Cooking Suggestion

[BlueOreo]

Okay, I've only played for a few hours, but I did spend my time trying out as much stuff as I could. As a result, I have some food for thought on cooking. Let me know what you guys think. (Bad pun, sorry.)

As far as I can tell, cooking has only been added to the game in order to introduce an element of realism to the game world, as well as to add another element to combat. In combat, or in any task that requires health, stamina, or mana (I suppose we could include gathering in this as well), characters are dependent on the natural regeneration of the aforementioned to keep them going, whether they're fighting or mining or whatever.

Cooking adds food, and food helps natural regeneration. However, as it is, cooking is needlessly painful and time consuming. I understand that in order to get food there needs to be an element of time involved cooking that food. However, as it is, cooking one fish at a time, taking 10 seconds each, is pretty overtaxing. Gathering the raw materials to cook already represents a huge time investment, whether you are fishing, harvesting berries, or skinning animals. Why bog down the whole process by making cooking so painful and time consuming?

Instead, I propose that we be able to cook food in sets or in larger recipes. In real life, you can cook a meal for yourself, or you can cook a large meal for many people. The same should be true in game. So, you should be able to buy a "large set of pans" or some new cooking item that allows you to produce in bulk, maybe make it more expensive, or maybe make the new tool only be usable by a cooking mastery skill. If you want to further develop cooking as a legitimate craftskill, then this would be the way to do it.

Under the new addition to the system, a player would be able to cook say a skillet of cod or bass, which would use up 10 raw fish and produce 10 cooked fish. You could keep the time cost the same, but just allow us to produce more. Also, if you really wanted to be kind, you could have 10 skill checks in there, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that.

I hate to draw any parallel lines to other games, but it seems like DF has taken so many cues from Ultima Online already that it's hard not to. In Ultima, this is how cooking functioned. You would spend hours catching fish, but then you could cook them all at once and have X amount of fried fish, allowing you to forgo sitting at a bakery, mindlessly clicking "cook" every 10 seconds. Having more food readily available at less of a time commitment for the cooks only speeds up the game, as everyone will have access to food more often, and thus they will regenerate health, mana, and stamina more quickly, therefore leading to less down time and more PvP time.

Thoughts?

[katahlyn]

The need for mindless clicking every 10 seconds is plaguing the entire gathering and crafting system.
Also for cooking and other crafts I think it's 20 seconds.

[GroovyBob]

Yes this needs to be done, and not only for cooking. Though for cooking it's even more logical to allow this.

[Elelish]

Well i like it that it takes that long.

Compared to other MMOs where you took 10min a day and made everything you needed for the rest of the day, which was really sucky, this system is better i think.
If you want to prepare yourself perfect for a big fight, you just NEED a lot of time. Or if you want to prepare yourself for some huntings, no matter what. If you need food, then you need to invest time to get it...and i really like it that its not the typical 1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit and afterwards you are ready for everything -.-

[Chainzer]

Well i like it that it takes that long.

Compared to other MMOs where you took 10min a day and made everything you needed for the rest of the day, which was really sucky, this system is better i think.
If you want to prepare yourself perfect for a big fight, you just NEED a lot of time. Or if you want to prepare yourself for some huntings, no matter what. If you need food, then you need to invest time to get it...and i really like it that its not the typical 1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit and afterwards you are ready for everything -.-

you can charge alittle extra gold to those you sell your food to for the time your could have spent hunting/in pvp:idea:

[Agge]

Well i like it that it takes that long.

Compared to other MMOs where you took 10min a day and made everything you needed for the rest of the day, which was really sucky, this system is better i think.
If you want to prepare yourself perfect for a big fight, you just NEED a lot of time. Or if you want to prepare yourself for some huntings, no matter what. If you need food, then you need to invest time to get it...and i really like it that its not the typical 1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit and afterwards you are ready for everything -.-

Instant gratification whiners will win, I'm sorry.

[Fro]

Instant gratification whiners will win, I'm sorry.

Unfortunately not everyone plays DF as if it is a second job, some people dont want to bored while playing a game. I know it sucks doesn't it?

Also i quite like this idea.

[Agge]

Unfortunately not everyone plays DF as if it is a second job, some people dont want to bored while playing a game. I know it sucks doesn't it?

Also i quite like this idea.

If you don't want to cook, buy food.

[Frisbo]

yeah, this "issue" is everywhere in the crafting system. I think I'm down with WHY it's in there: it slows down skills ups and the introduction of products to the market.

However, waiting for a bar to move from the left to the right SUCKS.

I would love to be able to queue up crafting tasks. Just say how many of each recipe you want to attempt, and let 'er rip. Then I get up and go get a drink or something. Or I can check my email. Something that doesn't require me to stare at the goddamn bar moving.

I'd even settle for a 10 second mini-game like whack-a-mole or something to keep me distracted, especially if it kept a high score :rolleyes:

I really hope that they have a phase planned to revisit the playstyle of crafting.

