Crafting/Cooking Recipe Realism

I wonder will there be a concentration on recipes and finding different spices that could be reflected into real life, so-to-speak. Like how we would need 2-cups of water, 1 egg, 1/2 cup a sugar, 3 cups of flour. a teaspoon of salt. etc. Where we could make it in real life if we wanted. This would add an extra level of realism an also would allows us to cook our own renditions in game! What do you all think?

?Baroness BorgKitten? wrote:
"I think that this is an amazing idea! No other MMO has done that before so I think that would be something special. The recipes would have to be tested beforehand to make sure that they would be delicious enough for the masses. But even if it's just the average cook crafting, I would love to look the items up on google & try my hand at preparing them. Also, I have thought about this since I saw these guys during Kickstarter http://www.hearthofbritannia.com/, a cookbook containing popular dev team & player recipes would be cool. We could have a section in the SoTA forums where people could post their recipes & we could rate them, if the rating is high enough, the recipe makes it into the cookbook. The cookbook could be bought for use in your in game house & eventually would be available at the SoTA store for a physical copy, every year we could make a new cookbook.

Wouldn't it be cool to know what Richard Garriot's favorite dish is, Firelotus, Stephen & Chris' etc."

I think that having the ability to find a recipe and apply into real life makes total sense for a game that has cooking and such in it. The monotony of finding a sack of flour, and using an entire sack of flour for one loaf of bread was entirely inaccurate back in the day. The kind of recipes used in Shroud of the Avatar, could be reflected into real life recipes and made at home by anyone who wishes to do so. for instance, To bake a loaf of bread, there should be a real amount of ingredients that are measurable, or at least provide the player with the option to read or print the actual recipe to put one page of lore back into the recipe pocket of the masses.

All of us over at MGT470 love this idea. What do your developers think, and what does everyone else think about this idea as well?

 

I think it sounds to tedious for the average player.

 

Tedious sounds correct... and tracking how many teaspoons, cups, gallons of things you have would also be cumbersome, not to mention the difference between metric measurements.


to make one of my favorite dishes (Chicken en croute) would require gathering a ton of ingredients, chicken, rice, 6 eggs, butter, milk, flower, salt, chicken broth, olive oil, shallots, mushrooms, wine, pepper, lemon juice.. make the rice dish (risotto), flatten the chicken, make the pastry, wrap it up and bake and then cook the sauce...Yeah... making irl takes a lot of time but it's delicious and worth the time.. making it in a game without being able to eat it? yearrgh!!

I wouldn't mind seeing a cooking recipe book with actual recipe's submitted by players/developers. But not actual in game recipes.

 

More than tedious, following an entire cooking process to a tee would get rid of the need of a Cooking skill for your characters since a lot would be on the skill of the player. I don't see that's what the OP is suggesting though.

I'm assuming he means since there will be "crafting recipes" in the game, where the player in game automatically crafts based on a recipe, for cooks there will be crafting recipes for cooking. And the recipes don't need to use up an entire sack of flour.

I agree with not using up an entire sack of flour in a cooking recipe. There's no reason why sacks of things can't have quantities to them. That wouldn't be any more tedious than keeping track of reagents, or keeping track of gold, or keeping track of arrows. No metric conversions would be required. You just see your bag of flour going from full to 3/4 full to 1/2 full to 1/4 full and know that when it runs out you need more flour.

 

Tedious indeed. I do like the idea of player submitted recipies though that can easily be done by writing a book. Someone will likely try to go around collecting recipies from other players and putting them together into a collection of in-game cook books. I can SO see that happening.

Having to track portions of ingredients per recipie? Not only tedious but not realistic. Every one of those recipies would have to be coded into the game in order to function.

However, if you'll permit the shameless plug. Bob Star started a thread on cooking that has some interesting ideas for a more flexible cooking system.

https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/crafting-food-dev-replied.1682/#post-20801

To sum up the ideas I'm refering to.. having a primary recipe requiring base components.. ie pie crust + filling = pie.. but having secondary ingredients also (such as spices) and the pie filling could be almost anything.. so you have one basic recipe you could use to make any number of different pies.

 

You can make the recipe look really complex on paper.
You can have very sophisticated crafting animations.
As long as the actual game play comes down to gathering a few things and clicking a button.

Feel free to assume that minor ingredients are simply part of the crafting station and no special effort is needed to collect them.

 

I thought that most people would think that cooking style in a game would be too tedious, which I understand. I was more so pushing the cookbook idea, I just think it would be cool to have a cookbook made by our gaming community. I personally do not cook much & am no expert in any way but I think that the cookbook would be fun to learn from, something for experts & novices alike.

 

The popular recipes could be added to the game & be cooked in a simpler play style than using the precise ingredients.

 

I think you can make it really tedious and involved for the <i>character</i>. Just watch what you do for the <i>player</i>.

I mentioned this before but I like the idea that there's such a thing as a better crafting station. So maybe the good ones have running water and others you need to go get it. Maybe the best ones have boiling water. I like the idea that there's sub-tasks which can be done by a servant / apprentice.

But don't push any of this on the actual players. Just automate it.

e.g. I'm sitting by a campfire with raw chicken trying to make "fancy roasted chicken whatever". My companions (with their limited cooking skills) are sent off gathering and boiling water, chopping stuff, picking flowers, or whatever else goes into the recipe. This just plays out over however long the game decides it takes to craft the meal. But it's all 100% automated.

 

Read my above post PrimeRib, my idea was more so for a cookbook that SoTA gamers could contribute to, the idea was for a physical cookbook, one that could be bought on the SoTA site. Maybe this would be a better post in the Swag section of the forums. I think it would be cool though to put some of the popular recipes in the game. I understand that cooking with precise ingredients can be tedious, the recipes could still be cooked in the game as something more simpler &amp; fun than just cooking an actual meal with exact measurements &amp; such.

