[Input wanted] More actual use cases for different food

[bronze kindle]

we now have a great variety of food. it can be processed in various ways, we have dozens of kitchen tools but... as you know... our characters can't taste anything. so it's currently completely without use.

as long as you fill your hunger or energy rate, it doesn't matter.

now my suggestion is: make cooking more meaningful.

But how exactly is this gonna happen? here I'd really like some inputs from other players 🙂

One thing i could imagine is that we have more status buffs from food.
For example meat dishes traditionally raise strength. but... strenght is not really a topic in this game :/

especially i want to emphasize the quality of food.
like that it actually pays off that you make something that takes incredible complexity in cooking and processing. like when you have a smoked beef burger with hand-made pickles, freshly baked buns and self-made cheese slices.

then this should give you some awesome benefits.

[subtle falcon]

Yea, I've seen some people say they like the freedom to eat whatever for role-playing purposes, so I get why adding buffs to certain things will kinda mess with that lol

I like your thought about meat affecting strength though so stuff that's protein heavy (including some veggie dishes that have nuts or soybeans as a component, to be vegetarian-friendly), could make it so rocks / trees take slightly fewer hits to axe

Similarly, seafood dishes could affect fishing in some way (fish bite faster, the time to reel is shorter, etc.)

[bronze kindle]

yeah... but we already have the skill tree entry to smash it with one hit >.<
oh yeah that's a nice idea!!

[subtle falcon]

True...

[bronze kindle]

but i'd like it to SHIFT it from a skill tree to a food bonus or maybe have both and then you can basically cope with not having full skill tree

i also thought about body shaping... i mean we need to weigh it together with the freedom of choice.
but what if for example eating meat gives you "muscle points" and if you want, you can go to a mirror and add more muscles to your character based on your "muscle points" that you gain with eating high-protein food. and the higher the quality the greater the effect, or in this case the amount of points gained 🤔

[subtle falcon]

I think the key is to make the bonus to whatever be smol enough that it's a nice thing, but doesn't completely overtake the skill tree. It could help to make it bearable while you build up to the perk

Small percent buffs or what have you.

[bronze kindle]

yeah exactly... balancing is really difficult right.
it could help you in battle when processing through the caves

or maybe even boost your romance performance... or item drop rate.

[subtle falcon]

I'm also realizing the quick ideas I can think of are already part of the skill tree, like jumping higher or running faster lol

[bronze kindle]

i hope some other people come here and have some nice ideas ^-^ it'd be nice to have that stuff a bit more appealing, but also combine it with realism. and don't ruin the freedom of choice
because you're right you shouldn't be forced to eat specific foods, just to have a certain gain.

you know what would actually help with the immersion? better animations and cutscenes when eating.

like when eating in a restaurant. currently you buy food there and take it home, that's weird.

rather we should maybe start having a cutscene where you eat it right away, i know some games that do it like this. you sit down at a table, and chew it down, with all the 3D graphics.

and you could add the same at home. for example if you sit down in front of a table, you could get a "plan dinner" or "plan lunch" popup where you can put food in that you want to eat/drink
and then this specific routine could increase the efficiency of food itself. for example that your hunger rate decreases slower if you sit down and have a proper lunch/dinner and your energy recovers faster.

i feel like this would really add to the immersion part.
i need to go now see you tomorrow and please add a LOT of ideas here~

skill tree takes it all ^^ but that's why i made a brainstorm thread like this ^^ let's hope a lot of people can share their oppion here, on how to make food more fun

[subtle falcon]

I think I saw someone mention like a "charisma" bonus where relationship gains are boosted for a short period of time from talking / hanging out, etc. That could be fun too

[ionic smelt]

It'd be neat, but they don't have an an animator, so they'd have to hire one

[subtle falcon]

And even if it is something already in the skill tree, food buffs could be a smol time-limited bonus that stack with the skill tree perk

[crystal nacelle]

We do have an animator It's @modest dock But animation isnt the issue. All these ideas, while fun, would take a LOT of programming and redesigning of systems. That's the part that we don't really have the capacity for 😦
But keep the ideas coming! There may be a nugget we can pull out at some point.

