Food Aging -- Discussion Thread

[Desertman]

I dunno why we'd need to change recipes to accommodate the food aging code.

Yes, it would be cool if recipes needed salt or whatever, but there's always going to be virtual components for tons of crafting recipes, be it food, clothing, armor, or weapons.

Not trying to be a downer, I get what Desertman is saying, but it doesn't seem like implementing food aging necessarily requires food recipes to be more realistic or require more ingredients.  Food will age now regardless of what the recipe for crafting a salted strip of meat is.  And making crafting recipes more complex is a good way for them to get lost as people forget how to make them, especially now that food will poof instead of remain helpfully on a shelf for years to be analyzed.

I personally never create a mastercraft that requires a single virtual component. It is a pet peeve of mine and I don't and won't condone it and I will always try and fix it when I see it.

I am in the minority, and I'm ok with that.  

My whole reason for this however is to add another player-to-player element to salt foraging instead of it being a completely PC to NPC relationship.

I also want to make chefs/cooks more useful and their job more interesting within clans.

Granted, salting food in this regard (requiring actual salt) would be more difficult than just using the craft code and smoking it. In order for this to work you would have to make salting food a much better and efficient method of preserving than any other method to convince people to expend time and energy to gathering the extra resources (the salt). It might be more effort than its worth.

I would however like to see more of an IC reason for going to forage salt than "Well, the Jal guy buys it.". I would also like to see PC's buying it from other PC's or Houses buying it from PC's to help preserve their food stores for their employees. That sort of thing.

[nauta]

And making crafting recipes more complex is a good way for them to get lost as people forget how to make them, especially now that food will poof instead of remain helpfully on a shelf for years to be analyzed.

This is my biggest worry with the new (awesome) change: sample items for rare and exotic treats will no longer be around, and so future PCs will no longer be able to gain access to the recipes (very easily, without asking staff).  I hope someone in a position better than my current PC took a chance to jot them all down before the treats went poof.  It's petty and minor, but it's a loss of lore.

I also know of a couple items that have so many rare ingredients, it is impossible to make up the actual item in the 36 hour window.  I'm working with staff on one of them, but the solution would seem to be to preserve some of the individual ingredients -- e.g., instead of a juicy ginka fruit you'd have a dried ginka fruit, or something like that, or a pickled ginka fruit.

[Lizzie]

And making crafting recipes more complex is a good way for them to get lost as people forget how to make them, especially now that food will poof instead of remain helpfully on a shelf for years to be analyzed.

This is my biggest worry with the new (awesome) change: sample items for rare and exotic treats will no longer be around, and so future PCs will no longer be able to gain access to the recipes (very easily, without asking staff).  I hope someone in a position better than my current PC took a chance to jot them all down before the treats went poof.  It's petty and minor, but it's a loss of lore.

I also know of a couple items that have so many rare ingredients, it is impossible to make up the actual item in the 36 hour window.  I'm working with staff on one of them, but the solution would seem to be to preserve some of the individual ingredients -- e.g., instead of a juicy ginka fruit you'd have a dried ginka fruit, or something like that, or a pickled ginka fruit.

Pickled ginka is probably going to taste really nasty when baked into a pie.

On the other hand, I can totally see a jar of ginka preserves used to make pastries with flour, preserves, marilla sap and a pinch of white salt (no baking soda or baking powder in Arm - but we do have salt!). Could even add an egg if you want to use actual coded ingredients instead of virtual ones. However - using that much stuff should yield a whole lot more than just 2-3 pastries. Maybe if you include a plate on the floor or in your inventory, you'll end up with a plate full of them - a dozen 2-bite pastries. And those pastries will be edible for at least a week.

Anything using vegetable oil should last no more than a week - veggie oil left out to the elements goes rancid very very quickly. Animal fats, however, can last months. Butter at real-world room temperature can stay good for 6 months before it picks up too much ambient scent/dirt to retain its flavor, but will still melt into a cake batter. Butter in a refrigerator can stay good for years. Frozen butter, decades. Butter out in the zalanthan heat? Probably a month, tops, IF it doesn't liquefy before you need to use it.

Personally I like a modified version of d-man's idea, which is - actual components, instead of individual ingredients. So for that plate of ginka pastries:

You don't craft fruit + sugar + flour + salt + egg + oil + water + plate.
Instead, you
craft fruit + sugar to make the preserves.
Then you craft flour + egg + salt + oil + water to make dough.
Then you craft preserves + dough + plate to make plate of ginka pastries.

The preserves would last the longest before decay.
The dough would last the -least- longest.
The pastries would last somewhere in the middle.

[MeTekillot]

1 RL day is a Zalanthan week. Would a peanut left out for a week+ still be edible?

They're Zalanthan peanuts!  So much more hale and robust.

harsh desert world, more like harsh DEEZE NUTS

[MeTekillot]

robust nuts

robustin' a nut

[CodeMaster]

Great change.  I love that the PC population got nastily surprised by it.  Vermin and spoilage typically are that way.

[solera]

Walnuts in their shells last several years, especially if you are hungry.
Dried ginka in pies would be fine, after soaking and soaking.But preserves would be ++, if the damned sap stayed put.

[AdamBlue]

I kinda liked it the way it was before.

[manipura]

Pickled ginka is probably going to taste really nasty when baked into a pie.

