Quality of Crock Pot Dishes

[Viktor234]

Certain Crock Pot dishes are from my point of view not worth to be made because they either do not increase the value of their ingredients or have some easy alternatives restoring even better stats:

Pumpkin Cookies: Increase sanity from +15 to +33

• Compared to Taffy, it perishes 50% faster and requires a pumpkin, which restores 37.5 hunger and 8 health if cooked. Other than that, it has overall worse stats than Taffy + Pumpkin:
  1x Taffy + 1x Cooked Pumpkin restores: 5 health, 62.5 hunger, 15 sanity
  1x Pumpkin Cookies + 1x Honey restores: 3 health, 46.9 hunger, 15 sanity

Seafood Gumbo: Reduce required fish value to 2.0 for Seafood Gumbo and increase required fish value to 2.0 for Surf 'n' Turf

• Has overall worse stats than Surf 'n' Turf and requires at least one Eel, else you will always obtain Surf 'n' Turf.

California Roll: Reduce required fish value from 1.0 to 0.5 and required kelp from 2 to 1

• Replacing 1x Kelp with 1x Egg or 1x Twigs will result in a dish restoring 100% more health (and perishing 50% slower if Egg is used).
• 1x Surf 'n' Turf + 2x Meatballs (+1x Fish Morsel) restores: 66 health, 162.5 hunger and 43 sanity
  3x California Roll (+1x Monster Meat) restores: 60 health, 112.5 hunger and 30 sanity

Waffles:

• With the introduction of Surf 'n' Turf, Wobster Bisque and Wobster Dinner, it's not anymore the only (non-Warly) Crock Pot Dish which restores +60 health. Other than that, all of these dishes have better stats than Waffles (except Wobster Bisque which restores 33% less hunger), making Waffles not that useful. By replacing the 4th filler with 1x Living Wobster, you'll obtain Wobster Dinner which restores the same amount of health and hunger but also +45 sanity and lasts 150% longer.
• Replacing 1x Butter with 1x Fish Morsel and using 1x Twigs or 1x Vegetable as the filler will yield Fishsticks or Pierogi, restoring 33.3% less health than Waffles but lasting 66.6% or 233.3% longer than Waffles. Other than that you won't loose your butter which can be consumed directly for +40 health and +25 hunger:
  1x Waffles + 1x Fish Morsel restores: 61 health, 50 hunger, 5 sanity
  1x Fishsticks + 1x Butter restores: 80 health, 62.5 hunger, 5 sanity

Ice Cream:

• With the introduction of Wobster Dinner and Jelly Salad it's not anymore the only Crock Pot Dish which restores +50 sanity. It's also the dish with the worst stats. By replacing the 1-2x Ice with 1x Living Wobster and 0-1x Twigs, you'll obtain Wobster Dinner which restores +60 health, +12.5 hunger and lasts a whopping 400% longer than Ice Cream. Considering the fact that stale food restores 0 sanity and sanity is the main reason for consuming Ice Cream, it's a major improvement which makes Ice Cream literally useless. Even the fact that Ice Cream can be made with Electric Milk doesn't change that much because it needs to be consumed as soon as it's made. And in most cases it's easier to either sleep in a siesta or a tent or to fight the shadows instead of charging & fighting a Volt Goat.

Unagi: Increase health from +20 to +30 and/or hunger from +18.75 to +37.5

• By using 2x Monster Meat you can obtain Surf 'n' Turf which is almost 3 times as good as Unagi:
  3x Unagi (3x Eel + 3x Lichen + 6x Any Filler) restores: 60 health, 56.25 hunger, 15 sanity
  1x Surf 'n' Turf (2x Monster Meat + 2x Eel) + 2x Lichen restores: 66 health, 62.5 hunger, 23 sanity
• Replacing 1x Eel with 1x Butterfly Wings will result in Butter Muffin, restoring 100% more hunger and perishing 33% slower.
• Removing the Lichen or replacing the Eel with any other fish; and using only 1x Twigs will result in Fishsticks, restoring 100% more health and hunger.

Asparagus Soup: Increase health from +20 to +40 or reduce the amount of required veggies and increase hunger from 18.75 to 37.5

• Replacing the 1x Asparagus and 1x Vegetable with 1x Butterfly Wings + 1x Twigs will overall grant better stats and more than twice as much hunger:
  1x Asparagus Soup + 1x Butterfly Wings: 28 health, 28.125 hunger, 5 sanity
  1x Butterfly Muffin + 1x Asparagus: 23 health, 62.5 hunger, 5 sanity (Unless you use 3x Red Cap as filler, resulting stats will be even higher if you replace them with twigs)

Fish Tacos: Increase hunger from 37.5 to 75, reduce perish time to 10 days

• Perishes 66% faster than Fishsticks and by replacing 1x Corn + 1x Twigs with 2x Berries you'll end up with twice as much health and slightly more hunger.

Fruit Medley: Reduce required fruit amount to 2.5 and increase dish priority from 0 to 1, increase overall stats (Increase health or sanity by +10 and increase hunger from 25 to 37.5)

• Has a complicated recipe (3x Fruit + 1x Twigs (to avoid getting Fist Full of Jam)) and perishes 150% faster than Trail Mix while also giving worse stats.