[bronze kindle]

i mean a bare stat-increase would be easy, then you just switch up some numbers for good and you're done but the second it creates more effort will be the problem.

the charisma suggestion is good i think. i'm assuming that the relationship to a character will probably be measured in dating-EXP that increase while talking, dating and gifting. simply add a multiplier to it and call it charism.

depending on how the hit count is implemented for trees and other stuff, you might need to redesign it a bit but basically, each hit decreases the targets "HP" by XY%, the skill tree sets it to ... dunno 10 - 25 - 50 and 100% and then we simply add a multiplicator and clamp to a max of 100 so it doesn't over-do it. then we have our strength value.

it's literally the same with attack multiplicators for actual battles.

then there was the mention of reducing the hunger consumption rate, which is also very easyy to implement as i think it's present in the skill try so again, just a numeric multiplier. same for endurance.

so that'd be the easy ideas.

the hard ideas would then be, graphical modes and optimizations like the dinner/lunch/restaurant scenes i mentioned, this would probably take a bit more effort but i can't imagine it'd take that much. because you already have stuff you can re-use right? when dating you have the restaurant option.
and the food already has 3D models so there's no rework pending here i hope, though the models might need to be optimized if they're getting more attention like that, dunno, maybe for now you just covered a disk with a 2D texture 🤣
stuff like introducing a "half-eaten" state is optional and can come later

but yeah let's keep it rolling do you fluffers have more ideas on how we can improve the eating-experience? i'm reaching the limit with my suggestion already... i want it to be fun and rewarding, because eating is living ❤️

[royal jungle]

Another means of making cooking a more attractive option to would be to maybe nerf some of the hunger/endurance restored by foragables and uncooked food. It would definitely incentivize taking the time to cook your food rather than just gobbling down half a dozen bayberries and going about your day.

[bronze kindle]

yes making cooking per se more attractive would be even another topic because the process of cooking is currently very tedious and tiresome and realistic to a degree that it's already unrealistic, so this should definitely be improved, and i made a seperate suggestion for it in #1253036310524989440

i don#t think that foragable items are that more popular than cooking, i rather think most people will buy stuff from a restaurant or what do you think? but i agree nerfing that would probably be a good idea

but when it comes to buying vs cooking we can't do much. we can't nerf bought food because that'd be unrealistic. if anything for realism we'd need to make cooked food LESS efficient, but that wouldn't fit the actual goal.

[ionic smelt]

Somehow I thought they weren't but that's good to know!

[warped rover]

on the point of forageables vs bought food, when i started playing in RPG mode i didnt budget well (or at all) and ended up with too little money to even buy 1 onigiri...so I did have to depend on wild mushrooms and berries for a good long while XD it's cheap, easy, and free, and they spawn so rapidly and in such massive quantities, that I have never run out of any of the forageable items yet, even when they were all I could eat.

[bronze kindle]

okay but if you HAD the money would you rather farm foragables? or would you rather buy onigiri?
because if they nerf something and you have no money you'd still need to collect stuff. you're forced to eat or you can't do anything. nerfing that would in this context only be annoying,

but if you HAVE the moeny, would you rather cook, forage or buy?

[warped rover]

honestly if money is no concern (which it isn't for me anymore), I still want to try to cook things. I would prefer if there were a more tangible in-game reward for cooking than just cooking exp, but that might be asking a bit much. the forageables are already OP, so I personally think nerfing them would actually be helpful, balance-wise. If it's the end of the day, I'm all the way in Higashi, and I'm literally about to starve, then I'll head for the nearest vending machine and grab a bun or an onigiri, but I normally try to cook from scratch or buy better meals at restaurants.

