Cooking: Doing more with the same. Seasoning and Optional Ingredients

[Smuch]

 

Hello.

 

First, allow me to apologize if this turns out to have been suggested a hundred time before. As far as I can tell from searching the words ‘ingredients’, seasoning, ‘cooking’ and the food tag it doesn't seem to have been but it’s possible I missed it. I do mention and link to some suggestions already in previous game tho, because I feel they do go naturaly with what I'm trying to pitch here.

 

The big idea of this thread is to think of way to make the cokin system a little more interesting, have some more options without adding too many new stuff to the game (no that I’m against new ingredients or recipe being added, but this is just for theorycrafting sake) but allow for new combinations of existing ones by using extra ingredients and seasoning, things that are mostly already in the game ( two major exceptions are listed, aforementioned suggestions already made by others people, though both would be byproducts of things already in the game) to be added to already existing recipes.

 

Now these suggestions are not like, a huge propose fix to some problem the game has or something I feel it’d glaringly need, the game work already well without any of it, sure, but I do believe however it would add something good to the game and wouldn’t remove anything either just by being there.

As it is,there aren’t that any recipe and between duplicants getting tired of certain kind of food and availability, some recipe and ingredient downright (looking at you, mealwood) become fairly obsolete

There’s two big ways I could see this working that seems reasonable (in my admittedly limited understanding of game development that is) to implement.

First options: Advanced recipes

 

The big idea here is just adding extra recipes but in a way that doesn’t need to add t the game another cooking station, completely new plant or animals (technically two of the possibilities I mention later aren’t in the game but are derivative of things that already are) not elgonating even more the food selection menus and have the recipes still require most of the same base ingredients as their classic base (thus not changing the balance of aring and ranching much)

 

Examples:

-Add one portion of cooking oil (obtained from seeds, details later) when making a “Fry Mush” to make it a “Deep Fry Mush” Adds some 450 calories making it  a single ration meal big enough even for Duplicants with bottomless stomach traits) and making faster to cook

-Add one portion of oil and a Pincha Pepper when making a Gristle berry” to make it a “Sizzled Berry”, similar to a grisle berry but with the the ‘soul food” quality added

-Add 10 kg of algae to a Barbeque to make it a ‘Seasoned Meat’ which replace the ‘soul food’ condition with another one that only give you only a bonus

-Add a mushroom to an Omelet to make it a “Scrambled Shroom” givin +1 quality

And so on… Possibilities are endless

 

Things added to the recipe don't have to be all positive the can induce tradeoff to keep things interesting. For example, adding certain ingredient could make a recipe with a btte quality end result but at the expense of a longer cooking time for example. Or using certain ingredients like oil or mushrooms could augment food quality but give a recipe a small chance of diarrhea. (as I’m sure real world mater of mushrooms and deep frying can sadly attest) Or at the contrary constipation a condition where  a duplicant has to spend longer in the toilet for the same volume of excretions.

 

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Second option: Seasonings

 

Instead of each recipe having one or two extra advanced recipe tailored for them that can be made by spending specifics extra ingredients, instead you get the same options that can be checked for every meal prepared.

 

Less art and writing required to implement, I would imagine you wouldn’t have to come with art and description and balancing extra ingredients, advantages and flaws for each extra recipe. Also open the possibility to use several combining upgrade on a single meal.

Not sure ow hard it’d e to implement on the coding front, I’m pretty sure the game already track each consumable object individually with its own properties since it raks freshness for each consumable object and it’s possible or a duplicant to eat part of  a ration, abandon it due to an urgency and another duplicant to finish it with the exact number calories left, so you’re just mpemening a system that let you tweak the values of the consumable object when queuing it here.

 

In that case, maybe the meal would have to be already cooked in other cooking stations and then a specialised cooking station, the ‘flavoring bench’ or ‘seasoning bench’ can be used to apply upgrades afterwards to already cooked meals.

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Potential ingredients.

 

Seeds and Oil. (The vegetal kind, that is.)

 

Seeds do tend to accumuate due to change to the farmng system, I've noticed personaly that I tend to get tons of mealwood seed after a while, this has been brought up before in this thread by InternalScreing among other.

