Big Cooking Expansion

[GrumbleGrits [TTV]]

Initial issues

For the most part there isn't much engagement or progression when it comes to cooking. You start off slapping some meat onto a pan before pretty quickly moving on to throwing random things in to a pot of boiling water and then, eventually, if you grind XP, you might even get to use the oven before you complete the available content. In 40+ hours of playtime, serving as my groups cook, I did not unlock the oven because I didn't spend a bunch of time grinding XP cooking Pest rumps in a pan. Currently, the issues I find most prominent when it comes to cooking is the lack of progression, early game variety (not counting the many permutations of soup, it's all soup), and amount of time spent waiting. Below, I seek to address these issues.

Indepth cooking prep!

• An upgradable crafting station dedicated to food prep, such as crafting Pecarry Sausage (Upgrades may include things such as a blender, or other tools necessary to unlock new recipes.)
  
• More advanced recipes, with subcomponents
  
• Cooking Minigames! Flip your pest rumps and stir those soups!

More ways to cook, and more things to cook!

• Grill/Smoker for some outback BBQ!
  
• Fermenters for beer and stuff!
  
• Functional Microwaves for snacks

Some other small tweaks

Add a manually set timer to the OVEN that shuts the oven off, alongside a more audible 'ding' when it's finished. And this would add an additional, albiet small, level of engagement to the oven in figuring out how much time is required for each recipe. Currently, the oven requires a level 10 perk and takes forever to cook while simultaneously being very quick to burn whatever is inside. The player is practically held hostage watching it cook.

Improve XP gains! More complicated recipes/higher tier foods should reward more xp. Cooking a pest rump in a pan shouldn't be as rewarding as a more resource/time intensive soup.

[StopItStepBro]

I could see the bbq/smoker working because it would give an extra blueprint or two for the steel drums so they aren’t solely for water filters and liquid storage.

[Matt]

This is great! I think it would also be awesome if there was something extra like corn to make things like popcorn, cornbread, etc...
Wheat could be used to make bread or something and pizza would work amazingly in the oven!!
For drinks beer would be great (again we could use the wheat for fermentation) and maybe be able to store it in barrels? I mean surely the scientists haven't been completely formal there must be a stash of something somewhere ;D (could provide a quick buzz to keep us a bit more warm in the new snowy area but maybe reduces our accuracy or something)

[Vuur]

This would require more ingredients, alien and otherwise. I'd also like to see some "fun" recipes that use the vending machine ingredients. Ofc, I would assume that some recipes would give some sort of buff.

[Vuur]

If we had a chemistry skill tree, it could influence the cooking tree by adding bonuses to buffs.