Lo-Fi Games

I noticed that cooking seems to speed up food production. While this is ok, it is not very realistic.

Instead i think it should increase how much nutrition you get from the food. This would make the skill a little bit more valuable, and encourage players to have a trained cook per base.

Because of item stacking this suggestion is pretty impractical. you'd get tons of food that cant stack with all different NU values and oh god why please no. Also, if you want to talk about "realism" im not sure a better cook can magically make food more nutritious using the same ingredients, though im sure it would taste better. We're already encouraged to have a trained cook, they cook up to around 3 times as fast as an untrained cook.

The nutritional value is still the same via a good cook and a bad one. the difference will be taste and quality.

What if the bad cook burns much of the food and has to cut away all the burned parts?

Low cooking skill should reduce NU, not the other way round.

I could see a quality system similar to what we have for gear. The cook definitely does impact the nutritional content of a meal, anyway. Nutrients are lost like mad in the cooking process, but at the same time nutrients are made accessible in the cooking process. It's a delicate line that someone can bumble or finesse through according to their skill.

I think the quality system would be a better way to go about it, though, because of A) the stacking issue, and B) food that is more nutritious than general should be rare, while food that has had nutrients squandered -- Shoddy Grade -- might be much more common.

Mattk50 wrote:Because of item stacking this suggestion is pretty impractical. you'd get tons of food that cant stack with all different NU values and oh god why please no. Also, if you want to talk about "realism" im not sure a better cook can magically make food more nutritious using the same ingredients, though im sure it would taste better. We're already encouraged to have a trained cook, they cook up to around 3 times as fast as an untrained cook.

Without necessarily weighing in on the nutritional value idea itself, the stack problem could be fixed by averaging out the nutritional values of otherwise identical items. So that isn't such a problem as you make it out to be.

I think though if something like morale ever becomes a thing, that's a better area where quality would be tied to skill. But again you'd just average it out among the stack.

I wouldn't do that for say... weapons or armor, but for bulk items like food or raw materials that is a fine solution.

Berzerker Jay wrote:I could see a quality system similar to what we have for gear. The cook definitely does impact the nutritional content of a meal, anyway. Nutrients are lost like mad in the cooking process, but at the same time nutrients are made accessible in the cooking process. It's a delicate line that someone can bumble or finesse through according to their skill.

I think the quality system would be a better way to go about it, though, because of A) the stacking issue, and B) food that is more nutritious than general should be rare, while food that has had nutrients squandered -- Shoddy Grade -- might be much more common.

I think this wold be the best.

Instead of shoddy we can have: "under cooked, burnt, dangerous, shitty, Awesome" etc etc

This also opens the door, for poisoned status... Like having poisoned food/getting poisoned by food.

In this case, raw food would give the most nutrition. When we boil foods we are getting rid of a lot of vitamins and other nutrients. When we simply cook something on a pan that takes out water and nutrients as well.

If anything, there should be a cap on nutrition for lower skilled workers, then it would go away around level 30. Although to be honest, I would rather see something like this happen for weapon smiting. There is no way a lvl 1 weapon smith is going to make a perfect Katana in a real world situation.

Except raw food doesn't give the most nutrients because the cooking process makes more of those nutrients available. Forgive the explicit reference, but when it comes back out of your other end it still has plenty of nutrients left in it -- all the nutrients your body wasn't able to take in.

There is a definite balance between the total nutrients in food, the nutrients made accessible by cooking, and the nutrients burned off by cooking.

For an example, if you eat raw meat you're going to have a very difficult time breaking down the protein. By the time it makes its way through your digestive system a lot of the proteins will remain intact.

To solve all problems and get the added bonus of cooking skill affecting NU, I suggest going about it the opposite way. Low cooking skill should produce food with NU missing. Higher cooking skills will result in food with only a few NU missing. By having it subtract NU, all food items are technically still the same and stackable (we know that partially used items stack with unused items). This can be done for any consumable item that is crafted as well (Meds, Splints, etc.).