Remove bad soup sickness or give recipes by default.

[EchoFiveActual]

I feel like we should get a bunch of starter soup recipes when we unlock the ability to make them.

Currently soup recipes are unlocked by combining ingredients randomly. Which results in bad soup. Something that now has a 50% chance to make you sick. This is a huge waste of resources and makes soups not worth experimenting with. without a guide open.

It's fine as experienced players who already know the recipes. But this is terrible for fresh players who may not want to have to open a guide to interact with an entire mechanic without Harming themselves. The other nerfs are fine and a good step even. But this particular aspect feels heavy handed.

[Ccrack]

a good compromise in my opinion would be the option to pour out bad soup instead of having to drink it

[Chipperz]

You can right click the pot while it's in your inventory to get the option to pour on the ground. It can also be done with the soup bowls in case you've placed down the pot.

[superman]

friendship ended with bad soup now veggie stew is my best friend

[Ccrack]

Originally posted by Chipperz:

You can right click the pot while it's in your inventory to get the option to pour on the ground. It can also be done with the soup bowls in case you've placed down the pot.

iv only ever used the soup bowl from my hotbar. good to know i can stop guzzling turd stews now

[Mr_Jumbles]

imagine if you had to trial and error every single crafting recipe schematic one item at a time, turning items into junk, every time you got a new item to try to figure out if it made something useful.
no one would play this game.
so why do soups function this way?
why do you have to be near max level cooking in order for it to half function like all the rest of crafting in the game?

yes, we can keep bad soups as making you sick by all means but considering how highly specific soups need to be PLEASE just give us recipes like the rest of crafting once we get proper ingredients.
it's not fun to have to look up a guide, in a game that's massive draw is a sense of discover from finding and/or making things.
or by just wasting tons of time, making purified water, and materials trying to figure out said highly specific recipes.
the system is just bad all around.

there is a reason people so often used bad soups (and junk food), devs should have looked into and thought about WHY so many are doing that instead of just penalizing all those people for doing it.
just a dumb decision on top of an already dumb mechanic.

[MechWarden]

Before the update, I did get soup recipes that were one away from what was needed, so the trial and error part is not brutal, but is still a challenge for some weird recipes.

I'd have to start over again on a save and try experimenting with soup (and not look at guides and the wiki) to see if how bad it is now. Before the update, it was pretty bad in solo because you get so much from soup that you were really limited on how often you could experiment if you didn't want to waste anything. Now that values across the bord have been lowered, I might be able to experiment more often.

I can agree that arbitrarily making all Bad Soup cause sickness 50% of the time isn't the best call. It doesn't make sense to to toss in perfectly edible food ingredients and somehow 'things go wrong' and it is borderline inedible if you either skip or swap an ingredient. Missing an ingredient is more of a Sub Par Soup, or Lame Soup, or Meh Soup. Though missing a key ingredient might legit be bad, like not putting proper yeast in bread. (though that example falls apart, because you can have flat bread)

I think a different debuff might be better for Bad Soup. Instead of just making you sick, you just can't eat it while not hungry, because 'it tastes bad' and the character isn't desperate enough to eat it to survive. Or there could be a simple stat Debuff that is annoying, but not crippling.

[Insano-Man]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

I can agree that arbitrarily making all Bad Soup cause sickness 50% of the time isn't the best call. It doesn't make sense to to toss in perfectly edible food ingredients and somehow 'things go wrong' and it is borderline inedible if you either skip or swap an ingredient.

This is where I'm at. This feels like an unnecessary and inauthentic way to punish beginners.

I think it might be time to bring back Weird Soup. Make Bad Soup a less-severe Toxic Soup, made from nonsensical or questionable ingredients. For example, salt water. Weird Soup would be just whatever is reasonably edible, but off-script, like pest-and-chips, pea water, or boiled water sausages. Bad nutrition, but no sickness.

[MechWarden]

I accidentally made 'Bad Soup' out of water and salt, because the makeshift stove top was insanely quick on 'cooking' the first ingredient when trying to make a two batches of Pest Goulash, and I have to say Bad Soup is a huge liability. I lost half my Hunger and Thirst stats just playing Russian Roulette with just that one batch.

So yes, In-game, I effectively got acute food poisoning from freshly boiled, lightly salted... fresh water.

