Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Deantwo]

Cooking. In this game cooking will matter, it is needed and even required if you want to do well in this game.
But unless you know all the cooking recipes by heart and have all the possible ingredients at hand, it is nearly impossible to do well.

Currently
Currently the cooking system is simply like the normal crafting system. You have a list of recipes you can cook.
This mean that if you have only two types of ingredients, you have to look through all the recipes to see what you can make with them.

You can also only see the recipe list while the campfire/whatever is burning, meaning you are wasting fuel while looking through the long list.

A lot of the recipes are also very specific. You have to have that kind of meat with that kind of vegetable, no substitution.

This works well when crafting tools, because there you want to make a specific tool before you know what you need to make it.
Cooking is the other way around. You have a few ingredients and want to know what you can make with them.

Suggestion
When cooking in real world you don't have to follow a recipe, you can substitute a type meat with a different meat if you don't have that specific one. Same with vegetables or fish. The ingredients in a meal changes depending on what ingredients are available in the area.
If you don't have any pork, you use beef. If you don't have any potatoes, you use carrots. If you don't have any salmon, you use codfish.

Change cooking from a lame list of crafting recipes into another system, similar to how herbalism is something unique.

Depending on your cooking skill you can add a number of ingredients together, if those ingredients are a good match the meal gets a bonus to quality.
I don't mean cooking need to be random, but we need to be able to cook with what we have rather than following strict recipes.

So say we can cook with three ingredients. We add in some game meat, some onions, and some water. This would make a meat stew of some kind.
If you don't have any game meat, but wanna make the same meal again, you can just make it with pork.

This of course mean that most of all the named food items in the game would have to be made more generic.
For example: "Meat and potatoes", " "Fish and vegetables", "Cooked meat" and so on.

The basic nature's lore campfire cooking can stay with the normal crafting system, since it is just basic survival.

What are your thoughts on this?

EDIT: This thread is 3 years old, rewrote the post a little to make more sense.

[Solon64]

Much of the food in the game needs to be reworked if they want to make it an actual feature that needs paying attention to.

Many things could be changed for, I think, the better. For example, eating one kind of food endlessly is pretty dull (apples for dinner AGAIN? Ugh.). Perhaps implement some kind of depreciating value for the same kind of food eaten in a given time period, although that would need to be carefully looked at in order to balance it at both early game and late game play; new players may ONLY end up having apples, roots, and game meat to eat. Also, quality of food should be a modifier, not the end all be all for that food value. A q100 apple fills your food bar pretty much all the way, exactly the same as a properly cooked meal. Preposterous. Apples should fill, say, 5 food, with a modifier bonus of up to 50% more for quality. A q100 meat stew or somesuch should be the only way to completely fill the food bar in one go.

But I digress. More on topic, cooking is in a bit of a placeholder position I think. If they don't want to put in replacements for certain recipes, your "pork instead of beef" thing, then an easy solution is to provide an option to display only recipes for which you have the materials available, a checkbox would be the simplest way. That way, if you only have the materials for roasted game meat, you click the checkbox, boom, the only recipe in the list is roasted game meat.

As this is alpha, this fix is quick, sure, but it's a quality of life fix, not a "right now" sort of thing. Stuff like this will get looked at as they move into a more complete version of the game.

For now, 10 minutes of campfire life from a single softwood billet should be more than enough time to figure out what it is you wanted to cook

[Deantwo]

I haven't been playing the game as of late.
But the newest patch did say something about primitive food items.

lif-yo-early-alpha-version-0-2-4-2-t4856/

• Tweaked hunger system a little. Primitive food should no longer provide a good nutrition. Idling characters slowly lose hunger rate now.

A "Show only what I can make" (that is long, got a single word for it?) checkbox would be a good quick fix.
But if we simply get a quick fix, we may never get a real change.

[Vasquez]

To the original post:

I agree with everything you've said.
This way, cooks can even make their own recipes.
And trade them aswell.

It just gives diversity into the game and I love it.
Just wanted to show my support

GO-GO Suggestion

[Solon64]

From a programming standpoint, is there any advantage to having a million different recipes for the same thing? Whether your meat stew used beef or pork or chicken or game meat or what have you, it's still just meat stew, right? You could have 30 different recipes for meat stew but it should still give the same nutrition, same other ingredients, same weight, etc.

Making so many different recipes for the same thing is what you'd call unnecessary bloat. While I do admit that it would provide some variety to the world, you know, some small village in the north is famous for its chicken stew, or what have you, I kind of feel that having apple pie, pear pie, orange pie, whatever-pie would just clutter the already-cluttered cooking menu.

I dunno. It depends on how much detail the devs want to put into that portion of the game. I could argue either side, but my general opinion would be that fruit pies, meat pies, stews, porridges, etc. should be kept fairly generic, if only to make it easier to stack in inventories, haha. Then again, I would like to see some inn in a major city advertising "Try the world-famous apple dumplings, imported directly from (insert village name here) all the way in the Northern Kingdom!" Would add a lot of roleplaying value to the game.

[Podj]

i would go with that check box thingy idea.

Only show the stuff that you currently are able to make with those recipies you have and level. Maby even have yet another folder to be able to chose if you want to make drinks/food or even drinks/meat/vegtible/soups/fried and so on so you really can limit the amount of anoying reading and finding. cinda like if carpentary, masonary and construction was one list together instead of 3 options when u rightclick.

Anyway lets say..
you only got eggs in your inventory? show "fried egg" in list.
got water and eggs? show "boiled eggs" and "fried egg".
only got a fish? show fried fish.
got fish and boiled eggs? show "fried fish with eggs" and "fried fish".
also please a freaking autocrat here like with smithing..

