Rainbow Fresh

There is way too many individual points to potentially quote here so I am not gonna. Tl;dr, as you have specifically stated multiple times throughout and as Teh Pizza Lady already poked back at; if truly the only singular usecase for such a whole ordeal would be "that one player on an active server that doesn't have friends to keep a stockpile in their absence, doesn't have other people to ask for help, doesn't have livestock to solve the immediate food crisis in the span of all of 5 minutes, and doesn'T play regularily or just has to take a sudden long break." - then yes, this does not sound like a "The base game needs a whole new tier of food that is deliberately ass just to accomodate for the single odd-out player on a specific server" problem. This is either a "install a mod if you want this" (Long Term Foods exists already, so do many other forms of Pemmican-adding mods) or a "The server staff should deal with it" kinda deal. As was mentioned before, if sudden circumstances come up you can always kindly ask the server staff if they can help. It's their server, they should generally have an interest to make people have fun. You say Minecraft is not an issue because food doesn't spoil - which is true - yet as a server administrator for a "just friends" server I had plenty of situations where I intervened with cheats and commands just so people don't get frustrated about being too unskilled even for TOBG, or because unfavorable circumstances resulted in major downers. That is not a "Minecraft should add XYZ to account for that" problem, that is a "It's my server, I want my players to have fun, they are not in XYZ situation, I fix specifically XYZ situation" deal. And, quite frankly, for most major public always-on servers; if you go play Singleplayer on a Multiplayer server you are kinda responsible for your own shortcomings. If you don't have or want to invest the time to play on such, the game should not make room specifically for you doing something you are not intended to. Different issue from sudden onforeseen circumstances happening (spontaneous sickness, vacation, whatever) but the main "You have no other people despite playing in Multiplayer to solve the issue by playing when you don't". As for your friends-only chill weekend hangout server you let run 24/7. They do not really exist (according to your argumentation - I wouldn't know, I don't play public Multiplayer); but that isn't necessarily an "it's not possible" problem. It is possible, as I have explained above and will further explain below, so it's more a situation of people see no need to make it happen. The availability of plenty forever-food is not the deciding factor; I personally wouldn't consider Vintage Story my "Pub with friends on a weekend" alternative. There are way better options for such. But even if you do want such a thing, an always-on server where you and your friends and cozily, relaxed play and hang out on whenever. Turn on the "stop time when nobody is on" setting. Crank global spoil rate down to a minimum so that basically nothing ever spoils. If someone is still gone for long enough to have EVERYTHING spoil; tough luck buddy, should have played the game in the last 5 years. Turn off seasons or modify growth times to be Minecraft-instant. What, that sounds like a bad game experience because you remove all challenge? Well, you wanted a "cozy, relaxed pub evening" VR chat hangout lobby in Vintage Story. The game isn't this. The game isn't supposed to be this. You can still make it happen, with what the game has, right now. So no, plenty of forever-food should be a mod for those really interested in it. It serves no greater purpose to everyone but the oddball on a public always-on server.

Aside from all the other points already brought up about the nature of busy multiplayer servers and stuff, I still gotta ask: Nothing kills engagement more than coming back and being immediately stressed to not starve rather than being able to at least mostly pick up where you left off. But do you really think it would be a better experience having to forcefully invest most of your time playing in a slow, tedious, otherwise useless process of crafting forever food in bulk because you know you will now have to take a break? You want this to be aimed at the "occasional player" that may vanish from the face of earth for a week and then comes back on a server running 24/7 so that a year or two pass in that time. Do you really think it would be any more engaging or any less motivation killing if that player knows "Well, I HAVE to spend my last few hours of available time now to prepare this stuff so I can come back and not worry"? I don't think so. It's just moving (and disguising) as to when the frustration happens - from after returning because you have no food (you keep livestock specifically for this reason, so butcher it) to before you leave because you have to do something deliberately annoying in preparation for your eventual, if ever, return.

Correct. However. Honey isn't the ideal food source I would go to in Vanilla especially because long term mass bee farming is a pain. Fat is a byproduct you only obtain from harvesting fresh animals - at which point you get fresh meat which is, also, the far better food source. On top of fat being needed/useful for other applications, so is honey (or rather the byproduct of wax). I am not even sure you can eat Walnut seeds, pretty sure I saw a mod that enables this. Cattail root is, as you correctly pointed out, finite. Of all the infinite food sources you listed, this one is the only one I'd personally consider an actual food source and even then only as emergency rations in the early game. None of these fulfil the role you proposed of *effective* infinite food. Something that can actually sustain you. While however simultaneously highlighting the problem with your "progression" argument and further amplifying what I already said about tedium. Even if we added an "infinite" end-game alternative for each nutrition category... Why would one bother? Why bother going through in-game weeks of preparation and ripening and whatnot for some salami or cheese or tack when you can just stuff your face with honey... or eat normal food that much more readily and simpler available?

