Cooking Feedback

[Slandyr]

Within my squad, we each gravitate towards certain tasks. For me, cooking was a thing that I actively wanted to do in-game because of how much I enjoy grilling/cooking in real life.

So...with 200+ hours played and quite a few meals made for my squaddies, here's some feedback.

"Cooking for Dummies"
One of the most frequent complaints by newbies I've seen is that even though they're constantly eating food, they're still starving...or that they just don't understand the way the cooking system works.

I like introducing the newbies to the basics of cooking because once they have cooked and eaten their first soup or grilled steak, things just click for them and they enjoy the process...it gives them something to do during the pitch-black nights as they wait for their hiking backpack to finally dry out.

I actually LIKE the way the cooking system is. But wait...before I get raked over the coals (pun intended) for that opinion, let me specify:
I like that there are recipes.
I like that the amount of wood added to the fire affects how food is cooked.
I like that the durability of the ingredients that go into a recipe modifies the durability of the finished product...especially since it's easier to burn crafted items it seems.
I like that if a fire is too hot, it burns food and reduces the durability of it.
I like that the amount of nutrients you get from cooked food is rewarding enough to make the process worthwhile.

There are a lot of things I like about the system. It feels rewarding to have spent as much time as I have learning to optimize how to cook over an improvised BBQ grill, the hotspots, the difference in technique between adding more sticks vs. moving the food closer to the center of the fire.

What I would like to see changed:

1. Cooking Pots not being craftable.
Biggest peeve, hands-down. I don't care that the pot is consumed when the final stack is eaten...we live with it. What bothers me though, is that you can't craft them!
We have scrap metal that already looks like a rusted paint can. It's not a stretch to think we might be able to bang out a workable cooking pot from some materials. As it is, Cooking Pots are one of my squad's most highly-sought out items when we're scavenging due to how rare and irreplaceable they are.
Yes, this could also make pressure cooker bombs more prevalent and I DO want to acknowledge this as a potentially dangerous side-effect.
My proposal- Instead of allowing us to craft Cooking Pots, make a new sub-class item called "Makeshift Cooking Pot" that can only be used for food recipes and NOT useful for pressure cooker bombs.

2. Make Durability matter.
It doesn't seem to matter whether an apple is at 5% or 95%...they're functionally the same thing.
I do NOT want to see food become a "you get sick if you eat this banana if it's under X% durability," because that can make an entire swathe of randomly-spawned foodstuffs immediately and permanently useless.
Instead, make durability affect the base number of uses of a food.

Example: In real life, let's say that I have a steak that will be about 10 decently-sized mouthfuls to consume. If I am cooking this steak and it's a really crappy cut of meat, there'll be inedible bits of gristle. If it's a fresh steak, there's more "good" bites. If it's old, there may be parts that are going bad that need to be cut away, leaving fewer "good" bites.
So...in-game, a 10/10 stack of steak could be affected by the durability. If it's at 80% durability, that steak would actually be an 8/10 stack. This would happen due to burning it on the grill while cooking it...or inexperience in prepping it on a skewer reducing the durability.

My proposal- Have the durability of the food affect the number of bites that can be consumed (rounded up to 1). During cooking/recipe crafting, the Survival skill (til Cooking skill is re-implemented) can affect the durability loss, so that a higher skill rewards a good cook with more uses out of the finished product.

3. Cooked Food "Stacks" vs. Stomach Fill Ratio
Some of the values just seem inadequate. Especially for the pot items. A 10/10 stack of Stew should be able to fill multiple stomachs. As it is, the process seems almost wasted for the return on time invested in crafting/cooking the item.

4. The Cake Is A Lie
The Birthday cake doesn't require sugar as an ingredient. This is an oversight that simply bugs the crap out of me.

5. Make Pasta craftable
We can craft dough to make a pie. We should be able to craft pasta noodles as well. The whole Pasta-->Spaghetti Bolognese is gated by the requirement that you find spaghetti noodles.

6. Make Cream craftable
See above. Milk exists. Butter exists. Both are easier to find than Cream. Cream is just homogenized milk with a higher butterfat percentage. 10/10 stack of milk and a 10/10 stack of butter could combine into a single 5/5 stack of Cream.

7. Tomatoes and Chili Peppers
These should grow in gardens or at least be more prevalent in found loot. Finding a Chili Pepper is as rare as a 3-dollar bill.

8. Cake and Sausages Burn too easily
I have stated that I do indeed like that fire can burn and destroy food items. But...you have to be an absolute Warlock of space and time to get a cake or sausage to cook without being eternally warm and raw or instantly going from raw to burned. Maybe ease up a bit on their heat tolerances or make items like the skillet be useful as a heat damper that prevents instant overcooking/burning?

9. Experience...or the lack thereof
I know it's a work in progress and that the cooking skill isn't active in game currently, but the system is still miles above and beyond where it was back when you could craft a skewer, eat all but the last stack, and then uncraft it to regain all the base ingredients.

