Exclude twigs/ice as filler in most Crock Pot recipes

[Tumalu]

Although I always knew about stuff like making dragonpies with 3 twigs in them (which, by the way, is probably the worst offender considering how godly dragonpie is if you start farming dragonfruit seeds!) I was amazed when I went and looked and found out -just how many- recipes are fine with you having 2~3 ice or twigs in them as filler; that is, recipes that don't have any need for twigs/ice to start with. In particular, ice is excluded from also no recipes, being nearly a universal mass filler item... that lasts forever in the icebox and can be easily farmed in massive quantities outside of summer.

Both for reference and to kick in how significant it is, here's a list of the foods you can make with 2+ twigs or ice as filler (aka, they are not needed for the recipe like fishsticks or kebobs... and even those limit you to a single twig! Until you put in 2 ice instead, at least.)

3+ Ice - Dragonpie(3 twigs also work), Meatballs, Ratatouille, Fist Full of Jelly

2+ Either - ButterMuffin, FishTacos, FroggleBunwich, Unagi, Guacamole, StuffedEggplant

2+ Ice - HoneyNuggets, Fishsticks, Kebobs

And then, less importantly, 11 recipes where you can totally use them but it takes 3 actual food items to fulfill the recipe's requirements. I excluded Mandrake Soup, Monster Lasagna, Powdercake, and shipwrecked recipes from the count. With all the +20hp (or more) recipes you can make with a bunch of twigs, you'd almost think twigs are the next big superfood XD

[Muche]

I wonder how the impression of effectiveness of twigs/ice as a filler in these recipes would change if the recipes needed less ingredients?

So dragonpie would need only one dragon fruit, butter muffin only one butterfly wings and one vegetable, etc.

That is, instead of looking at twigs/ice as an overpowered filler, look at whether those recipes needing less ingredients makes them OP.

[Auth]

But... But I love making my spicy icy cheatballs!

[ScootyPuffJr]

6 hours ago, Muche said:

I wonder how the impression of effectiveness of twigs/ice as a filler in these recipes would change if the recipes needed less ingredients?

So dragonpie would need only one dragon fruit, butter muffin only one butterfly wings and one vegetable, etc.

That is, instead of looking at twigs/ice as an overpowered filler, look at whether those recipes needing less ingredients makes them OP.

If you weren't able to use twigs/ice you would have to use some other foodstuff that has some "value" on its own, even if it's as small as berries, the recipes would be less overpowered than they currently are.  Focusing in on Dragonpie...

Dragonpie gives 40 Health, 75 Hunger and 5 Sanity.

Dragon Fruit (cooked) gives 20 Health and 12.5 Hunger

Berries (cooked) give 1 Health and 12.5 Hunger

If you were using berries x3 as fillers the sum of the parts would be 23 Health and 50 Hunger, compared to the Dragon Fruit's stats alone.  That's an increase of 17 Health, 25 Hunger and 5 Sanity, as opposed to an increase of 20 Health, 62.5 Hunger and 5 Sanity.  This is still a massive increase in how good your foods are but it's way less drastic than if you use 3 twigs.  When you consider the investment required to make a crockpot and obtain dragonfruit in the first place, it starts to seem a little more reasonable, especially with the additional added investment of making a birdcage and delaying using a dragonfruit in order to be able to start getting them regularly.

The only times that twigs as filler in D Pie aren't overpowered is when you're first starting out (and unlikely to have a crock anyway) OR if it's a twiggy tree world.  Although, if you're playing as Maxwell or Woody, twiggy trees would be way less of a limiting factor.

[mranon245]

What about only allowing one of those two fillers per food? For instance, to make a dragon pie you have to use a dragon fruit 1 twig (no more) and two other fillers. Honestly I find that ice should be a specific food filler only, for melonsickle etc and not a general filler.

[Muche]

1 hour ago, ScootyPuffJr said:

If you weren't able to use twigs/ice you would have to use some other foodstuff that has some "value" on its own, even if it's as small as berries, the recipes would be less overpowered than they currently are.  Focusing in on Dragonpie...

Yes, you are focusing on whether it should be forbidden to use twigs/ice in the recipe. My point was to look at what should be required in the recipe. For the dragonpie, maybe adding requirement of one fruit (equivalent of 2 berries) would make it better? So the new minimalistic recipe would be dragonfruit+berries+berries+twigs or dragonfruit+pomegranate+2xtwigs.

[ScootyPuffJr]

18 hours ago, Muche said:

Yes, you are focusing on whether it should be forbidden to use twigs/ice in the recipe. My point was to look at what should be required in the recipe. For the dragonpie, maybe adding requirement of one fruit (equivalent of 2 berries) would make it better? So the new minimalistic recipe would be dragonfruit+berries+berries+twigs or dragonfruit+pomegranate+2xtwigs.