Now some stuff can easly be done like pork, game meat, chicken being used as a subtitute for eachoter just by having another value to the ingredience.
Lets say that all meat object is a line of code with ofc a icon, name and then a id number. but add one more didget for what kind of thing it is. lets say all fish have this number to be 0 while all meat have the number 1 and then vegtables have the number 2. In that case you dont have to make "game meat + onions = meat and vegies" and then have all the millions combinations there depending on name.
it could be "1+2= meat and vegies" now if its going to be more exact like "fish with eggs" it could be
*IDnumber for boiledeggs = #123
"0+#123=fish with eggs"

Also when programming it dont have to be IF(onions&fish){get food}
it can also be IF((onions|cabbage|carrot)&(fish)){get food} so you basicly dont have to have 13123123 IF's but rather a few ones depending on what food you want to create. Atm there is as many IF's as there is recipies but you could have 10 combinations of fish stew with just one IF if you would use the extra number thing which i talked about in the middle of my comment.

[Deantwo]

Now some stuff can easly be done like pork, game meat, chicken being used as a subtitute for eachoter just by having another value to the ingredience.
Lets say that all meat object is a line of code with ofc a icon, name and then a id number. but add one more didget for what kind of thing it is. lets say all fish have this number to be 0 while all meat have the number 1 and then vegtables have the number 2. In that case you dont have to make "game meat + onions = meat and vegies" and then have all the millions combinations there depending on name.
it could be "1+2= meat and vegies" now if its going to be more exact like "fish with eggs" it could be
*IDnumber for boiledeggs = #123
"0+#123=fish with eggs"

Also when programming it dont have to be IF(onions&fish){get food}
it can also be IF((onions|cabbage|carrot)&(fish)){get food} so you basicly dont have to have 13123123 IF's but rather a few ones depending on what food you want to create. Atm there is as many IF's as there is recipies but you could have 10 combinations of fish stew with just one IF if you would use the extra number thing which i talked about in the middle of my comment.

The hard part is not making the recipes use multiple types of ingredients.
Just look at most of the constructions you can make with the construction skill, you can use both hardwood and softwood boards when the construction require boards. So I would guess the underlying code already support some of that to a degree.

But if the whole system was to be changed to be more like herbalism, all the recipes need to be rethought.

[Podj]

no no ofc not. I just wanted to be clear about it not being a issue.

How ever im not sure i understand how you would like to have it like herbalism?
It cinda sounds like game meat and carrot would be a meat stew for me but for you it would be a recipe for salad.. lol
But i guess what you are saying is that you would like to discover recipes? Like trying out to see if you get something out of mixing tuna with dirt then pray you learned something kinda like skyrim did?

I however dont see the problem with the cooking as it is except for the stupid long list (and that you need a cooking pot for the big cooking fireplace/kitchen). If the list only showed you thing that you can do with what you at the current moment have in your inventory then it would be a lot easier. Also auto craft... annoys the hell out of me that smithing is one of the few/only skills that actually auto craft stuff.

[Deantwo]

How ever im not sure i understand how you would like to have it like herbalism?
It cinda sounds like game meat and carrot would be a meat stew for me but for you it would be a recipe for salad.. lol :ROFL:
But i guess what you are saying is that you would like to discover recipes? Like trying out to see if you get something out of mixing tuna with dirt then pray you learned something kinda like skyrim did?

I mean I don't want recipes at all.

Think of it as a giant pot you just toss ingredients into. Then once you are happy with what you tossed in, click cook and out comes a cooked meal.
The meal should then default to a name/type that make sense according to what ingredients you used.

So rather than finding recipes, you cook without recipes. Simply mix whatever you have and get a meal out of it.

The quality/complexity could depend on the amount of different ingredients used and a small bonus if those ingredients work well together.
Potatoes could give a bonus if mixed with beef for example.

The current cooking skill milestones even still make sense as it would still limit the number of ingredients you can use at a time.

[Podj]

i dont see why this would be better?.. there still would need to be recipes to have the foods named.

Lets say you throw 2 meat and 1 cabbage in the pot how would it know that it is a meet dish? It needs to tell meat from vegetables and then calculate amounts and name it after that.
For an example. 2 water + 1 meat + 1 vegetable = meat and vegetable soup. Basicly seeing that there is more water then anything else and water would make soup then add the other ingredient as name depending on how many different add and between them or something.

and then also combine how good that ingredient is plus the overall quality of the ingredients.

its seams a whole lot less painful to just make a recipe bank with given values that takes quality in the calculation and give you a more precise dish from what ingredients you have. Or do this and then use the way you talked about but then just give failed food if the combination of ingredients don't mach that of the recipe bank.

how ever if i was the one programming this i would still do it the way it is but it but not show you recipe's unless you have ingredients for that recipe.

[Jaxomadar]

I think the system is good as is. Except it would be nice to see the recipe prior to starting the fire.

[Podj]

I think the system is good as is. Except it would be nice to see the recipe prior to starting the fire.

So you dont feel the long list is to long and not even in alphabetic order being anoying?

[Deantwo]

i dont see why this would be better?.. there still would need to be recipes to have the foods named.

...

Well yeah. But from the player's point of view there would be no real recipes to follow.

I am not saying it would be an easy system to make. I am just saying it would work better with how the game works, and be more like real cooking.

I think the system is good as is. Except it would be nice to see the recipe prior to starting the fire.

So you dont feel the long list is to long and not even in alphabetic order being anoying?

If we are keeping the current cooking system, then I think we should have all three of those ideas added.

• Check box to hide recipes you don't have ingredients for.
• Sort the list alphabetic.
• Allow us to view the list of recipes before lighting the campfire.

[Podj]

• Check box to hide recipes you don't have ingredients for.
• Sort the list alphabetic.
• Allow us to view the list of recipes before lighting the campfire.

This.
Crisp to da maximum Y'kno!