Improve cooking menu

[blash365]

The current menues for mushers and electric grills are micro intensive, since you have only 2 choices for dupe assignments:

• infinite production of food x
• queue up a limited number of food

This means that when you intend to produce multiple kinds of food, you will either have to change the queue everytime the queue has been finished or that you will need to build several musher/grills to serve as a production facility for one type of food each.

 

Possible improvements to the current system could be:

Continous production with cycling:

You can already queue up multiple unlimited productions on the same device, but only the first in line will be worked on. My suggestion is that the queue should requeue all infinite production tasks at the end of the queue upon completion, allowing multiple food types to be handled in sequence.

As an improvement the grill could also skip infinite production tasks, when there is no supply at the moment, allowing a supply based production.

This system would also provide a way to define a ratio in which different foods will be produced (queue up twice -> twice as much produced)

 

Alternatively overhaul production menu with a menu:

The interface allows to check certain meal types, that are on the menu and the device is allowed to produce every checked meal. Sliders could also be added to allow ratios by meal type.

 

 

Side-note: this system could also be applied for the metal refinery.

 

[Zarquan]

I like this idea, but doesn't the smart fridge kind of let you do this?  Of course, it isn't really a menu, but it is close.

[blash365]

What does smart fridge have to do with cooking assignments?

[AileTheAlien]

2 hours ago, blash365 said:

Continous production with cycling

This would actually be a very useful, easy to understand UI. It's basically the system that was in Total Annihilation. (and also Supreme Commander? and Planetary Annihilation?)

[Zarquan]

Let's say you want some liceloaf and some berry sludge.  You can have two microbe mushers, one of which is tied to a smart fridge for liceloaf, one is tied to berry sludge.  They are set to continuously produce.  Once you have enough berry sludge (the smart fridge is full), it stops being made because the berry sludge microbe musher would be disabled by automation.  You can do the same thing with cooking stations.  You could also use automation to only allow one of the microbe mushers or cooking stations on at a time if you can't support too many stations at once on your grid.

That said, I think that the idea of having a cycling queue would be very nice.  I know whenever I have had them, I always used them, like in Rise of Nations.

[blash365]

But in your case you still need one station per meal. So it does not really help saving material for an additional station as in the status quo.

My main point was not limiting the amount of stuff produced by 1 machine, but allowing different meals continously being produced by the same machine.

[Heinyken]

If you've played RimWorld, their solution to this is cascading queues -- so in a cooking station you tell it:

1) Build [x number] of [meal].
(if you can't do that, move to the next...)

2) Build [y number] of [differentMeal]
(if you can't do that, move to the next...)

3) Build [z] of [lastMeal]

[Ichikai]

How about, produce the first continuous thing in the list, if no resources are available, produce the second, and so on.

Prioritizing the first thing in the list with the one you consider best, for instance stuffed berry, second pepper bread and third gristle berry.

1. Station has berries and peppernuts? Produces stuffed berry
2. Run out of peppernut
3. Wants to produce pepper bread next but no peppernut
4. Prepares gristle berries until peppernut gets supplied or berries run out..
5. And so on, seems simple enough, might not be.

I realise it might not be the same behaviour as you'd like. But it just makes more sense to me personally. And may or may not be easier to implement if one isn't feasible for whatever reason. Or why not both?

In any case, either would be preferable to how it currently works. I.E. make the first thing and nothing else and if no resources for this thing are provided stop working completely, ignoring whatever may be behind the first.

[The Plum Gate]

I think check boxes or filters would be better than the que, if I could check allt he items I want made there coninuously, then it seems like common sense that I would want better food produced first, then lesser quality food later. This would give better food priority over continuously running low end meals.

The idea falls apart on account of ingredients being used in multiple recipes, but having some number higher than 6 in the que and some way to automate production based on logic test or what have you would be nice.

[blash365]

That's why defining ratios as part of a checkbox dialog might be a solution.

 

E.g.: continous production of: 2x gristle berry, 1x bbq, 3x frost bun

will produce any multiple of gristle berry, bbq and frost bun with the ratio of 2:1:3. If a step has no ingredient, it is skipped.