Revive the Culinary Arts in the 25th and a Half Century

[Kaed]

So, in bay, cooking works like this: you throw a bunch of things in a microwave, and then it turns on, and either a food pops out, or you get a wad of inedible slop. This... works. On a basic, minimalistic and functional level. But it's not really that fun, to be honest. I have heard a lot of complaints that being a chef is an unrewarding, unengaging position, and mostly people try to look at it from the side of the food itself, suggesting we encourage people to come more by making hunger different.

This thread presents an alternative (other than 'port in TG's stuff'): We throw the microwaves in the garbage, and make the kitchen and actual kitchen. We will need things like a stove/oven combo, pots and pans, a mixer, cake trays, a cookbook that is actually a cookbook, rather than a resprited piece of paper with a half dozen simple recipes listed in it. A list of summarized ideas regarding this.

-Items are cooked where they are supposed to be, and individual components may be cooked in different places before the order is actually assembled. Ex: You chop up a chunk of meat into cutlets, cook the cutlets on a stove (this probably takes a short amount of time to complete (bonus points if you have to flip the cutlet during this and can burn your burger if not watching close enough), meanwhile, you mix the dough in your mixer then bake it in the Future Oven that can somehow cook bread in a timeframe that isn't an hour, before inserting the completed meat patty in the bun. All food items would be constructed in a similar way, with some need for restructuring, such as all pastas being made as plain pasta and the alternate forms coming after you add toppings, some of which you might have cooked in other places (such as meatballs)

-When making complicated items that have multiple ingredients put in the same place, a prompt is given that indicates how much you still need to add, ala making an autolathe or other machines. Ex: You have a cake pan, and through some method (using a cookbook on it, perhaps?) you set it to 'lime cake'. Then, it tells you that you need to add 5 units Milk, 15 units Flour, 5 units Sugar, 9 units Egg Yolk, 3 units Lime Juice, 1 Lime, and each time you add a component, it pops up a new prompt saying what is left. Once you are finished, you take the new Lime Cake Pan and put it in the oven. Pots would also work this way on the stove for making things like soups.

-Due to the above, making a 'burned mess' is much less common, but you can intentionally make one by, say, overcooking meats or other foods, or letting a valid recipe cook for too long. Food no longer automatically pops out of it's cooking station when done, instead the station dings and gives some kind of prompt saying you need to remove the food before it burns.

-Add a way to make pepper. As in, the condiment, that comes in pepper shakers. Right now, it is a non-renewable resource, as far as I am aware.

-Add a way to rename and redescribe food finally for god's sake.

Suggestions and critique are welcome.

[Carver]

Port goon cooking 2016.

Whilst the above comment was entirely serious, I do truly believe that unnecessary complexity isn't always a good thing. Although renaming food would be quite nice.

[Kaed]

You see unnecessary complexity, I see an engaging game experience that will continue to engage beyond cooking a dozen things and leaving them on the counter before buggering for the rest of the shift.

[Carver]

I see forgetting how to make anything and having to refer to a wiki page/github even more than chefs already do as is. Making the job even more wiki-reliant and confusing will not attract people unless you also plan to write an in-depth guide on every recipe and cooking process you include with this new system.

[Jboy2000000]

I will say that I think some of this would be good. Being able to pick what you want to cook so you don't put too much or too little, and re-adding ovens and grills would be cool. I remember on the old station, when I still played cook, my Grilled Chicken Breasts were the best on the station, but it only worked because you could rename food with a pen, and roleplayed around that, so renaming food is HUGE yes for me.

[Nanako]

You have my support in principle, but actually coding all of this would be lots of work, and cooking is a largely RP/flavour thing while there are many other mechanical areas to work on

I'm definitely not saying these ideas are bad, they are good and correct and should definitely be done. But i cant see it being on my list of priorities in the near term :<

[Dreamix]

So, in bay, cooking works like this: you throw a bunch of things in a microwave, and then it turns on, and either a food pops out, or you get a wad of inedible slop. This... works. On a basic, minimalistic and functional level. But it's not really that fun, to be honest. I have heard a lot of complaints that being a chef is an unrewarding, unengaging position, and mostly people try to look at it from the side of the food itself, suggesting we encourage people to come more by making hunger different.

So, cooking is as minimalistic and as basic and dumbed down as basically every other job: Chemistry shouldn't just be pushing buttons till the meds are done, research shouldn't just be putting things into a machine that does all the work, construction shouldn't just be magically folding metal into things with one click. Just like cooking shouldn't be putting a few things into the microwave and done.

