Kitchen QoL

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

• More Coffee Makers: All of the kitchens have the specialty coffee makers from what I can see, but breakfast food just isn't the same without slightly burnt ordinary coffee. It would be very convenient if the kitchen had it's very own coffee brewing machine + wall mugs!
  
• Reduce Food/Plate Sizes: Plates take up an incredible amount of space and makes it hard to cleanly decorate counters with our culinary confections and dishes. This one seems kind of difficult because placing a lot of dishes on plates already makes them small and difficult to see and this would reduce food on plates into mere pixels.
  
• Processing Limbs: We can make meat out of entire bodies but we can't break down arms and legs to make stuff. Apart from making just meat, the ability to make human drumsticks would be incredible or getting the bones from them and using them as sticks for kebabs.
  

If you have anything extra to add, I highly encourage you to comment! Thanks!

[DioChasek]

Easiest one I can think of that would save an incredible amount of time is, allow dumping a produce satchel full of flour or rice onto a sink to get your dough or sticky in one click instead of the insanity we currently face.

[Kotlol]

I like all of these things. Even DioChasek's addition.

As a chef there is no real "Fast preparition" and alot of tools are barely used during shifts cause it's too much effort for a meal for 1 person.
Heck some stuff requires specific ingridents that you have to wait for botany to give.

So I recommend the following additions as well to make chef's life a little easier.

"A food dispenser the chef can stock"
Think of it as a vending machine but it only accepts cooked meals (Or any food on a plate) that the chef can put in and employees with IDs can pull out.
Just like with mining and the rockbox you can activate it and deactivate it and put prices on it for a lil bit of extra cash. Now you also can check the vendor for inventory and also find out who's been eating all the food!

Another idea is that food from the kitchen can be sent from the kitchen to any "break room" via a teleportation system (like the rockbox again). Only from break rooms/crew quarters and nothing else.

My next idea comes from Roleplay sessions with fun chefs. You know the chefs that make a menu and everything?
Well why not make it easier to have an interface where players can ORDER MEALS from that the Chef can activate, showing they can cook it?
Note the chef can just turn it off all together, but it would be fun to see a "Menu screen" and order food from it then the chef will read it and prepare it for you.
Might also be put up in break rooms?

This way the chef can stock up on meals in 1 way. And the other can be a fun way to tell everyone: "Today's chef will only cook these things"

Just an idea :P

[Frank_Stein]

Easiest one I can think of that would save an incredible amount of time is, allow dumping a produce satchel full of flour or rice onto a sink to get your dough or sticky in one click instead of the insanity we currently face.

I'd personally like higher yields. Like, a bag of flour having multiple uses and being able to make more dough

More batch cooking as well. My problem with ovens is they're less "box that heats up and cooks things" and instead "box that combines set ingredients into food"

Take burgers. Instead of say, laying several dough buns out in a tray and baking that while grinding meat into patties and doing the same, you're making each one by hand. Being able to prep and up and down scale recipes would be handy

[Yellow]

I believe the ability to make meat from limbs, specifically named meat, would be an excellent change to chef, as it would make limb scouring the halls/medbay a lot more lucrative, and would change “Grib dibbly meat sandwhich” from a “yes this chef almost entirely killed someone” to a “perhaps they just found an arm, or maybe they killed someone”

[DioChasek]

Easiest one I can think of that would save an incredible amount of time is, allow dumping a produce satchel full of flour or rice onto a sink to get your dough or sticky in one click instead of the insanity we currently face.

I'd personally like higher yields. Like, a bag of flour having multiple uses and being able to make more dough

More batch cooking as well. My problem with ovens is they're less "box that heats up and cooks things" and instead "box that combines set ingredients into food"

Take burgers. Instead of say, laying several dough buns out in a tray and baking that while grinding meat into patties and doing the same, you're making each one by hand. Being able to prep and up and down scale recipes would be handy

Man if I could load a tray and pop it into the oven and make a dozen burgers in 7 seconds I would be so happy. All of this is so much better.

[Lucky.Cobra]

i would personally love to be able to decorate your dishes with stuff like flowers or herbs to make em look more pretty and nicer

[DioChasek]

Garnish for your plate does sound fun.

[Kotlol]

Easiest one I can think of that would save an incredible amount of time is, allow dumping a produce satchel full of flour or rice onto a sink to get your dough or sticky in one click instead of the insanity we currently face.

I'd personally like higher yields. Like, a bag of flour having multiple uses and being able to make more dough

More batch cooking as well. My problem with ovens is they're less "box that heats up and cooks things" and instead "box that combines set ingredients into food"

Take burgers. Instead of say, laying several dough buns out in a tray and baking that while grinding meat into patties and doing the same, you're making each one by hand. Being able to prep and up and down scale recipes would be handy

Defintally this. But I figured that would be a coding nightmare.... but this is 100% a QoL thing.

That and the decoration post. But I fear the sprite work on that one. Maybe just fancy new plates. Since plates just have mini sprites of the food on them anyway so.. why not have a clown face plate for birthdays (or clownery) and other prints on plates. Might even try making it myself.

[DioChasek]

New emag functionality for the glass fabricator clown-deco plates glasses beakers and bowls the ultimate in kitschy dining !

[Shmiggy]

Perhaps multiple racks inside of an oven so you can cook multiple of same / similar things at the same time?

[Nihisohel]

[*]Processing Limbs: We can make meat out of entire bodies but we can't break down arms and legs to make stuff. Apart from making just meat, the ability to make human drumsticks would be incredible or getting the bones from them and using them as sticks for kebabs.

Mmmm soylent green, wonder what our nanotrasen copyright free version would be

i do think there should be more consequences to cannibalism though

[RGBDeadSilent]

Make it so that one person can't eat the entire stock in the kitchen in one go. Nothing worse than cooking up a huge meal, like a bunch of cakes with special ingredients and putting it out on the table. Then the clown walks by, honks and eats it all by himself, like an asshole. Does the Clown think its funny? Sure sure, but its dumb and a huge waste of the chefs time.

So add a maximum size to the stomach so you can't literally pour the entire kitchen down your gullet, and add a trait that increases the size of your stomach if you want to be that person who gorges themselves on extra.

[Deep-Freeze-Defender]

I know a big obstacle for many chefs both new and old is the ol' Alt+Tabbing To Wiki And Hitting Ctrl+F and god knows I dislike it because my computer can't handle DreamViewer and my browser at the same time lmfao

Seems to me that the cooking system for ovens is so complex because most meals used to be made in ovens (after microwaves), so I think the overall quality of life could be made much better by adding specific tools to the kitchen. Stuff that doesn't have to be put on the actual map, but could just be dispensed by the chef.
Something like a sandwich spike that the chef can put on their counter. Add a little fancy menu and allow the chef to make any kind of sandwich by slapping any piece of bread and following it with ingredients until they finish it with another slice of bread. No cooking! No ???'s! No burnt sandwiches because oh my god I can't believe the souschef touched the timer again! Add a funny suicide option too, delicious chef-sandwiches!

This could work for many different meal types, think about how easy soup is, but the obvious con is that it would require coding and spriting for every new kitchen tool, and that could take a while before volunteers get around to it.

[DisturbHerb]

burn down all of the cooking code and start fresh. 🙏