Lets overhaul cooking to not be a one trick pony.

[Blacklotus 276]

Lets explore the problem, then I'll offer my solution and finally, I ask for constructive feedback. I know there has to be a better way.

Needless to say, cooking is overly complex with little to no reason for it. It's kept obscure for the purpose of exploration and overall is boiled down to a few recipes that anyone and everyone uses. Pizza, unfermented moonshine, bangers and mash, meal, dumplings.

 

We have about 650 recipes in the game that I've personally seen/have. We have 138 skills which we can make affinities for, 16 kinds of meat, 20 kinds of fish, 11 veggies, 5 grains, 13 herbs, 7 spices, 4 nuts, 5 berries, 3 kinds of cheese, 7 fruits, 6 mushrooms and various other ingredients useful in cooking but not one damn good reason to use the majority of them outside of pizza or unfermented moonshine. It's a broken system, we have numerous recipes to make all manner of things that go unused because they don't feed you as a player enough to make them worthwhile, they don't offer an affinity long enough to be worthwhile, and many of them are so stuck to a set of ingredients that you cant even get an affinity you want if they did for the majority of players. Additionally, because affinities are so hard coded to this system we cant introduce new skills without breaking the existing cooking formula.

Lets talk beverages, first off unfermented moonshine. This recipe is the only beverage recipe I know of that allows one to hit all affinities and on top it's extremely easy to cap out the affinity timer. It takes little effort in terms of beverages for the insanely massive boosts it offers. not only does it provide the maximum drunken modifier available, it also can hit 48 hour timers and hit any and every affinity, on top it doesn't even have to be distilled or fermented to get this bonus. on top of that, it does not decay at all. A single barrel, 45kgs of fermented and distilled moonshine has 4 possible affinities depending on the rarity of the still that cooked it, it takes 5-7 days real time to ferment, and another 90+ hours to distill. That represents every distilled alcohol, not just moonshine. I'm aware you can find random affinity alcohol from treasure hunts but it begs the question why isn't our system capable of doing better. 

Therefore I want to offer a simplification of this system and a change to how it all works.

 

Right now cooking a recipe does the following to determine it's bonuses.

How each ingredient is prepared in a recipe helps decide how much of a multiplier it gives to the affinity timer. the ingredient only counts towards that if it's unique, meaning its the only ingredient in the recipe with that exact name, and then it counts how many times that ingredient has undergone a cooking action prior to the final recipe. for example, chopping or mashing a veggie, then cooking a chopped or mashed veggie before using the final product as an ingredient.

 

The other consideration is all strictly math. Each final ingredient in a recipe has a number assigned to it, as well as the type of pan used to cook it and the type of cooking space it's made in. Do the same named ingredients the same way in the same kind of pan and same cooking space and it'll always be that affinity.

 

All this information is strictly kept secret from the player.

 

The changes I'd like to see, my suggestion for fixing this overly complicated and utterly nonsense complex system is an overhaul of both the temporary affinity buff, and the buffs food in general offer.

 

I think it all begins by untying affinities to specific kinds of food. Instead lets have a final step in cooking where you add several recipes into a 'meal' using a plate perhaps and use the hand to create a food for a specific affinity instead of determining the affinity by the ingredients added. Different foods will be responsible for the different fats, carbs, and proteins say 3 recipes to a meal and when you eat a meal, it consumes the whole thing, in turn you get an 8-16 hour temporary affinity of your choice, full nutrition fat carb protein bars and a small buff related to what kinds of food were added to the meals. did you have a bunch of desserts, you get a sugar rush movement speed, maybe you ate a lot of heavy foods, so a sleep bonus gain boost, was there caffeine? awesome lets make that caffeine make you wired and make you sleep worse but you learn faster. going fighting? eat a hearty meal that ups your defense temporarily, or get a boost to fighting. Make it a choice worthwhile that you have to pick 1 and you cant get another until the buff wears off or you dismiss the effect. better quality ingredients makes for better food. Want to make crafting more difficult, add alcohol, make it so the better the alcohol, the longer it's aged the better the buff. the fresher the food, the better the food. Food that's sat in a LMC is great and all but after a few months that cake you left in the fridge is likely still good but you're not going to get nearly as much from it. The quality of the ingredients, how good your pan is and the oven you cooked it in should all make things more appetizing

 

So what about cooked recipes that are not made into meals? I think it'd be a good idea for those foods to give a much smaller bonus but still be usable to meet hunger needs, that sugar rush might only be 1/6th of what a meal would provide but still be a small boon in between. Have the current system of how ingredients are prepared determine how strong a buff is.