The BBQ Grill is an awesome tool and I think that the optimal way to reward a player for cooking is like this:

Tag each piece of food that's put on a grill or on a cooking recipe's final product (meaning this is independent from the reward for crafting a recipe...this is specific to what's done with the final product) with the "owner" of it...I.E. the player that placed it.

When the item is then picked up into inventory, a check is made to see if the item went from raw or partially cooked to cooked or overcooked/burned.

If the check finds a change in the status, it then checks to see if the "owner" is the same as the person that picked the item up. If so, points are either awarded for a cooked item and the item is marked ineligible for future points, or the item becomes marked ineligible for awarding points at all if it's overcooked/burnt.
This last bit about ineligibility would be to prevent an already cooked item from being spammed on/off the grill to rack up points for the "if Cooked == TRUE, Points++" sort of event.

In effect, this would mean that a player can earn Survival points (til Cooking is broken back out as a skill) if they're actively manning a fire/grill and monitoring the cooking process from start to finish. Meaning they have to place the item AND then pick it up at the right time.
This also allows players to re-position the food near the fire without penalty, as a raw or partially cooked food item can be put back down and tagged by the owner.

This also means that if a player were killed with inventory that had been placed on a fire but never fully cooked, the scavenging player could take their victim's food and cook it for themselves and still be able to get credit for cooking it because when they place it on the fire, they are the new "owner."

The "ownership" would be a temporary variable that could be checked just like the durability of a food that's burning. It's only active so long as it's in the "cooking" state. If the server resets or something else like that...the variable is lost. No big deal. Maybe include the owner of the food in each Check Food so that the result says something like this to indicate the owner of the piece.

"Potato [Slandyr]-
-Hot
-Raw"

This might still allow a cheeky player to reposition or pickup/place a partially cooked item that another player is working on at just the right moment and gain credit for the points, but that's a small price to day for having a rewards system. The reward check could even be extended to checking if the cooking process occurred within the same squad so that points could be earned/shared if one squadmate put it down but a different squadmate was the one that picked up the completely-cooked item.
This happens often in my squad, as we'll have one or two grills full of dozens of items going. One of us may have placed the item down, but we all agree that whoever sees that the item is cooked is free to pick it up immediately to prevent burning/durability loss.

10. There is no ten
This isn't a listicle on Buzzfeed. It doesn't have to have 10 items.

[Siamese]

Yeah man, it's broken. You nailed it

[Ghost1]

Originally posted by Siamese:

Yeah man, it's broken. You nailed it

Agreed!!!

[Death Dark Star]

Been running around in a3 of late never found so many chilli peppers. Still only 3 in 2 days, but hadn’t seen one in a long time. Are these region specific?

[Des]

I agree with pretty much everything. Very well constructed thread. I don't know anyone who likes cooking as much as you do but it's good to know some people enjoy that aspect of the game. I dabbled in cooking shortly after release but it got boring after a while.

I particularly agree with food durability effecting the consumable amount, though I would still like to see sickness have a role. I'd also like to see a few different cooking pans for different purposes (wok, skillet, saucepan, etc). Your idea regarding tagging seems overly complicated, I had trouble following what you were saying and it seems not so easy to follow in practice either. That said, I do agree with your intentions, and there should be greater fame point / skill perks for cooking properly.

I think the most important things regarding food are the following;

1. There is no clear advantage or disadvantage to eating good/bad food. I know it has an effect on stamina, but I have no idea to what degree, and whether it's actually worth wasting my time eating good food or if I should just eat whatever I find to fend off death from starvation. The effects should be clearer to the player. Perhaps this could be shown in the metabolism tab, or on the wiki? When sickness is introduced, vitamin/mineral deficiencies should be optimised so that there are unique disadvantages, and these disadvantages should be known to the player. Example: hovering over the sickness should provide you with information on what exact effect it has.

2. Comfort isn't a mechanism in scum. One area this shows is in the form of taste preference. I think characters should have different taste preferences. At the moment, it could be determined at character creation based on your skill choices, but later on I'd like to see other variables at play to determine what your character enjoys and what they do not.

[MDII]

Really interesting. Thanks man. Totally agree with a lot og your ideas: make craftable cooking pots, more tomatoes and chilli peppers needed...

[Slandyr]

Originally posted by Tenderlicious:

I agree with pretty much everything. Very well constructed thread. I don't know anyone who likes cooking as much as you do but it's good to know some people enjoy that aspect of the game. I dabbled in cooking shortly after release but it got boring after a while.

I particularly agree with food durability effecting the consumable amount, though I would still like to see sickness have a role. I'd also like to see a few different cooking pans for different purposes (wok, skillet, saucepan, etc). Your idea regarding tagging seems overly complicated, I had trouble following what you were saying and it seems not so easy to follow in practice either. That said, I do agree with your intentions, and there should be greater fame point / skill perks for cooking properly.

