by Potjeh » Tue Mar 03, 2026 10:40 pm
They just need to simplify the FEP calculation for recipes. The current matrix multiplication (I assume that's what's going on under the hood) produces highly unpredictable results which makes it pretty much impossible to balance. And it doesn't really add anything to enjoyment the game, in fact I'd say that forcing players to bruteforce experiments with millions of possible combinations makes the game less enjoyable. Leave that random shit to something optional like alchemy, don't cram it into the main systems. What we have right now is on par with making it so curios get multipliers to LP depending on how you arrange them in your study.
Anyway, IMO all food ingredients should just have a flat list of bonuses to specific stats, and these bonuses should be show in the ingredient's tooltip so players can make informed decisions while cooking. I think additions would be best (for example using chives in any recipe adds +1 base Agi), but I guess really high end stuff could have multiplicative effects so it retains it's value (for example base Str+2 x1.5 for mammoth meat). With this system it'd be a lot easier to balance recipes by limiting the number of variable ingredients, and it would make it easy to add new ingredients like pickled mushrooms without accidentally creating completely broken ingredient combos for recipes like autumn steak.

Bottleneck