 

Ultimately, my goal is to see the system be more usable for new players and vets alike. To still leave some level of exploration possible but remove the janky reliance on pizza and unfermented moonshine as the godly foods and give us a far more balanced use of a hugely awesome system I love.

 

I fully believe this change will make it easier for players with only a little time to be able to do what they want easier, to give new players a better chance at staying with the game and to give vets a reason to cook to max out those buffs.

 

Not only will it do all those things but it'll allow our devs to develop new skills and to fix problems with current ones much easier in the long term.

 

Thank you for reading.

[Legios 497]

I like it, cooking has always been a one trick pony in wurm, every since I started playing back in 2016. If you were not rocking out with your bangers out you were not living, then we got the cooking overhaul that simply replaced bangers and mash for full house pizza with a craptone of fluff nobody asked for but few enjoy. I'd be more than happy to see other affects to eating foods especially the negative ones of eating unhealthy foods vs good food etc, it would really shake up the markets for sure haha.

[Finnn 3,322]

lets .. not ...

 

You mention 97 ingredients.. chopping/steaming/frying/roasting/grinding/etc.. all that will provide duplicate effects, so we wont be using 2/3 or more of the ingredients, and will eventually only need farming goods, or only herbs, meats, etc... but stick to a new meta to get 15x chopped and fried seal meats to get 40 hours of aggressive fighting or something like that .. stacking x amount of time per meat type and it's processing;

What you do suggest but not explain is system similar to skyrim's with herbs and such, where each have it's own effect, but here we'll be stacking it to amplify it or use amplification rarer ingredients, but we don't really have such or have a meme meta for the possibilities, it's somewhat ok.. but at the same time, we're trading 1 legged ponny for another no better one and we'll still do a dumb meta all over again, what's the benefit to throw time on something that does nothing to fix anything, waste time?

 

Just ask for buff foods, this is no better system, if old one have few special foods/drinks, your idea have none, anyone can cook anything and get everything any time, on top have to remember a ton of new recipes and somebody have to make them work like that,  while old system have established calculators and we've dealt with a hell somehow, new system will be a weird card system with variety of foods where you probably can't recall what a misery it is to create all kinds of ingredients, while this is haven for anyone enjoying cooking and variety, it's not going to be great for everyday player;

 

 

you're introducing a small hell "trying" to make use of all recipes;

we do have a crazy system which is wurm-wogical... but it works, thanks to calculators, not the game;

we could of taken a simpler path.. and achieved something in between with system like blackdesert's cooking buffs, where one food gives one or several buffs based on rarity, which lets the player be lazier with the preparation, have a cookbook for these inside the game and be able to recreate any food if the ingredients are present without the need of external tools, this of course did offer very short buffs, forcing the player to eat contently to get "constant" buff for not just minutes but hour/s long session, where wurm gameplay is different and long hour sessions are the normal play; special or town specialty offers variety of buffs at once from single cooked food, but it uses more rare ingredients, wurm have none, unless we get into the mess of unique meat memes and start trolling to require such;

 

Turn 180... reach new lands where things will be greener and we'll hopefully make use of the dropped recipes and get +1-2-3% more skill from them or something like that... or get special new recipes to learn and get atk/def/etc.. PVE buffs;

 

Unexplored land of opportunity is pvE non-priest combat ability land, halt priest buffs, add healing/buffs similar to spells and some cooldowns to the use of such, even the gap of abilities between non and priest characters, a lot of priest limitations dropped but nobody ever cared to buff non-priests for combat abilities, hilarious "balance", right?

 

Filler and aff food as it is, is ok.. we could really use a dev fix to what decay "fix" did to ruin the game and larders, but devs don't seem to care to fix that negligence*.

(decay "fix" rendered old food in existence, created before the fix to age faster, based on it's creation date, no wsa or any warning for the "feature"/bug, it presented to be a giant impact to player time investment and created content)

 

...a fix to the mess above and somehow making food to be reliably taken on the road will be good, in addition some kind of not crazy broken once in a while released new creature dropped recipe.. for buff food of some sort.. could be anything.. from buff exp to skill/s to regain sb while online, etc.. with it's own new limitation.. like use once a day like coffee for the 10min sb.. etc.. possibly skins or new recipes to create new items, collectables, decorations, item modifications, etc....

[kordethbludscythe 762]

i think if you really want to fix the cooking system then changing the way the buffs and affinities work to gradually degrade with time to be less effective would make it so that the fresher a food item is to having just been made would stop the bulk creation of same types of food that you buy once in a long while to eat nibbles of each day. freshness would equate to spending a little time each week to plan out meals and preparing them as needed. however this would not work with the long grinding sessions that most people engage in in this game so  would probably elicit a negative response from the player base.

