Several Quality of Life Suggestions

[Redrune75]

Not sure if it's best to post this as a separate thread or in the support/bugfix thread, but here goes anyway. Apologies ahead of time as I know my writing is very wordy.

There are several food items--dried meat, sake soaked stir-fry, pickled vegetables (one or two exceptions here), sushi, and perhaps some I'm forgetting--that have identical effects when chosen for a meal. That is to say, for example, Dried Rabbit Meat and Dried Pork give the same effects when eaten: 5 Strength, 5 Vitality, 3 Magic, and Natural Healing 1. Given how many different types of dried, pickled, etc. foods there are (I count 8 meats, and I think I'm most of the way through the game), it would save a lot of menu space in both the "Change the Menu" menu, and in the "Stored Ingredients" menu to collapse all these options into one generic option. Dried Meat, Pickled Vegetables, (Meat) Sushi etc. I do notice that when these foods are listed in the "Change the Menu" menu, their description is identical as well, although a distinction is made in the "Stored Ingredients" menu. There may be a good reason for that which I'm not aware of.

If there is actually a need to distinguish between Dried Rabbit Meat and Dried Pork in storage, it would still be possible to collapse the multiple options in "Change the Menu" into a single option. This could function similarly to the "Process Ingredients" menu, where the player can change the inputs for a given process if there are multiple options--making Malt from Brown, Mixed, or White Rice, for example. Have a single menu choice of Sake Soaked Stir-Fry, and let the player choose whether they want to use Dried Rabbit Meat or Dried Pork.

The example with different meat types for Sake Soaked Stir-Fry is more trivial, but being able to choose what sake you want to use is less so. As an example, I don't want to use my Daiginjo Sake to rehydrate dried meat, I want to drink it, especially when Kuchikami Sake rehydrates meat just fine instead. There's a way to get around this currently, though it is a bit awkward: if the game has decided to use your rare sake for some basic dish, you can temporarily select that rare sake as another course for your meal and the game will be forced to pick another sake for your basic dish. The choice still seems to be random, however, and if you've built up a small collection of whatever that rare sake is you might not be able to force the game to select a different one by "exhausting" your supply on other courses.

This "complex ingredient selection", for lack of a better term, would also have uses on several other dishes (though I can't recall their names at the moment) that seem to take various vegetable ingredients at random but have identical effects regardless of the vegetable. Choose between plum, persimmon, garlic, wasabi etc. for your soup, for example.

[Hoshikudaki]

I get the idea behind this for options like stir fry and the pickled stuff, however for meats I think there are some that have different effects.

Going through my dinner menu options there are I guess there 5 groups of menu items that have the same effect/description.

1. Dried meat*
   
2. Smoked meat
   
3. Stir Fry
   
4. Sushi
   
5. Pickled items

* Dried Salmon was an exception in my list having a different description and effect

There are also dinner menu options that follow a theme but have different descriptions & effects

1. Roasted Meat
   
2. Meat Jelly
   
3. Meat Bowl

There are probably more that I can't remember

It could be a bug that those menu items all have the same description & effects. It doesn't make sense that Dried Rabbit Meat would give the same effects as Dried Bear Meat.

If it is a bug then my guess is that these recipes are pointing to the same effect rather than their ingredient specific version.

Otherwise it would be been better to just have the dinner option and item as a generic item (Dried Meat, Smoked Meat, Sushi etc) then let the process ingredient menu let you pick which meat to use when making the generic item.

[Guedez]

Being able to 'save up' my good stuff for before the boss would be nice. currently I have to manually pick he menu every single time otherwise I will be wasting a whole lot of stuff before harvesting

[LotusBlade]

What is a point of those changes? Food system is ignorable and has no significant impact on character. While i do understand what you are trying to discuss, yet game clearly shows us developers don't care about depth / mechanics design.

+ this is NOT early access, i don't remember a single released game in my entire life which changed from meaningless into meaningfull because someone asked for it. I doubt they even read Steam forums, alteast i don't see a single answer to negative reviews, means they don't care even about rating.

Instead of waiting for it to do something unprecedent go play Battle Chef Brigade.

[Redrune75]

Originally posted by Hoshikudaki:

Going through my dinner menu options there are I guess there 5 groups of menu items that have the same effect/description.

1. Dried meat*
   
2. Smoked meat
   
3. Stir Fry
   
4. Sushi
   
5. Pickled items

* Dried Salmon was an exception in my list having a different description and effect

Dried Salmon and Pickled Wasabi both have different effects from other things in their categories, and I think also have different inputs when processing them. Obviously I wouldn't advocate collapsing those into the generic Dried/Pickled etc. option. Again, could be more exceptions like this, as there are a lot of menu ingredients to choose from. Also worth noting that Salmon is the only fish that can be dried, so there seems to be a distinction between meat and fish. Yes, they are both the flesh of animals, but plenty of groups of people in real life have considered there to be a meaningful difference between the two, over the course of world history.

Originally posted by Hoshikudaki:

It doesn't make sense that Dried Rabbit Meat would give the same effects as Dried Bear Meat.

I disagree with this, though, at least from a standpoint of gameplay mechanics. Allowing the player to preserve meats/vegetables perfectly, stat boosts and all, even at a cost of an extra meat/vegetable, seems a bit too strong. Preserving things basically says "Okay, you can have your meat/vegetable available whenever you want, it will never go bad. But you have to sacrifice on the quality to do so." Of course, complexity isn't always a good thing, but I think it's reasonable in this case.

I think we agree for the most part, though. And thanks for engaging in the discussion.

[Vexare]

Great suggestion.

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

What is a point of those changes? Food system is ignorable and has no significant impact on character. While i do understand what you are trying to discuss, yet game clearly shows us developers don't care about depth / mechanics design.

+ this is NOT early access, i don't remember a single released game in my entire life which changed from meaningless into meaningfull because someone asked for it. I doubt they even read Steam forums, alteast i don't see a single answer to negative reviews, means they don't care even about rating.

Instead of waiting for it to do something unprecedent go play Battle Chef Brigade.

Heh, try beating the 300 floors and still saying food is ignorable...
Perfect food setup is nearly a must to deal any damage at all reliably.