Variable fish recipe

[wonder-ass]

Unpopular opinion, that is somehow not just the general consensus because it's so obviously correct: the game was better with regard to food production when all there was to eat was like pumpkin pies, MBC, Sunlit, and I forget what you even ate for agi.

There are in excess of a hundred thousand foods/variants. Has there literally ever been a single person that's said something along the lines of "ahh, yes. I can't wait to go through this 200,000 line excel sheet to find the 7 best things so I can ignore the other 199,993 things that may as well have never existed". I feel the previous food rework has thoroughly displayed J&L either don't care to make everything at least situationally useful, or don't have the ability to - which is exceptionally reasonable considering the scale of variables they've put in place. Fish are meta food early game anyway.

What is the point of having hundreds of thousands of red herrings?
Less foods good, more foods bad

Sometimes less is more, but the devs don't seem to understand that. Adding more stuff to the list of food/curios doesn't result in the list of useful things increasing, it usually just swaps things out as they get buffed/nerfed. It doesn't change how the game is played, it just changes what you decide to play.

Other games have items that are at least useful in SOME scenario, hafen just has a list of crap you have to sift through.

this is also why legacy was so good there wasnt much but a lot of it had value in its own way. now there is so much but 99% of it has no value.

[Agrik]

I would be willing to bet a large sum of money neither you, or anybody you know has cooked even 1% of food variants.

I'm not that sure to agree, but... is it bad? Do you have the same stance on cooking 1% of real food recipes of the whole world? About sewing 1% of real clothes (incl. headgear and footwear) variants? Hunting 1% of species? Foraging 1% of herbs, mushrooms, etc.?

I see countless unexplored possibilities as a much better option than having all variants checked at some moment, like in a couple of months. When everything is known, incentive to confront each other grows rapidly. There are many games in the stance "nothing is left to explore, just fight", and I'm glad that H&H at least tries to be different.

Even if somebody had checked 1% of the variants, I'd suggest they wouldn't be in a much better position to find that specific obscure better food for their specific situation (not that it actually exists, there's a pretty refined and restrictive "food meta"), because they would've had to put every recipe in an excel sheet to really have access to the information since it's wayyy too much for you to just remember.

Much better than who? They are certainly in a better position than those who check nothing. And then, if no new variable-FEP food can be better than known meta even theoretically, food system revamp needs to be completed. We still have partially old food and partially new food now, not in much balance with each other.

And... I don't understand what "just remembering" you speak about. Yes, such info is put into spreadsheets, is this a problem?

You're right, I bet there's a very, very small subset of haven players that would genuinely enjoy data entry and "discovery" of this kind, but I don't think such a minority should be taken into account with a system that everybody has to interact with.

I don't now how many such players are in H&H. Basically any kind of analysts and explorers putting data bases together. For example, I view myself as one. And it seems to me that authors and contributors of the Cookbook, of the game Wiki, of the map of the game world, are such people as well. Are they a minority that shouldn't be taken into account? I don't want to imagine H&H without even the need for such tools, because of the game simplicity.

I don't think many people would like if H&H had small and fully explored map, short list of obvious food choices, and an obvious sequence of all items to be crafted... or maybe I didn't get you point.

I feel a better option would be to massively simplify the system, and give everything an obvious formula. Every recipe uses its base FEPs, and variable ingredients always give the same static and or percentage based boost. For example, any fish recipe with perch could give 2 +1 int @ Q10, and 10% of it total feps as int. Anything made with laurel leafs could give +3 constitution, anything made with pepper could give +20% feps. Players would have the ability to make a more meaningful choice, because they be capable of actually knowing the choices.

This sounds reasonable, I agree. The current system seems to be is a bit too unsystematic. While I'd like to have endless possibilities of finding better solutions, I'd also like to see some system, not just tons of independent cases.

But I see a downside. A more obvious system is faster to unravel, with lesser amount of checks. With such rework applied to the current food list, we can get too fast to the point when everything is checked. So together with this systematization the game will need a big bunch of a new variations, just to have something to explore and analyze for months.