Cooking makes no sense

[Jon.Topps]

I keep wanting to cook, to try to maximize either profit, or health/energy gain for caving.
It just seems so pointless. The energy/health goes DOWN when you cook? And the profit difference is so minimal, and at times it goes down too!

Is there something I'm missing to cooking? I would think the final product would be worth more, and do more, so maybe there's some element that's helpful?

If you say "gifts", there's basically always a better, cheaper, easier thing to give that will be just as good.

[EleventhStar]

some foods have useful stat buffs. mostly for fishing.

[NBOX21]

Cooking isn't and has never been an ideal way to make a profit. Usually, I tend to cook meals as a source of healing/recovery for when I'm down into the mines, skull cavern or volcano and need emergency supplies in case monsters deal a lot of damage.

Bread does the trick for me really well seeing as I'm used to growing a lot of wheat on the farm, then turn it into wheat flour to cook bread with it. But other recipes are really good, too. Crab cakes grant temporary speed and defence buffs, and when combined with Triple Shot Espresso which also grants a speed buff, you can move a lot faster than normal.

You're also required to cook every single recipe for 100% completion, which you can always check in the collections tab to see which recipes you've cooked at least once.

[IamMokume]

I don't go in for large farming operations, so I cook sashimi for energy in the early game, then rely on a few basic dishes to boost stats in the dungeons and while fishing.
It is a bit silly when the hp/energy gain of the finished product is less than the individual ingredients, but obviously cooking is more about a collection to work towards than about min/maxxing resources.

[Dunkler Messias]

Yeah, cooking is a bit underwhelming. But it's nice for people who likes to collect ingredients and cook.
The main reason to cook is for the buffs. Mainly lucky meal or something which increases the fishing skill.
To restore energy and health, well, I just use eat some crops or cheese. For the early game Sashimi is quite easy and fast to make if you have crab pots.

[Empath demon]

Cooking is just a fun collecting mini game for me, find all the ingredients find all the recipes cook all the things. Get a star.

[Jon.Topps]

Yeah it definitely seems pointless, outside of the achievement. The buffs are cool, but very minor, temporary, and kinda expensive, not to mention getting the recipe is usually either random or takes a long time for each one.

I mean, what would be the harm of making the dishes have 1.5x more health/energy benefit than the raw ingredients? Or being worth slightly more money? It would add an additional stage of crafting fun, for only a slight payoff.

[red255]

there are 80 dishes in the game. I would say maybe 15 have any use. the rest are just there to make perfection more of a task.

recipes that serve a purpose:
Pancakes. easy +2 foraging makes shaking bushes go from 3 berries to 4 during salmonberry and blackberry season. (at 10 foraging)
Sashimi, sells for 75 I think, so it takes your cheap fish, like crab pot fish and combines them into one stack thats easy to eat or sell.
Spicy eel, dropped from the enemies in skull cavern good food for the cavern.
Crab Cakes, same.
Fish stew, seafoam pudding, lobster bisque. +3 (or 4 fishing) useful for catching legendary fish.
blackberry cobbler. if you harvest the blackberries with the pancakes, plant beets and mill them into sugar,

mostly that I think

[Sstavix]

I typically just cook three things: Sashimi (good way to use up cheap fish, and a handy source of cash if I need it), eggplant parmesan (for delves into the mines) and dish o' the sea (for fishing buff - yes, I know seafoam pudding is better, but sardines are easier for me to get than squid ink until I get a fish pond built).

The others I typically cook once for collection purposes and then sell. Sometimes I'll do a gift, but only if there isn't a better choice for a particular villager (fried calamari for Pierre, for example).

[Snowy Sprout]

I agree most cooking in this game is bogus. Worse, it's out of order. You're not given recipes in first spring that use first spring crops. So even if you wanted to invest in a cookout kit, you'd basically have nothing available you could cook.

Recipes should come to you in relative order with the ingredients available that season. At least the ones on the Queen of Sauce should. Ones from friends should come in relative order of how rare an ingredient is. Also in order of how big the buffs are.

