suggestion: cooking improvement (a big meal)

[mightyhuhn]

the current cooking is limited to 1 meal at a time.

so here is my suggestion that make cooking faster by making the cooking time more important and the cooking skill compared to walking.

let them cook up to 7 meals at a time by a new bill (big simple meal).
it need 70 of each resource and takes a longer time to cook like 3x a normal meal. the speeds needs a testing but this behaviour makes a lot more sense and give the cooking skill more important because currently when cooking the cooking it self takes little to no time compared to the walking. I don't want to make cooking a lot faster. i want a good cook to cook notable faster.
this should be easy to add everything that is needed for it should be part of the game. the cooking bill has only 3 bills so 6 doesn't bloat it to much.

i can believe this isn't suggested before so i search for it and couldn't find it so i guess i missed it so here i go again.

[Scrabbling]

i can believe this isn't suggested before so i search for it and couldn't find it so i guess i missed it so here i go again.

You need to up your searching game 

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=33176.msg338079#msg338079
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=9190.msg91053#msg91053
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=28846.msg290450;topicseen#msg290450

And as with most frequently suggested things, there is a mod for this - or rather multiple mods. For example: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=729690064

But if you'd ask my opinion: I find time investment per meal quite balanced in vanilla. And with time investment I mean hauling plus cooking. Hauling can be optimized quite a bit by having a decent layout with finetuned stockpiles and priorities. If this is more or less optimal time/meal is what it should be IMO. So if you add cooking in batches to the game it should not take less time (per meal) but quite a bit more (per meal) to adjust for the hauling that is no longer necessary.

[SpaceDorf]

Also try searching for bulk meals in the mod section 

[mightyhuhn]

there was no question that there is a mod. but i think there should be vanilla.

But if you'd ask my opinion: I find time investment per meal quite balanced in vanilla. And with time investment I mean hauling plus cooking.

pawn have a cooking speed stat that barely matters with the current cooking.

So if you add cooking in batches to the game it should not take less time (per meal) but quite a bit more (per meal) to adjust for the hauling that is no longer necessary.

with out a question the needed work to do it should be increased by at least 3x so cooking speed is more important.
but in the end you should be rewarded for having the material to spare some time (mostly from hauling) it's faster in reality too.
like i said it needs testing.

[Scrabbling]

Since my point with time per meal obviously did not come across, let me state it more clearly:

• Assumption: Food production right now is balanced with regards to (total) time needed.
• Problem: It lacks common sense. Nobody would cook individual meals for 4+ people to feed.
• Your suggestion: Cook 7 meals with 1 hauling trip and need 3x the cooking time of 1 single meal for all 7 meals.
• My critique: That would be unbalanced as hell. If the assumption is correct and if you don't want to make the game any easier, cooking 7 meals at once should take MORE than 7x the time to cook to compensate for the saved hauling time.
• Problem: This again lacks common sense. If bulk cooking would indeed take longer nobody would do it. But everybody does it, so this can't be.
• My point of view: Don't prioritize realism/common sense over game balance/mechanics. If the balance is fine don't mess with it. So I would not want to see your proposed change in vanilla. My guess is that the developers are with me on this one because bulk cooking is such an obvious possibility but not in the game so I would interpret that as a decision against it. And that's why I pointed to a mod. But I could of course be wrong and you could bet on your suggestion to be implemented. In that case ignore the mod and wait.

[mightyhuhn]

of cause it going to be faster.
but it shouldn't be faster than let's say 20% which is hard to calculate with the hauling time no question.

that's why it needs testing and i can't make total numbers.

there are a lot of ways to do that.
example1:
make cooking take a longer time in general. the exception is the simple meal which doesn't have a "bulk" version.
in this case you need 6-7 times the cooking time to cook 7 meals.
but this may make cooking one meal not viable.

example2:
maybe the normal cooking time is fine and it just takes 7-9 times as long to bulk cook 7 meals and it'S still faster.

how much faster makes cooking to easy?

the next problem is path optimization a want game part? so is this factorio part an important part of the game? i'm not the game dev so i don't know. i have a feeling a reasonable layout it important but not the game focus which is the created storys.

[patoka]

sorry for necro but in my opinion there are only two possibilities:

either make the game realistic (which was never intended) or make the game have many (if not very efficient) tools for survival and therefore story creating.

if we wanted to make it realistic, we had to add two bulk cooking options for simple meals and fine meals. lavish meals first of all require too many resources to start with to make it practical to bulk cook, but also realismwise it is hard to cook many perfect meals at once and i am a 3 star cook (not really). i guess you could add an option for bulk cooking pemmican aswell at this point, to let's say produce 64 pemmican from 20 meat and veggies each, but that is less important because it is already a bit impractical.
EDIT: i just gave it another thought: if you butcher something big, the colonist can also carry more than 75 meat at once, so i guess you should also be able to bulk cook pemmican as anything else.

how long this process would take is quite easy to say for anybody that has cooked a single meal for himself and a larger one in his life. it DOES take longer, but not as many times longer as you produce additional meals. i guess it is the most extreme when you cook rice. you can make 10 times the amount with barely any more time needed, but cooking a whole turkey for thanksgiving takes way longer than some sausages from the deep freezer, but then again that is represented with the simple/fine/lavish mechanism already.
lastly, if you just look at the sprites of the meals you'll find that the simple meal is just some kind of soup or goop. it is easy as pie to cook a soup for 50 people, you just need a big enough pot and a bit more time (and energy) to make the water boil.

