Cooking Meters

[Frank_Stein]

Essentially, some kind of visual clue for how cooking food is doing.

I imagine at least two meters

• "Cooked": How thoroughly cooked an item is as a whole. This increases at a steady rate with time, and is directly related to heat
  
• "Heated": How hot the item is. This increases quicker and more aggressively in relation to high the temperature of the heat source that is providing the cooking is set to
  

The idea here is that you stick something in the oven or whatever, and you can see it cooking in real time. Use time and temperature settings on the oven to get the cook meter to rise while not overshooting the heat meter and burning the food.

At it's simplest we just have two bars appear above the oven while in operation. If we want to abstract it more, maybe different kinds of smoke appearing to come out of the oven as the meters reach certain stages. Maybe even have being a chef give a certain edge in that respect.

My hope would be making cooking feel a little more open to touch and go experimentation, where you can adjust things as they occur and kind of learn to balance heat and time for optimal results.

Some things that I think could expand on the base concept

• Being able to load multiple foods into an oven to take advantage of different heat settings. Maybe you have something that has been slow roasting and you turn it up near the end while popping in a something that requires high heat for a shorter time
  
• Ovens having cooldown time. By that I mean, they have to cool down to go back to a lower temperature. Turning down the settings only caps the point it will let it drop to
  
• Other food meters like "moisture" to affect other cooking methods like microwave or steaming. Different spice meters like "Sweet" or "Salty" that tie into character traits for roleplay purposes. Have a character that canonically likes sweets and gets a minor buff and debuff to food bonuses that have spice meters that meet or contrast with those traits