an ingot" in an instant as the displayed forge item temperature snaps down do 500 something. Granted, I did not test taking the fresh ingot off again to see if the underlying 2 ingot would snap back to their previous 700° or not, but the overall presentation of the item temperature did adjust for an averaged-out temperature like when stacking items. Since bellows are already a thing and necessary for iron+ smithing now, broken or not underneath the bellows already fix this issue as well. Just... give the forge another pump before taking off the next work item. Resets the timer guaranteed because temperature is going up again.

Anyone have one of those? Something that doesn't require me to have a 3x3 square of cobble or other non-flamable things with a floating dirt block above? Something that looks intentional and is functional even if built in cramped spaces. On a side note, does the block directly above the kiln need to be free or can I just worst-case scenario slap an iron trapdoor of it and call it a day?

I don't know for sure but I would certainly assume that simply placing a dungeon template via World Edit does not actually register it to any other system in the game; see your already encountered missing land claiming. Would probably be easy enough to test if whatever trigger/NPC (Treasure Hunter? Resonance Archives post-boss?) are supposed to give you a map marker to the location will actually recognize it but my gut feeling says no as structures like this are usually (see TOBG) handled on a deeper level than "place block template". Otherwise a dedicated command for it would not need to exist.

I understand that any further discussion about the intrisic details of the game's inner workings is pointless at this point. The concept of a quiche has been simplified enough and the actual implementation details should a quiche become a thing left open for discussion. However I am going to be petty about it and so I did snoop through the source code, which you yourself can also do for confirmation at https://github.com/anegostudios/vssurvivalmod/blob/master/BlockEntity/BEPie.cs while also looking at the base game assets for, in my test scope, readmeat, vegetables and cheese to have the behavior of the vanille potpie mixed ingredients and a not potpie-able but generally pie-able third ingredient. The pie does track slots, and is as such vaguely akin to the cooking pot, yes. With the main difference being that you do not see those slots, you cannot take out from slots and you only ever insert in a first-come-first-served manner. The important detail as is what I was trying to convey is that there is no logic for a recipe. In fact, it goes even further than I assumed - pie recipes aren't real. Every ingredient defined with pie properties allows the combination of a 4x2 pie of that type. Meaning defining eggs as pie ingredient, I think, automatically makes an "egg pie" a reality, consisting of 4x2 eggs. Pie combinations are just a "steps of insertion" comparison with the pie ingredients defining which category/name? of combination pie they make. As the only example in the game, readmeat and certain vegetables define that they are combinable in the "potpie" category. Meaning that is it possible to make a new combination category "quiche" which could be set on the same chosen vegetables, meat and eggs to allow combining these into a pie. That would also result in you adding vegetables and meat to make a pot pie, then still allowed to add eggs as third or fourth ingredient changing it to a quiche. Though I do currently not remember if the name of the resulting pie is set at adding the top crust or not and it is too late in the day for me to go in-game and confirm. Either way there is no further logic for limiting combination options. The logic is, in fact, so simple that any combination pie can only ever *require* two different food categories of ingredients. Ingredients within the same category (all same-class vegetables, all meats, all cheeses - luckily neither eggs nor milk would have competition here) always mix without changing the outcome. Starting upon adding a second category that is allowed for mixing and shares a possible combination outcome with all other ingredients (your "the game doesn't let you add fruit to a pot pie") the first fitting combination is taken. Ignoring the, again I *think*, automatic all-egg pie that comes with making eggs pie-able, if you stick with eggs, vegetables and cheese from your first recipe (not sure if liquids like milk would even work) there is no overlap here. As meat is not allowed, no confusion with the pot pie. If you were to say eggs, vegetables and meat, the eggs are the required ingredient to change it away from a potpie. So yes, limiting combinations is generally possible. But also, as I was trying to convey from the get-go, *no*, you cannot limit ratios. The resulting pie is solely the work of combining enough ingredients to rule out all other combinations. If a quiche *supports* eggs, vegetable and cheese, because of the currently very limited scope of pie options, *vegetables and cheese alone would make a valid quiche*. The current pie system does not support any more complex than that and is probably the reason we only have one "mixed" pie yet that only contains 2 ingredients, because at 3 the system falls apart. EDIT: So tl;dr. Implementing a quiche that is more than just an "egg pie" is rather difficult with the current implementation of pies and if there is some feature we should really be suggesting, it is a better pie system. EDIT 2: Having gotten curious I just looked at the existing Quiche mod. It is indeed a just an all-eggs pie. The mod also claims you can put eggs into meat pies now without me seeing any patch for that at which point I realized - eggs are in the protein group. Meaning, as per explained above rules of ingredient insertion yes, eggs - as soon as marked pieable - will be a substitute for meat in meat pies and there is no way to circumvent this without making eggs nutrition category-less.

