Lets discuss... Food

Those are some great ideas you have there, if they added effects like this, I would be a lot more apt to delve into cooking further.

 

I mean, I don't blame 'em for not having gone whole-hog implementing tons of status effects on foods already. It IS rather lower priority than a lot of what they're working on now, and generally the kind of balancing/flavor stuff one focuses on much more towards the end of the cycle.

But the core system is there, and that's the important part. It can be filled out once they've got the main-main game stuff much closer to finished.

 

So.....the point here is, Food is life! Food is awesome!

 

I'm a farmer. Always have been. I'm the kind of guy who played minecraft for 10 hours straight just on farming wheat.

The hunger system made me valuable to my team because honestly? I get a nice buzz watching my crops grow and my friends rather go around hunting down pirates or raiding dungeons.

The new system I just feel like an over glorified medic who doesn't have a medi-gun but just throws sandwiches on the floor and hope they're buff timer is low enough.

But....it works. The food is unique enough where I can keep mixing things, cooking things and trying thousands of things all while having fun. My buffs early games are meh but the buff timer always feels too long for low tier food. There's no saturation bonuses so my buddies all just want banana bread but I made a nice meal of neomelons and popcorn for the road.

I would love a food rework. One where my food debuff is proportionate to the buff I gave and that the buff is good for the materials and time I spent.

I want my food to have bonuses for eating something exotic once but lower bonus for stuffing my face full of it over and over again (I'm looking at you, banana bread)

More drinks and more ingredients.

At this point I know I'm asking for a lot but sense I feel like I'm asking for the impossible I'll say this now.

I want to decorate with my food. A plate item that I can use to combine with my food to make a nice decoration item. Making my restaurant look like a real restaurant.

More herbology and science to make my plants better. Cross breeding to change the genetics to get more bountiful crop outcomes.

I just want to be rewarded for farming a colorful mango for 20 minutes.

Tl; Dr = I love cooking, farming but my job feels moot and I would love a rework

 

I'm dead certain a reworking of food buff stats and timings and all that is going to happen. But heavy re-balancing of stats like that tends to happen late in the development cycle, and they're still getting major components in. Once they have combat tweaked to how they like it, once they have the missions how they like it, they an adjust the numbers on food healing and buffs and "fed" statuses to compliment all that.

But yes, decorating with placeable foodstuffs would be fantastic and really needs to be one of the first post-v1.0 additions.

 

I'm sure it'll happen. My only actually worry is that I have to install a persistent farm mod to make it efficient to farm in general.

I know foods on the bottom of the list or at least not thaaat important but I hope it goes and takes a good turn.

 

persistent farming is already a thing, crops grow when you aren't there. But you do have to be playing I think.

As for place-able foods, that could already be a mod if someone wanted to do all the work. But it might take a new crafting table because there's just so much food.

*points at the Felins mod* That mod has a few varieties of foods on plates you can craft, but they don't actually use the food item.

 

To the original question...

I generally stopped using food, well the farming part, as @Darklight pointed the hunger is gone.

I think the only thing I use is cooked steak or well alien meat. The reason for this is because I use a crossbow as a secondary weapon. that tends to land quite a few raw meat laying around. So I just use what I have in this instance. Not often though even then. Think I used that for dreadwing... The regen maybe slow but I hardly pay attention to that when bandages seem to do a bit more on top of that.

I probably will tend to the food system eventually when they add hunger to higher difficulties. Other than that time, I probably will not go far into cooking at the moment, even if the ship pet is tempting to feed. Is what the steak or the various fruits are for right...

 

Fox is not like a cow.

 

You really need to give some of the high end recipes a try, some of them are insanely powerful.

 

Well that is the thing. I am not really relying on foods, so I don't feel the need to even experiment the diverse selection; at least at this moment. I know I will in the future eventually, when I finally find the place I am looking for.

Besides I usually just utilize what I have at its' basics so I can seek out my mystery planet.

 

The issue is that there's no incentives to do so. Before you would at least have a place in keeping people alive but now you're the equivalent of a potion merchant.

 

Considering that there are no potions in Starbound, and that healing and other status effects have a great impact on a players survivability, I concur with Oberic. Not being required to click a mouse button when you see a pop-up was a great improvement.

 

I don't mind "hunger" coming back for hardcore mode (or a specific game mode, or option to turn it off), but overall I'm not a fan the idea of making food relevant by simply forcing one to eat. That just become tedious and annoying. I don't want to be forced to pay attention to hunger when I'm simply trying to build something, or have to quit to go afk.

I do love food, however. I'm pretty sure they haven't fleshed out all the details regarding food though. I like food being buff/effect based, it just needs a little love. Keep in mind also that farming will be a progression path, so food will and can be relevant without a hunger bar by way of profession and way to make money. At any rate, I'm sure we'll see some balancing when it comes to food and buffs once they get around to it. Right now I can see how it's not crazy high on the priority list.

One of the things I think would help most is implementing a "shop owner" profession that would work similar to the landlord thing. Except instead of recurring rent you'd get periodic "cash" from shops you have stocked with goods. If we could buy a specific business license, make a building, stock it with food (or weapons if you're a blacksmith shop), and villagers buy from you. That'd give me plenty of reason to make food.