Aunty Margarine's Guide to Space Cake Making in NMS

A Systematic Guide to the processes and ingredients required to make all the cakes in NMS.

Introduction to Space Cakes and Guildfords' most Ghastly Concoctions

Last night May 2022, Aunty Margarine, Mistress of the Galactic Pie Shop and cake scoff-eress extraordinaire reluctantly sold about five hours worth of cakes for 122 million golds. This followed nearly ten minutes previously spent researching the most valuable and the basic nature of the recipes.

Beforehand food processing was an impenetrable fog of burnt cake smoke. Uncle Alfred woulder'er 'v'd of had been proud. What follows is a systematic approach to cake making, which is the greatest activity possible for any semi evolved species prior to H.o.m.o sapiens sapiens sapiens sapiens (Hs4) becoming widespread and replacing them. Slurps and mugs and rocking roe jus' dun't come close.

So courtesy of Aunty Marge's steely eye and wonderously thrummin' brain power, here are identified all six basic cake batters, and the six categories of cake flavourings, that individually combined with cake batters make 100 cakes. Lovely lovely cake.

Cakes come in four varieties of which only the first three are relevant here:
(i) Cake
(ii) Tarts (pies)
(iii) Doughnuts
(iv) et ... leaving no trace but a few plausibly deniable* crumbs.

(* Plausible deniability- a strange concept, invented by government civil servants to provide an apparently sustainable method of lying, that is only considered that by themselves but is blatantly obvious to the man on the street/Clapham omnibus, even if that man was your Uncle Nobby semi un-conscious, tired as a newt and still dozing alone upstairs for an hour at the terminus).

These are distinct in the method and ingredients they are made from. Pies are easy, and are the common ground between sweet and savoury- ie you can put meat in a 'pie case' too to make a pie, but if its a sweet ingredient instead- it becomes a tart. Doughnuts are basically the same, but require a more involved method to make the equivalent BASE: of a pie case or cake batter- the 'lumpen doughnut'.

Type (i) Cakes are my favourite though, so we'll concentrate on them first. Like pies and doughnuts they require a base which in the cake's case issss... 'cake batter', after which is added the flavouring. This may be consider as the following:

Bases

Pie case..................................+ Flavouring =..........................Pie or tart
Lumpen doughnut...................+ Flavouring =..........................Doughnut
Cake Batter.............................+ Flavouring =..........................Cake

PART I Cake Bases- Batter making

Standard Cake Batter is made of:

Sweet Butter + Eggs + Flour.

Sweet Butter itself is a product of any milk processed to cream, processed to churned butter , then processed with sugar. The milk, eggs, sugar and flour have multiple types names, but to keep it simple we'll stick to the basic types, and use some short cuts.

Sweet Butter is: milk P2 [processed to] cream P2 butter (lower case for all basic ingredients processed but not yet combined] + sugar = Sweet Butter. Thus standard cake butter would be:

cactus P2 cactus jelly P2 sugar
frost crystal P2 glass grains P2 flour
milk P2 cream P2 butter + sugar = Sweet Butter + eggs + flour = Cake Batter.

This is the basic recipe, but there are variations from it. Minor ones are substituting heplatoid wheat for glass grains, and sweet root for cactus jelly, but these are both not growable and of limited utility.

The eggs come in four varieties: tall, giant, creature, and stellar. The latter is not used for batter, it is a product of chromatic metal processing- not biological laying! The individual egg types are irrelevant to the batter outcome- they all do the same thing. However there are also four types of milk- wild, proto, bone and fresh. These do affect the batter type. Bone milk comes from processing bone nuggets. So:

wild milk P2 cream P2 churned butter..........................+ sugar =................Sweetened Butter
fresh milk P2 cream P2 churned butter........................+ sugar =................Sweetened Butter
bone milk P2 bone cream P2 bone butter ...................+ sugar =................Sweetened Butter
proto milk P2 proto cream P2 proto butter...................+ sugar =................Sweetened Proto Butter

(I coulder've of'd sworn I saw getting 'craw milk' as part of the pre Blight Expedition 5..? Maybe I just gonn'ed prematurely senile or bonkaz, or both).

In addition to these two sweetened butters types, honey can be substituted for sugar giving:

Churned butter...............................................+ sticky honey = ....................Gooey Butter
Proto Butter....................................................+ sticky honey =.....................Gooey Proto Butter

Substituting synthetic honey (made from sticky honey P2 synthetic honey) for sticky honey makes Honey Butter in both the above two recipes.

The next stage is adding the two other ingredients: flour and eggs. The flour is a single ingredient, but the eggs are in two types. The first being three described above, obtainable from animals by farming or feeding, and the second type: larval eggs. The latter are normally obtained in bulk (20+) by shooting monstrosity eggs nests around abandoned sites on planets. Some may also be obtained from completing Space Station missions.

