Cooking: What Do?

[DisturbHerb]

i'm sure this hasn't been posted on recently enough for people to mind but since there's been some momentum for a rework of the entire cooking system (and i'm not aware of any specific plans by the developers for this if they eixst), i think i should ask everyone:

what are we looking for in a cooking rework? what about the current system makes it frustrating to deal with, and what do we wanna improve?

i'm lost and i wanna start writing a basic framework for making cooking good so lemme eat ur ideas plea

[BatElite]

The main thing that's been on my mind for a cooking rework is that there is no bulk scaling when cooking anything outside of maybe soup (which I don't know much about). I know and appreciate that the chef's job is more slapstick than it is real, but there's not hope catering to a 40+ crew if every recipe is per portion. Let me make big batches of stuff! I think it'd be okay if you could add n times the ingredients to an oven/pot and get n portions out (saving on cook time) but you could also tie the amount that an ingredient provides to its quality (mostly for botany atm but other categories can follow).

Naturally certain recipes scale much better than others, and I think that's perfectly fine. A giant pot of spaghetti sauce is a lot quicker to do than making tons of sandwiches one by one. (I am hoping someone will one day make like 40 haggises for dinner)


On the back end, a simple sorting algorithm that sorts the recipe list by number of ingredients automatically should fix every "X is unmakeable because Y with less ingredients is first in the list" type bug. Beyond that the conflicts would mostly come down to "X is unmakeable because Z with more generic ingredient types" comes first but IDK if that's ever an actual issue.

Oh also something that can be done immediately: guaranteed sous-chef slot above a certain server pop. It's kinda absurd to me that on 80+ players there's only one person at roundstart manning the kitchen at all and I think the sous-chef is a random chance right now?

[Roddy]

Chef needs to be more front facing on certain maps, because god knows you don’t get any rp or attention if you aren’t. Example: cog1’s chef works through the bar, donut2’s chef was reworked to be front facing. Making the chef be the main focus of the cafeteria helps alleviate some of the loneliness and boredom. 

 And the way recipes are handled in the code is annoying; now that one specific recipes uses dough strips (just an example), you cannot use that for any other recipe unless you further modify it. Which in turn lacks customization.

 Some of the best recipes are the ones that are able to be made with whatever you have onhand- consider how many times you see soup, pizza, or sandwiches. Having certain recipes require exact ingredients is… annoying. And often means you end up with 5/6 things for, say, ramen, but if you put that in the oven it turns into mush. It hinders creativity. 

It’s been mentioned before but, having recipes pull from what you have and offering various outputs to choose from could be fun. Recipes taking multiple variants of ingredients (ex: ratatouille is literally ‘stewed vegetables’ and was always intended to be used with whatever) would encourage people to try out cooking something with what they have available. 

Also- dear god, something to stop people from just eating everything in the kitchen. That really makes me feel awful as a chef when I spend 20 minutes cooking food, and one bored staffie walks up and eats it all.

[cyberTripping]

The big difference between bartender and chef is that, while on the surface they're both just about memorizing lists of ingredients to make a list of things, there aren't any mechanics that say you can't just serve someone a champagne flute of pure ethanol cut with bitters. Like Roddy was saying, sandwiches and soups are the kings of the kitchen because of how wildly versatile they are.

Spitballing random ideas, maybe you could lean into learning from bartending. Maybe there could be different methods of preparation that you could apply to whatever (not entirely unlike how grilling and frying work) and if the ingredients you use for that step meet certain criteria, it might get a specific name or sprite. Make a sandwich with a cooked patty and sliced cheese? that's a cheeseburger. Fry an egg and put it over rice? That's omurice. But you could also still just make a "slurrypod and sliced meatballs sandwich with coldsauce" or "boiled pepperoni slices over rice" or whatever hell concoction, too.

The benefit is that you get to keep the power of specific recipes with wacky effects but also get to take compete creative control.  the downside is that someone has to code it and reorganize every recipe (also it would probably be an absolute goddamn nightmare as far as sprites go)

[babayetu83]

cooking is pretty enjoyable as is now for me at least, the most work i have to do is go onto the wiki and look at all of the recipes. it'd be nice if the chef spawned with a cookbook of recipes. maybe as an aside, an inborne resistance or immunity to food poisoning as the chef/waiter/bar staff would be nice since it's a little annoying seeing a sous chef or something eat a ??? and then start puking all over the floor forever until the end of the round

[Decarcassor]

The lack of batch cooking is probably the biggest issue. You just can't load your oven with 6 times the ingredients to get 6 identical meals. Having to assemble every dish by hand, one by one can get really annoying. Especially with ingredients and utensils scattered all around the kitchen. But since things like nano fabricators can build things in batch provided they have enough material loaded, I believe it woudn't be the most difficult thing to change.