so from a realism perspective you would need a very time efficient way of bulk cooking.

but what is way more important is how a well balanced bulk cooking recipe would look like and if that even is desirable.

first let me tell you where i am coming from: for the longest time i didnt use to care much about efficient cooking. i just installed a bunch of stoves and let all my cooks cook simple meals. they had long hauling routes and if i look at it nowadays, it is a quite abysmal way of cooking. no wonder i never had a cook above level 11, my cooks would lose all their skill immediately when they haul stuff. still, it wasnt very disturbing, but maybe that was just me. now obviously i found a very efficient way of cooking (armchair for sitting, surrounded by stools with food ready to be cooked and cooking recipes requiring meals to be dropped and everything is inside a heated room in the fridge) and now i feel like cooking has become TOO efficient :/ a good cook will just sh¡t simple meals out like there is no tomorrow and the haulers cant keep up with bringing ingredients (while still being able to do other things aswell)
i believe that the trick with the stools is too detrimental and difficult for new players to understand. the stool trick is great for producing medicine for example, but for cooking it is TOO good, as said. i'd enjoy bulk cooking recipes because it would weaken the stool trick in comparison and therefore make the game more accessible for new/weaker players.

now how could this be remotely balanced, when i already stated that the stool trick is too powerful? how would making cooking even more efficient the game more balanced?
in my opinion the OP part of cooking with stools is that your cooks dont have to walk a single steps and your janitors can do that themselves instead and way more efficiently at that by hauling 75 resources at once. now what if normal ass cooking didnt require a pawn to go get e.g. 5 meat and 5 veggies from all around the place and cook it with a single meal as a result, but they could go get let's say 75 meat and 75 veggies at once and cook it for a resulting 15 fine meals/240 pemmican? it would mean that the stool trick essentially gets nerfed because the cook can only repeat this once afterwards even if he is surrounded by all stools and raw ingredients and the haulers most probably wont be able to keep up. but even more importantly, a noob that has his food all over the place and has only his active cook participate in the cooking process will experience a huge performance boost in meal/pemmican production which is a very good effect, isnt it?

on a sidenote this would make stockpiling pemmican much easier aswell as you dont have to hover over your cooks all the time and forbid their newly produced pemmican before it gets gobbled up, only like once a minute to forbid the new bulk.

now we need concrete numbers i assume.
i guess any cookable meal (except for maybe lavish meals, but i could live with them being bulk cookable aswell) should have the option to be bulk cooked. but what amounts are we talking about? 15 meals at once like i said in my badly thought out example? 7 like you said before? i dont really know. all i know is the more meals you can cook at once the more you relatively nerf the stool trick and the easier the game will be for noobs, which is a good thing. it would simplify the game for everyone, afterall.
i dont wanna put too much text in this one comment and therefore wont provide an exact number, as my post is getting too long already. but mostly because i cant. 15 meals at once are possible with the current game, so we might just take that number. on the other hand i wanted to call one thing into the mind of everybody:
kibble and nutrient paste meals already exist, so if you need a lot of food cheaply and fast, there you go. otherwise, implement bulk cooking for both realism and gameplay reasons.

[AileTheAlien]

I think most of the non-paste recipes should be bulk, to help new players and because it's actually how humans cook in real life. (It's a game, but I can't suspend my disbelief on everything 100% of the time; It's taxing.) It would be thematically relavant too, as cheaper meals generally are produced in bulk. Kibble and simple meals (the graphic actually looks like a bowl of soup, so...) should be large stacks/batches, fine meals in medium/small batches, and lavish meals individually or stacks of two (romantic dinner for two?). Paste is entirely different, as it's thematically an on-demand thing, extruded from a machine into your waiting bowl. (As far as balance or quality of life...) That's my opinion on it, anyways.  : )

[lancar]

Introduce a new workbench called "Large Kitchen" that contains bills that produce 5 meals at a time. Only capable of making simple and fine meals as well as pemmican. Nothing else.
Lock it behind research.

Done and done

[Jibbles]

• My point of view: Don't prioritize realism/common sense over game balance/mechanics. If the balance is fine don't mess with it. So I would not want to see your proposed change in vanilla. My guess is that the developers are with me on this one because bulk cooking is such an obvious possibility but not in the game so I would interpret that as a decision against it. And that's why I pointed to a mod. But I could of course be wrong and you could bet on your suggestion to be implemented. In that case ignore the mod and wait.

Is the vanilla system truly balanced though?  I don't have problems with food shortage in most situations as I know how to optimize.  However, that leads to similar kitchen/freezer designs, and the way I set up my bills.  The big part here is that optimizing the bills/locations for ingredients makes meals faster than I need, and significantly faster than if I was to just plop down a bill and freezer without much thought.  For most new players (who don't look up tips) it'll be awhile before they figure out how to do it.  I definitely agree with having a bulk meal bill especially with all the hauling quirks around.. Which usually leads players into mods as they notice these quirks.

Reminds me of rich soil. Why not have ability to build? Often leads players to look for mods. Then they come across tilled soil which is extremely OP compared to vanilla rich soil. I imagine a lot of players who use it don't know just how much a difference that makes.