And yeah, if you want to just get out there and fight, why are you crafting? Just buy your stuff and save the time and headache.

[BlueOreo]

Well i like it that it takes that long.

Compared to other MMOs where you took 10min a day and made everything you needed for the rest of the day, which was really sucky, this system is better i think.
If you want to prepare yourself perfect for a big fight, you just NEED a lot of time. Or if you want to prepare yourself for some huntings, no matter what. If you need food, then you need to invest time to get it...and i really like it that its not the typical 1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit and afterwards you are ready for everything -.-

My suggestion is so far away from the, "1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit," that you're describing. As I already pointed out, there's already a massive time component to cooking, because you have to spend so much time gathering. You wouldn't be able to gather enough food in 10 minutes AND cook it to keep you going for any extended period of time.

Okay, and secondly, cooking is really a small and unimportant thing. The food buff is there to add another element of realism, or whatever, but when it all comes down to it you need much much more then food to PvP. As far as consumables go, you need arrows and reagents and potions at the very least. That all adds up to a whole lot more time you have to spend preparing yourself for PvP. Once again, there's no "I'm ready for anything in 10 minutes."

Finally, I'm not suggesting that someone be able to cook 600 fish in 10 minutes. I'm suggesting that they be able to cook things in larger increments, like you can in real life, instead of this ridiculous 1 fish every 10 seconds. So, you'd be able to cook larger recipes, say 5 fish or 10 fish at a time. This is NOT instant gratification. It would still take time to cook a lot of fish.

[Frisbo]

But cooking larger batches DOES take more time, so I don't see what you're saying other than that you want to be have more "power" to produce things.

The crafting system appears to be designed to limit your power to produce things on purpose. The designers seem to want to force you to interact with people on as many levels as possible. If you want to make potions, buy your food. If you want to make food, buy your potions. You're going to have buy materials if you want to speed the process up. All of these things make for a deeper and more mature economy and society. If everyone was able to be self-sufficient, the economy wouldn't be as robust.

The requirement for repetitive user input every 10 seconds to accomplish the same task multiple times in sequence is the worst problem because it adds nothing to the game. The time it takes to produce a specific quantity of goods and introduce them into the economy IS an important thing and I don't think it's something that can be played with without careful consideration from the designers.

[BlueOreo]

The requirement for repetitive user input every 10 seconds to accomplish the same task multiple times in sequence is the worst problem because it adds nothing to the game.

I totally agree. That is a large part of what I was trying to remedy with this suggestion.

The time it takes to produce a specific quantity of goods and introduce them into the economy IS an important thing and I don't think it's something that can be played with without careful consideration from the designers.

I agree here also. The time is important. However, I'm suggesting that food does not play a larger enough role in the game to justify its time cost. Like I said, make cooking even more legitimate by limiting bulk type cooking to high level cooks only or to a cooking mastery skill. If you do this, then you force player interaction and help to develop an economy, while limiting the pointless wait-and-click gameplay. Under this kind of a change, players would not be self sufficient at all, but players who were dedicated cooks would successfully be able to ply their trade.

[gsky]

I will like when they add more recepies because its starting to get me sick etaing the same stuff over and over again ^^

Add more recepies !

[Frisbo]

Ahh, I see your argument now. You're saying that the rate at which food enters the economy is too slow compared to it's effectiveness. That if food was more powerful then it would make sense.

I don't necessarily agree but I can see where you're coming from. Allow me to provide a different perspective on why food is actually really good and should be limited.

Everything in DF seems to be short-lived. Weapons, armor, and tools all break. Arrows are made in the thousands and are gone through in a day. Potions last for 6 seconds. Buffs don't last terribly long either.

Food is basically a light buff that can be used by truly every character in nearly every activity. Harvesting, riding, fighting, casting, training/macroing, running, etc. Everyone could use food. That's pretty awesome. Having apple pie be a 5 minute stamina buff is pretty awesome. It cuts down on your stam pot usage, it's passive stamina gain.

If it's slow to get into the economy, there's less of it, which makes it more valuable. Right now, it's of very little worth to people. If you speed up the rate of production, the price will bottom out or the market for it will go completely away. I've made a total of 1 sale so far with food, selling 50 pieces. That's not so great, but hey, it's a skill everyone gets so...

Anyway, if they were gonna make food better, if they increased the stamina gain by a hair, would you be happy with the current time cost?

[Rope]

Ahh, I see your argument now. You're saying that the rate at which food enters the economy is too slow compared to it's effectiveness. That if food was more powerful then it would make sense.

I don't necessarily agree but I can see where you're coming from. Allow me to provide a different perspective on why food is actually really good and should be limited.

Everything in DF seems to be short-lived. Weapons, armor, and tools all break. Arrows are made in the thousands and are gone through in a day. Potions last for 6 seconds. Buffs don't last terribly long either.

Food is basically a light buff that can be used by truly every character in nearly every activity. Harvesting, riding, fighting, casting, training/macroing, running, etc. Everyone could use food. That's pretty awesome. Having apple pie be a 5 minute stamina buff is pretty awesome. It cuts down on your stam pot usage, it's passive stamina gain.

