Some views on the existing cooking mechanisms

[Pig and beefalo]

Cooking is a relatively ancient mechanism. Its essence is to transform and refine ingredients to exchange for attributes, long-term preservation or buffs. However, as the types of ingredients increase, some problems have gradually emerged in this transformation.

 

First, for some ingredients, there is almost no benefit in cooking them. One of the most notable examples is pumpkin and pumpkin cookies, whose properties are as shown in the following picture.I seriously doubt if anyone would specifically make this dish for just 15 san?

Second, the properties of some ingredients are overly outstanding. Regarding this point, I have no intention of evaluating which is more important, the dish or the ingredients, nor do I want to belittle either side, as this would lead to a lot of arguments. So, I only intend to raise some questions: If the "Polar Bearger Bin" were to lift the restriction of only storing dishes, what would you like to put in it? Why is a "A portable fridge" designed to only store dishes? Should everything be attributed to the mysterious power of the "The Constant"?

 

Thirdly, the value of the ingredients themselves has been severely assimilated by a single dish. For instance, a "sliced pomegranate" can provide 20 health points and 12.5 satiety, and a nightberry can offer four minutes of "night vision" effect. However, in a pot, they are equivalent to two "berries". When you put four watermelons, four pomegranates, or even four nightberries into the cooking pot, all you can get is a "Fruit Medley" or even "Fist Full of Jam". It has to be said that this is a bit "extravagant".

 

In my opinion, it shouldn't be particularly difficult for the klei team to design such an excellent activity as "The Gorge" and improve the cooking system. If these excellent mechanisms can be correctly introduced into the game, I think it will be a "surprising" improvement in the quality of life. After all, those who would merely offer the "Eternal Gnaw" some shoddy food are now neighbors in the swamp with tentacles and spiders.

[Hungry French]

If Klei changes the cooking, it will force players to use more than 3-4 dishes, if this happens, most players will not like it. 
Strengthen weak dishes ? It wouldn't be bad. But this doesn't make much sense, because cooking remains in 3-4 dishes...

 

From my point of view, ready meals should have advantages. Because they make you cook them in a crockpot and waste your time.
They either have to give good characteristics or deteriorate for a long time.

But don't give such nonsense as Perogies... They were more or less normal only in DS without dls...

[Echsrick]

if theres enought honey and pumpkin yes, i will at times make cookies

[Mayson71]

45 minutes ago, Hungry French said:

If Klei changes the cooking, it will force players to use more than 3-4 dishes, if this happens, most players will not like it.
Strengthen weak dishes ? It wouldn't be bad. But this doesn't make much sense, because cooking remains in 3-4 dishes...

 

From my point of view, ready meals should have advantages. Because they make you cook them in a crockpot and waste your time.
They either have to give good characteristics or deteriorate for a long time.

But don't give such nonsense as Perogies... They were more or less normal only in DS without dls...

Perhaps it's worth being indignant if the new cooking mechanics become more complex and interesting, isn't it?

[DegenerateFurry]

I'd really like to see Klei revisit these weaker recipes with a standard of "the stats gained should have at least the same total as the minimum ingredients used". 

So, like, pumpkin cookies: you need a pumpkin, two honey, and a twigs as the bare minimum recipe for them.

That gives 56.25 hunger and 9 HP for a stat total of 65.25. Pumpkin cookies give 37.5 hunger (the pumpkin), 15 sanity, and 0 HP for a stat total of 52.5, which even at the bare minimum requirements is a loss of 12.75 stat points.

I'm fine with the stat points being redistributed from, say, health to sanity, but it needs to either be more sanity, give some health, or give more hunger so we're not wasting food by making it. The only reason to make pumpkin cookies is if you're playing Warly, have a surplus of pumpkins and honey, and need a dish you don't normally eat.

[Hungry French]

34 minutes ago, Mayson71 said:

Perhaps it's worth being indignant if the new cooking mechanics become more complex and interesting, isn't it?

Yes, it is, but a lot of players won't approve of it... Especially the Chinese audience, who likes simple games...

[Cuernito.]

