Let's make Food and Drink better

[Cogwerks]

OTOH, some coder was talking about just letting us name drinks with some machine. That'd be cool too.

(And besides, all I know is coffee drinks, and we don't have Kaluha.)

What I'd love to see is more freeform food, like how cakes, pizzas and fried stuff is now. That'd take a lot more coding, but it'd be nice to be able to just slap whatever between two hamburger buns, or on top of a bread slice and get a [whatever] burger/sandwich out of the oven. As it is, I tried to make a banana pie and accidentally rediscovered banana bread.

Oh, also: would it be ridiculous for Hydroponics to have a cargo transporter-esque device for sending produce directly to the kitchen, if this is implemented?

They just lost their conveyor belt. I would be for either that or the old disposals tube from Mushroom station.

Yeah, that was me, I'm trying to get a thing together where bartenders can more easily name their cocktails. I've also been kicking around some ideas with ISN about freeform foods already.

You may have noticed how crops in Botany now have names like "perfect banana" or "moldy grapes" or whatever. ISN set up a preliminary quality check for me, so now all crops are harvested with a Quality tag derived from a bunch of genetic and plant-care things.

Quality is going to be a major feature of a planned kitchen/bar overhaul that is already somewhat underway. The idea I've had there is that there will be more freeform recipes where you just pick a general type of food (sandwich, burger, stir-fry, soup, chili, casserole, pizza, cake, etc) and then just lump whatever you've got around into it. The resulting food item would then take a sum of the quality var and combine the reagents of all its parts, including negative qualities, and multiply it against the cooking settings you used. Cooking settings would be changed to be more of a range thing instead of hardcoded specific values.

Things that end up having extremely high quality would be delicious as heck, quite valuable for selling and acquire some nice healing and positive boosts. Things that are of horrifically low quality would do hilariously terrible things, enough that you could even weaponize them somewhat.

For cooking times, I was thinking it wouldn't be too much work to add some ideal cooking settings to specific ingredients. Some things might need high heat, others might like a nice slow cook and have their quality get fucked up if cooked poorly, and it'd track that stuff while cooking to see how the ingredients are behaving.

I got rid of the belt between botany and the kitchen because I never saw anyone using it and having a pod bay closer to botany seemed like a good idea. Botanists can just enter the catering storage area behind the kitchen now to drag crates over to the chef. They oughta do that, it's pretty damn close to botany, there's no need for a mail chute unless you are lazy as all hell... if that's the case, I guess I could give it back. Lazy jerks.

side note: the quality var is also planned to be a central thing when I get around to overhauling Electricians