If it's slow to get into the economy, there's less of it, which makes it more valuable. Right now, it's of very little worth to people. If you speed up the rate of production, the price will bottom out or the market for it will go completely away. I've made a total of 1 sale so far with food, selling 50 pieces. That's not so great, but hey, it's a skill everyone gets so...

Anyway, if they were gonna make food better, if they increased the stamina gain by a hair, would you be happy with the current time cost?

I agree with this guy.

[BlueOreo]

I agree with this guy.

Yea, I begrudgingly agree with him too.

Arrr. That's why I posted this in Crafting though, instead of in the Suggestion forum, so we could talk about it.

[Siddalee]

Realistically, it doesn't make sense that you would get more items per craft. If you have one fish, you can only make one meal - any more dishes would mean you'd be getting only a fraction of a full meal, so only a fraction of the benefit/fulfillment.

But realistically, ten seconds is a very short time to cook a fish, too, haha!

I would be keen on a stamina increase. I would also be keen on stat info added to the food to see how long each meal lasts.

That being said, cooking could stand to be a little more exciting. If you had a chance to randomly make some really GOOD food - maybe something that lasted extra longer than normal, or provided a really good stam buff, that'd be one suggestion - but once again, you couldn't know unless you can see the stats on the items you create.

But if you really wanted to get more bang for your buck, perhaps the happy compromise would be a greater chance to get more items per craft as your cooking skill increases? So at skill 100, you'd have 65% chance to craft 1 item, 20% chance to craft 2 items, 10% chance to craft 3 items, 5% chance to craft 4 items - IF you have a successful craft, that is. ;)

I guess for realism's sake, you could say that you partitioned that fish into four separate meals, but your cooking skill is so awesome that each quartered fish meal is as fulfilling as a single meal that used the whole fish.

But honestly, I think any sort of random event while crafting would go a long way to spicing up any crafting skill, not just cooking.

[BlueOreo]

Realistically, it doesn't make sense that you would get more items per craft. If you have one fish, you can only make one meal - any more dishes would mean you'd be getting only a fraction of a full meal, so only a fraction of the benefit/fulfillment.

But realistically, ten seconds is a very short time to cook a fish, too, haha!

I would be keen on a stamina increase. I would also be keen on stat info added to the food to see how long each meal lasts.

That being said, cooking could stand to be a little more exciting. If you had a chance to randomly make some really GOOD food - maybe something that lasted extra longer than normal, or provided a really good stam buff, that'd be one suggestion - but once again, you couldn't know unless you can see the stats on the items you create.

But if you really wanted to get more bang for your buck, perhaps the happy compromise would be a greater chance to get more items per craft as your cooking skill increases? So at skill 100, you'd have 65% chance to craft 1 item, 20% chance to craft 2 items, 10% chance to craft 3 items, 5% chance to craft 4 items - IF you have a successful craft, that is. ;)

I guess for realism's sake, you could say that you partitioned that fish into four separate meals, but your cooking skill is so awesome that each quartered fish meal is as fulfilling as a single meal that used the whole fish.

But honestly, I think any sort of random event while crafting would go a long way to spicing up any crafting skill, not just cooking.

I was suggesting that you use 10 raw fish to produce 10 cooked fish.

[ZachLight]

what might be an idea to make it more viable as you say is to increase it duration a little more....nothing ridiculous but just a step up, then make all raw food such as potatoes, berries, onions etc (not fish obviously) which anyone can loot/harvest have a much more reduced effect......say half of cooked food or something.........meaning yes you can still use the uncooked stuff but if you use cooked food you'll get a much better pay off.........so its worth while buying/ or skilling up in that skill..........

just my idea anyway, for starters

[Stanley Cleaner]

Well i like it that it takes that long.

Compared to other MMOs where you took 10min a day and made everything you needed for the rest of the day, which was really sucky, this system is better i think.
If you want to prepare yourself perfect for a big fight, you just NEED a lot of time. Or if you want to prepare yourself for some huntings, no matter what. If you need food, then you need to invest time to get it...and i really like it that its not the typical 1-click-10min-afk crafting bullshit and afterwards you are ready for everything -.-


/Agree

I like that it takes forever to make and gather stuff. I even like that it takes forever to run places...

[Sutter Cane]

I also think you should be able to cook in bulk, but the sucess rate should drop a good chunk every ten or so, and if you fail at say cooking 10 fish you should lose atleast half of them. I'd also like to be able to build a fire in the wild and cook some fish on it when i run out while on the hunt....

[Acrylic_300]

The need for mindless clicking every 10 seconds is plaguing the entire gathering and crafting system.
Also for cooking and other crafts I think it's 20 seconds.

If this isn't bad enough....I just got naked zerg ganked for trying to cook 45 bass and a few trout.

The last few times I've even dared to wear cloth sleeves in town 10-15 people suicide-hacked me.

I'm free of all that now though.

have fun.