Quality Meat!

[Berzerker Jay]

Who doesn't like to gnaw on strange and exotic animals? I know I do, and I know I've gnawed on some I probably won't gnaw on again. Alligator? I'll pass, thanks. Muskox? Umm...you sure that's all you got? Kangaroo? Now we're talking. Save me a chunk of tail.

I guess where I'm getting at while I reminisce of the various types of animals I've eaten, is that I want to eat the other animals in Kenshi. I want to sample more than just dog, bull, goat, and garru. I see a whole, carnal cornucopia in raptor, leviathan, and beak thing. (By the way, can we have like a name change contest for those? Talk about immersion-breaking... )

But I don't think a river raptor should give quality steak. I imagine it would be like fatty gator meat, and that I wouldn't want to eat much of it at a time. It would probably be 30 Nu, in the game, dried. Meanwhile a 16th of a massive bull, a massive chunk of beautiful protein, only offers 40 Nu?

I suggest that different species produce different qualities of raw meat, which transfers over to the same qualities in the dried meat they produce. Shouldn't be too much of an inventory burden, and if it is well then it is conceivably tough to carry multiple large animal carcasses on one's shoulders anyway. This way, higher grade meat from a bull might offer 100 Nu, and a chewy slab of raptor steak would only offer 30 or 40 Nu. Goats might offer a grade just below bulls.

Just a thought as my ex-slave hurtles himself and his sword after garru in the jungles of Vain.

[Berzerker Jay]

One thing I like that could emerge from this is that some beast in a dangerous wilderness area might possess the finest grade meat, maybe only two each. Hunters would seek it out, and its nests. Depending on what's planned in the future, maybe we might be able to seek them out as young and raise them as livestock at our outposts even.

Mmm.... Meat.

[Berzerker Jay]

Question: is it possible to have a particular biome "upgrade" the quality of the drops?

For instance, could bulls in Vain drop higher quality meat than bulls in Dreg?

[ezekhiel2517]

Also we could have "survival meals", like you are starving in the middle of the desert, suddenly roots, worms and scarabs become a last resource delicatessen

[Captain Deathbeard]

There's a technical problem though. At the moment you have a nice handy campfire to cook all your meat. If there are multiple meat types then the campfire will have to change to a crafting-type object where you have to manually queue up the type of meat you want to cook, which is a lot more annoying micromanagement.

[Berzerker Jay]

Good point. Off the top of my head I think I may have a solution -- what if campfires by default aren't able to produce top-quality meat. Like, if you get that primo steak and you spike it on a stick and cook it over a campfire, you're going to be ruining it compared to if you had cooked it properly in a well-outfitted kitchen.

[Berzerker Jay]

So basically, Bull or Dog, it's all the same if you cook it over a campfire -- charred and crispy.

[swillo]

I think you need to leave the campfire like it is.
And rather than different kinds of meat have different spices. You can add those to the stove when you are creating dried meats on stoves and get various different meat qualities/flavors.

You could put those in as Easter eggs and have conversations in bars or with npcs that would reveal recipes. Or industrious chefs can try different combinations on their own.

This could be a different box on the stove for spices, that could be used for all types of improvements to meals.

but if we are adding hot peppers we need to also be able to build out houses in our outposts!!!

[Berzerker Jay]

I don't know that spices improve the quality of meat...more like disguise it.

Ultimately the issue I see this as a solution for is the lack of meat on many animals, and the definite difference in quality there should be between say a slab of river raptor and a slab of bull.

Maybe different items altogether might be a better way to go about it? And maybe there could be multiple cuts on some animals?

[Captain Deathbeard]

Thats the problem, we want them to be different meat items from different animals, but the problem is the campfire can only take 1 item type unless we turn it into a complicated crafting building

[Zeal]

Thats the problem, we want them to be different meat items from different animals, but the problem is the campfire can only take 1 item type unless we turn it into a complicated crafting building

No chance of doing so, but rather than selecting items in a queue, it could automatically detect, select, and output? Just like a queue list, except instead of providing a list for the players, it automatically selects the output type based on what you put in it?

I can't think of a currently existing example in Kenshi that does this, but it should be doable? Just don't know how much work that would be.

[Berzerker Jay]

It would definitely be a lot better if it was based on automatic detection. I seriously wouldn't mind cooking one type of meat at a time, and that's even pretty realistic. You wouldn't cook salmon the exact same as you'd cook pork.