Aaaaaaaaaah! I just realized something! I can't cook!

My biggest issue with cooking is just the sheer amount of time it takes. You can easily spend hours cooking. And there is basically no profit it in, and really you are just losing money once you factor in the gold you'd be making doing anything but sitting at the cooking station for hours. The amount of sub combines is waaaay too high, they need to increase the yield on things like butter/pie dough/cooking oil by at least tenfold.

 

This is one of the things where I see an unintentional parallel to FFXI, the cooking system makes you combine piles of different ingredients, many of which also require you either to make them from other stuff, or chase down the appropriate NPC that sells it. Almost everything non-cooking is just two or three ingredients, many of which come straight from the crafting supply merchants.

It's surprising that the native population isn't horribly obese!

 

Cooking really drives me batty. The thing is, I really want to do it but when I can't pick up standard ingredients at the vendors who are supposed to be selling produce and such, it makes it very difficult.

What's that? Need potatoes? You can either grow them yourself or go all the way across the map to find someone who does. It's hard enough getting ingredients like Corpion Claws. Adding more difficulty to the mix just makes it too difficult to be worth doing.

I'm all for making further specializations but first cooking needs to be worth doing to begin with and there needs to be a good amount of people willing to step into specializations and make it worth their time.

 

I think some people love it. I think they usually grow their potatoes because grocery stores only display them, they never sell them.

 

What's to know? Follow the recipe, a little of this, a little of that, and when it inevitably burns you order a pizza. See? Cooking's easy.

 

I enjoy cooking.

I already do a lot of hunting of animals for RP reasons so I have copious amounts of carcasses and animal parts for cooking. I have a small (very by the standards I've seen) farm and grow a lot of the ingredients I need. The rest, I buy in bulk (100s at a time).

I've made every carcass I have gathered into a meal, and have an obscene amount of meals in my pantry. Literally thousands.

The problem is, only two or three of those recipes are worth selling because they give good enough bonuses. And I can't sell them to anyone because if someone is going to buy food, they are going to buy the obsidian ones, not anything else.

Though, I suppose some lower tier foods might be good now that we are seeing some new folk come around.

The biggest issues I have:
a) see above: no one to sell too, and
b) PINE NUTS!! Every recipe requires oil, and the only way to make oil is pine nuts, and they are so damn hard to get I end up spending gold to make everything, and it is literally the only item (other than the occasional bottle of wine/milk or glass jar) that I can't source myself, and is expensive, and is hard to find on shop keepers.

 

Agreed on the nuts for cooking oil. Myself I just stay clear of any and all recipes that require cooking oil or pie dough.

The Empty Jars you can find in buildings. But they are mostly private so a Nono for the virtuous.



Regarding the selling and everyone wanting the same foods.
The design flaw is that the food items scale up in duration as well as power.

Which means there is no point or choices to be made with food items. It is simply bigger is better.

While if it had been either duration or power as choices then we would see more variety.
For instance, if the top tier in power all had 30min or 1h duration.

While the 2nd tier had 2h to 6h.

And some would last a day 24h but with tier 3 power.

For instance breads like Bark Bread should last 12h with the current minimal effect.

Then one could differentiate and players could chose between power or conveniance.

Also my opinion is that there should be different buff channels for "beverage", "meal" and "deserts/snack". One shouldn't have a system which optimizes on eating two full meals.
Where I'd say that sweet deserts should have high power but short duration.

 

Wait till they make where that stew can blow up in your face

 

Too many cooks spoil the stew.

 

Look for the seed merchant in Kiln or Etceter for the nuts.

 

Wait till specialization comes out. Gonna be alot of specialized chefs

 

That is kind of my point. Something that is so vital for cooking (there are A LOT of recipes that use nuts (or oil, more so), or at least it feels like it.) that is only for sale in two towns. Maybe three. But Lettuce, which is used for, what, one or two? can be found anywhere or everywhere and in loot.

I know where to get pine nuts, but it shouldn't be so hard to find if nearly half of the recipes the people of Novia eat require it to be in their food.
(Granted, they all aren't eating fried anything... but still, I feel the oil/recipe ratio is off)

 

Man, the nutrition facts sheets for Novian products must be absolutely off the charts.

 

Yeah I agree the nuts are too difficult to find. As far as I know, they cannot be bought in Perennial Coast at all and it makes starting out cooking there very difficult.

They should be able to be bought anywhere really.

 

Ah well, I still never eat food in the game, because I don't usually find a good enough reason to. #:| Maybe if I did, I'd be your customer.

 

It does help with health/focus regeneration during combat... but only the highest tier ones are considered worth it, which is part of the issue.

 

Well, yea, because the people demanding it are doing mostly high level stuff like fighting bosses or PvP and other stuff like that. But out hunting and adventuring, relying on auto-heal and healing spells and so on is sufficient for me, at least, and I think most people, and its just more trouble to buy food and keep it on you than to worry about it.

 

This is very true. I do a good deal of hunting and soloing, and never eat food. I do sometimes when I think I might be in trouble, but that is only because I do actually cook.

 

Is there an updated spreadsheet anywhere that shows which vendors sell what and where?