[Sankhe]

This could be fixed by preventing soup from cooking until a nutrition item is added, then reducing the hunger gain to bad soup to something like 5 and making it a single portion soup. No sickness debuff needed, experimenters get a consolation prize and nobody cheeses out salt or wheat "bad soup".

[Pinocchia]

the point is "why bad?"
how come cooking meat with salt worse than only beans?
they need to add some general outcome, determined by materials' hunger value you put in.
you can get light soup, normal soup, thick soup

[MechWarden]

Originally posted by Pinocchia:

the point is "why bad?"
how come cooking meat with salt worse than only beans?
they need to add some general outcome, determined by materials' hunger value you put in.
you can get light soup, normal soup, thick soup

That takes work to do permutations of item combos, and then assign an effect. Work that I feel like they aren't willing to put in just yet.
(given they have the rest of the game to finish up and publish, I'm not too surprised)

Oddly enough, it feels like the system is already a bit cumbersome with options while the devs are trying hard to keep things simple by not hammering out an entire nutrition system into the game; like some Modded Minecraft thing focused on food.

That said, I think they do need to put more work into it. The current system doesn't feel right and sometimes requires a wiki page or guide to get around the hassle, and that's just not right for a system that's supposed to be easy and simple.

[Professor Funpancake]

I agree, they have two good options to fix this I think.

1. Could do a raft style system where you can "find" blueprints for recipes in the world. Could be scraps of paper that have it in kitchens, or even have the food itself which unlocks the recipe.
2. Cooking level unlock would be fine as well personally. I like finding stuff so I like the first one more but either option is solid.

[Drakogarnus]

Originally posted by EchoFiveActual:

I feel like we should get a bunch of starter soup recipes when we unlock the ability to make them.

Currently soup recipes are unlocked by combining ingredients randomly. Which results in bad soup. Something that now has a 50% chance to make you sick. This is a huge waste of resources and makes soups not worth experimenting with. without a guide open.

It's fine as experienced players who already know the recipes. But this is terrible for fresh players who may not want to have to open a guide to interact with an entire mechanic without Harming themselves. The other nerfs are fine and a good step even. But this particular aspect feels heavy handed.

new players dont always need their little hands held its called trial and error. please stop trying to add handholding mechincs and suggesting things. if people cant handle their digital soup failing then maybe they shouldnt be playing a video game

[Monokuma]

Originally posted by Drako Lo Garnus:

new players dont always need their little hands held its called trial and error. please stop trying to add handholding mechincs and suggesting things. if people cant handle their digital soup failing then maybe they shouldnt be playing a video game

Trial and error is not exactly the type of game design you would want to go for. Wasting resources trying to figure out the exact combination that makes a viable soup feels bad, and it heavily pushes players to just giving up and using a guide/wiki. And if a game requires a guide/wiki in order to be fun, there's a problem.

[MechWarden]

Originally posted by Drako Lo Garnus:

Originally posted by EchoFiveActual:

I feel like we should get a bunch of starter soup recipes when we unlock the ability to make them.

Currently soup recipes are unlocked by combining ingredients randomly. Which results in bad soup. Something that now has a 50% chance to make you sick. This is a huge waste of resources and makes soups not worth experimenting with. without a guide open.

It's fine as experienced players who already know the recipes. But this is terrible for fresh players who may not want to have to open a guide to interact with an entire mechanic without Harming themselves. The other nerfs are fine and a good step even. But this particular aspect feels heavy handed.

new players dont always need their little hands held its called trial and error. please stop trying to add handholding mechincs and suggesting things. if people cant handle their digital soup failing then maybe they shouldnt be playing a video game

You failed at math, didn't you?

If you knew anything about mathematical permutations, and how long it takes to do each test, you'd understand that trying to test for each type of combination to discover a soup, with no hints, is not fun. We are here to play a game, explore things, and have fun, not stand next to a boiling pot, wasting time, wasting resources, and act like cooking nOObs.

I'm all for discovering things, but the needed ingredients for certain soups are often times arbitrary, overly simplistic (by design), or contrary to some people's common sense. Players will still need hints to reduce the frustration; which thankfully the game does give nowadays.

And to get back on the topic, the added insult to injury of a failed soup, giving not only half the servings; but worse, a chance to get sick, which if it triggers, will greatly set you back if you even attempt to eat it.

Originally posted by Monokuma:

... And if a game requires a guide/wiki in order to be fun, there's a problem.

Pretty much this. Ideally, a game shouldn't require a wiki to play properly.