How to make cooking easier for new players

Cooking is a survival skill and should be learned early since the focus costs during fighting can be an issue.

1. Reduce the requirements to make lower level food.

The bark bread and other breads should be easier to make. The fish meals would be nice also.



I attempted to make bark bread and was told to have 40 proficiency to make this.

So, lowering the requirements would solve this and would also increase success chance.

2. Make the supplies easier to find.

The only ones that have been hard to find are the maple bark for the bread and pine nuts to make cooking oil for the fish.

The only way I know to fix this is increase the rate of finding these harvesting trees.

3. Add cooking quests.

I like the quests where you go out and gather resources in Solace Bridge Outskirts.

It would be good to be guided through the process of making one or two meals.

Also, you would learn the recipes to make these instead of having to find and buy them.

 

Maybe there could be some skill that comes before actual 'cooking', which infers actual cooking with pots and pans at a station. This could be a survival style of cooking? Agree with all.

 

Yes, agreed that the introduction to production skills could be handled better, so there is a somewhat more linear progression, say past skill 40, in difficulty in finding ingredients, etc, but before then, it could be easier to get started, more difficult to master Hopefully all major crafting skills will get a play through by a dev (before too long) from 0 to 40 at least to assess for balancing, etc.

 

I would like this, because at my current level I still can't even cook anything because I still lack items.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...A0zYmaFPEZEjvpt_I2Bojg3kk/edit#gid=1976746119

It looks like Ardoris has most of the produce, but the pine nuts and carrots are harder to find.

It looks like Kiln has those. I did not see Etceter listed they may have some also.

 

Then it is not convenient. To get to ardoris you must typically pass through a 5 skull gate. I barely survived it when I was starting out and I trained pretty hard first.

So for a new player that wants the supplies mostly found in ardoris that's ridiculous.

But to have to rely on a spreadsheet to find seemingly common resources seems a bit absurd. If I had up all the spreadsheets I have been sent for where to get x y and z it would crash my browser.

 

There should be a way to craft food with items available based on where a player is located.

Other cities like Brittany or Owl's Head also have grocery vendors.

They could also add more recipes based on what is available to make cooking possible in any region of the game.

 

Here is another idea - create recipes that are region specific - Perennial Coast, South Paladis, Drachvald with ingredients that can be found locally.

This would go along with the regional economy theme and give players more options for cooking.

 

So, food is a tricky thing -- there are some tiers that require farming or finding a town with a farmer NPC to produce them, others seem to be more locally/globally sourced. Bark bread seems to be the default 'recipe' ATM though. There are also recipes that seem to be region dependent, or you have to pass one of those tier 5 gates. HOWEVER! -- if you go back to the starting area of your region, you can actually find a lunar rift that depending on the in-game moon phase, will TP you to a different region, so you can use that to bypass at least some of the lv5 gates.

The other gotcha I've seen: pecan nuts are actually a gating item to making cooking oil, which most of the 'hot' recipes depend upon. Not all towns have a pecan vendor. They do drop randomly from tree harvesting though, so if you level your forestry, you can begin to accumulate your nuts. Happy squirrelling!

As for the cooking proficiency, level gain in cooking actually happens stupidly fast up to about lv35ish where you get around the 40 proficiency spot. Just buy some sacks of wheat and milk, and make some flour+butter. You'll level into the basic 'cooked/baked' recipes really fast.

 

There are still lunar rifts we can travel with? I have not seen one for a very long time that worked. Where are these?

 

Solace Bridge, Blood River and Highvale.

 

Found another source of pecan nuts if you get tired of chopping trees. So at least fish meals are possible in this area.

 

I've known about this but thought killing a squirrel might be a virtue hit so I've refrained from doing this.

 

Vegetarianism/Veganism aside, dont think hunting for food was ever not virtuous?

 

This is the closest vendor that sells nuts. If only the trees dropped more nuts, then I would leave the squirrels alone.

 

don't forget cannibalism!

 

The trees are dropping as many nuts as the squirrels leave on them...

 

Make butter and pie dough, once you get to being able to make surprise foods, you will need lots of pie dough, and that requires butter.

 

Perhaps, but I got docked for giving someone one of their possessions back that I was asked to retrieve so I have no idea what pisses off the Oracle.