Cooking Reworks: Recipes and Avante-Garde

[Sevenless]

Spitballing ways to fix the cooking system without deleting it and starting over. Probably bad, but maybe?

Recipes:

Allow us to craft a recipe from parchment for a specific food item, and include a recipe slot in the crafting UI. This recipe would give specific requirements to the input ingredients, preventing accidents and making it possible to have mixed ingredient foods without going insane (3 turnips, 1 carrot, etc). Looking at you stuffings.

Include FEP values in a crafted recipe? Be kinda neat for people not alt tabbing constantly for cooking. Also gives valuable info to players from the next suggestion.

Avante-Garde Cooking:

Since the system is already fairly "hands off" in terms of balancing, I think an automated system to adjust balance is also necessary. The fact that we don't have one is why we've ended up in this weird place with a couple super power recipes and a bunch of larper recipes. Rework FEPs given by a food to have a visible modifier (flavour name levels like humdrum vs high cuisine vs avante-garde?) indicating how often a food is eaten by hearthlings at large. Foods eaten frequently will lose potency, foods not eaten/eaten rarely will gain potency. Likely best to calculate this with an eye towards FEPs gained per consumption as well, which would put meaningful weight against powerfoods (if the system doesn't nerf powerfoods and buff non-powerfoods it's not doing what it needs to). Due to possible food combinations in the game, might be better to do this at an ingredient level instead of a recipe level? Combination of both?

This allows the game to naturally balance over-powered foods by pulling them down, and boosting under-powered recipes by having them appreciate over time. This also gives potential information to the devs to adjust recipes as the system will be generating useful metrics. Make this visible in the game though, not a hidden mechanic, so it reduces the burden on players navigating the already complex system. If it's recipe based, say it in the recipes. If it's ingredient based, say it in the ingredients, etc.

[DDDsDD999]

Letting us force what ingredients we want while crafting all would be nice. But fuck parchments, let me just set some sort of filter in the crafting window.

Global balance mechanic sounds bad though. Having to check all the recipes on their current standing with some bots/calculators would be ass. It'd be another unintuitive mechanic that just boils down to a multiplier you apply to the FEP spreadsheet, that you need to check each time you feast. If the devs care about balance, they should try to balance the foods themselves.

[wolf1000wolf]

The avant-garde auto adjusting system sounds remarkably familiar... Like a certain system of magic in a work of fiction.

Seems like an interesting thing for the casuals but a pain for the tryhards?

[TheServant]

I agree. The main problem with the food system is its complexity. Casual players should be able to make some significant progress without investing a great deal of time to understand the mechanics. Haven is, and perhaps always will be, my favorite game, and I fervently hope that one day it can become a popular game. What drives this scenario away is perhaps the developers' own genius, a double-edged sword. Maybe one day they'll give in and make the game more efficient. We need a balance. We are getting old and each day having less time to play the game.. I understand one can play it on its own pace and still enjoy, but still there is room for tons of adjustments.