Large Expansion To Hot Food Cooking.

[Atndy 385]

Hot food cooking has always been the same, you make meals and that's it, generic meals. There should be more types of meals that you need to keep switching to get your nuteriance up. (Higher nuteriance the more complex the meals will be to make)

New Items :

Grinder .01 KG iron (Grinds up salt or dried peppers to sprinkle on food made with iron, steel or brass.) (Would go well with the cravings post.)

Hand Mixer .02 KG iron (Allows you to mix milk and flower together for dough)

Grater 1.5 KG iron (Allows you to grate cheese on top of a food)

Pizza pan 2.5 KG iron

Masher 3.2 KG iron (Allows you to crush things into a paste)

Recipes :

1 Corn on the cob ( 1 corn put in cauldron of water, take out corn apply add butter and salt)

5 Mash potatoes ( Activate masher and use on cooked potato. Apply butter and salt)

10

15

20

25

30

35

40 Apple sauce (Use masher on apples to create apple paste which is then placed in a hot pan with apple juice added)

45

50

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

90

95

(Levels are just a rough est can be switch around as seen fit by rolf)

(Give me ideas for more recipes.)

[Atndy 385]

*reserve*

[Aldaturo 6]

<skill> has always been the same

FTFY.

On a serious note. I think that Rolf et al. ought to have a good think about the whole skill system, including HFC. At the moment, it is largely based on timers, difficulty and ql. An exception to this is meditation when you start answering path questions. But for most skills, you grind the skill until you reach some goal you've set. For crafting skills, it's easier to find incentives to grind. For other skills like HFC, it is more difficult to find incentives to grind it, because the results isn't as tangible as for weapon smithing, ship building etc.

I'm all for making HFC more worthwhile or content rich, but I will give this (and the cravings idea) a -1. The reason is that the suggestions seem to add a few things that increases the complexity of HFC, but it doesn't add that much to game play. Yes it's cool to be able to make dough, then a pizza base with a (new item:rolling pin), then get tomatoes (new plant) and squash them, add grated cheese, add some onion, some meat and bake in an oven.

And although I think adding a few recipes, another tool or plant are not necessarily tasks that require a lot of dev time (most of the time would probably be for the graphics guys), adding a lot of them will. And because you can keep adding them ad infinitum to further increase the richness of HFC, I don't think it's a wise decision to make (because you get down a one-way street). I'd prefer thinking a bit more out of the box, and the cravings post does that to some extent, in that it adds a use for the different products of HFC, and so encourages diversifying more (than the current grind HFC until you can cook meals, then cook meals forever-and-ever-amen).

To improve on HFC, I think these are key things to consider (and some of these are transferable to any skill)

• Make use of the huge variety of ingredients we already have (there are already many different types of herb/meat/fish, for instance)
  
• Avoid upsetting people who have no interest in cooking by shaking HFC up too radically.
  
• Make the game more 'sticky' (immersive,engaging), so that more people stick with the game (I have argued elsewhere for things that replaces the wait-for-timer approach to skills with something that engages the player, which could include operating machinery (in the Windmills post, I suggested the player control grain flow and apply a brake, which along with a third variable wind speed would determine the outcome of the operation, which could be a vast improvement on the basic tool grind stone if the player was skilful). Another way could be to add an element of player research.
  
• Encourage trade and player interaction generally.
  

For HFC, I think the research approach is the best approach. The basic idea is to give the player an incentive for the player to play more thoughtfully than choosing the right tool to imp until s/he's gotten to the desired skill level or made something of the desired QL. To contrast this with the cravings idea, in which the game tells the the player "you'll get a benefit if you go cook X right now". If instead, the game provides a general incentive for the player to experiment with recipes, the player who choose to do that will feel that it is them, and not the server, that is the driving force behind the player devoting time to cooking. In contrast with the cravings idea, in which the game tells the the player "you'll get a benefit if you go cook X right now", I think the game should provide a general incentive for the player to experiment with HFC. The players who choose to experiment will feel that it is them, and not the server, that is the driving force behind the player devoting time to cooking.There are a number of ways the experimentation could be facilitated, such as:

• Make eating certain HFC products give shorter timers/higher skillgain for certain activities. Can be combination of generic and character-specific. E.g. Meat casserole may be generally good for mining, but one charcter may get more benefit from beef+rosemary and another from pork+thyme. There could also be a disadvantage for other activities.
  
• Make eating certain HFC products give a temporary boost in characteristics.There could also be a disadvantage for other characteristics.
  
