Multiple Course Meals

[Kajin]

Nutrition mention in Mondoid got me thinking on a couple of different ways to improve the food system.

 

First idea is turning tables into a storage unit like shelves and updating their sprites to indicate that there's food on the table.

 

Second idea is the introduction of a multiple course meal system. Make multiple food item types and combine them into a meal with as many courses as there are item types. So you cook a steak, bake a piece of bread and make a soup from potatoes, carrots and other vegetables. Put these three items on the table and they're turned into a meal with three courses that is then divided into multiple portions of each depending on how much total hunger the whole meal satisfies. Eating from the table consumes a single portion of the meal

 

Third idea is expanding the player's repertoire of cooking options so there's more variety in cooked food items that can go into the multiple course meal system. Bake bread using just flour and water for plain flat bread or add any number of other things in a modular method comparable to the stew or soup methods of cooking. Maybe add butter, milk or eggs to enhance the flavor and nutrition of the bread. Maybe take some garlic from your garden and add it in for extra flavor and a mild boost in nutritional value. Take potatoes and dice them up into hash browns or mash them, butter them and serve them as a side dish. Some other stuff I'm too tired to think of.

 

Fourth idea is make it so that there's an upper limit on how much hunger's worth of food can be put inside a single container for cooking. Separate pots and frying pans into different sizes that vary in how much food you can put into one. This would make it so that players will probably need to juggle around a couple different pots and pans while fixing large meals. That might make things annoying, so it's debatable if it's a good idea, but I'd think it accentuates the meal course system nicely. Makes it so that finding a large pot that can make lots of highly nutritious multiple ingredient stew is an event worth celebrating.

 

I think the addition of multiple course meals would help make it easier for players to manage their nutritional intake and make meal time more interesting and dynamic. Make it so that players are encouraged to put more thought into their meal planning rather than just tossing it all into a stir fry and eating it straight out of their pockets >.>