I would like to say that i do enjoy making a filler recipe so that my toons dont die of hunger that can be stored for indefinate amounts of time, and i make dagwood sandwiches which last close to 3 rl months in my larders wrapped and portioned out. However whenever i cook i also make a handful of other food items to play around with or to use in a roleplay fashion so i dont get bored with the same old same old food everyday. I find that i really dont need affinity food with 24hr+ timers because i can really only play the game so long these days before i pass out from exhaustion and that makes larger timers somewhat wasted.

i also do not depend on certain affinites to make my grind easier because i simply do not grind. i tend to do what project i want when i want and eventually i attain skills, i find grinding a game makes it less fun and i prefer to have fun playing instead of focusing so hard on one tiny thing until i am driven mad with frustration. Although i do wish the decay nerf on larders would be fixed sometime in the future cause it does get annoying to open the larder and find fairly recent wrapped foodstuff covered in damage

[Finnn 3,322]

53 minutes ago, kordethbludscythe said:

i think if you really want to fix the cooking system then changing the way the buffs and affinities work to gradually degrade with time to be less effective would make it so that the fresher a food item is to having just been made would stop the bulk creation of same types of food that you buy once in a long while to eat nibbles of each day. freshness would equate to spending a little time each week to plan out meals and preparing them as needed. however this would not work with the long grinding sessions that most people engage in in this game so  would probably elicit a negative response from the player base.

I would like to say that i do enjoy making a filler recipe so that my toons dont die of hunger that can be stored for indefinate amounts of time, and i make dagwood sandwiches which last close to 3 rl months in my larders wrapped and portioned out. However whenever i cook i also make a handful of other food items to play around with or to use in a roleplay fashion so i dont get bored with the same old same old food everyday. I find that i really dont need affinity food with 24hr+ timers because i can really only play the game so long these days before i pass out from exhaustion and that makes larger timers somewhat wasted.

i also do not depend on certain affinites to make my grind easier because i simply do not grind. i tend to do what project i want when i want and eventually i attain skills, i find grinding a game makes it less fun and i prefer to have fun playing instead of focusing so hard on one tiny thing until i am driven mad with frustration. Although i do wish the decay nerf on larders would be fixed sometime in the future cause it does get annoying to open the larder and find fairly recent wrapped foodstuff covered in damage

Are you aware how long food lasts and how much time it takes to make aff meals for specific skills?

Food decays fast, at the same time it's time consuming and takes a lot of focus and time to prepare these, unless somebody worked on bulk preparation system and keeps variety of food/moonshine, then it's somewhat manageable, but still not trivial;

 

 

 

 

long buffs on their own do nothing, you only get bonus skill if you do actions, long-term buffs aren't that broken, it's convenience to not run around and rebuff every 2hours, and with that spend hour/s to prepare variety of foods, or be constantly drunk and unable to speak or perform create/continue actions

 

consider gameplay, time investment, return for it and the reward

[Simyaci 425]

+1

 

I like this idea from a concept perspective and not its specific details . By the way, the combat defense thing would quickly become another PvP mandatory mechanic so I am not sure if this would be a good addition to the PvP side of the game. 

 

I am not a cook and more of a consumer of what the cooks make but.... If we are still using the different food for each person's each skill system, I'd rather have it changed to a system where each food type gives a specific affinity which is the same for every character. 

[Karrde 344]

Granted it would be nice if there was more recipes that found favoritism; however, there is a concern with balancing players who love complexity with those who prefer simplicity.

 

If a player wants to just make a simple meal, then they can.

 

If someone wants to delve into recipes counting northwards of five hundred, feel free.

 

Although adding new gameplay features could be tied into the food system as well. Some sort of stress stat perhaps with a favorite food. Climate temperatures forcing crops to be more server specific. Famines, etc.

[kordethbludscythe 762]

On 9/24/2023 at 6:43 AM, Finnn said:

Are you aware how long food lasts and how much time it takes to make aff meals for specific skills?

yes Finn i am aware of this i was just trying to express my own ideas and if you notice in my post i also mentioned that it would not be popular changes and that i really dont go for custom affinity food but thanks for asking  

[Finnn 3,322]

56 minutes ago, kordethbludscythe said:

yes Finn i am aware of this i was just trying to express my own ideas and if you notice in my post i also mentioned that it would not be popular changes and that i really dont go for custom affinity food but thanks for asking  

the whole point of the system was the affinities, random ones would be somewhat useless or weird.... (we'd be cooking random things, examining and then likely selling them asap, all affinities would be set to be exactly the same for all.. etc.. for such system to "work", ideal wurm rng meh system..)

