Cooking balance

[Sticks]

I find some of the recipes and odds for failure just totally disincentivizes cooking to instead just eat room temperature vegetables out of a can. Say I have a can of pea soup, I could eat it as is with no mental health penalty and 30 nutrition, or I could cook it in a bowl on my table stove and in the best case scenario lose nutritional value. Or it could turn into ash or make a pea soup so awful that it would be more harmful to eat than it would be beneficial meaning its now hogging the bowl until it spoils and can be emptied.

I think this game could take a page out of project zomboid's rulebook where cooking is always worth the effort and stuff like burnt food only happens because of player error rather than RNG. As it stands I almost lost my current run to a mental health death spiral because I made the mistake of cooking all my food assuming it was improving it when in reality it was just making it worse and lowering my mental health over time as a result. If I just ignored cooking altogether I wouldn't have run into that problem and I just think it should have been the other way around.

[V4rim4thr4s]

I've never seen that, the food just burn if I don't take it out of the fire when it's cooked. What do you mean by this?

[Sticks]

Are we even playing the same game? There's a percentage chance to fail at cooking and get ash instead, but even if you succeed for a lot of recipes it's better to just eat the raw ingredients than make them into a worse tasting less filling meal.

[master_pain_betty]

While I don't agree with the OP's solution - I think it's a good thing that there is a risk-reward calculation with cooking - there are many good points raised and cooking does need some significant changes. My take on it is:

- One of the main problems with cooking is that the game in general doesn't tell you explicitly that you succeeded or failed, it just presents the resulting products. But for some recipes, e.g. heating up soup in a can, the failure result (bad-tasting soup) looks almost exactly like the success result (good-tasting soup). It's very easy for a player to not understand that they failed the crafting and/or that they keep failing and they need to either suffer until their skill stat increases, or they need to use a better crafting machine.

- Granted, the game does show a sort of halo effect in the UI around products that taste bad or exceptionally good. But it's very subtle and never explained to the player.

- It's nonsensical for ALL of the recipes to have such a high failure chance even in the beginning. I can understand that it's hard to get e.g. a complex multi-ingredient meal right the first time. And maybe even grilling a turnip has its finer points. But just heating up a soup in a can, or boiling a potato, that should have a less than 5% failure rate even on primitive equipment. Ideally, the player should be incentivized to start with very simple recipes first (heating up soup), the sacrifice being just time and convenience in exchange for better taste, and gradually move on to complex recipes which have a more significant chance of outright failing and losing the ingredients.

- It's an annoying oversight that you have to wait for a failed soup to spoil before you can empty the bowl. You should be able to empty it right away (in the sink or toilet).

[PrueferAuge]

you need to increase your cooking level
farm a lot of turnips (you can replant them without the need of seeds)

fill your entire inventory with turnips and take them to the stove behind the pea soup guy. the gree thing with wheels is a mobile stove and the best place to level cooking, as its capabe of 30 parallel crafts.

the first load needs some firewood, but after the first run, just leave the badly grilled turnips inside until they rot and use the moldy waste as fuel for the following cooking runs

this way youll increase your cooking (and farming) in no time and youll be able to cook loads of excellent quality food for your mood/ depression

the same thing works with potatoes as well, or minced meat from rat cages

[Sticks]

That you have to basically exploit the xp system to bypass the progression because it makes no sense and outputs inedible garbage until you're a master is my entire problem with cooking in this game. It should always be more beneficial than nothing and then progress from there into making the most out of the worst ingredients.

Making a sawdust bread rat meat sandwich with rotten lettuce edible through culinary talent alone should be the end goal, right now being able to warm up a can of peas and have it be edible at the end is the end goal and that's just stupid, especially when there's absolutely no penalty to just eating it cold out of the can like a savage.

[Oskutin]

Changed fail chance of canned foods to almost zero

[woodchuck07]

Depending on your cooking equipment the fail chance decreases and the recipes show the percentage of fail possibility on the right side. Stoves (with ovens) and BBQ grills have a lower chance of failure, while the open barrel stoves will fail about 40% of the time. You can let bad stuff rot and take the moldy rot (or poor quality produce) to the plant lady. One stop shop will buy your piles of ash.

This game is about survival, finding opportunities and getting better at it. So, yeah, take the worthless items to the grills and fail, but sell the failed stuff. I lived (and cured my illnesses) snacking on free pea soup and good quality carrots (expensive but they last!) until I got a kitchen to make sandwiches. Keep good stuff in a freezer (Contractor guy doesn't mind your stuff into his freezer...) until you find a place to cook that won't fail.

[woodchuck07]

On another topic, some items are too big to eat and send you straight to the relief need if you eat it all. The slices are 6/6 for pizza and 4/4 for pie, but, you can't just eat one slice (like who would want to eat just one slice?). Anyway I can cut them up and save a portion(s) for later?

[sxd]

I boiled turnips until cooking 10 and there's still no reason to ever cook food. I just buy canned vegetables. It's honestly an interesting system, but when making any sort of food is more expensive/less helpful than buying canned turnips it's hard to justify the effort.

[PrueferAuge]

Originally posted by sxd:

I boiled turnips until cooking 10 and there's still no reason to ever cook food. I just buy canned vegetables. It's honestly an interesting system, but when making any sort of food is more expensive/less helpful than buying canned turnips it's hard to justify the effort.

good food really helps with depression, but the o-market sells mashed potatoes and meatballs that are just as good
btw: grilled turnips are better fro exp/min, because you can grill 30 at a time using the outdoor grill by the pea soup guy

[Eddy63]

Have to agree with this.
At the moment I am scared to cook anything because even when it says failure chance 0% I still get pea soup with a terrible quality. So I am better off eating it uncooked from the can.
It's not like we can afford eating bad food since the depression from it is a much worse burden to deal with.

How does one increase cooking skill? Do I have to sacrifice a sht ton of initial ingrediences in order to build up cooking skill? is there a skill book to learn?

Could it be made in a way that only unkown recipes can fail this bad, while dishes for which you have the recipes can end up more "save"?

[Eddy63]

I have noticed a failed cooking attempt (ash) didn't give any cocking skill increase. Even a failed attempt should give you experience just like one learns from miskates in real life.

[Angry Trash]

Originally posted by Eddy63:

How does one increase cooking skill? Do I have to sacrifice a sht ton of initial ingrediences in order to build up cooking skill? is there a skill book to learn?

You do need to sacrifice ingredients to learn, but the good news is that the ingredients are basically worthless to begin with in most cases. If you buy turnips and potatoes from the discount bin, you can take them to the food truck and roast them all at once. If you let them rot you can use them as compost in the composter but I just shove them in a trashcan.

If you are doing a chore to get money, like using the greenhouse and growing food for him along with selling bottles, you should still be at a net profit daily. Using the greenhouse also builds your farming skill, which results in better plants, which boost taste outcome.

[Zack Wester]

Im not sure if this is possible but I dont even bother using the portable stove item you get more or less fro free in the player apartment.
and just cook at the pod hotel.
and that is change so that the portable stove dont increase the fail chance of cooking stuff but instead caps how good something can get.
Like if I cook chicken right now I can toss 10 on it.
I fail 5 and 5 becomes +++ quality if my cooking still is at 10.

what I would do is that instead 1 would fail and 9 would be capped at + at best.

[Eddy63]

yeah I started cooking backed potatoes in deekula B to gain cooking skill (since there are at least 2 good kitchens) and toss the failed results. Was wondering if some vendor can buy the bad results for cheap. (Side note do not store stuff in public fridges it will be overwritten with respawning stuff)