Cooking/Hydroponics Reform - The Death of Black Boxes and Generic Reagents

[Kaed]

It's time for another round of Kaed Pitches a Big Project He May Or May Not Commit To!

Something I've been bouncing around for a while in my head is a reform of how hydroponics and cooking work. Right now they mostly work, aside from Nanako's additional cooking code for procedural food, by combining certain foods together in a special machine (be it microwave, oven, or fryer) and pressing a button to wait before your food comes out.  Nanacode food is the same, except what pops out is based on what you put in and your choice of food container for it. Food, however, is mostly a chem that exists in either the animal protein (for meats) and nutriment (for everything else) and your character's mob processes both of these two chemicals to give you nutritional value.  The type of food you ate is irrelevant, their contents are largely going to be either of those two things, and the flavors you taste are given to you by the food container you consume from, not by what's inside it.  That's not a bad system, it works.  This is what I will call 'Black Box' cooking.

What I'd mostly like to do is inject a bit more interactivity and complexity into the process of cooking. I will give you an example of what I mean.

This is how you make a burger now:

• Break an egg into a bag of flour
• Pick the dough that just appeared and fell on the floor up and put it in an oven tray, which you put in the oven
• Quickly pull the resultant bun out 10 seconds later because otherwise the nuclear reactor core you call the oven will burn it
• Shove the bun and a slab of meat into the microwave and press on
• Retrieve burger.  Shove an entire wedge of cheese into the burger if you want to.
• Give the burger to a passing crewmember who will begin shrieking at you if you try to pull out the EFPoS.

Here is how making a burger will ideally work in my plan

• Put flour and egg into a mixing bowl item or beaker, because you can no longer break eggs directly into the flour bag like a neanderthal 
• Pick up the resulting dough and interact with it to shape it into your desired shape (i.e. hamburger bun, hot dog bun, bread)
• Put it in an oven tray and then into the oven, which no longer has to preheat and is just on or off. It also cooks said bun at a reasonable fucking rate instead of burning it in less than 20 seconds.
• Go begin preparing the meat in the meantime. Pick up a piece of beef, which is now a distinct object from non-cow meats. It contains 10 units of Raw Beef, which unless you are unathi, you should not be eating.
• Put the beef(s) in the grinder. Retrieve the container of raw beef, add some salt or pepper (after putting it in a mixing bowl, you savage!)
• Put the resulting burger patties on the grill (a new object) and while they cook, retrieve your hot, fresh burger buns from the oven.
• Once the meat is done cooking, pick up the Hot Patty with a spatula (don't use your hands unless you are wearing gloves or are unathi, or you will burn yourself and drop the meat on the floor violating health and safety regulations which will result in you being brigged) and insert it into the bun.
• Now you have a Basic Burger!  You may also add cheese slices, produced by further slicing a cheese wedge, or vegetables, such as Sliced Tomato or Diced Onions, both of which are produced by using a knife on the relevant vegetable, to make more complex and tasty burgers to order.  All of these items contain reagents that are named and flavored after what they came from, which will be child reagents of nutriment and animal protein.  Due to how tasting works, you should be able to taste what is in your burger as a result.

Cooking will function similarly across the board.  I will be adding things like onions and lettuce, too, and probably using better sprites for things. Food that is typically not eaten raw like potatoes rice flour and meat will have a uncooked reagent inside their vegetable or meat container. Eating uncooked foods like this will cause you to receive less nutrition and also some gross taste messages. We'd call this system "modular cooking', because it involves adding ingredients into a food item like a burger or hot dog manually to upgrade it.

Other ideas:

-Portable grill.  Works like the kitchen grill, but can be dragged with you.  It can't cook as many burgers or hot dogs at once as the kitchen grill, but it can hold some buns and fixings inside its cooler, allowing you to have a BBQ anywhere!

-Mouseburgers/sausages. For when you want to show your appreciation for the local rodent population

-Mystery meat patties/sausages made from more than one meat, which may or may not contain rodent filler. For when you want to be a dodgy chef.

Edited March 21, 2019 by Kaed

[Butterrobber202]

This is a video game, not a cooking simulator. Can we just be happy with a simple system for a simple job designed to be entry-level for new players?

[Kaed]

1 hour ago, Butterrobber202 said:

This is a video game, not a cooking simulator. Can we just be happy with a simple system for a simple job designed to be entry-level for new players?

???

This game IS a simulation. That's the entire point of why anyone plays on Aurora, to pretend to be a spessman. And I don't think I'd quality the cook as 'entry level'.  Even now, there's a lot of fiddly recipes and three different cooking machines to use, to the point where you literally have to have the wiki open to use it.  If you want entry level, play an assistant, cargo tech, miner, or janitor, the main roles for farting around and doing fuck all except role-playing and exploring.

