I'm sure Chucklefish has seen the upswing in people fawning over the removed old and underdeveloped hunger mechanic in Starbound from before Upbeat Giraffe. People like me remember less fondly, as little more than an unchallenging and unimmersive egg timer which killed you if you didn't left click a couple times, and as an anti-AFK mechanic. Still, the people who want it back have a point. It does make sense to have a hunger mechanic if there is going to be an eating system. I too want to see its eventual return, just not as it was before. And if I can help balance it better, then that is fantastic. When it comes to the hunger system, the most predominant issue I can think of is the overabundance and relative ease of acquiring food to eat. Beyond changing the time it takes to grow a crop, there is not any other existing mechanics which could help balance out the food system. This is why I propose that the first step in balancing hunger is to add complexity to cooking. At the moment, cooking is just crafting with plants. In an instant, you can boil Pearlpeas or squash fruits into juice. This is a major problem for a hunger system, and even with the current food buff system. Think about it: Why eat less-filling or less-buffing food, when you can make better food without further effort? A couple of clicks and *poof* better food, up to the number of ingredients you had on your character. It is for this reason that I propose, first and foremost, that the Cooking Table receive a new Interface. Instead of a crafting window, it could be like a Campfire with multiple input slots, as well as a list of known recipes on the side. With this, there would be no more instantaneous improvement to your food supply, as you would have to place all the required ingredients into the UI and then hit "Cook" to begin cooking your new food. A rather significant change. Of course, this alone would not be enough, in my opinion. Within current limitations, all UIs which use that type of crafting take the same amount of time to convert an input to an output. Given the relative complexity of cooking in real life, and how boiling vegetables does not take the same amount of time as cooking a delicious meal, I believe that each recipe should have its own defined crafting time in this new Cooking Table UI. This way, players can be encouraged to go with what takes less time to craft over what is simply the best food available, adding other options for balancing. Together, these changes would make cooking more interesting, and possibly make balancing hunger a lot easier. With other changes, particularly to how the hunger meter works, Chucklefish could make hunger a feature that is interesting for everyone who plays Starbound! TL;DR: 1) Fix multi-input/output crafting 2) Make a new, unique crafting UI for the Cooking table 3) Add crafting times for recipes What do you guys think?
I'm not a huge fan of the cooking time requirements. While it is realistic and makes sense from that perspective, I don't think it makes cooking more enjoyable or attractive. Just like in the past, how smelting used to take time, and now it doesn't, I think there are more valuable parts of the game to add time sinks into, and the actual crafting or cooking is not them. I'm all for crops taking awhile to grow, recipes taking time to learn (trial and error or re-cooking things you already know), and cooked food not being used as ingredients into later/better cooked food. I don't see it as meaningful to tell players that crafting better food simply takes more time, and thus they have to sit around and wait for it to be done, or they press "Cook" and go explore planets. In a way, adding a time cost where there used to be none could be seen as discouraging players from using better food.
Enjoyable? As opposed to a "cooking" system with exactly zero depth and a smidge of user effort? A change I rather disliked, aside from now being able to see the recipes... If not crafting or cooking, what other time sinks could there be in a game that revolves around crafting? Chucklefish has changed it so that they do not. Chucklefish has changed it so that almost all recipes are learned on pickup of a crop. I disagree, because you should be able to used cooked food in other recipes. And I do not see it as meaningful to have to put zero effort into preparing a food that gives you fantastic buffs. Would it surprise you to learn that that is the point? I am not a fan of instant gratification and effortless rewards.
You enjoy time sinks in cooking. Okay, cool. I don't. They don't make the game more difficult, they don't add a challenge, they don't even add a requirement for exotic ingredients. It just requires time. I don't have a lot of time, and I don't want to spend my limited time sitting around a campfire by myself, watching my marshmallows slowly turn golden brown. Making the food is not the fun part of the game, to me. Farming, watching the crops grow and planting new seeds, exploring worlds, building elaborate structures, doing things is what I enjoy. That is what I would rather spend time on. Not watching my building blocks slowly form (smelting times) or watching my food slowly cook (cooking time). These are the appetizers, the necessary preparation for the main course (exploring, building, food buffs/hunger). Otherwise, we might simply need to agree to disagree.
So, you are fine with spending significantly more time growing the crops (which is still not long at all) but not fine with having time requirements for crafting those crops into something else? Funnily enough, you talk about enjoying doing things like watching crops grow, when you probably do something else while you wait for crops to grow, and there is nothing stopping you from doing something while the suggested cooking is taking place... And what, exactly, is the feeling of reward you get from instantaneous cooking? And don't use "agree to disagree". It is such a cop-out.