Technically, that exists already - it's the "always passive" creature hostility setting. We'd need separation between monsters and animals for those, yes, but other than that passive monsters are just decoration and if you know they don't do anything they aren't scary even if you run into one in the deepest, darkest depths of a dungeon. Personally, I am always all for more enemy variety because killing my 50th drifter this night just because the rift activity turned apocalyptic gets old real fast. As with multiple other previous discussions though, that's only nice if we do get a surefire way to earn safety in our base. Because even the 50 drifters, bee-lining single file into my blade, disrupt anything and everything else you'd ever want to do in the game, and there is alot of stuff to do at home. So, make the wild land a horrific, postapocalyptic hellscape full of creatures beyond human comprehension that turn even the slightest resin-run into Expedition 33 for as long as I can return home and relax there in-between.

As from your initial opening post: You want there to be a pie recipe with eggs. The Quiche. The thing where you slap 2x dough on a table, slither 4x2 something else on it, top it off with 2x dough and put it in the oven. You have also just confirmed, again, that you are thinking of having "minimum 4 eggs" as the recipe. That is not how pie recipes work in the game. That is how cooking pot recipes work. A pie can take any valid ingredient and the name of the resulting pie is solely on a compared list of all ingredients used. You put in 4x vegetables, it is called a vegetable pie. You put in 3x vegetables and one times meat, it is a pot pie. There is no "atleast 2x vegetables and 2x meat" for a pot pie. Neither can there be "atleast 4 eggs" for a quiche. Either egg has to be the only ingredient, or every ingredient necessary (egg, milk and almost anything) NEEDs to be present in whatever quantity is allowed to reach the requirement of WHICH ingredients are in. So with your original recipe of eggs, eggs, maybe eggs or vegetables and maybe eggs, vegetables or cheese - the only actually implementable recipe of that would be that a "Quiche" pie requires either ANY of eggs, vegetables OR cheese to be present (clashing with 4x cheese for cheese pie and 4x veggie for the vegetable pie) or ALL of those in any quantity, be it 1x eggs, 2x cheese and 1x veg or 2x veg and 1x cheese and 1x egg, both if which go against your "minimum 4 eggs". The only system supporting individual measurements is the cooking pot recipes where you can say "Yes we need a slot of and another slot of egg and then we need milk and then we can take this list of possible fourth ingredient." In order to still make a pie out of it in the way you described, you'd need a new item "Quiche base" or whatever that is made in the cooking pot so you can control the ratio of ingredients, and then use this intermediary item as only ingredient allowed for the quiche pie. EDIT: Also just to clarify, I do agree that having egg-based pies is a good idea. Iirc there is a mod that does it already. Just saying that your specific recipe is not gonna work the way you want it to.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/upgradedlakes

You have given a clear example. 2 eggs. 2 eggs. 2 vegetables or 2 more eggs. 2 cheese, or 2 vegetables, or 2 more eggs. That means for the game, a quiche pie is made with either cheese, or vegetable, or eggs in any slot. That means, theoretically, 8x eggs is a quiche (which is fine and as you intended). That also means, 8x vegetable is a quiche, which clashes with the existing 8x veggies "Vegetable Pie". Same for 8x cheese which would be a valid quiche recipe then and clashing with the existing 8x cheese "Cheese Pie" (according to the wiki that's a thing?). Only solution would be to make it require all ingredient categories to be present, like the pot pie does with meat and veggies. Meaning to make a quiche you would need eggs, cheese and veggies guaranteed. With maybe a same-name-but-different-id recipe for a just eggs quiche. Mixing and matching specific things only in specific quantities (like 4-8 eggs and 0-2 cheese and 0-4 vegetables) or assigning specific slots (1x2 eggs + 1x2 eggs + 1x2 eggs OR vegetables + 1x2 eggs OR vegetables OR cheese) is a feature only of cooking pot recipes. Hence my solution suggestion of making a cooking pot recipe to prepare the quiche base from your very specific ingredients, then using 8x quiche base to bake the actual pie with.

The numbers were, as mentioned, eyeballed. They do not need to be balanced - that is the job of the person actually implementing a system like this to do and testing to prove with possible configurability in mind. I just wanted to convey the general working of the proposed system in an easy manner. You mean if you satiety is at 50% nothing changes and if your satiety is at 100% you get maximum max health regeneration and at 0% maximum loss? Because that would mean you always have to keep your hunger over 50% at all times no matter what or you slowly die. The point is not to make satiety bar even more of a nuisance but instead add a deeper, more complex system that keeps the punishing nature of "not eating food" while shifting away from the satiety bar being the sole indicator of life and death. I also think a lagging delta is more realistic, as you too would not just go from "weak and dying and critically malnourished" to "fit as a fiddle" just because you ate a full hearty stew today.