What I'm doing is trying to make the simulation a bit more realistic than magical microwaves. It doesn't change the recipes, it just makes them a bit more immersive and multi step.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Kaed

[Conspiir]

9 hours ago, Kaed said:

???

This game IS a simulation. That's the entire point of why anyone plays on Aurora, to pretend to be a spessman. And I don't think I'd quality the cook as 'entry level'.  Even now, there's a lot of fiddly recipes and three different cooking machines to use, to the point where you literally have to have the wiki open to use it.  If you want entry level, play an assistant, cargo tech, miner, or janitor, the main roles for farting around and doing fuck all except role-playing and exploring.

What I'm doing is trying to make the simulation a bit more realistic than magical microwaves. It doesn't change the recipes, it just makes them a bit more immersive and multi step.

All civilian jobs are very much entry-level. Chef and bartender are the first jobs that expose players to using the wiki. It's important that cooking and bartending remain understandable and relatively simple. I mentioned this before, but more complex does not always mean more fun.

 

Do I think magical microwaves are silly? Yeah. Do I think adding complexity is the way to go? Not necessarily to the extent this post suggests. Does slicing tomatoes and dicing onions (onions themselves are already coded and sprited, so don't worry about adding them) and adding them to burgers sound like fun? Yes! Totally, go for it! But think of complexity like... a sandwich. Making a sandwich shouldn't be difficult. Everyone should know how to make a sandwich. You throw slice of turkey and cheese between two slices of bread, and you have a perfectly fine sandwich. Even a kindergartener can do it! However, the option to make a more robust sandwich is there. Say, I want to make it grilled. Or I want to use peanut butter and slices of banana. Or I want to make it a triple decker extreme sandwich! But that ability doesn't come at the cost of a 6 year old being proud of their sandwich. If we handle complexity by not raising the skill floor, but raising the skill ceiling, we'll really be getting somewhere in my eyes.

 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I like this suggestion! An option to mold dough into different shapes for different foods is a lot more intuitive than what we have currently.

But how do you see this affecting how much food can be produced? How many burgers, fries, and onion rings can I put on my counter within 15 minutes?

[Kaed]

8 hours ago, Conspiir said:

All civilian jobs are very much entry-level. Chef and bartender are the first jobs that expose players to using the wiki. It's important that cooking and bartending remain understandable and relatively simple. I mentioned this before, but more complex does not always mean more fun.

 

Do I think magical microwaves are silly? Yeah. Do I think adding complexity is the way to go? Not necessarily to the extent this post suggests. Does slicing tomatoes and dicing onions (onions themselves are already coded and sprited, so don't worry about adding them) and adding them to burgers sound like fun? Yes! Totally, go for it! But think of complexity like... a sandwich. Making a sandwich shouldn't be difficult. Everyone should know how to make a sandwich. You throw slice of turkey and cheese between two slices of bread, and you have a perfectly fine sandwich. Even a kindergartener can do it! However, the option to make a more robust sandwich is there. Say, I want to make it grilled. Or I want to use peanut butter and slices of banana. Or I want to make it a triple decker extreme sandwich! But that ability doesn't come at the cost of a 6 year old being proud of their sandwich. If we handle complexity by not raising the skill floor, but raising the skill ceiling, we'll really be getting somewhere in my eyes.

 

See, that doesn't seem much different from my idea, though.  It's easy to make a burger this way, and even if there are a few more steps involved, it actually makes more sense to grind up meat and make it into a patty before cooking it than just sticking a whole steak in a microwave with a bun. There are already some mechanics in the game for cooking that rely on putting mooshing together two food items to make a new one, namely how you make a cheeseburger - put a cheese wedge in a burger and it becomes a cheeseburger on the spot. 

7 hours ago, Senpai Jackboot said:

I like this suggestion! An option to mold dough into different shapes for different foods is a lot more intuitive than what we have currently.

But how do you see this affecting how much food can be produced? How many burgers, fries, and onion rings can I put on my counter within 15 minutes?

It should be easy to mass produce basic burgers/cheeseburgers and hot dogs if you want to, but making fancy food in this way is actually going to be easier to remember than it is now, because it just involves adding more ingredients to the base rather than remembering the specific list of say, the ingredients that you have to cook to make a big bite and then a super big bite burger (which involves 3 microwave sessions to make, in current code).  Let me show you what I mean.

