Can we please get our food-progression back?

[Draconis]

The long story

Well, this is a thing since the bog witch update and it mainly has an impact on the mistlands and the ashlands. Ashlands mostly. So I'll only describe it for there.


Before the bog witch update we hade some kind of "micro-progression" regarding foods in the ashlands. I'll just use the health foods as an example.

Cooked bonemaw meat - was and still is the first and easiest thing to get. No cauldron required, on par or slightly better than misthare supreme (I'd have to look it up do be sure).
Fiery Svinstew - was the next. Better than cooked bonemaw, did not require the latest cauldron upgrade. So that was obtainable as soon as you have a foothold in the ashlands and can start exploring.
Piquant pie and mashed meat - these were locked behind the cauldron upgrade, with the Piquant pie being the stronger one.

And here comes what I think feels like a break in progression:
Since the food preparation table does override all the cauldron level requirements, we can make Piquant pie as soon as we have access to the materials. We could totally skip all the cauldron upgrades for this (as the cauldron is not even needed any more for this).
And then we take the effort to upgrade the cauldron, find our new recipes - and the nwe health food is just a downgrade to what we had before.


It's a similar situation for all mead recipes. We had cauldron level requirements for meads, that are now all irrelevant because we can simply make all the mead bases in the mead ketill.

The suggestion in short

What I suggest is:
- Bring back the level requirement of the prepared foods and the mead bases.
- Make the food preparation table and the mead ketill require a cauldron nearby.
- Let the Mead Ketill and the Food Preparation table take over the level of the nearby cauldron (or the highest level of several cauldron in case there are more than one nearby)

In my opinion this will bring back the feeling of progress in the field of cooking.