I love mods like Vegetable Garden, but I've often found myself just going for the most efficient meal and crop every time. I wanted to try make cooking a bit more interesting by giving you a reason to grow, hunt, produce, and buy different ingredients every new game you play. The cooking recipes this mod creates are procedurally generated at the start of every new game, and offer different stats and effects that may make them better or worse for each situation you're in. Recipes tend to be specialized; one recipe might offer great stats for doctors, another recipe might be great for shooting, yet another recipe might have a high nutrition value to help with low food biomes. You must choose the ones you think best adapt to your situation. Here is how it works:
- Several procedurally generated cooking recipes get created at the start of the game. Their stats and effects are balanced around different power levels. The higher a recipe's level, the more powerful the effects, but they also require higher cooking skill to make and higher ingredient diversity. All recipes come with upsides and a downside, so choose wisely.
- To unlock cooking recipes, you can use the new draft system on the "Materia" tab. Throughout the game, you'll be given several opportunities to choose amongst different recipes. The one you select will become available on the electric and fueled stoves after some time. This gives you the opportunity to start growing the ingredients you'll need while the recipe gets unlocked.
- (Optional) Normal cooking recipes that make end products (meals that aren't used as ingredients in any other recipe) are removed from the game. Things like Fine Meal and Sweet Rolls are removed, while things like Polenta, Cornmeal, and Bread are kept. The only exceptions are Simple Meal and Pemmican. Doing this makes sure you are incentivized to grow different things instead of going for overpowered recipes like Lavish Meal and Stew every time. It also increases the stakes on the decisions you make using the drafting system, knowing they are your only meal options moving forward. However, you can disable this on the mod's settings if you like.
- (WIP) Colonists will tend to diversify their diet so that the effects from different meals can overlap. Moreover, colonists get a small mood penalty or bonus based on the meal diversity available to them.
- (WIP) There is a chance you'll get the option to unlock a rare recipe. Rare recipes offer better stats and have unique effects that only rare recipes can get (like turning colonists into cannibals). However, they require very specific ingredients, usually in the form of a specific animal's meat (i.e. Ibex Meat), or a specific animal's product (i.e. Cobra Eggs) together with other ingredients. This should make them not be the obvious choice when they show up, but if you're lucky they might just be what you need.
I highly recommend you use Vegetable Garden with this mod. In fact, that's mostly how I've tested it. Even though you might not use the meals of it, the added crop diversity and intermediary ingredients like Bread make the procedural recipes more interesting.
I'm still trying to balance things out and playtest the system to see how it feels. Any feedback or ideas you might have are greatly appreciated. The mod also needs more flavor text, which is easy to add through XML definitions. If you're interested in adding some, let me know. Textures might be nice too, in case anyone is interested in making them. You'll get full credit in anything you do of course. I'm more interested in making this a community project than anything else. Otherwise it might end up being too specific to the way I play the game, and not be that useful for other people.
You can find the mod here and start using it: https://github.com/shifteds/materia
(http://i.imgur.com/sh6YeGr.png?1) (http://i.imgur.com/kfyxbNw.png?1) (http://i.imgur.com/KauuliK.png?2)
Nice idea, this is cool, just wondering if you'll be expanding this even more or updating it anymore pass this point?