How to make a big bite burger now:

• Bun and steak in a microwave = burger
• Burger, 3 meat, 3 egg yolk (raw egg ;s) = Big Bite Burger
• BBB, Ball of Dough, 1 meat, 1 whole tomato, 1 boiled egg, 1 cheese wedge, 5 units salt/pepper = Super Big Bite Burger

Total ingredients needed: 2 dough (1 is cooked ahead of time), 5 meat, 2 eggs (one is boiled one is raw), 1 tomato, 1 cheese wedge, 5 units salt/pepper (10u total) + using the microwave 3 times. Assuming you have all the ingredients ready, from the time you start making the first burger till the super big bite burger is finished is probably about a minute to a minute and a half, including loading ingredients into the microwave and waiting for it to finish cooking.

Contrast how it would work in my system, assuming all ingredients were on hand:

• Stick a patty in a bun.  You have a burger
• Add 3 more patties, and a fried egg to the burger.  With each addition, it becomes something new.  A double burger, then a triple burger, then quadruple burger and finally a big bite burger upon the the contents totaling 4 patties and a fried egg. Up until then, it's just an X burger with an egg in it.
• Add another bun. You have to do this before you can add more meat, making it a 'double decker X-burger', because it will get silly if people make burgers that are just stacks of meat (I'm not looking to have silly joke food items that are just stacks like people used to do with sandwiches). Then add tomato slices, another fried egg, and at least 1 slice of cheese and it becomes a Super Big Bite Burger (note: You may have added the cheese and veggies before this step because you wanted a double or triple cheeseburger with fixings. This is acceptable, and will still get you a SBBB)

Note that the qualifiers for a Big Bite and Super Big Bite are determined by the total ingredients in the burger, with certain points where you have to complete before you can move to the next one. Most importantly that you can't pass 3 meats total without adding a bun, which turns it into a double decker. This is probably going to sound complicated but it's actually not that difficult: you can make a 5-patty double decker (this is the most meat you can fit in one burger) without making a Big Bite or Super Big bite - the main difference between the two is the addition of the fried eggs, which changes it from a regular burger to a Big Bite, and Then Super Big Bite once all the requirements are met. The salt and pepper is not even part of the recipe anymore, because technically you use it with raw beef to make the ground beef you form into patties at the beginning of the cooking process.

Now as for the speed of this... well, if you know the ingredients and have them all at hand, you could go from a pile of ingredients to a Super Big Bite Burger in less than 20 seconds, just assembling the the required ingredients as needed fairly quickly from your premade materials.  This is, in fact, exactly how a 'fast food' restaurant works, they have a lot of prep time but then all the ingredients are ready to go the moment someone wants a burger, and they have it to them in minutes.  Also keep in mind that a steak will probably contain sufficient meat for 3 or 4 burger patties, and instead of using whole tomatoes and cheese wedges, you will be using slices. Your resource usage is a fraction of what it used to be with the wasteful microwave method.

Imagine if you will, too, that instead of a SBBB requiring 'tomato slices' it requires 'at least one vegetable'.  What if the customer doesn't like tomatoes and wants pickles and onions on their preposterously large burger? There's no real reason they can't have it and still get their coveted "Super Big Bite Burger'. 

And we're only talking about burgers! It also saves a lot of time if three people want different items - Let's say you have three people, one wants a hot dog, one wants a cheeseburger, and one wants a big bite. You'll have to wait for the two microwaves you have to finish the first two orders before you can even start on the third one, with our current systems, since microwaves can only process one recipe type at a time.  AND remember, a big bite requires two trips into the microwave, so it's actually four separate microwave orders for 3 food items. 

In my system, you'd just slap a hotdog in a hot dog bun, and then the required fillings in the hamburger buns, and you have the orders ready in 30 seconds or less.

As for the cooking itself, I'm ballparking about a 20-30 second cook time per patty/hot dog/fried egg/etc, but you can cook up to 10 objects at a time on the kitchen grill (3-5 at a time on the portable grill)

Edited March 23, 2019 by Kaed

[SatinsPristOTD]

Nothing mentioned here is really... that difficult. Ya'll are talking about it like he's suggested piping out a new distro loop to churn butter.

Adding a few extra steps (and making sure the wiki is up to date) really wouldn't hinder teaching. If anything, it'll shove new players into the hRP mind-set more.

I like it.

[Arrow768]

I have to concur with some of the things already said.

It is important to draw a balance between making the job boring and making it too difficult by adding a large number of needed steps.
One way to solve this issue would be to provide a certain number of pre-made items.
(For example at my local pizzeria they prepare the dough in advance so when a customer orders a pizza they dont have to mix up the dough, but just take the dough, flatten it, add the ingredients and bake it.)
Similar options could be provided for other food items (such as burger buns that need to be toasted, ...)

