Cravings Warly Progress Thread

[PicklePet]

Hi - I've had this idea for a Warly mod for like, 2 years now and finally want to commit to making it, but I'm just an amateur hobbyist coder so it's super slow going! My hope is that having a place to mark progress will help me stay motivated to keep at it, and maybe if I'm lucky draw the attention of anyone who can give me a pointer or two.

Elevator pitch: Warly has started having cravings for specific food. With his balanced diet he finds himself in immaculate health (flat stat & speed buffs) and the more he's able to keep up with his palate's demands, the more of a connoisseur he becomes (increased food effectiveness - stat gains, spice efficiency & special dish effects) - however his hunger for new tastes becomes proportionally demanding (massive increase to hunger and duration of food memory).

The intention is to shift the focus of the player's game to just cooking and collecting ingredients, kinda making Warly his own Gorge mode in the base game - but to enable this, the benefits have to basically allow him to bypass the other regular challenges (combat and seasons). I play alone a lot, and that definitely shows. All the gains are personal. That probably means I'll scale it too powerfully because I kind of want to accomplish what a party could by myself XD but I intend to make the whole scale adjustable for other people to find their own balance.

Specifics:

Cravings are ordered into tiers. At each tier, a new list of dishes will be crave-able and buffs + debuffs will scale. Also, the amount of time for a craving to be fulfilled will shorten each time. If a craving is ever missed, the tier will drop and the player will take a flat sanity loss. Tiers are ordered by difficulty of obtaining ingredients. Note that tier 1 stats are vanilla Warly and it has no missed craving penalty - so effectively, if someone just ignored the system Warly would play the same as he does now.

*Considering instead making it so that any food eaten other than the craving counts as a miss. This would also create a neat little mechanic loophole with two particular equipment items that might be fun...

Cravings should be picked randomly, but anything in food memory is disqualified from showing up. If upon picking a new craving all crave-able dishes are already in food memory, bump up a tier - if at full tier, max out stats and clear food memory. Dishes without sustainable ingredients are not crave-able. Neither are ones with oddball effects like chaud froid, grim galette and glowberry mousse. I'm currently considering necessitating the mod to crave a temperature regulating dish any time it's not in food memory for the appropriate season. Not sure what to do about mild temp adjustment dishes like bunny stew & melonsicles. Flower salad should only be crave-able in summer. Might not remove already unlocked dishes from the pool when dropping a tier.

Considering making each dish worth a certain number of craving points, rather than counting just number of dishes fulfilled - because even within tiers not all dishes are equal, and dishes from previous tiers shouldn't be worth the same as ones just added to the pool.

(Butter/milk and koalafant trunks are currently a bit too rare, bad rng could really screw the player.)

Honey crystals will also buff other work for Warly: picking, rowing, tilling, planting, carrying & watering

Display current craved dish in the HUD. Would be even cooler to update the frame to display the current tier too, and base them off the Gorge coin designs. (Tier 1 - nothing, 2 - old coin, 3 - sapphire medallion, 4 - red mark, 5 - gnaw's favor)

Announce craved dish as a wisecrack upon setting it.

 

Extra stuff:

Buff chef pouch slots back to 8. Maybe add upgrade crafts for even more slots and better spoilage but give it the same item limitations as a fridge (can't hold non-food). Potentially designated spots for portable crockpot and seasoning station. (Beyond the mechanics above, this helps enforce even more - Warly must forsake regular loot for ingredients.)

Pipe dream - I want to add Mumsy and Billy to the map and be able to buy stuff from them with cooked food - maybe base value of dishes on craving point value? Buyable: Identified seed packets including wheat & turnips (and maybe bananas?), Mumsy's milk, crabs, Gorge spice, syrup taps, gorge cooking stations - with that, one could add all the gorge recipes toooo...

Those extra crop properties:

Turnip - all but summer, nutrient like watermelon/tomato, but pair with garlic/durian

Banana - summer only, nutrient same as turnip

Wheat - year round? Eats compost, spits nothing out and can't go giant - therefore it can’t be combo’d! This gives an excuse for tryhards to make use of non 2x2 farm plots made by newbies and gives more incentive to actually build & use a composter.

Current progress:

I can display a static image on the screen! ; u ; (intended to evolve into the cravings HUD) I'm trying to figure out how to update it through a component, but I'm having trouble figuring out the path to reference something on the HUD... I need to get better at reading the base code so I can just see the structure. I'm also unsure what the significance of each place I see to insert a HUD. I've seen widgets/controls, playerhud/controls and screens/console. I'm also about to have a busy month at work so lol will be moving like a herd of turtles through a cloud of peanut butter...