Cooking early game foods should at least recoup you the health and energy cost of the ingredients in it, as well as the basic price of the ingredients. It'd be better if it were more like shoes in the mines, and you get to choose to cook something with higher energy, for example, or higher health, or lower health and energy but add a small buff. Recipes that come later and use rarer foods, like year 2 crops or stuff from Ginger Island, should have higher rewards as a sort of pat on the back for making it that far into the game.

Also, the Saloon should have more recipes, and they should be exclusive. It's a waste to have the Queen of Sauce take up valuable space showing recipes you could just go buy easily. If QoS needs them for filler, put them at the end of the second year. Lucky Lunch would be a good one for here, to give you the heads up that you should grow/save a Blue Jazz and hunt for the Sea Cucumber.

Having recipes be relevant to the season they're in would encourage players to be on the lookout for those ingredients. It gives a reason perhaps to grow certain crops, even if we choose the Joja route and don't need to grow crops for the CC.

Also, every cooked dish should be a beloved gift for at least one NPC. Let it have SOME reason for existing beyond pure completionism busywork.

I seriously wish our beloved Ape would consider a major rework of the whole cooking aspect of this game.

[Radiosity]

Basically the only time I bother with cooking is for Qi's ship 100,000G worth of items. Even then, I focus entirely on growing a ton of cranberries + beets, then ship a couple of thousand cranberry juices rather than messing around with any other recipes.

[Keeper Of Monsters]

Originally posted by Snowy Sprout:

I agree most cooking in this game is bogus. Worse, it's out of order. You're not given recipes in first spring that use first spring crops. So even if you wanted to invest in a cookout kit, you'd basically have nothing available you could cook.

[a lot of snipped words]

I seriously wish our beloved Ape would consider a major rework of the whole cooking aspect of this game.

We already have farming (crops and animals), fishing, mines, forage... Cooking is just "on the side" - and most of us are fine with it.
As to early game - cook sashimi. Yes, you have to befriend Linus, but that's easy - he loves forage and there's a lot of that early on. As soon as he sends you the recipe - you wouldn't need to cook anything else for a while.
And by the time you can cook anything else that gives benefits - you would probably upgrade your house at lest once, so cookout kit is more useful now than before, but still not that great (compare to kitchen).
Besides - why would you want to cook early game? That's time for selling everything you can to get more seeds to grow more crops to sell more of them for profit... Snowball effect!

That said, I'm not opposed to Stardew getting even more and various content - game is great, and we can't have enough of it. ;P
But at the same time - there are other games that focus more on other aspects. And I would like to see and play Haunted Chocolatier some time soon-ish (no rush though).

[Snowy Sprout]

Originally posted by Keeper Of Monsters:

We already have farming (crops and animals), fishing, mines, forage... Cooking is just "on the side" - and most of us are fine with it.

Hey, that sounds rude. How do you know most people are fine with the way cooking is in the game? I don't think I'm wrong for seeing problems in the cooking aspects of this game, and imagining ways it could be better. I don't know why you'd want to shut me down about my ideas.

Originally posted by Keeper Of Monsters:

Besides - why would you want to cook early game? That's time for selling everything you can to get more seeds to grow more crops to sell more of them for profit... Snowball effect!

I'd want to cook if cooking were fun, interesting, or productive. The current state of cooking is not. I think we could do better, which is why I joined this thread, to share some ideas.

If all you want is to shut me down and aren't curious what someone's ideas might be, then I guess there's no reason to burden you with them.

[D's Journal]

He should rehaul cooking and make is useful for selling and ♥♥♥♥.
Could have a Baker and a Mixologist side.

[nohero79]

It does seem to be mostly about just a list of tasks for perfection. I think it was always intended to be a very minor system within the game.

I think the best thing they could do with it is expand the "Help Wanted" board to also include a desired meal (or more than 1) every day. If the pool of possibilities was every meal and every resident, it would be another good way to grow friendship, and maybe get a bit more than market value for meals.

Also, I know Qi Seasoning will instantly take a meal to iridium quality, but it'd be nice to see a system where after cooking a meal X times, you now craft silver star version moving forward... and so on until you reach iridium. I don't know what would be a fair balance for amount of times, but it would also make meals a better gift option. Sure, you could give some random loved gem as a gift, but cooking meals would get you the quality bonuses to gift giving, making it more enticing.

[hawkthief]

I just cook for the vibes, ngl. It's cosy.
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