Let's make Food and Drink better

[Walrus]

Necro, but will there be anything on nutrition or such?
Maybe make better food give better health benefits and healing?

Yes, giving food more of a healing benefit reduces everyone breaking into medbay to steal medicine after they've been budged down to yellow health. I'm going to plug Mozi's idea again because nobody seemed to notice it the last time this thread was brought back to life (and because it's very good).

here's a big dumb thing I wrote up about making all food useful, I spent 30 minutes trying to code it before getting distracted by a shiny and wandering off

http://pastebin.com/6TB1sNVW

The favourite food idea seems very similar to heirloom items and doesn't seem like it would be difficult to add in at all.

[Sundance]

Err my post the last time this was necro'd was literally pertaining to mo-zi's post. In-fact it was nothing but an expansion of his post. Did you miss that or..

In that food should become quality based (in ways it already is, the angry chef bot will destroy any food that is poor quality), which is tied to the quality of the ingredients. Quality = longevity of whatever benefits eating your favorite food may occur. Favorite food should be randomized every round to stop scrubs from picking simple foods and just stocking up on it every round.
I then further suggested that perhaps, the buff shouldn't be healing, because that's kinda boring and too direct as food already heals if ain't below yellow. Instead perhaps should give a unique random buff to the player, like some sort of damage (oxy/tox/brute/burn/bleed/organ) buff or something else entirely.

[Frank_Stein]

While were talking about food and drink, could we make cooking a little more intuitive? Something that isn't stick the right things together and plug in the right time/heat settings or else you get a inedible lump? Something with a little more feedback would be nice.

For instance, the results from failed cooking should give hints at where you messed up.

Is it undercooked? Overcooked? Is it missing something spicy or sweet? Maybe the Chef can tell these things at glance but anyone else would need to try it first.

It would tie well into favorite foods. Two people might like steak, but maybe one guy likes his rare and the other well done, or their eggs over easy instead of scrambled.

[Sundance]

That's a pretty solid idea, and could be easy to implement if looked at from the right angle.

You could change food to be instead of having just "good" and "bad", you could have in betweens, and that would be entirely based on a prefix-
So for example, a raw-steak would be heat:time ratio of 1:1 while a badly burnt-steak would be 5:5. To get a smoldering piece of shit, literally put the badly burnt steak straight back into the oven.

The addition of spices/herbs could be a pain to code. I'm a bit of a foodie, so I would not recommend going down the realistic route unless coders want to give themselves a colossal headache trying to see which herb and spice would be good to code and how to implement, but instead maybe have like in addition to S+P in the kitchen, you could have a herb and spice shaker, green and red colored. It would be something to be added on after (or perhaps before?) that would make it appetizing.

[Sam Guivene]

If you botch the time on a valid recepie you already get a burnt mess, why not also get an undercooked mess as well?

Also we need some dish to put burnt messes into, and we could use more creative usages for ???? besides bath salts, gruel and fartonium.

[Walrus]

Err my post the last time this was necro'd was literally pertaining to mo-zi's post. In-fact it was nothing but an expansion of his post. Did you miss that or..

Hah, my bad. I remember reading that the first time and I'd already forgotten once i'd made my post.

If you botch the time on a valid recepie you already get a burnt mess, why not also get an undercooked mess as well?

I could swear that this is already in, isn't it? The ???? is what you get when you mess up the recipe/undercook it and the smoldering mess is what you get for burning it. I'd personally like to see undercooked food look mostly normal but be really gross tasting and have a high chance to give you food poisoning.

[BaneOfGiygas]

I think, speaking in a more general sense, that one of the best ways to help the bar and kitchen become relevant aside from inane shenanigans is to actually give purpose to the shit they make. The threshold for food-healing is laughably low and doesn't heal any meaningful damage, most of the drinks either do nothing, bad things, or get you godawfully drunk, and the most that the chef can do to actually help the crew is stuff omnizine into cakes.

Basically, my overarching suggestion is to make the cafeteria serve as, basically, a poor man's medbay in the event that the actual medbay is completely fucked, which it probably will be during any given round. Introduce more drinks and foods with significant, helpful effects while still keeping a balance of food that is silly and/or dangerous. Spiking my drinks with stuff like ants and glitter and such always gets a chuckle out of me, and that is a crucial component of the cafeteria. But, right now, that's sort of all the cafeteria is: Chuckles and the (admittedly amusing) wasting of time.

[Frank_Stein]

I'd personally like to see undercooked food look mostly normal but be really gross tasting and have a high chance to give you food poisoning.

That's what I'm saying. Even overcooking something should still look kind of the same, unless you massively burnt it.

Also, invalid recipes should maybe be something different from something mostly useless like ?????

Maybe they turn into casseroles? Still edible, just sloppy.