Substituting animal eggs for larval eggs produces Wailing Cake Batter.

The final type of cake batter derives from a slightly different set of ingredients to make Delicate Meringue first. This is:

Sugar............................................................... + eggs =...........................Delicate Meringue

Which is equivalent to the Sweetened Butters, Gooey Butters stage above.

Now we come to the final stage of making Cake Batter- adding flour and eggs:

Sweetened Butter........................+flour..................... + eggs =................Cake Batter
Sweetened Proto Butter .............+flour..................... + eggs =................ Proto Batter


Gooey Butter .............................+flour..................... + eggs =................Thick, Sweet Batter
Gooey Proto Butter ....................+flour..................... + eggs =................Thick, Sweet Batter
Honey Butter ..............................+flour..................... + eggs =................Cake Batter

Delicate Meringue ......................+flour..................... + eggs =................Extra Fluffy Batter


Substituting larval eggs for the animal eggs produced the following:

Sweetened Butters ...................+flour................ + larval eggs =............Wailing Batter
Delicate Meringue......................+flour................ + larval eggs =............Writhing, Rolling Batter


Thus we now have all six basic cake batters:

1. Cake Batter
2. Proto Batter
3. Thick, Sweet Batter
4. Extra Fluffy Batter
5. Wailing Batter
6. Writhing, Rolling Batter

I would suggest making large amounts of all these batters particularly plain cake batters before moving on to making particular cake types.

Part II Cake Flavourings.. yum yum!

There are four reasons to make cakes in large quantities, and this affects which ones and how you make them.

(i) to sell, in which case- make large numbers of the same highest value cake.
(ii) to increase your 'Discovered items' list, where you want to make small numbers of ALL the cakes.
(iii) to swop for nanites with Cronus, which is a compromise between the first two, having a reasonable number of different types, just to prevent boredom handing them over individually.
(iv) cakes have buffs. They increase various Exo-suit components abilities temporarily. Be the first NMS player to actually bother with this!

PART 2 Flavourings

There are a large number of cake types, as defined by being the final possible stage of food processing. They are in six categories in the following flavouring groups.

(i) sweet: sugar, honey, cactus nectar, caramel
(ii) jam: wriggling, grah, furball, anomalous, ever burning, cactus jelly
(iii) custard: viscous, monstrous, salty, stellar
(iv) basic ingredient: crab apple
(v) chocolate: bitter sweet cocoa
(vi) cream/buttery: cream, gooey butter [not honey butter]

If you take the six base batters and the six flavouring types, and add them together, you get cakes! Given that there are 18 flavourings in total this should produce about 100 cake types. In practise there are less, because some flavourings produce the same type. And in some cases two flavourings are required: Traditional Cake is a good example:

Cake Batter + Grah Jam/ Fur Ball Jelly + Cream = Traditional cake.

Rather than go through every recipe to produce every cake- there are two good NMS websites for that:

[Sorry had to remove the links- Steam's retarde AI has closed my [u]other[/u] NMS Guide because there are links in this one...]

(and type in 'cake' and/or 'fancy'/ 'delight' in the search box...), I'd suggest making 400 of each cake batter from Part I (storing them in two Freighter inventory slots each) allowing at least 6 lots of 50 cakes, and go through each of the six flavouring categories in turn, and try each of the individual flours within. When you get to the jam section also add cream.

That accounts for the 'make every cake' route.

Part III CAPITALIST Pigging Out on Cake

To sell cakes at maximum profit is simple. The highest value cakes are:

Custard Fancy 85100 golds
Briney Delight 80200 golds
Interstellar Fancy 80200 golds


These are made from:

Cake Batter + Viscous Custard (egg + cream+ sugar) = ......................Custard Fancy
Cake Batter + Salty Custard (salt + cream+ sugar) = ...........................Briney Delight
Cake Batter + Stellar Custard (silicon egg + cream + sugar) =..............Interstellar Fancy

The larval egg based cakes are more valuable, but the eggs are far more labour intensive to get:

Horrifying Gooey Delight 200,000 golds is the most valuable.
Cake Batter + Monstrous Custard (larval egg + cream + sugar) =........Horrifying Gooey Delight

The six classes of flavourings are in most cases just two ingredients/ processes to make, excepting the custards which are cream/bone cream + sugar + silicon egg/larval egg/egg/salt.

It is a lot easier to experiment if you approach cake making systematically, and are not making basic ingredients and batters at the same time. Making the batters first makes life a lot simpler.

PART IV- Pies, " laiik dough, an' laiike meeat, bu' ah donne't laaaike paaiy"**

Pies and Tarts are both made from a Base of pie case + flavourings.

[** quote from bizarre Traveller (common, only found in the North) visiting Plannit Devon some years ago, who found the pasty 'pie' concept beyond comprehension... Herself being also beyond comprehension]

The pie is an easy concept to grasp- that is if you don't normally wear your pointy finger out when reading sophisticated philosophy books involving catching balls, patting dogs and a is for apple....