 

Okay i see.. So you follow a more normal number and amount of ingredients, but it also gives you a player's recipe for making some irl? I get it, and it could be really cool.. Especially if you could get multiple recipes and up vote them to get put on the main screen choice.... ooo who makes the best cookies? mmmm....

What would be interesting is the weird dishes.. fish head soup or ingame-only things.. where someone needs to be inventive... like some sort of creature's fried brains or something... so jelly mold brain or shape hamburger meat into shape of a brain etc...

 

@Sir Mishri, ah you get me, haha yeah it would be interesting to see what people do with that.

@PrimeRib, Sorry for the short post above but it's hard to type in these forums on an iPhone, at least for me it is XD I do like that Daven wanted to cook in a more realistic manner but of course you can still simplify cooking to what the majority of players are comfortable with, I in no way want to force a more intense play style on the masses if that is something they do not want. I can definitely understand that. I love the fact that Richard Garriott &amp; his team are allowing ways for us to contribute to the game &amp; to add our own creative touches to the SoTA world, not only by adding our own ideas &amp; pieces of story &amp; design, but in whatever way our creativity can take us. I think this is yet another chance to do so. My inspiration came from this wonderful kickstarter project http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plotbear/publish-the-5-food-of-eating-cookbook as well as from the amazing guys at http://www.hearthofbritannia.com/. I seriously have no inspiration for cooking, but a cookbook by SoTA gamers for SoTA gamers would get me curious about trying some of the great recipes I would find. To think that some of those dishes could be put in the game world would be cool, knowing that the dev team isn't deciding the food ideas on their own. I guess it's pretty weird but I always wanted at add my own dish idea to the MMO games that I've played. Of all the things in a game to worry about, I know food is probably the last, but if others like this idea then maybe something could come of it. Maybe this whole idea is bad, maybe not but I'm just laying it out there in case maybe others like it too.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood Ah, thanks for posting such an idea &amp; thank you for the forum link :3

 

As I said, I'm all for it being as realistic as you want it to be. I was imagining you could stream/youtube a cooking show straight from the game as your character made the recipes. I love the idea that you could just sit all day and watch your character bake...or someone bake while someone else runs the shop...or a whole team of people collaborating on the tasks. And this can be done with apprentices or NPC servants or whatever. I'd love to see players basically be able to say something like "this is what I do when I'm offline" and it goes through a schedule and queues of tasks that you can interrupt to do something else when you're on. (Love to see a mobile app around this too.)

And this would include any crafting, not just cooking.

As long as we can keep actual gameplay being the simplest possible thing so that people who don't care and are just trying to do the minimum for avoiding the "starvation" debuff, I'm all for it.

I'm all for seeing a physical cookbook. Or as you discover recipes they can sent to your kindle or whatever else too. It's just about not adding a dozen steps and ingredients over-complicating game mechanics.

 

I believe BorgKitten and SirMishri have the point down-pat. I was referring to how the recipes, if any, in the game are utilized to provide food in-game, the player should be given a real life recipe prompt, or opt out of the RL recipes with one click. I, for one, would love to see all the different recipes that players come up with, but the game mechanics are as simple as typing a few words, and would give some added realism to the game. LOL when i was saying for instance, measuring amounts, I was meaning by not using up all of the flour as was noticed in an earlier post. It does not make any sense whatsoever to have one muffin take up a whole 15 pound sack of flour from one usage. So how do we address that scenario? Anyways. The suggestion is to provide the player with a real-life rendition of the food being crafted.

If a player is baking some bread, or cooking chicken, is the chicken bland? does the taste of the chicken give more health than average if it tastes better?

**Grills some chicken**
Game-prompt

"Would you like to view the recipe for this?"
Yes/No

If Yes
"Prompt Recipe into view"
Print? Yes/No

I do not believe it is sensible to force every player to tediously measure a teaspoon of salt and a cup of milk, but it would make sense for the crafted item to only take a certain amount of each resource automatically. If you bake some bread, the bread should take an automatic amount of flour, an automatic amount of water, etc. it's hilarious to think that though. Dam, i forgot my measuring cup back at the house.. **sigh**

 

@DavenPockMGT470: When looking at minecraft, you use much more resources than it would actually take to make a cookie(1). However if you make cup cakes in SOTA maybe you get 5 bakers dozen, not one cup cake. When bakers make small things like donuts, cupcakes ect. they make them in quantity, not one at a time.

When I said tedious earlier, I don't want to go find or buy 15 things to make just one thing for myself like Sir Mishri mentioned, its not bad for a baker or a cooking shop, but for a single player it can get way to tedious to make one meal for myself.

 

@PrimeRib, sorry for not saying earlier but I love your crafting station idea :3

 

Couldn't we accommodate both sides here by having a selection of standard iron ration type recipes for those who don't wish to get in depth with the cooking skill, and have the detailed recipes like are being suggested for those who do wish for the detailed recipes?

Personally I like the idea of having realistic recipes producing realistic food in game. Having worked in restaurants for 12 or so years I'm somewhat partial to seeing food and ingredients done in detail . But I'm aware that many couldnt give a flamb?ed mastodon loin for such a concept. I do like the suggestions in this thread. So long as we keep an eye for how difficult it will be to code this, it will help meet the Devs approval.

This won't please some of you who were wanting actual recipes (something I would love to see by the way). But in an effort to avoid the metric vs. standard measurement issue, recipes could be made to use the term "unit" instead of ounce/gram. Meaning a bag of flour could contain say 10 units, and a cake recipe might call for 1.5 units of flour. Meaning that your bag of flour now shows to have 8.5 units left, or 8.5/10 after making a cake. This would avoid the different measurement standards.