Ingredients distribution could use some rework.

[Cantus]

Preface: Day 58. Currently working on League entry fee. I have all Tier 4 recipe able cooking stations and I have cleared up to and including Konpeito swamps. I have all bag size upgrades (40.)

tl;dr; version:
There are a few ingredients that I feel are used in too many recipes in the later game, and the amount you get going through an ENTIRE dungeon is not enough to sustain day-to-day consumption.
There are a few ingredients that are overly generous with drops, but underused in recipes, resulting in a useless ingredient that is just a pain in the ass to throw away all of it as you pick it up, but also blocks spawns of the more desirable ingredients.
Bosses should drop ingredients specific to them, keep the reward chest the same.

Looking at my fridges, I feel like the ingredient distribution could use some work.
This is a combination of:
- How "rare" an ingredient monster is.
- The quantity of the ingredient dropped.
- How often it's used in recipes.

Format:
Ingredient Name - # I have after many many days of playing.
Thoughts and then my Suggestion

Cheese - 20.
Really only comes from those pot-head mooks, and has to share drop with Tasty Spice (which I have 126 of coincidentally). Also comes from the black flame bulls (shares with tough meat.) Cheese is used in a LOT of recipes, in large quantities. Pizza and all the different types of pizza, pastas, and I think fast food? There's not really a consistent way to farm these, and I usually am lucky to make it out with a stack of 20 cheeses by the time I finish a dungeon.
Please boost the amount of cheese dropped, or add more sources of cheese.

Fatty Meat - 16
Comes from wild boars only, and has two issues. Wild boars are pretty rare all things considered, and while they can drop up to 5 I think, you usually only get 1 or 2 pieces. Considering how many recipes uses this, we really need more piggies, and Pom really needs to learn how to butcher them better to get more meat.
Please add a carnivore dungeon that has a density of Pigs/Bulls/Chickens

Tough Meat - 39
Comes from all the wild bulls. There are two variants of them (Normal tannish and Fire trail black bulls, but they share a drop of cheese with the other.) Honestly these aren't too bad to get in Mala caverns, but it suffers from the same issue as Fatty meat, where you use them in so many recipes so you can deplete your entire stock in a single lunch rush.
Please add a carnivore dungeon that has a density of Pigs/Bulls/Chickens. Also it doesn't hurt to increase the drops.

Pale Meat - 70
Egg - 121
Number is inflated because I just completed the first dungeon before I made this post. Honestly the least of issues in terms of meats. I feel like chickens dropping only one meat OR one egg is the biggest issue, where you could take out a pack of 4 birds and only get 2 eggs and no meat. Might just be unlucky, but I feel like you could just bump up the drops by a little bit on these.

I have many more of these.
Seafood (Not Prawns)
Tentacle - 6
Crab - 0
Fish - 7
These three are likely because I haven't hit the Ice dungeon in a while, but still I believe they're worth calling out. You tend to get a decent amount of these. I think I could pull in 40+ crabs, 30 or so Tentacles, and 40+ fish because it drops alongside the others. However, the big issue with seafood is that YOU USE SO MUCH OF IT. Most of the higher tier recipes ask for 2, of each. I think the number of spawns of these is pretty good in the ice area, but on the downside they don't drop a lot when you kill them, usually only 1 or 2 of each.
On the other hand, I have 126 prawns. These guys are WAY too common in the ice area, you can even get arenas full of them and you end up fighting 12 of them in a single arena. Not enough recipes use these.

Tasty Spice - 126
For being a seasoning, I feel like these aren't used enough in recipes. Despite them coming from those Pot-head knife guys, the same drop as cheese, I have a surplus of these and only a single stack of cheese. If cheese is used more, the drop ratios should kind of reflect that.

Flaming Spice - 148
This is a big peeve. I've basically had 150+ of these ever since I unlocked Mala caverns. The pepper dog things are way too common, have a strangely high amount of HP compared to other mooks for their plentiful spawns, and you seemingly ALWAYS get at least one pepper from a drop. There aren't enough spicy recipes to use them either at a good rate. More pigs/bulls, less of these please.

Mushrooms - 195
Once those trees start spawning they don't stop. They are very generous with the mushroom drops, the trees are pretty much in every room when you're in their area, and not enough recipes use these. Either increase the recipes that use these or tone down their spawns.

Ice Crystal - 123
You get these at a pretty good rate in the Ice Area. The enemies are uncommon, but are very generous with the drops. Problem is there's like 3 recipes that use this, so you tend to build up a stock of them and never really care about picking them up again. Increase recipes that use this please.

Last other thought: Bosses.
Why don't bosses drop ingredients? If you kill the Mother Hen or Black Rooster, you should get a pile of their ingredients. The ingredients that pop out of the reward chest are usually small amounts of ingredients from the next dungeon, which you probably don't have room for anyways if you're target farming that dungeon already.
If you take out the bosses, you should just get a full stack of that ingredient to make target farming dungeons a little easier.

[P4wn4g3]

Agreed. I'd also say you tend to get too few Honeys or Coconuts, and potatoes need to be dropped more often because they are in a bunch of dishes and only drop from the potato enemy.

Minibosses should also drop resources on top of the chest. I assume you meant that since you mention the BBC.

I guess I should clarify with the exception of red chiles I feel like all the food items need to drop more. I don't mind dropping items as much as I do spending extra time finding more. The trader doesn't help, since he only offers random ingredient A in exchange for very few random ingredient B. I use him anyway, but he'd be more useful if he always offered common trades for uncommon items, or had some fixed trades for less common items he could do. And also if he traded for wood/stone and was there every day.

[Cantus]

Originally posted by P4wn4g3:

Agreed. I'd also say you tend to get too few Honeys or Coconuts, and potatoes need to be dropped more often because they are in a bunch of dishes and only drop from the potato enemy.

I think potatoes are actually okay? Potato enemies are super common in the Mala caverns. They get used a lot, but the monsters are common enough to balance it, which is I think the ideal situation, where the use of the item appropriately matches the farming for it. Coconuts and sweet sap are in the same boat, where while they are probably uncommon, the recipes that use them are highly limited.

A lot of it will get better when we get the 30-item stacks, which will make collecting the uncommon items a lot easier.

Originally posted by P4wn4g3:

Minibosses should also drop resources on top of the chest. I assume you meant that since you mention the BBC.

Yeah, that's what I meant with the last section. The chickens should drop meat or egg, the cows tough meat, the crab boss crab meat, etc.

For the trader though, I think a better change would be to make it point based. Some ingredients are worth more, some less, but you can pile in whatever you want to gain credit for whatever the trader has in stock.

[P4wn4g3]

So like some kind of in-game currency that could be used to buy items 🤔