Stuffed Eggplant:

• Unless 1x Mushroom and 2x Twigs are used for the 0.5x vegetable filler, eating the ingredients will restore more health at the cost of 5 sanity. Adding a Fish instead of 1x Twigs will restore 40 health instead.
• Replacing the Eggplant with 1x Butterfly Wings will result in Butterfly Muffin which restores better stats:
  1x Stuffed Eggplant + 1x Butterfly Wings: 11 health, 46.875 hunger, 5 sanity
  1x Braised Eggplant + 1x Butter Muffin: 40 health, 62.5 hunger, 5 sanity

Kabobs: Increase the max amount of inedibles from 1 to 2

• Using fish instead of meat will increase the restored health by +37 at the cost of 50% faster perishing
• Using berries or veggies instead of twigs will increase the hunger by +25 at the cost of 50% faster perishing
• If you use at least 1x Vegetables in your filler, you can swap the meat(s) with 1x Butterfly Wings (and more twigs) to obtain Butter Muffin, restoring +17 health

Ratatouille:

• Adding 1x Butterfly Wings will result in Butter Muffin which grants +12.5% hunger and +17 health and allows to replace 2 more fillers with twigs

Puffed Potato Soufflé: Increase health from 20 to 40 and hunger from 37.5 to 62.5

• Replacing 1x Potato with 1x Twigs will result in an almost equivalent dish without using the potato (+20 health, +25 hunger), replacing 1x Potato with any meat will result in Pierogi which perishes 50% slower and restores 100% more health at the cost of 10 sanity.

Hot Dragon Chili Salad:

• By replacing the 1x Dragon Fruit with 1x any meat and by cooking the 1x Dragon Fruit with 3x Twigs you'll get a whopping +73 health and +75 hunger at the cost of 10 sanity and 4.5 minutes of heat. In this case, heat is less of a problem because obtaining Dragon Fruits & Peppers before winter arrives is harder than obtaining a proper heat source & insulation during winter.

Ceviche: Reduce required Fish value to 0.5 and increase health from 20 to 40 and hunger from 25 to 37.5, making it as useful as Fishsticks

• Replacing 1x Ice or 1x Fish with 1x Twigs will result in Fishsticks which restores 100% more health and 50% more hunger at the cost of coldness. Other than that, Ceviche's recipe is almost same as Seafood Gumbo's recipe, except that it requires 1x Ice instead of 0.5x Fish, by replacing the 1x Ice with 0.5x Fish you might end up with Seafood Gumbo or in most cases with Surf 'n' Turf, restoring more than twice as much stats as Ceviche. The saved 1x Ice can be eaten directly to gain at least 75% of the freezing effect of Ceviche.

Melonsicle:

• Despite me not being able to find a good replacement for this dish, it is a quite bad dish due to its low stats. Especially the fact that it turns stale after 1.5 days, restoring no sanity at all makes it not as useful as other sanity restoring dishes. Also eating 1x Melon + 1x Ice will cool you down for longer than the Melonsicle itself.

Especially for Wurt, Fist Full of Jam might deserve a little boost too, for example by increasing its hunger or by increasing the max amount of allowed inedibles from 0 to 1.

I would also ask for a way to obtain ice somehow during summer or in caves without the use of a Deconstruction Staff. Players tend to use all the ice in the Ice Box for Ice Flingomatics or Meatballs, making recipes requiring ice hard to obtain. Sustaining everyone with ice requires alot of ice and there are easier alternatives to keep someone cool during summer e.g. by having a Thermal Stone inside your Ice Box.

[Owlrust]

More crock pot recipe diversity is something I would definitely appreciate as a Warly main. It gets disheartening to know you are essentially wasting ingredients in certain dishes, so you'll avoid them almost entirely in favor of better ones.

[Josedx9]

Yes, I never really saw the meaning of so many different dishes when they essentially do the same but some are more complicated to manufacture than others.
Alternatively they added the favorite dishes for each character, but in most of them it doesn't make sense to make them, since they only have a plus to restore hunger.
I mean, for example Wilson, her favorite dish is eggs with bacon, but we could perfectly make two meatloaf and save the eggs to make pierogis

If they were going to give the characters favorite dishes, give them more than just a bonus to restore hunger, like making Wilson run faster after eating them or something like that.

The only character that really benefits from this mechanic is Wolfgang, as he only needs cooked potatoes and with that he will always have a full belly, which means that he will always have a constant benefit of damage and movement speed.

[Viktor234]

I just added a few more underwhelming recipes to this list and want to make sure that the developers take a look at this list in case of if they plan to balance certain crock pot dishes.

While doing that list I realized that Butter Muffin does a pretty good job at making most of the low quality crock pot dishes look bad due to its high stats compared to its low cost. But nerfing Butter Muffin isn't a good way for how to fix that since players still won't consider low quality recipes over high quality ones and it would hit Wurt quite hard without affecting most of the other characters that much because there aren't that many good vegetable recipes ingame.