Catering Rework Overview :D

[Erinexx]

Hello!

Bit caught up with the whole viral shenanigans due to the fact my job is both essential and political so I haven't had much time to commit to Goon, but i'll make an exception here to post some thoughts on the topic.

Ahh I hope you're ok, do stay safe! D:

I'm super excited to see the sprite reworks, my wandering eye caught glance of it on #imspriter, some jolly good work there. 

I'm super happy to hear that <3 Your input is always welcome on anything I make, an artist thrives on feedback!

- I would agree with Gogorow in that there could be some form of device in the kitchen that acts as a mini/stunted hydroponics tray. In an ideal world, this is hydroponics job to deliver produce, however that may not occur on some (cough, most)  rounds. Which means you may have to rely on the head of catering to resolve this, or you might have a plan C. The plan C could be that hydroponics tray, or more like a 32x32 unit (call it GrowFriend), that stores 3 miniature trays for plants. While this sounds buff and makes hydro redundant on paper, there are a number of caveats that you could add, such as the unit cannot accept chems other than water (so you cannot crank up the harvest) and/or severely reducing the output or quality of the harvest and/or locking it behind QM. This will give you stunted (you'll be running short here if you rely on it) output of produce. 

I do like the idea of the mini hydro tray, it could definitely help as a stopgap for if botany are being lame - but itd need to be cleverly designed to avoid stepping on botany's toes

- These changes would need to made in conjunction with some neat oddities to Botany too. For it to work fluidly, you need bodies at botany, even with the above suggestion, you'd still want a friend in botany. It seems that you're already kind of doing this with that Mandrake, so keep adding more odd stuff like this. More lethal stuff, stuff to backfire and blow up in your face. However, there also needs to a be a reason Botany will want to trade with you in the first place. Which leads be onto my last and most important point..

I agree there should be some consideration given to what catering can provide for botany and I think there's absolutely a lot that can be traded, it'll just need some discussion and designing 

- Output. This one is simple. In the current method, making a single burger takes up not only a relatively large amount of time, but is extremely resource wasteful (1 meat = 1 burger) and taxing on the machines around you (one burger in the oven takes up space in the entire oven). All this when you want to produce food for a hungry 40+ crew station isn't particularly viable. ...or fun for that matter, as it is repetitive. And probably demoralizing as nobody will eat the 40+ burgers you've made apart from the clown who's spam clicking, occasionally barfing up undigested food. This might be something to address in the rework.

One thing I would love to get done is to make cooking MUCH more accessible - currently I have to just sit on the wiki 24/7 whenever I want to cook anything, which isn't optimal.

Things I'd like:
-Cooking dough on its own turns it into a burger bun that can be cut in half to make proper modular burgers (all sprite work is done for this already)
-Using dough on a breadtin makes cookable bread-in-tin
-More modular cooking recipes
-More easily understandable recipes (no more microwaving dough + mystery meat to make meatballs for example)

That will go a LONG way to solving the problem of resource-intensivity and time taken to make stuff like burgers, and work should be done for example to make one steak produce (for example) 3 meatpastes, which can then be turned into 3 burger patties, which would make it a tonne easier to make a lot more food in a lot less time

- The need for catering in the first place. I have made a number of suggestions in the past on how to tackle this, and a big ol' rework is a good time as any to raise it again.
Bioeffects was and still is a good idea - in that food gives background benefits. There needs to be a closer look on how this is implemented in the rework. I might suggest tieing this in with quality, if that's something you have planned. I do think the "timer" aspect of it is currently a bit misplaced - quality should affect the scale of the bioeffect, while the amount of sustenance  (not a thing in code yet I don't think but it would be the difference between a bite of chips and a cheeseburger) should affect the time it stays in the system. 
Ideally in my head, a chef cooking up a grand meal would have a niche but great benefit to the player while also staying in their system for at least 25 minutes or 1/3 of the round, but would be slower to eat than a bag of chips which you can effectively inhale. 
Additionally there needs to be more bioeffects.

I would love bioEffects, but also honestly I would love to see at least the need to eat to be added in some capacity to Goon2 - I doubt I'm in a majority with that opinion but it definitely gives people more of an impetus to not just sit in their department all shift (eg. genetics)

I definitely agree that it would have to have bioEffects since just saying "fuck you, you have to eat now or youll suffer consequences" would be lame after however long not even having to eat

- I lied, one more point. There needs to be a larger nerf on spam eating. Currently, you could run into the bar and consume everything on the table so long as it isn't poisoned, while barfing up undigested chunks along the way, which you promptly and grossly eat also. While this can be humorous, if the rework is something putting more emphasis on meals, then you might want to remove the factor on one shithead eating entirely everything that was meant to be for the crew. Perhaps, like sustenance above, if there's too much food then you simply can't eat anymore. Or you could link it into the organs code where eating too much causes blocked intestines, requiring surgery or even possible removal of the stomach.

I absolutely agree with this - I'll write it into a design document at some point then we can potentially work to refine this fully in future