One thing that I would love to see is a slight adaptation to the way stuff is served:
Instead of the food magically coming out on a plate, you actually have to take a plate and place the food on it.
If the food has been on the plate for a while, the plate becomes dirty and has to be washed.
Something similar should ideally apply to the drinks; If you have a drink in a glass and empty the glass, you get a dirty glass
Bonus points if you apply a similar system to forks, spoons, knifes, ...

Dirty dishes can then be placed in a dishwasher to clean them.

[GreenBoi]

I want this now. Also, as Satin said, nothing mentioned here is difficult, period, and it's not like the wiki wouldn't be updated to accommodate it. Sure, it's long in text, but it's not hard to do in actuality. And it's not like we need chefs pumping out 10 burgers within 5 minutes anyways.

[MoondancerPony]

Quote

The type of food you ate is irrelevant, their contents are largely going to be either of those two things, and the flavors you taste are given to you by the food container you consume from, not by what's inside it.

This is false. It's actually assigned to the nutriment in the food, proportionally. You could grind it up and drink it and it *should* still taste the same.

Quote

• Put it in an oven tray and then into the oven, which no longer has to preheat and is just on or off. It also cooks said bun at a reasonable fucking rate instead of burning it in less than 20 seconds.

I don't mind the preheating too much. We can just make it faster. The burning can also be adjusted or even disabled entirely.

Quote

Mouseburgers/sausages. For when you want to show your appreciation for the local rodent population

These exist, actually, but adding more/making them more modular would be nice.

Quote

• Put the resulting burger patties on the grill (a new object) and while they cook, retrieve your hot, fresh burger buns from the oven.

We have a grill in the code already, it just needs to be fixed.

Quote

• Put flour and egg into a mixing bowl item or beaker, because you can no longer break eggs directly into the flour bag like a neanderthal 

The flour bag is a reagent container. Disabling that functionality is infeasible and just not good.

That said, the other part of this: using knives to dice ingredients, using mixing bowls, etc. is something I have already been planning. This would actually come in the form of an overhaul of how reagents are handled in general, including a ghetto chemistry system as well as more cooking functionality. Copying it over from a document I had for it:

• Makeshift assemblies for various chemistry/cooking tasks.
  • Makeshift chemistry.
    • Heating a reagent container with a heat source will add heat to the ingredients in it. Water (and possibly other reagents) can also boil off.
    • Adding ice will cool it down, obviously.
    • A knife (or maybe mortar and pestle) will grind the components up. This would be time-consuming, however, and dangerous to do for certain chemicals without gloves.
  • Makeshift cooking.
    • Heating a mixing bowl with a heat source (lighter, igniter, welder, etc.) will have a chance to cook the ingredients in it like in the microwave, a chance to burn the ingredients into a burnt mess, and a chance to do nothing, requiring reapplication of heat.
    • Knives can be used to, for example, grind tomatoes into paste or wheat into flour. May want to add mortar and pestles too, or using a metal rod (or marble brick??) as a makeshift pestle.
    • Add a heat_act proc that takes heat energy as an argument. Defined on all atoms. Will probably be integrated with atmospherics/fires at some point, but that sounds like a huge headache.

This could easily be expanded to include: giving foods flags like "diced", "sliced", etc. when cut with a knife. Cutting whole tomatoes with a knife creates sliced tomatoes, cutting sliced tomatoes creates diced tomatoes, and cutting diced tomatoes (or using a mortar and pestle) creates tomato paste/grinds it into reagents. Cutting a slab of raw beef will make beef cuts, cutting those will make ground beef. It's a little bit of an abstraction, but it works, I think.

Edited March 24, 2019 by MoondancerPony
adds mouseburgers

[Skull132]

On 22/03/2019 at 19:04, Kaed said:

???

This game IS a simulation. That's the entire point of why anyone plays on Aurora, to pretend to be a spessman. And I don't think I'd quality the cook as 'entry level'.  Even now, there's a lot of fiddly recipes and three different cooking machines to use, to the point where you literally have to have the wiki open to use it.  If you want entry level, play an assistant, cargo tech, miner, or janitor, the main roles for farting around and doing fuck all except role-playing and exploring.

What I'm doing is trying to make the simulation a bit more realistic than magical microwaves. It doesn't change the recipes, it just makes them a bit more immersive and multi step.

No it's not. Treating it as a simulation will lead you down the road of dwarf fortress et al. Well, lead you down further I guess. Though I will suppose that keeping a job entirely "entry-level" is also not a good way to do this.

What you actually want is depth. The core concepts of a mechanic should be easy to grasp, but they should expand to really fun and interesting fuckery, combinations, etcetera. If you make it too much of a simulation, then you'll head down the path of surgery: just following the wiki, doing wrote actions that are not compelling at all, since there's nothing to explore.