This apply to ovens obviously but also to other machines. Being able to put multiple ingredients in the mixing bowl to prep a large batch of dough for instance would be very usefull. Also a way to carry around a stack of ingredients. The ice cream machine is also annoying to use in this regard since the whole process of mixing dough, baking cones, loading them and then loading your flavor all for a single ice cream is quite the tedious process.

But beyond the QoL that the kitchen badly need there is another huge underlying issue with cooking that is related to botany. A large amount of cooking recipes completly ignore the quality and chemical content of botany produce. And this is very sad as it shuts down a big amount of traitorous shenanigans but also the ability to make healthy super meals. This is also a shame since quite a few botany produces moslty exist for the sake of a few cooking recipes and have very little usefulness outside of it.

[Kotlol]

Imagine working so hard to get ingridents for a hard to do recipe... alot of work...
But now redo it every time...
Chop this, grab that , add this, oven this, then grab food, put them in the oven again with other stuff and uuuuugh.

My problem with cooking is the fact it is slow and has low pay off with alot of effort.
In classic most ignore the chef cause you gotta stay on your feed, free food takes too much time.
On RP most people don't want to interact with the chef cause they are either in the back, busy or take too long to prep food while buying two donuts from the vending machine is enough to feed you.
The reason people interact with the bartender is because drinks can have fun effects but if you order your drink it comes to you within 15 seconds and you can drink it.

Also the bartender is technically not tied to botany for their rarest drinks. It just takes time learning the compound or knowing the secret chems for those drinks.

Chefs on the other hand are entirely stuck on botany or cargo luck draws to get the ingridents they need.

You want to make the perfect spicy tacos? Hopefully botany will be making that.
And hopefully you will be able to get it in time.

So yea. One of the biggest gripes in SS13 for fun shifts is time to prepare. And if making a taco tuesday takes longer then....well...someone blowing up your kitchen. You can see why cooking needs to get a "time buff" if anything.
If they are tied to botany for recipes.... have them have a way to order ingridents from the get go.

A better idea will be a "farmers market" console where they can port in food using their own money.
If they wanna save money, wait for botany, if you want it now, pay your wage away.

I think that alone will make chefs make more fun foods, experiment and most importantly, remove one of the biggest time aspects.
Though mutated crops will ALWAYS be botany only. So if you want magic mushroom soup? Botany is your man.
Also weed is botany only for obvious reasons.

[TDHooligan]

i think a big thing is that the oven timers are the same for so many recipes, so you cant just assume that 6 pies' ingredients are 6 unique pies, and could actually be one very large pie. a pass of the different oven heat/times to make them mostly unique would give the room needed to assume that multiple of the same recipe is what is intended.

ie. ALL the pies have the same temp and time, maybe make the recipes that could take multiple items require a different time
then 6 sweet doughs and a bunch of fruit would = 6 pies.

[Frank_Stein]

I feel there's room to expand batch cooking with the use of things like containers. Things like pots, pans, trays, pie or casserole dishes, etc.

So, in the case of making multiple pies it could be you have pie dishes you place the ingredients inside, then load the pie dishes into the oven. If there's multiple dishes they all get cooked according to the oven settings, but only the ingredients inside the container are combined.

Personally, I'd like if cooking was more hands on. To use burgers as an example, instead of sticking meat and dough into a box and having it spit out an assembled sandwich, I'd rather want to have to make and cook buns from the dough, grind meat and shape it into patties, cook those, then combine them by hand

[Waffleloffle]

hello! I have created a loose design doc regarding updates, reworks, and features that I would consider part of the grander idea of A Cooking Rework. take a look and let me know how you feel about it if you'd like!

[babayetu83]

read it and i love it. recipes using ingredient categories instead of a specific veggie or fruit being mandatory for it would make things way better. the other misc stuff especially being able to feed silicons, the singularity sous vi de and most of all putting hotdogs in the nadir power substations, it's silly shit like that i think makes goon what it is

[fungicidal]

hello! I have created a loose design doc regarding updates, reworks, and features that I would consider part of the grander idea of A Cooking Rework. take a look and let me know how you feel about it if you'd like!

Great ideas, I haven't seen a streamlining of the oven settings mentioned but now that I've read about it I want it to happen.

Rn playing chef seriously is an exercise in futility, the best you can do is make weird shit that can be cut into a lot of servings, like pizza, cake or soup. Itd be so nice if the creativity those foods allowed was applied to every dish