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Cooking assist


nickodemos

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While in a new game I decided to hit the West Point grocery up and work on my cooking skills with all the fruit and veggies. The idea was good until I really started to work with it. This became a seriously tedious to try and burn up the stock and having to pick six items for each bowl I made.

 

So what I was wondering can it be possible to have an option to let the game pick random things for us? This would be along the lines of right-clicking a bandage and say disinfect all. In our case, it would be right clicking the bowl and have the option to random choose ingredients for a fruit/veggie salad.

 

Asking only because this is a huge time sink that could be easily alleviated.

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9 minutes ago, Zorak said:

The problem is not the number of clicks that you need to do for cooking but no great benefits for dooing so.

 

The only thing I cook is raw meat.

Yeah, i agree. I only cook raw fish or things i found during foraging. I've been trying to do trapping, but it's winter so there's nothing to catch.
All in all It's just not worth the hassle, which is a shame. The cooking skill has a lot of depth to it.
But it's too tedious to be bothered with. Maybe cooked food should add a longer and/or stronger buff?
Or allow your character to heal wounds/inflictions faster. Higher nutritional value would be a good idea too.

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Cooking is useful because it allows you to stave off rotting.  You can cook old (but not rotten) food and get a fresh meal out of it, basically resetting the item's shelf-life.

Alternatively, eating cooked food is a good way to improve your mood.  This is important, because being bored or depressed makes you do everything slower.  And since Zomboid is mostly a game of logistics, this can be dangerous.

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I think whatever they do should be within the confines of reality. What are the actual benefits of cooked vs. raw food? I don't think the real difference will ever be sufficient to justify the over-involved cooking system.

 

A quick-prepare option would be excellent.

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I like to cook. The bonuses are hard to beat for such little investment. How hard is it to make a salad? I understand cooking some other dishes can take a lot of time in the oven/on the fire, but you can do other things while it cooks, or make cook several dishes at once. Leveling the Cooking skill provides great benefits as well. 

 

Many crafting tasks in this game are kind of ponderous, but I always thought that was kind of the point. I do not want to just click on a pile of logs and pick the 'Build a House" option actually.

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3 hours ago, explorator said:

Many crafting tasks in this game are kind of ponderous, but I always thought that was kind of the point. I do not want to just click on a pile of logs and pick the 'Build a House" option actually.

Agreed and yet cooking is the only skill where I go kind of numb doing it. While some of the other skills can be boring in and of themselves, they are not used 2-4 times a day. Cooking really is not crafting anything that you will use for greater things. It is just mindlessly choosing six random items to make a salad of some sort.

 

Part of these suggestions are to help create a balance of realism along the lines of playability. As you have heard so far, many people just cook meat since it is the simplest solution to the boring task of making salads. There are other skills that need improvement besides cooking and yet while you can ignore others, cooking is essential to playing the game. I would love for there to be a system of greater happiness with the higher your cooking skills. Maybe for the first couple levels you can only cook with say three items so your happiness increase is limited. Every two levels you get an additional item you can add. Maybe even start adding random nutritional skill information for finished product. And at level 7-8 gain the nutritional skill itself.

 

If this was the case cooking early in the game would not be a real issue but later on it would prove to be an invaluable skill to have as you start to be able to get higher returns on the items you use so that during the winter months, when resources are low, you can get a better results with fewer resources. I have yet to play a game all the way to winter months so not really sure how hard it is to play with no natural resources around.

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Cooking is definetly worth it. But you don't need to level it all at once. Simply do some cooking from time to time, slice watermelons or bread, cook meat and fish, that's enough to level it quite quickly. The higher your cooking level the better is the nutritional outcome of the food. So if you have high cooking levels you get higher caloric benefit of your homemade food. Later on you need less vegetables or other food to get enough caloric intake for keeping your weight stable.

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I understand I do not need to level it all at once. It was just a spur of the moment decision to try and burn up stock at the grocery before it rotted and realizing this is where a simple function could be added that could be useful for many others no matter what their cooking level is.

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