Cooking, the rocket science of Zalanthas

[spawnloser]

Solution:  Eat travel cakes until you can make batches regularly.  Hell, I've made Silt Sea Stew for a character.  It was all the character ate by the end, and that's complicated stuff.

[Lizzie]

Definitely travel cakes are the way to go, if you can afford to buy flour, or if part of your job isn't to provide food for an entire crew of employees. If you're just starting out and -want- to be good with cooking, definitely..absolutely..positively..go for flour as long as it's available to you cheap.

Unfortunately once you get good at flour, you STILL have to start digging into your crew's raw meat supply, or tuber stash, or grub cache, or fruit bowl, in order to improve beyond being really damned fucking good at making travel cakes. So the solution isn't a solution at all. Thankfully Morgenes is working on that, as he has mentioned in his most recent post.

[X-D]

Aside from what has been mentioned already.

My biggest pet peeve with cooking is that different classes have different max skill levels.

Now Merchant, fine, I can live with them being high.

But why would say a pickpocket have a higher skill level then a burgler?

Though over all the skill level max for most classes is simply set way too low.

Being the poor ranger who finds it easy to get meat but still fails 4/10 tries at 50 days played and thousands of cooking tries.

Bump the max across the board to 75-80% for every class but merchant and give them 95% Then lower the price that merchant NPCs will buy even cooked foods for. Something else I have found to be somewhat silly BTW. When you can sell a pretty common steak to a npc merchant without using haggle for 49 coins. I can see making a living being a cook but man, you should not be able to get noble wealthy selling cooked tubers.

[spawnloser]

I'm just saying, with a character that I wanted to get good at cooking at... I had no problem keeping myself fed on ONLY things crafted myself.  I gave food to people as payment for things because my character could cook fancy stuff.  I understand that it's kinda silly not to get anything edible out of an entire carru, but that also goes back to the skinning code.  Don't lay the 'we have to overhunt just to feed ourselves' problem just at the foot of the cooking code.

[Lizzie]

I agree that it is in part, the skinning code at fault. But I maintain cooking is majorly seriously screwed. Actually, any crafting recipe that -can- produce more than 1 of something..SHOULD produce at least one, even on failure.

Travel cakes work that way, and so do fruit slices. I think any meats that you can craft into slices or pieces or "more than one" of something, produce at -least- one, even upon failure. But it isn't always the case, and I never felt comfortable wishing up to ask if it was a bug or if it was intentional.

If I can make "a few" then I should be able to make one with ease, even if I fail to make the rest of them.

ANY recipe, food or otherwise, that allows you to make more than one of should always result in a minimum of one upon failure.

[spawnloser]

ANY recipe, food or otherwise, that allows you to make more than one of should always result in a minimum of one upon failure.

I'd back this for MOST things, but I wouldn't say all.

[LauraMars]

I have found the colossal failure of the cooking skill to be so ridiculous over the years that it has become comical.  I don't even pretend that I'm going to succeed at the simplest of tasks anymore.  When I have a new character who is cooking something, the scenarios go something like this:

>craft hunk into a hunk of cooked meat
You start preparing some food.

>:laughing hysterically, @ throws ~hunk into the fire and jumps up and down on it.
Laughing hysterically, the tressy-tressed lass throws a hunk of meat into the fire and jumps up and down on it.

You burn the meat.

>craft slice slice slice slice into a small cup of kalan jam
You start preparing some food.

>think (a sudden surge of fury) I...I HATE THIS JOB.
Feeling a sudden surge of fury, you think:
     "I...I HATE THIS JOB."

>:flings the bowl of fruit onto the kitchen floor and bursts into angry tears.
The carnation-eyed, vine-haired woman flings the bowl of fruit onto the kitchen floor and bursts into angry tears.

In trying to make jam, you spill your work.

>rebel
You rebel from House Kadius.

[Salt Merchant]

I have found the colossal failure of the cooking skill to be so ridiculous over the years that it has become comical.  I don't even pretend that I'm going to succeed at the simplest of tasks anymore.  When I have a new character who is cooking something, the scenarios go something like this:

>craft hunk into a hunk of cooked meat
You start preparing some food.

>:laughing hysterically, @ throws ~hunk into the fire and jumps up and down on it.
Laughing hysterically, the tressy-tressed lass throws a hunk of meat into the fire and jumps up and down on it.

You burn the meat.

>craft slice slice slice slice into a small cup of kalan jam
You start preparing some food.