I'm also an otaku and bit of a gourmet irl, so it could just be me being weird about food lmao

[bronze kindle]

so i definitely agree about nerfing foragables. but we shouldn't just stop there.

you know the more i think about it the more i think this "hunger rate" and "endurance boost" that food already gives is a very good start.

think about it. you could for example eat 1kg berries. in real life i mean... but that wouldn't satissfy you in any way. they're delicious. but you're also hungry after 1 hour again, especially since they're mostly water... so what if different items have a different "hunger multiplier"?

like when you eat a balanced meal with carbo hydrates and meat it gives you more satisfication and your hunger rate doesn't decrease as fast so you can easily last 1-2-3 days. while if you just eat berries you'll be hungry again in 2 hours.

and then we have endurance. so i think hearthy stuff like meat can give you more endurance. it decreases slower and regenerates faster. every food has an effect on those properties, and every food could have its own unique modifier to those values.

and if you know that you'd of course rather go for a healthy burger or a steak with fries than just filling yourself with foragables.

and btw wouldn't it be wholesome if the whole process of eating would be less "take food in your hand and smash it in" and more like this?

i mean okay you need to remove the people from that image because it was stated that you will not be able to move together, but at least sitting somewhere with actual dishes in front of you and doing the actual stuff would be so much more wholesome,

and then we could even remove "raw" ingredients from a meal like this. and additionally to single dishes a restuarant could also offer courses folloowinjg the japanese ichiju sansai pattern. and if you buy them you sit at a restaurant table and have such an animation. i think that'd be fun. but a bit of work for the animators.

[frank forge]

forageables and raw ingredients do need a nerf, I subsist on strawberries only for a while now

[ionic smelt]

that's mostly by design, though

the point is to making cooking an optional system to make it better rather than having to interact with it, IIRC.

[frank forge]

maybe set it as an option then

[bronze kindle]

first of all, cooking doesn't need to be an optional system if the system was easier and more enjoyable
and second, foragables aren't the only alternative to cooking. as discussed you can still buy stuff from a grocery store or a restaurant. that's how i survive. it's quite cheap so it's a good alternative.
and third, it's not like nerfing foragables means they should not be edible at all. if you're committed to not cooking or buying you just need to forage 10x the amount 🤣 which is possible because we have a lot of foragables.
and there'd still be the possibility to sell your foragables somewhere and then buy real food 🤣

i think overall it's better for the immersion, better for the balancing better in any regard, or what do you think?

[ionic smelt]

the advantage of foragables is that you can avoid buying stuff ffrom a grocery store

i suspect that several moneymakers were meant to be nerfed

[bronze kindle]

okay if making money is getting harder then this could be a tough one. 🤔 then they might need to change the order a bit, but even if money making is nerfed, an onigiri costs like what, 3 bucks? can't remember.
and the money making shouldn't be nerfed to a degree that you need to worry about your daily food. i mean here in germany even someone who doesn't work and only get "Bürgergeld" can afford 3 proper meals a day.

[ionic smelt]

maybe. I'm not sure personally

[bronze kindle]

i think if players eat only foragables then we need to tackle the reasons why they do it.
if they're just too lazy to go to naka or grocery store, then we need to push them
if they really have enough money then we need to ask: why is money such a big problem to a degree you can't even buy food?
if the player doesn't even know that you can get anything better then it's lacking documentation, which is actively worked on.
If the player principally doesn't want to buy stuff but finds cooking to annoying, cooking needs to be improved.

so what about others? why do you use foragables? and what would be required to make you use better food without feeling it's "grind"?

[ionic smelt]

i don't have many thoughts on this, tbh. I have the income to buy food so

[bronze kindle]

same, this is why i'm thinking, money should not be an issue here. 🙂

i mean we have the goal for this thread to make different food more appealing, nerfing foragables is one way, but please add up on that, plenty, infinite! 🙂 at some point i'll simply collect all ideas and pin them for better overview.

[unborn cosmos]

I like your idea that some food will give you muscles. So its purely aesthetic. Cmon I want to be as buff as Gabe as well 😁

[bronze kindle]

🤣 hey i mean why not, that's one vote for body-shaping food.
i'd still make it optional, i doN't want players to feel the need to go on a diet. in a game 🤣

[unborn cosmos]

Lets see how realistic they want it to be 🤣