 

While said thread had plenty of good ideas to deal with its problem (that aren't mutually exclusives), from feeding seeds to animals, or composting them, the one I’m going to retain here are those relevant o cooking:  Seeds as cooking ingredient or Seeds pressed into oil (which of course can be used as a cooking ingredient itself)

 

Particularly do like the oil one the most as it also opens to plenty of others uses. Oil as lubricant for your engineer to apply a short lived buff for your machines it the early game (maybe toih the possibility to replace it later with petroleum based lubricant which work better and longer). Oil as a component for medecine upgrades and quality of living items like soap. ...Oil as a way to reenact holiday on ice for your duplicants without ice…

 

 

And as  cooking ingredient It feels like a fairly natural complement for most of the electric grill recipe.

 

Salt: (Could be produced from grinding bleach stone. Prior suggestion by ImpalerWrG)

Seems once again like a fairly basic and ubiquitous cooking component and seasoning. Maybe it could have some interesting effect on duplicant food intake and y’know output (since food and water intake aren't separate things in this game and neither are solid and liquid dejections).

It could also be used to make low or medium quality but very long shelves life rations (salted meats and jerkies come to mind without having to us the power on refrigerators /goo backups if there's a power shortage)

I could also see it, similar to oil as a pretty essential ingredient in medicine/biochemistry crafting and apothecary options. maybe in farming too , we have wooly critters so maybe we’ll get space goats..

 

Algae:

Algae salad and soups are a thing in the real world  first place so why not letour duplicant eat some, especially when you can make them eat bars made of fried mud of all things….

Admittedly there is the fact that algae is already used in large quantities in oxygen production,  much more useful one might argue, but that’s kinda the point. The possibility of trading off: Consume an ingredient or resource (here something that could be used for precious oxygen production) in exchange for a boost to a food item

 

And finally other cooking ingredients.: Pincha peppernuts and mushroom sices seems a good fit for being seasoning/side dishes to other meals, augmenting quality and KCals.

You can never go wrong with too many peppernuts !

 

 

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As a last topic of food for thought, so to speak, Since Duplicant AI will likely evolve a bit as the game develop, so might their ‘personality traits’. We could see traits related t the Duplicants tase appear and thus, why not, what they like in food preferences

Yes, I know this is ‘oxygen not included’, not ‘restaurant simulator in space’ but since the game does want itself inspired in part of Dwarf fortress, anything that favorize personality quirks and strange emergent behaviors in Duplicant is welcome. (as it is now, endearing as they look, they really do feel a little too much like busy little meat drones in play. but its still Alpha)

[ArunPrasath]

Superb idea. Can even implement a separate Cooking Upgrade with new plants and spliced plants that produces seeds for creating oil.

Maybe the developers can have a look at this @Ipsquiggle

[mox]

Advanced recipes could be a great reason to upgrade your chef. I'm all for eating that algae tbh. 

[vovik]

Very nice idea, it is sorta something like in dont starve.
Another thing that i would mention is AWKWARDLY high prices of water for food and mass deletion... use 50 kg of water/mudto produce 1kg of something... 99 kgs dissapear.

[Fenixix]

To be honest each new recipe is more useless than previous recipe that you add so there is a golden middle of amount of recipies when they all have something distinct that make them optimal in a right situation. If there is no niche for a recipe (no situation when it's optimal) there is no reason for people to use it and obviously there is a limited amount of situations aka niches for recipies. Atm there are very good recipes. They are all usefull in the different kinds of situations. So that is why i think that it's a bad idea to add recipies just for the sake of making more recipes. If you add a new mechanics like space cows (was mentioned in a recent topic. using it just as an example) and all difficulties attached to organizing a farm then it's ok to add recipes but adding new recipes when all you have to do is just to click, don't know wabout that. I liked the oil recipe because atm there are no way to deal with excvess seeds. There are some ideas how to use them ofc. Oil is the first second is feeding it to animals.
P.S. if KLEI decide to go with oil it's probably wil lbe better balance wise if oil will cost many seeds to make(~20).

[ButterStuffed]

In the long run a single recipe would probably reign supreme no matter how many recipes there are simply because it’s the most efficient.

A great way to prevent this is for duplicants to have varying preferences and for them to get tired of eating the same food constantly. Duplicants would gain/lose considerably more stress or gain buffs/debuffs depending on how happy they are with their meal.

[Fenixix]

16 minutes ago, Mikro said:

In the long run a single recipe would probably reign supreme no matter how many recipes there are simply because it’s the most efficient.

A great way to prevent this is for duplicants to have varying preferences and for them to get tired of eating the same food constantly. Duplicants would gain/lose considerably more stress or gain buffs/debuffs depending on how happy they are with their meal.

That is a solution but the question is will it be fun? needs testing.