>think (a sudden surge of fury) I...I HATE THIS JOB.
Feeling a sudden surge of fury, you think:
     "I...I HATE THIS JOB."

>:flings the bowl of fruit onto the kitchen floor and bursts into angry tears.
The carnation-eyed, vine-haired woman flings the bowl of fruit onto the kitchen floor and bursts into angry tears.

In trying to make jam, you spill your work.

>rebel
You rebel from House Kadius.

   

[Thunkkin]

<3 LauraMars

[Kalden]

Bump? It looks like there was consensus that this was flawed, but I'm not sure there was ever any changes?

Also, how exactly does one use a grill? Does being in the same room allow it to work its magic?

[bcw81]

>get grill
>ep grill

[Sephiroto]

Code Select Expand


emote walks up to ~grill and tosses on ~meat.
craft meat into grilled scrab steak


That's how you use a grill.

[Nyr]

Bump? It looks like there was consensus that this was flawed, but I'm not sure there was ever any changes?

A good thing to note would be that player consensus on the GDB on a particular topic does not mean that it should necessitate any change.  In this case, it did:

Thanks for the ideas folks.  I have put this up for a staff member to take under their belt and do, with myself overseeing the changes.  We'll work on improving the experience of cooking.

A cursory search shows this thread

http://www.zalanthas.org/gdb/index.php/topic,35673.0.html

in which it was reviewed a couple of times.

[Synthesis]

Bump.

Cooking is still balls.

[Patuk]

Yep.

[nauta]

Bump.

Cooking is still balls.

'Balls' as in good or bad?

[Clearsighted]

The secret to cooking success is doing it in a room that gets a coded bonus to cooking in there. It's sizable enough to make it extremely difficult to fail. But there are a lot of rooms with grills, ovens, and firepits, which don't have this coded bonus.

[Synthesis]

The secret to cooking success is doing it in a room that gets a coded bonus to cooking in there. It's sizable enough to make it extremely difficult to fail. But there are a lot of rooms with grills, ovens, and firepits, which don't have this coded bonus.

Yeaaaah, that's not a fix.

Someone needs to do the hard, grinding work of going through all the cooking recipes and making the "object into very simply cooked object" recipes yield something like 90-100% success rates under the worst conditions at (journeyman) level.

[Talia]

Someone needs to do the hard, grinding work of going through all the cooking recipes and making the "object into very simply cooked object" recipes yield something like 90-100% success rates under the worst conditions at (journeyman) level.

I just went and glanced over the simple meat recipes and nearly all of them are set to either 5% or 10% of skill for difficulty, which is about as low as they can go. Crafting success takes into account the difficulty of the recipe, your base skill, any bonuses you're getting from the room or tools, and then there's a random roll to see if you succeed once those things are factored in.

Changing these recipes further won't help, from what I can see; they've already been as fixed as they can be. I have too much other stuff I'm working on right now to put this particular project on my list, but I do have a general interest in cooking and food in game and I'll keep it in mind to look at.

If there are rooms that you think should give a cooking bonus, we can look at that. I'd suggest sending those through the request tool as clan-related question/requests, directed to the clan that would make sense for the area. E.g., if it's a tavern in Allanak that should go to the southern staff team; if it's a tavern elsewhere it goes to the area team; if it's in a clan area it goes to that team.

[Synthesis]

Meh.  My PC is an amazing cook in the Gaj with (advanced) cooking, but anywhere else I'm shooting 40-50% on "turn a cold piece of meat into a hot piece of meat."  No negative modifiers that I can ascertain.

[BadSkeelz]

Isn't "amazing in the Gaj" and "so-so everywhere else" kind of indicative of negative modifiers at play? Or were you only using campfires and rooms with grills in them (real or virtual)?

[Synthesis]

Isn't "amazing in the Gaj" and "so-so everywhere else" kind of indicative of negative modifiers at play? Or were you only using campfires and rooms with grills in them (real or virtual)?

It shouldn't take a cookhouse to make a damn steak, is what I'm saying.

[wizturbo]

It shouldn't take a cookhouse to make a damn steak, is what I'm saying.

Agreed.  I think the "fail" outcome should be a poorly cooked steak, whereas a "succeed" result would be a well-cooked one.  Cooking shouldn't really have too many fails imo, unless you're doing really fancy stuff.

[aeglaeca]

Wouldn't it be less work to put some cooking tools in some NPC shops that give a similar bonus? I know there used to be frying pans.

[Delirium]

When I figured out that you have to hold tools and therefore have to "hold" the grills, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to laugh or facepalm so hard it'd put Picard to shame.