I understand the potential value in Multiplayer and the slight feeling of accomplishment; but other than that I really don't see why we'd need a way to make infinite food - for one because truly infinite food isn't really realistic (yes, let's get the "realism vs gameplay" debate out of the way first), two because there is nothing to be gained from that bit of extra shelf life compared to the already existing options for long term storage, three because adding unnecessarily complicated steps as means to balance achieving something not needed in the first place sounds too off-putting that it could likely not see all that much use. For more detailed clarification, ignoring the "realism" debate entirely: Food can already be stored pretty efficiently. Have a good cellar (easy and early to obtain), put in a clay vessel, fill it with grain - boom, easy 3-4 years shelf life. Even non-grains can reach a year-ish easily. Sealed crock pots with proper dishes can reach the same and I haven't even tested if it stacks putting a sealed crock into a clay vessel. The highest tier of meat preservation might, in comparison, still feel kinda lacking but meat is also the year-round most reliably obtainable resource should you need it. When I started out, I rather quickly installed the "Long Term Food" mod specifically to add such things as non-perishables and even longer shelf life options of preservation. Turns out, three years in, I could be arsed exactly once to make non-perishing Vintage meat just to have made it and never touched any other of the food processes. In fact, I am sitting on so much food I don't even know how to eat it all with each passively ripening harvest of my reasonably sized field essentially feeding me for the entire year. Specifically the "incredibly tedious to obtain" process of the long term options makes them so uninteresting and even if you'd want to sit down for a couple hours preparing 10 years worth of non-perishables to never worry about food ever again, if you didn't die of boredom by then the annoying part of food is still the fact the options are so same-y and you just need to constantly eat; which wouldn't change. If you want even longer storage, utilizing ice to actually freeze e.g. meat could fit much better than arbitrarily "in-universe difficult" recipes to take food that lasts 4 year to last forever. If we want to actually improve food, as has being brought up in plenty other discussions before, improving the food preparation system itself would be the better bet. You mentioned the use for Multiplayer. While yes, there will always be issues with Multiplayer not being able to play 24/7 and as such having to take breaks in which time passes and food spoils can become an issue. But assuming you don't play lone wolf you'll have friends to occasionally replenish the supplies they themselves eat long before they spoil. If you do play Lone Wolf... I guess considering how often big servers have longer month, if you cannot play for all of 3-4 in-game years coming back to a basement full of wax food is likely the least of your concerns. At that point the problem likely is that everyone else finished the game and stopped playing. And finally you mentioned the trophy value of having a big bunker full of forever-food. While sure, especially with arbitrarily tedious recipes that is true. But there are plenty other things in the game already to use as trophies. No need to turn something as basic as your daily necessity for nutrients into one aswell.

Take my input with a grain of salt, as I am playing with a huge variety of mods that add content and as such, naturally, add uses for most resources in the game that might very well skew the vanilla ratio significantly. But I really don't think recyclable broken metal tools would throw much of a wrench in the gears. As OP stated you would obviously receive less back than you put in, otherwise you only ever need a single tool all game and a little bit of time (fuel is infinite, so are sticks for handles). The details of how much you get back and whether or not this number may depend on the remaining quality/durability/whatever of the tool or not aside; I am currently playing with the Grindstones mod (which adds the one and only sensible thing I can imagine a grindstone to currently do, which is repair tools at cost of max durability, not this vanilla crit nonsense) which essentially replicates the same shift in resource usage as the ability to replace the handle separate from the tool head + recycling would achieve - a significant decrease in used metal for tools as each tool effectively lasts several times longer. And I don't feel like it has shifted my perception of resources and the quantity needed thereof in any dangerous "I don't have to mine for almost any metal anymore" way. Because tools are not necessarily the primary consumer of them. Sure, if your iron axe breaks every 5 trees and you have to craft a new one from scratch every single time it might be different but that is not a fun way to use those resources. I had a big pile of readily made iron ingots. Now I have an iron anvil, some fancier machinery, a full set of reasonably quenched tools and dangerously low iron supplies. All without accounting for any runtime waste due to tool usage. I'll soon have to look for a second iron vein (or check if more is hidden at my first one) if I want to go into Steel territory. Despite expecting these iron tools lasting me all the way until I upgrade everything to steel thanks to quenching and grindstones. I have to re-invest into copper and/or bronze to cover for things that need tons of nails or such which would be a waste to use iron for, or are outright only craftable with low-tier metals (I'm looking at you, chutes and distillery.) There is plenty to spend entire ore veins on that it feels like a safe bet to me to make the process of churning through tools a bit more fun and engaging. I don't think quenching would become *less* realistic if we removed the shitty RNG gamble "all in or nothing" shatter chance and replaced it with either a time cost (work piece is useless, melt it again and start over) or atleast just a partial resource loss (break into less than 100% of used bits). Then again, I neither see a point to ever waste *more* durability through grinding so the sharpness of a tool/weapon (through frequent grindstone sharpening) being a secondary metric that passively influences the main durability (by slower/faster drain depending on dullness) or tool effectiveness (higher/lower yield/speed) would be very swell instead. Yeah. I understand needing more mechanical consumers in the game as there is barely any point to set something big up if all you need is to run a helve hammer and the occasional pulverizer (the quern is a bonus luxury for lazy people and the large bellows utterly useless) but this ain't it, especially if they grindstones themselves then don't even do anything useful.

Aren't the only flying/working at 10+°C or was that fully added by From Golden Combs?

Sounds like a glitch to me. Only thing I can think of is a spoiler for the game's story but that should certainly not be a single block and also certainly not that close to spawn.

Only hens with atleast 1 portion eaten remaining go sit on the brood box, yes.

"Fine, I'll do it myself." https://mods.vintagestory.at/directionalbombs

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.