I'm sure that would go a long way towards fixing dragonpie, and giving the other problematic recipes more requirements would as well.  It seems a bit like we're arguing for 6 of something versus half a dozen of the same thing.  Ultimately the effect is much the same.  Personally though, I wouldn't mind if twigs were forbidden for all recipes that don't require them... I mean, imagine someone just putting little bits of twigs in a pie or stuffed eggplant.  At best you'd have to eat around them, at worst you'd cut your mouth up something fierce.

I think most of the recipes that require twigs reflect the valuelessness of twigs as a foodstuff in what they give you (with the possible exception of fishsticks but that's mostly for puniness I think).  Kebobs and melon pops don't give back a lot of hunger, though there's a decent argument for making the pops at least.

[Tumalu]

Kebobs are sort of worthless, that's true. Unless you seriously do not have one more food item for meatballs instead... a lot of the other recipes aren't worth anything for hunger w/o icetwigs in most cases, but they DO give 20hp.

I think adding extra requirements to food but continuing to allow twigs/ice is even more complicated of a solution, that still doesn't really make sense or entirely fix the issue. You'd have to add extra ingredients to all these recipes and make them even less simple to make normally, and yet -still- be able to use twigs and ice for some reason... XD

With the original set of vanilla DS (e.g. before RoG) recipes, twigs were excluded from mooost of the recipes they aren't meant for. But ice never really got that treatment and they mostly didn't keep excluding twigs from later recipes.

About the "maybe you should just be able to use less ingredients", whilst a lot of these recipes aren't useful for hunger when twigs/ice are disallowed (At best you can use a lot of mushrooms as filler since you're not exactly losing food) nearly all of them have other uses like +20hp, so they're still totally worth making. Food is already not a huge problem, making crockpot stuff doesn't need to get even easier than having to use the ice/twigs as filler by instead letting you use blank space xD

[1v0]

I totally agree with it - Leave the special recipes like ice cream and kabobs but remove them as a substitute/filler . At winter you can live only with 1 monster meat + 3 ice = meatballs . That's really easy , so easy that me and my friends don't use ice for cooking , because it feels like cheating . I mean you can farm monster meats from a spider nest and ice from the glaciers . Both of them respawn almost every day (at winter) ... We don't use twigs too for the same reason ... 

Just remove them as substitute/filler ...


(also add cave special food recipes please)

[Kuirem]

It has already been suggested somewhere that an easy fix for the Ice problem would be to add a "Monster Lasagna" style recipe with high priority. So when you use 2+ Ice in Crockpot you will get that "Icy goop" instead of easy Meatballs.

[StarvedKasad]

And Ice no longer provides rocks ,instead provides the same ice but requires 50% more hits from a pick axe (DS is 6 hits vs DST 9 hits ).Yes it is renewable but requires more hits which means faster tool degradation (50% faster).

From what I remember in DS ,if you've made meatballs and gave them to pigs they would follow you for the max duration,which is 2,5 days.
So no way I'll agree to that change

Twigs are fine too.Why'd you want to nerf the trail mix,the froggle bunchich or *gasp* butter muffns ?

 

Also how on earth are you suppossed to change such a difficult crock pot recipe system?Imagine the headache you'd cause to whoever updates the crock pots on wiki ..and mine too.

Do you know what's probably not fine and kinda overpowered?The damn bushes.Scout the map for 5 minutes and you'll find an INSANE amount of berry bushes.In our last base we got at least half a screen worth of berry bushes before our first summer.Just get your allies to gather flowers/berries,make a werepig and make him poop ,replenish the berry bushes,make more were pigs etc and god knows how many farms with renewable rock you can make after the first winter..Oh and you can farm drumsticks by trapping the gobblers (who doesn't likey turkey? )

P.S. The beefalos poop generation is rather low ,I think I got 2 poop every day with 10+ beefalos nearby.

[CaptainChaotica]

You know the funny thing?  I keep completely forgetting that that is even a thing, at all.  In winter, I will go far and wide looking for unpicked mushrooms, berries, carrots etc. to put in as filler in my crockpot recipes.  It could possibly save me from starvation/freezing not to, but I always just naturally make sure that all of my food is made of, well, FOOD!

...which means this change, if it happened, wouldn't affect me at all.   

When I harvest ice, I save it for one purpose:  Summer.  Sticks don't grow back in winter/not much in summer, either, so those get saved for crafting/torches.  You don't wanna be caught out at night without enough materials to make even one torch.

...Notorious