What? the actual cooking system is actually pretty solid and fun, there are bad recipes yeah but the vast majority are good options depending of your way to play and what character are you using. The pupkim cookies are a good example of a trap recipe, not all recipes has to be good or the best, some of them are occasional, like for example you are in oasis base and you dont have much food and you need health, well you can fish there and make fish sticks later, there are other traps or bad recipes like monster lasagna or wep goop but they are fun mistakes inexperienced players can make. Not all has to be top tier in my opinion. And in contrast to bad pupkim cookies you can make dragon pies too using 1 dragon fruit and 3 sticks(really cheap item) so yeah there are really good and cheap recipes too in this old system.

Finally i think the cooking system right now doesnt need a rework like the old farming system needed it cause the crcokpot system doesnt sucks, sure some recipes are bad but then we have a good amount of meta dishes. And if we are gonna talk about bad or not worth mechanics in this game i think klei should rework or improve sea fishing first before anything else, cause that system is actually really stinky in my opinion.

37 minutes ago, Hungry French said:

Yes, it is, but a lot of players won't approve of it... Especially the Chinese audience, who likes simple games...

Im not sure about this, they actually have some insane over complicated mods and servers so yeah this is not true at all.

1 hour ago, DegenerateFurry said:

I'd really like to see Klei revisit these weaker recipes with a standard of "the stats gained should have at least the same total as the minimum ingredients used". 

So, like, pumpkin cookies: you need a pumpkin, two honey, and a twigs as the bare minimum recipe for them.

That gives 56.25 hunger and 9 HP for a stat total of 65.25. Pumpkin cookies give 37.5 hunger (the pumpkin), 15 sanity, and 0 HP for a stat total of 52.5, which even at the bare minimum requirements is a loss of 12.75 stat points.

I'm fine with the stat points being redistributed from, say, health to sanity, but it needs to either be more sanity, give some health, or give more hunger so we're not wasting food by making it. The only reason to make pumpkin cookies is if you're playing Warly, have a surplus of pumpkins and honey, and need a dish you don't normally eat.

You have good ideas my friend, while i think the actual system is fine i dont oppose to improve(not rework) some stuff here and there.

[aidancode]

Might be cool if ingredients weren't necessarily consumed when cooking, and the chance is different between recipes. Would give another stat to balance.

[Evelo]

After playing a bit of Abiotic Factor (Pulling a Mike here :P <3 ) I quite like the cooking in that game. It is pretty simple, much like DST with set recipes for everything, but each food does something different in addition to Hunger/Thirst. DST could benefit from food beneficial stuffs, but that would very much step on the toes of Warly so, either he would need a dramatic change (likely to come with the skill tree but even then foundational changes would be needed outside of the skill tree) in order for this type of thing to come, or he would just get additional benefits from food that other characters may not.

[Edible Coal]

11 hours ago, Hungry French said:

If Klei changes the cooking, it will force players to use more than 3-4 dishes, if this happens, most players will not like it. 
Strengthen weak dishes ? It wouldn't be bad. But this doesn't make much sense, because cooking remains in 3-4 dishes...

this should be rewarded, and player will adapt to it

[Maxil20]

I’m not sure why people believe there’s only 3-4 dishes that are viable to make ever and no other dish is worthwhile. A good chunk of the dishes, especially post ROG, are genuinely viable to make. I’ve ran figatoni/tall scotch eggs/barnacle linguine as my hunger dishes before with pretty good success, and dishes like banana daliqri/shakes,  salsa fresca, creamy potato puree, and surf and turf are all dishes I’ve used for decent stat restoration. Even dishes like honey nuggets that my friend suggested as a meme was a dish I unironically mass cooked and used when the bearger bin came out for funzies.

Really, most of the mediocre dishes just originate from the vanilla/ROG experience. The Farm crop dishes from that era are pretty notorious for that for some reason (with the only one sticking out in a good way being dragonpie…). Those are dishes I can totally understand stat buffing, though I also hope they take more creative liberties with buffing those in particular. Someone suggested years ago for pumpkin cookies to be cooked in multiples of 2-3 (similar to jellybeans) rather than just buffing the stats outright, and I think that would be a really fun idea to take advantage of that as a way to buff them.

[linabagel]

I thought of another dish - Puffed Potato Soufflé.