Pie cases are made by:

frost crystal P2 glass grains P2 flour
milk P2 cream P2 churned butter + flour = Pastry P2 Pie Case.

As with cake batter, make lots of pie cases before adding flavours, to make processing less complicated.

Flavouring pie cases:

(i) meat
(ii) sweet
(iii) cheese
(iv) etc etc

Pie case flavourings are of every type, from single basic ingredients like berries, two stage processed items like jams and three stage processed like custards. You'll find it difficult not to discover a new pie flavouring by experimenting with a food processor, 50 pie cases in it, and dropping anything edible in your inventory into it. Silicon eggs are probably the only exception I've noted- but are fine as custard:

Pie Case + Stellar Custard (silicon egg + cream + sugar) = Stellar Custard Tart

It's also the most valuable pie/tart I've found at 78,000 golds

PART V - Doughnuts... "myuummp mummfffs"

"snuffle snuffle.. scoff scoff...."

"hmmm mmm? Dummmnumpfss.... wommmpt douuunummmmphs?"



***Section to be resumed later when fresh supplies of doughnuts have been fully restored....***

PARTY!! Tips to preparing the Cake...

There are some basic tips to making vast amounts of complex food items in the food processor.

1. Make a 9 food processor containing Base in the middle of an high aminal occuring zone. Put four automatic gathering machines about 25 metres away from the base blob thing- no more than that, otherwise the aminals will fade away. Around each gathering machine at about 8 metres set 2/3 food pellet distributors. In just the first instance, you can fill them up with 50 pellets if you have enough and if they are in Exosuit -Cargo. If you find filling them up with 25 as normal- annoying, simply do 'Construct + move + reset position' of the pellet distributor, rewire it, and you should be able to get the '50' fill capability again.

My other more general NMS Guide has some useful tips on Farming various ingredients- its easily find-able by author search 'Margarine Listless'

2. Good places are scorched plannits with Tyros and dumb hippo like monsters. Tyro's regis grease is a single pie type ingredient and not worth much, but the hippos provide eggs, and the littler aminals will do milk. You might want to farm 5-10 000 cactus and frost crystal in 2:1 proportions to compensate for the fast frost crystal growth and the slow cactus one. These two provide sugar and flour when processed twice.

3. Set up a dedicated Cake making Freighter Storage Unit, call your Freighter into the system you're cake making in, empty its teleport inventory, and also call in a 40+ hauler with teleport. This provides about the right amount of storage for 100 million golds cake making.

4. Make the non gathering machine sourced basics in large amounts first and store them in the Freighter Cake Unit/Starship. These would be flour, sugar, and jams. While you are doing this the gathering machines are filling.

5. Gather milk from the machines in 50's only. NEVER be tempted to take less- these only provide constant process /storage issues that take a vastly disproportionate amount of time to deal with than the 50's. Process the milk into churned butter.

6. Gather the eggs from the machines in 50's and the bone nuggets and others.

7. Make cake batters and store them. Transfer sugar and flour in 200's from the Freighter Storage Unit as needed.

8. Make custards, and other flavourings.

9. Now combine the final flavours with the cake batters and make cakes! Try and keep to 50's still for maximum efficiency, and store them first in Freighter teleport Unit, and then transfer them to the Freighter Storage Unit as it empties of flour and sugar, if you are storing them to take to the Amomilly for Cronus later, or bung them in the Freighter teleport/Starship if you're selling them immediately.

10. Selling Cake. Prices varying considerably in any System at the Galactic Sales Points. Additionally a cake with -5% offered as Trade to a pilot standing by their ship may rise to + 3% in one next to him. That's a difference of nearly a million golds for a hundred cakes in some cases. Hold out for a minimum of +3%, and keep trying more pilots.

No More Cake????

Sold every last bit of cake, or have carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking Cronus for 50,000 cake nanites?
What next....?


STAAAAAAARRRT ALLLLL OVVVVAAAA AGAAAAAAIIIN!
Thats the Beauty of CaaAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

There is a rumour of a Galaxy out there- but that's called a "Who TF is Sean?" scenario once cake making and similar more distracting game dynamics... or Preston Garvey undynamics... have made you completely forget the central plot and your 'in' (and lets be honest- 'out') game nearest and dearest!

♥♥♥♥ 's and kisses
Aunty Margey

PS If you'd like to move on down the bus (carefully avoiding Uncle Nobby's dribble, snores, and noxious niffs) to my other much more interesting NMS guide, may I refer you to the 'LOTS' PPS there. I need real cake in the real world... LOTS of cake...!

[idiot 3 alt (3)]

https://youtu.be/DdmNYNkcwKE

[Voltarc]

Thanks, not much information about cooking out there...I made some of the basic parts but then forgot how...good guide!