 

np

 

w/o the aff skill bonus.. we could just bake potatoes or just eat old pumpkin+meat in frying pan, that was old-gold-meal just for nutrition filler, current system is not exactly useful for more than roleplay, but it fills all categories as it is, for roleplay variance, and the players who don't care what they eat/drink as long it gives right skill bonus; to replace the system you'd need to significantly improve something and supply all parties with something and make it reasonable time dump to implement something new, unless.. it's sneak implementation... new mob drop recipe or unlocking recipes somehow and providing better buffs or more buffs at less confusing system, then.. oh well, hell.. hah.. huh.. lets switch to that new system.. once it offers enough variance and covers more needs in better way

[Locath 533]

Keep the "meal gives different affinity to different characters based on ingredients" part.

Base the timer length on something else than complexity/number of ingredients. 

 

e.g. 99ql simple food (like baking which easily produces food above the skill level) gives 10 minutes affinity per bite, without diminishing returns. For every bite.

HFC product is capped by the skill so harder to make at higher quality, give it 20 minutes per bite.

--Numbers are taken out of thin air, as an example. Don't hang me for "not long enough" or "infinite affi timers".--

Beverages could use the same logic. If my wine matured for 2 years, it could give at least half-decent affinity timer.

 

In the end, if a newbie could make a simple meal and get even 1 minute of affinity per bite, they might be ore inclined to experiment and explore the cooking system. Wait until nutri bar is low, take 10 bites, 10 minutes affi - great, something to show for!

At the moment, the impression from getting 12 seconds of affinity after eating something relatively complex but made by a newbie is probably not very good. Makes me wonder if i would ever bother with cooking past filling the nutri bar.

High skilled toons would still have the advantage of making "better" food than new players.

 

Sprinkle some bonus for the complexity on top of that, nothing big so that we aren't back to square one, so that people who want to make super complex recipes still get rewarded for the time and effort they put in.

 

This would also mean the concept of "filler" meals largely obsolete. I know there isn't much logic in Wurm and that it's only a game but currently i take 1 bite from 6 different pizzas and then stuff my face silly with cheap meals. Roleplay that!

 

Current system simply punishes for:

not spending hours on taking notes to make , test and write down a massive number of combinations for different meals until the player arrives at the conclusion that it's pizza/meal and still has to figure out the 138 available combinations.

or

not using 3rd party tools.

 

On top of that, the effort required compared to how fast food decays outside of magical chests, even in larders, makes many people dislike it very much.

 

This isn't to make food affinity timers super long. It's to make more of the hundreds of available recipes viable. 

[Blacklotus 276]

3 hours ago, Locath said:

Keep the "meal gives different affinity to different characters based on ingredients" part.

 

This is the main issue with keeping affinities tied to ingredients, some recipes just don't have enough ingredients to make all affinities, and on top if affinities are tied to a meal vs a choice it limits the devs ability to go about adding more than 138 skills if they so choose to.

 

I'd love to see the need for calculators go bye bye. and have more information directly available ingame while cooking and make all the recipes viable to be added to a meal that would feed you and give you affinities. Trust I stand to lose significantly from this if its changed but it's a good thing for making the system work better for everyone. We can make things that give 48 hour affinities now, it's being done and I do it every day, but it shouldnt be so hard for newbies or the general player base to not have to do as you say, research, write everything down or use a 3rd party tool just to eat.

[Kaide 38]

ok i haven't read the whole thread but if this has already been said then please take it as support to the same opinion lol. To the original post though I'm hearing "make it like wood types where the last thing added determines the outcome" and this is still focusing on ingredients determining affinity and trying to make each meal so useful on itself that each one can be worked in a way to get most/all affinities. in the end I fear that would still just result in all the top cooks doing what they do now, making pizzas in the right order to produce heavy weight items for any/all affinities.

 

I would rather see that each meal gives a different affinity, like the meal/cooked item itself no matter which way we did the ingredients up. different players could still get a different one so yeah that curry gives me carpentry and you toy-making etc. I feel like this would result in the top cooks having to stockpile and learn to make everything on the menu because their customer base would now be all over the board. 650+ recipes, however many cooked items.... divides up to each player seeking a small number of specific individual dishes to get that specific target affinity and all of us needing different ones. That would really pull up a need for the whole cooking system instead of just pizza

[Delg 13]

I like the way it is now, i dont want anything to change