Except that every other thing that's as minimalistic, as basic and dumbed down like cooking is a semi-mechanical (??? I forgot the word ;_; basically: needed for the station and the game to work) job, and cooking is purely RP. And no matter the code and codebase cooking is working on, people won't really care (except the cook). Unless you make it lé restauràtion dé l'Aurora.

Food renaming would be nice, through.

[LordFowl]

So, in bay, cooking works like this: you throw a bunch of things in a microwave, and then it turns on, and either a food pops out, or you get a wad of inedible slop. This... works. On a basic, minimalistic and functional level. But it's not really that fun, to be honest. I have heard a lot of complaints that being a chef is an unrewarding, unengaging position, and mostly people try to look at it from the side of the food itself, suggesting we encourage people to come more by making hunger different.

So, cooking is as minimalistic and as basic and dumbed down as basically every other job: Chemistry shouldn't just be pushing buttons till the meds are done, research shouldn't just be putting things into a machine that does all the work, construction shouldn't just be magically folding metal into things with one click. Just like cooking shouldn't be putting a few things into the microwave and done.

Except that every other thing that's as minimalistic, as basic and dumbed down like cooking is a semi-mechanical (??? I forgot the word ;_; basically: needed for the station and the game to work) job, and cooking is purely RP. And no matter the code and codebase cooking is working on, people won't really care (except the cook). Unless you make it lé restauràtion dé l'Aurora.

Food renaming would be nice, through.

 

A neat idea, but one that is certainly not being pursued. How could we say that we support simplistic systems when we are focused on complicated systems such as medicine and health. The general trend is not towards simplicity, but towards complexity. And this is a good thing - mechanical complexity keeps the game from going stale, and allows plenty of room for effective improvisation.

I think one of the greatest crimes of our switch to Baycode is the eradication of the Apollo-tech kitchen, the humilation enhanced by the fact that Bay is now porting this same cooking system.

[Dreamix]

(...)

A neat idea, but one that is certainly not being pursued. How could we say that we support simplistic systems when we are focused on complicated systems such as medicine and health. The general trend is not towards simplicity, but towards complexity. And this is a good thing - mechanical complexity keeps the game from going stale, and allows plenty of room for effective improvisation.

I think one of the greatest crimes of our switch to Baycode is the eradication of the Apollo-tech kitchen, the humilation enhanced by the fact that Bay is now porting this same cooking system.

I mean, don't get me wrong, and maybe I just worded it wrong, but I'd actually love it if everything was on the same level of complexity. Just engaging and complex enough to be a 'job on its own', but simple enough so you don't need to actually be a (for example) IRL chemist to do anything. But, priorities, man. Can't focus on the cooking, a job that's purely RP, while leaving everything behind. Or, if you want to port shit from Apollo or whatever, go ahead.

Or maybe I'm just rambling about nonsense. Maybe we can overhaul everything to my (or not just my, but general playerbase's) liking.

[Guest]

It would be fun to see griefers trying to figure out how to actually work some basic gas law and physics laws to grief as an atmos tech/engineer.

Complexity is cool and all but in the end it's still a game, a silly game about silly things mind you. You don't want things to be complex to the point where it just feels like real life. I don't know about you, but usually when I play a game, I play it so it's not real life. For the fun factor of a game.

[LordFowl]

The greatest argumentative fallacy you can make on this suggestion forums is the argument that the developer team "doesn't have the time to focus on such trivial matters". Nanako coded a series of PR's focused entirely on fucking mice. The Developers are deranged and unpredictable psychopaths.

[Kaed]

I see a lot of complaints that this is a really complicated idea, and sure, it's got a lot of moving parts. But it's really more of an overhaul on what we already have than making everything harder to understand. I do not think that people would be unable to intuit that you put cake pans in an oven and burgers on a stove, this is the sort of thing that basic human knowledge of how food works should be able to cover. And I'm actually trying to move AWAY from wiki dependency - the overhauled cookbook and requirement that you insert all the components needed in a secondary container (pan/pot/tray etc) before even being able to cool it, with a prompt guiding you every step of the way on what is still needed. We are simply adding more components and user friendliness to the kitchen, not making it a scary, formidable place wherein you have to run to the wiki just to get anything done.

Incidentally, you already have to do that now. The cooking system we have now does NOT encourage experimentation at all. You do it right or get burned messes.

I can understand the feeling that it seems odd to overhaul cooking when research is a boring as fuck dumbed down reverse engineering shithole, but, counterpoint: Think up a research department overhaul yourself, then. I'm not interested in the science department, my suggestions are going to involve areas of interest I think can be improved. It seems nonsensical to me to say someone's idea is unfeasible based on comparison other things that no one has yet suggested change for. The code has many areas that need work. this is just one of them.