I think the most important things regarding food are the following;

1. There is no clear advantage or disadvantage to eating good/bad food. I know it has an effect on stamina, but I have no idea to what degree, and whether it's actually worth wasting my time eating good food or if I should just eat whatever I find to fend off death from starvation. The effects should be clearer to the player. Perhaps this could be shown in the metabolism tab, or on the wiki? When sickness is introduced, vitamin/mineral deficiencies should be optimised so that there are unique disadvantages, and these disadvantages should be known to the player. Example: hovering over the sickness should provide you with information on what exact effect it has.

2. Comfort isn't a mechanism in scum. One area this shows is in the form of taste preference. I think characters should have different taste preferences. At the moment, it could be determined at character creation based on your skill choices, but later on I'd like to see other variables at play to determine what your character enjoys and what they do not.

I like the cooking because it's already a bit complex. Like...Engineering? You put down a blueprint and spam F to add materials and BOOM! You get FP and eventually can build better stuff. There's no skill needed. With this, the Minigame of getting the fire hot but not too hot and monitoring the temp/doneness of the food is already there. We're just not gaining any FP or skill experience for our efforts.

Yeah, the tagging bit seems overly complicated with the way I tried to explain the idea, but at the simplest...it basically is just giving players a way to earn points towards Survival/Cooking when using a grill or a fire to actually COOK the food. Currently, all of that time is wasted...no level-ups, no Fame Points gained.

The tagging is just me trying to go through the initial steps of pseudocode to lay out how an object could be tracked to award points to the player doing the cooking. I'm not a game developer...but I've been in web and applications development in the corporate world for 15+ years and was trying to skate the line between plain-talk and dev-talk.

[Scooty]

Good stuff in here.

[Herrin der Pixel]

Just searched for a littl info on scum cooking and stopped here. Great Ideas. I really would like to see the cooking skill become a valuable skill and so the player doing it become really wanted member. Like in the realworld some people are naturally great cooks, and so many people appreciate it and keep good cooks close as friends because of the great benefit and joy of good food.

And hell yeah, I would like to see a lot more recipes. Many Simple ones and a few rare extra ordinary - "wtf you did this?"-like meals.

Cooking shouldnt just be a skill determined by plane numbers or lvl. Like "INT 4 + Cooking Basic = Quality always Good". No it should really use real player reallife skill. As a example like the "Skill check" of Dead by daylight. The Check Bar can be thaaaat big, if you are just to slow / impatient, you suck at it.

Sry for bad spelling, but my hunting/cooking heart needed to tell this, with big hopes the great Scum Developers will see this Thread. I love you guys.

[naughtygreensleaves]

this is really a very interesting discussion here. nice that others are also very interested in this part of scum.

i remember very well when i first played scum, i was really enthusiastic and still am.
But after I tried out everything about cooking right at the beginning and found out that they stopped developing there, I have to say and cry out: please continue developing cooking.
and of course this includes metabolism and health / medical.
the big topics that have been discussed here, i can absolutely agree!
except one thing,
it annoyed me very much that the pot disappears when you have finished eating. that is the main reason why I lost the desire to cook. (although it is of course very worthwhile, because with cooked food the stomach is not directly full and sugar and carbs stay longer. just like in real life.)
soap is there, the action wash is there,
the only thing to program here is a dirty pot and some related scripts.

But the developers promised it's now their turn! i am thrilled!

Maybe a developer will have a word here :)

[Samurai]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vK6gd3tKg4

[Slandyr]

BTW- I learned something new this weekend!

You can cook the canned food! Just use a knife/can opener to open it, then set it on the grill. It'll cook like other raw foods.

Sardine tins can also be cooked, but there's no open mechanic. Just put the tins on the grill.

[Dribs]

I havent had time to read the whole post or the replies, but as far as getting fame points for cooking, that was removed a long time ago due to it being very, very exploitable.

I believe they are looking at reworking it properly somewhere down the line, and then I hope they take your suggestions to heart.

Also, I do believe they said once that cooking pots were made reusable? Apparently it does not work? Either they should be reusable or craftable, I agree.

[Slandyr]

It's been just over a year since I posted this. I'm now sitting at 1,971.2 hours played. Where has the time gone?!?!

It'd be really cool if some of these changes were to happen.

[moltenfang666]

I like cooking so much. If i meet a nice dude in game i would like to give him a really nice meal like a cake or stew instead of half cooked steak with blood or burnt steak with charcoal.
I love invite new friends to my base and have table full of foods, set some fireworks, have a bottle of beer. Just relax, enjoy the night. And put a bullet between his eyes when party is over.

[smokey57]

Originally posted by 。。:

I like cooking so much. If i meet a nice dude in game i would like to give him a really nice meal like a cake or stew instead of half cooked steak with blood or burnt steak with charcoal.
I love invite new friends to my base and have table full of foods, set some fireworks, have a bottle of beer. Just relax, enjoy the night. And put a bullet between his eyes when party is over.

What's this meat in your stew? It's unusual, but delicious... nom nom...