• Add some sort of skill that grows upon tasting new flavours - add some benefit to developing this skill (e.g. characteristics increase or faster characteristics increase)
  
• Give each player affinities for cooking certain recipes, which increases the pros/cons of the HFC product when they cook it (encourages player experimentation)
  
• Give each player affinities for eating certain HFC products (like a fixed craving). Increases the pros/cons of the HFC product when they eat it (also encourages player experimentation)
  
• Add location-based specialties. Maybe some ingredients can only be foraged/grown/hunted in certain locations (or even on certain servers). Maybe there are locations/areas that increases pros/cons for certain recipes, which stack with the cooking-affinities above.
  
• Make use of the variety of ingredients already available (pork and rosemary casserole is different from pork and thyme casserole).
  

The above approach will make sure that players can choose to pursue experimentation if they find that interesting. If they don't, they can continue with the status quo. Affinities for cooking recipes and regional specialties can also encourage trade (But only if the complexity is such that it is non-trivial to set up shop in each region, as happened with regional ores)

I think if an approach such as the one above is introduced, each additional recipe/ingredient/tool/technique will add a lot more to the game than if added to the current system.

Finally, here are some ideas for things to add complexity

recipes: pizza, pies, sweet pastries, savory pastries, beef jerky, sausages, haggis

ingredients: tomato, pepper, bell peppers, chilli peppers, lettuce, mutton/lamb, chicken, eggs, rice.

tools: rolling pin, cake/pie tins, pestle+mortar.

techniques: curing, pickling, drying, smoking.

edit: Non-sensical sentence.

Edited September 24, 2012 by Aldaturo

[Atndy 385]

Welp you took my idea and rolled with ;D

[Aldaturo 6]

Welp you took my idea and rolled with ;D

Well, I just applied my opinion of how skills generally can be vastly improved to the topic of your thread :-)

[sweatygopher 88]

Something needs to be done and honestly I'd take your suggestion over what they implemented any day.

Seriously food cooking is one of the BIGGEST ASPECTS of this game. 90% of the game content is centered around acquiring food, but once you acquire it it has no differentiating aspect.

Salem at least offers a semi-useful food system. Wurm needs to catch up!

I don't understand why it takes so long to make simple stat changes like you're suggesting. I've been programming since i was 14, and whenever I design games I never have trouble with quickly, and efficiently changing a system around. In fact if anything the art and implementing the systems to acquire the item is the HARDEST part. Not changing the functionality.

It's so sad that there is a type of meat for every animal in the game, and that there is various types of fish, herbs, EVEN RARE MUSHROOMS!! Yet none of these items matter. Just throw random ###### together and eat it lol

Edited September 26, 2012 by sweatygopher

[Garis 210]

Having played a game that was heavily oriented around getting different benefits from eating different types of food, I'd like to offer a couple of suggestions.

First, rewarding players for eating certain types of food (such as benefits to certain learning skills) encourages players to undertake activities purely for the purpose of increasing hunger, which is something that probably should be avoided. However, we get hungry standing still so this isn't quite as bad a possibility in Wurm as it was in the other game.

The food system should probably not affect the difficulty to increase one's characteristics or skills, or it could cause wild imbalance in the delicate PvP ecosystem.

Right now in game, food nutrition is based on the skill of the cook and not the variety of ingredients in the food. More ingredients increases the difficulty of cooking a thing, and certain types of foods (meals in particular) are given to be more nutritious than others such as soup or casserole, and this is somewhat astonishing. For instance, you don't need to raise any vegetable but corn to make meals.

I'd like to see the nutrition of the food related to the quality and quantity of ingredients in the food, with the skill of the cook enabling the creation of more complex (and thus nutritional) recipes.

Meals should be renamed to something like "Entree" and shouldn't be so much better than other food types that there's no real decision in cooking and eating them. A "Meal" should be something that is created by placing a number of food items onto a table. Having a selection of vegetables, entrees, beverages, and desserts would give the highest possible nutrition, as well-rounded meals tend to be the most nutritional.

Perhaps having a higher base Cooking score could allow you to make meals with more courses / side dishes, etc. This would in turn allow those eating from the table to get more nutrition.

Last, using tables as a tool for building meals from things like entrees, soups, sandwiches, cheeses, beverages, and so forth, would allow meals to become more of a social event, centered around a table, rather than tossing meat, corn, and water in a bucket and eating alone in the mine all the time.