I mostly agree. This new table could have some base recipes, like Sandwiches, which rely on their ingredients. (2 slices of bread alone might save you from starvation, but i would prefer to have cheese, meat, tomatoes in that.) I don't agree with crafting times though. It would seem out of place unless everything in starbound had a crafting time. It took enough time to mine the ores needed for my overwhelmingly powerful hammer that ends life with a mere click. The crafting time would be terrible.
I actually would like to see a lot of things get crafting times. Not everything, though. Some things should be crafted instantly, and others should take less and less time to craft (eventually instantly) as the player progresses through the tier system (because the later tiers become more automated, as demonstrated by the Robotic Crafting Table). But that, and the way ores are (not) balanced at the moment are different topics than what I had brought up.
That could be awesome, but I think there's some other ways to take back that system with a better cost/benefit relationship: -Add Hunger Bar again. -Conserve the "Wellfed" mechanic; probably renamed as "Belly Filled". -Add the "Not a Well-balanced food" (name's a placeholder). It'll multiply the hunger by 2. Level of debuff ajust the duration. -Hunger bar goes down 1 point (little bar) per hour standing, 0.03 points by step walked (No more "AFK mechanic"); it'll be 2 per hour and 0.06 by step under "Not a Well-Balanced food" effects. -Cooked meat and crude vegetables gives you 1 bar of hunger but a level 3 "Not a well-balanced food" debuff, crude meat level 3 aswell and a posion debuff too. Tier 1 food will give you a level 1 debuff an tier 2 meals with not give the debuff. (With this, you can have massive ammounts of food, but you must choose wise anyways). With this changes, the cookin' and hunger will be a problem at first hours of gameplay and still a complicated strategy in last, but not really an issue at last. Atmosphere will come back this supervivence element and will be more "use your brain" than it's last incarnation. Sorry for my bad English! PS: The idea of the OP of the cooking system it's almost pretty much similar to Don't Starve :/
It could work, but I don't see why we can't have both ideas implemented since we deal with different aspects of the food system. Never played. It must be a good system.
Very well. I don't sit there and watch crops grow. I plant them, then go about doing stuff, and when I come back, my farm looks amazing and it's ready to harvest. Then I can re-plant the farm, cook stuff, and go out exploring again. While it does take time to harvest/replant, I'm actively doing something. This isn't very comparable to sitting there and watching a bar fill in with color while I can't move around (cooking timer). The feeling of reward I get from instantaneous cooking is that my seedlings had sprouted, I harvested the plants, I had the ingredients, and I made something nice that will help me explore. It's the end result of a process.
Akado pointed out a good point regarding a cooking timer. They'd have to work out a way to allow a player to leave and come back if they were to implement this suggestion. I also would not care for something that keeps me from being able to do anything else.
Okay, first of all, I had considered making cooking require the player to maintain an open UI, but I ultimately decided against it so there isn't a "cooking timer" in my suggestion. What you are doing is basing your opinion on a mistaken assumption. You would be perfectly capable of going to do other things while cooking food up. Second, the feeling of reward is then changed from immediately after you've harvested your crops to after you've cooked them into a hearty meal.
You should go back and edit the original post, then, to reflect your changed suggestion. If this part is still in the original suggestion, I suspect that other people will mistakenly assume that you mean to include this in the original suggestion. If the goal of this "timer" is to make players do other things between the gathering of ingredients and getting a cooked food item in their inventory, then I would ask what value does this add to the game? Having time sinks like this, in my opinion, serve to discourage people from doing the thing. Just like with smelting ores, the timesink here was simply not adding anything to the game, and simply adding a timesink. The value was in spending the time to explore planets and mine the ore, and then in seeing that turned into a finished product. The value was not found in sitting there with 9 furnaces in your ship, collecting and splitting bars as needed. I think adding a timer simply forces people to sit there and wait before they can use their new food to go explore, whether or not they can do things while the cooking timer is counting down.
Um. I didn't. I never put it there, in the first place. I didn't suggest it. >.> It's not my fault that you interpreted it that way. I meant that each recipe will take its own amount of time to craft, as opposed to how "Campfire"-like UIs handle crafting now where all recipes take the same amount of time. It might take 2 seconds to boil Pearlpeas or 5 to melt Sugar into Candy. IDK. I didn't suggest recipe times, just the ability to define them. It adds a sense of reward to cooking, instead of just making cooking another form of instantaneous crafting. While mining is its own issue, I think that there should be a delay between returning to your base with ore and turning that ore into bars to craft stuff. Why? So people can feel like they have accomplished something by waiting a bit instead of instantly crafting bars and not having that feeling of reward when they then craft. When it comes to smelting, the old system took far too long because there were only one-to-one recipes, but one of the best mods I knew, back then, allowed the player to speed up the process by melting more than two ore at a time (up to 100). The only thing I like about the new system is that you can see what ores can be used to smelt. And you could always, you know, do other stuff while it smelts. You have already admitted you don't wait for plants to grow, and that you do other stuff anyways, so I am not sure why this is such a problem for you.