When I played the role of Warly, I only did it a few times. On one hand, its graphics were quite good, on the other hand, I hadn't mastered Warly yet. But after I got familiar with the initial rhythm, I hardly did it anymore. 

If it were just an ordinary dish, I wouldn't think it would be a big deal. But for Warly's special dishes, its performance has been unimpressive.

Edited March 16 by linabagel

[Cruvimaster]

The dishes that make sense are those that would give more than 75 hunger points, more than 40 health points, and more than 33 sanity points. Health recovery in the game is quite sporadic, rarely needed, and usually planned.

There's generally no better solution for hunger than Meatballs or Meaty Stew. They are easy to make and abundant resources in the game. All the countless dishes that Klei provides are just to show that alternatives exist. What would be the point of making a dish that gives 37 hunger points?





For sanity, we do have great options provided by the ingredients from the farm system (Vegetable Stinger / Creamy Potato Purée), but I consider a Banana Shake as good an option (thinking about single player). Why would I want to create dishes that give less than 33 sanity?



 

So, we look at the game's extensive menu of recipes and realize that very few are actually good at efficiently solving the problems of health, hunger, and sanity. And for me, it's frustrating that the effects of the recipes are only geared towards health, hunger, and sanity, forcing the developers to give different effects to a specific character (Warly).

 

The game does provide some very good dishes in terms of stats, but the cost-benefit ratio completely negates the point in creating them (Fig-Stuffed Trunk / Tall Scotch Eggs). 

Edited March 16 by Cruvimaster

[BB Marioni]

I've been suggesting to rebalance food and dishes to make it so that the stats each dish gives is proportion to how difficult the ingredients are to obtain. 

Also, like the current new pearl's tea, it would be interesting of .ore dishes gave certain unique effects or buffs.

 

Also survivor favorites are unbalanced, like how many times does maxwell get to make wobster dinner XD

[Swiyss]

In all honesty, DST needs a cooking update similar to Reap What You Sow.

Now here me out, this seems like a bad idea for some, but if you really think about it, there is definitely a way to do this without ruining how the current cooking mechanics works.

First of all, let's add wheat, milk, fermentation, cheese making, 50 more dishes and more processes to make those dishes. More cooking stations like grills and ovens. Then let's make each food necessitate a station to be made, and a process of grinding, chopping, preparing, salting etc..

90% of current foods will still be made normally, there will be no downsides to what you eat (meatballs, bacon n eggs etc..). More specific foods like pumpking cookies, barnacle linguine and froggy figgwich and all others alike will receive a big buff to them for how hard they are to make. Example:
_Eating Bacon n eggs = 75 hunger 5 sanity 20 health; No related benefits.
_Eating Barnacle Linguine = 75 hunger 20 sanity 30 health; Satiates the Fish category of foods, giving the character a 10% movement speed buff and +5 damage per attack for 1 day.

If you mix the Fish category with Veggie category, like say you eat a niguiri, then you get a different satisfaction buff, like +5% mv, +5dmg and a minor axe efficiency for 3 days.

There could also be many more effects, like eating meat makes you feel less hungry, eating honey makes you take less damage from bees, eating ocean foods makes you row faster and deal more damage on boats. And I'm talking about dishes of course, not just ingredients.

These are just random unpolished ideas, but anything similar to this (like a nutrition table, that has little to no downsides, but will have great upsides if the player decides to dive deeper into cooking) would already make the game feel so much nicer. Let's say you intend to kill bee queen and you wanna tank her, having the knowledge that a specific dish will greatly increase your damage or defense against her would be so cool and would help a lot. Need to do ocean exploration? Here's a salty buff for your rowing actions and wetness protection because you knew what to do with all that kelp and shark meat.

There are so many great ideas that can be created by making a nutrition mechanic that would tie the game together really well. Also, I really wanna make syrup and grind spices like we could on the Gorge event; That would be such a dream update if they made it the right way.

Edited March 16 by astareus

[Frosty_Mentos]

Would love to see pizza and pickling added.

[Hungry French]

On 3/15/2026 at 11:49 PM, NekoSoulx said:

Im not sure about this, they actually have some insane over complicated mods and servers so yeah this is not true at all.

No, it's true. The Chinese are both the most casual and the most hardcore players.