On the other hand, I can totally see a jar of ginka preserves used to make pastries with flour, preserves, marilla sap and a pinch of white salt (no baking soda or baking powder in Arm - but we do have salt!). Could even add an egg if you want to use actual coded ingredients instead of virtual ones. However - using that much stuff should yield a whole lot more than just 2-3 pastries. Maybe if you include a plate on the floor or in your inventory, you'll end up with a plate full of them - a dozen 2-bite pastries. And those pastries will be edible for at least a week.

Anything using vegetable oil should last no more than a week - veggie oil left out to the elements goes rancid very very quickly. Animal fats, however, can last months. Butter at real-world room temperature can stay good for 6 months before it picks up too much ambient scent/dirt to retain its flavor, but will still melt into a cake batter. Butter in a refrigerator can stay good for years. Frozen butter, decades. Butter out in the zalanthan heat? Probably a month, tops, IF it doesn't liquefy before you need to use it.

Personally I like a modified version of d-man's idea, which is - actual components, instead of individual ingredients. So for that plate of ginka pastries:

You don't craft fruit + sugar + flour + salt + egg + oil + water + plate.
Instead, you
craft fruit + sugar to make the preserves.
Then you craft flour + egg + salt + oil + water to make dough.
Then you craft preserves + dough + plate to make plate of ginka pastries.

The preserves would last the longest before decay.
The dough would last the -least- longest.
The pastries would last somewhere in the middle.

First thought:
I like the idea of having the components instead of just making something all at once.  It always makes me grumble a bit when I come across a recipe in game that is something like:
- craft A
- craft A into cooked A
You craft A into a cooked A, slathered with a savory 'this' sauce and garnished with sprigs of 'that.'

I do think it might be frustrating to get all the ingredients for all the components for the finished recipe, before one part of it starts to spoil.
I guess you'd still just gather all the ingredients at once, and then make it in two or three parts, instead of all in one go.


Second thought:
Not a single bag, hamper, bin, box, trunk, chest, crate, sack etc in game has giving me the assess echo of it being suited to food storage.
Maybe I'll just make a character who has the sole goal of making one of these elusive bins.

[manipura]

...everything that is a material used in crafting seems to now be flagged with the negatives of spoiled food, making everything uncraftable.

Code Select Expand

craft shimmering
A small, shimmering skin is not fresh enough to cook with.

craft tan.strip
A tan strip of hide is not fresh enough to cook with.

craft chitinous
A rough, chitinous shell is not fresh enough to cook with.

craft short.bone
A short length of bone is not fresh enough to cook with.

[Akariel]

Second thought:
Not a single bag, hamper, bin, box, trunk, chest, crate, sack etc in game has giving me the assess echo of it being suited to food storage.
Maybe I'll just make a character who has the sole goal of making one of these elusive bins.

We need to manually add these flags to items. If you find something that should realistically have the flag, IDEA it.

[LauraMars]

...everything that is a material used in crafting seems to now be flagged with the negatives of spoiled food, making everything uncraftable.

I am sure that will get fixed that pretty fast.

[Brytta Léofa]

At the high end is dried-fruit, which will last for at least 9 RL days, up to 20 when indoors/darkness/preservation container.

Okay, I like the numbers on this now.

Kudos to ness & company for a cool new factor in game and for iterating so fast to tweak it.

[RogueGunslinger]

Honestly the constant tweaks and checks Nessalin has put out for this the past week is kind of staggering. All around holidays too. Dude knows how to prioritize his time.

Thanks nessalin.

[The Silence of the Erdlus]

The item 'an airtight food storage bin' probably ought to have a preservation flab, but undoubtedly someone got around to it. Ah, memories. You can't even get those outside a clan.

[The Silence of the Erdlus]

Fresh bugs and one RL day old bugs cannot be cooked. I already bugged it.

[nauta]

Killer work on the food spoilage code.  A few questions about future developments:

1. Are there plans to give us (or cooks) some ability to estimate the shelf life of a given object?  E.g., assess (or value) <item>: This looks like it might last five weeks out in the open.

2. I noticed that fats spoil (great!).  What about (in the future or even now?):

o untanned pelts/hides (I'd expect spoil rates to be high, but they still would soil unless treated)
o (musk) glands/organs (probably quicker than meats, might affect poison economy in the game)
o leaves (spoil rates would probably be high)

[Miko]

If it doesn't already exist, I would love a flag that a food item/recipe could have that would make it last even less time than normal, like "easily spoiled." It would be very useful for certain food types! Thanks and these updates are awesome!

[Delirium]

I'm okay with herbs and poisons not spoiling until a seriously revamped code is put in place.. the old system works okay but messing with it without gutting and revamping it seems the stuff of nightmares.

[solera]

I would like herbs to be exempt from reality forever. 

[Delirium]

Maybe eventually they become "dried" but they shouldn't just disappear. Dried/fresh herbs could have various benefits and drawbacks.

[Akariel]

Maybe eventually they become "dried" but they shouldn't just disappear. Dried/fresh herbs could have various benefits and drawbacks.

Floristry allows you to dry herbs, but it would be cool if we could keep some of the herbs effects on the dried variants... Hrm. I'm marking that down in my notepad.

[Saellyn]

I wasn't aware drying herbs removed the properties associated with them...? Huh.

[Akariel]

I wasn't aware drying herbs removed the properties associated with them...? Huh.

Apparently it doesn't! Gee, sometimes I'm such a newb.

[Saellyn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io-t-bUkfY8