Levelling cooking tool lores

[Anachroniser]

Currently there are only a handful of cooking tools in the game many of which will see very little to no use by the vast majority of players. one reason for this is the notable investment to lore one up to max to even be able to determine if it is in fact a useful tool. most of these can be done with 10 or so stacks of water and is quick enough to do. For the smoke box the baking stone and the turnspit, that method will not work. Additionally these have far lower exp gains than the other tools. Where 10 stacks of water got my baking pot, cooking pot and fermentation jars all to max, it took over 80 stacks of wood to lore up the smoke box.

This is frankly absurd. In mo1 pricing a stack of wood was about 40g for much of the game's life. Wood is slow to gather. This would mean that learning how to use the smokebox would cost over 3000 gold. Next to nobody in mo1 even used the smokebox and i've found little reason to use it in mo2. This means that to just go and test recipes with it you have a massive investment that cant easily be farmed.

The baking stone has a similar problem. It requires a viable recipe on the baking stone to lore up. The only recipe i have found for that requires flour. Rye nodes are only 500 raw rye apiece and take a full day to regenerate. Then you have to grind that into flour to even use for lores. I only managed to get my baking stone to 10 lore due to the fact that almost all the rye nodes were depleted every time I tried.

The turnspit has the same problem but at least it accepts most any solids so it isnt as oppressive. that said it still required about 40 stacks of non water ingredients to level. Collecting that is an absurd task even with a molva and by hunting campodons.

All I ask is that these 3 cooking tools be brought in line with the other ones. especially considering the difficulty in obtaining flour and wood it should require less of them to skill up. also more than 40 stacks just to get lores up is absurd.

 

[barcode]

quite honestly i think it silly you would learn anything from a cooking tool by boiling water.

the mechanic works in that the better the item output is in terms all the stats, the more xp you gain. water happens to have a decent amount of stamina nourishment. not really a whole lot but certainly enough to get some xp for it. wood on the other hand ....

honestly i dont see why it shouldnt require more of a time investment to skill up, they're all secondary so you only have to do it once after all

-barcode

 

[Skydancer]

The value of a cooking appliance is a completely different story - each one should have its niche in usefulness and application for sure.

The exp gain though? MO is the only game that someone can boil water on their way to becoming Gordon Ramsay.

I like your suggestion @barcode. Similar to the suggestion of scaling combat skill exp gain to damage dealt/blocked, linking cooking experience to food quality seems like a good approach. Perhaps its not only the volume of material you put through a cooking appliance but also the quality of the result that teaches your character how to better use each cooking tool. Remember not everything should be a sprint, especially secondary's that stay with you for life.

Now cost - This is not established at all - MO1 had ridiculous issues with inflation due to numerous reasons I hope don't make a comeback in MO2 - We shall see.

 

[Anachroniser]

quite honestly i think it silly you would learn anything from a cooking tool by boiling water.

the mechanic works in that the better the item output is in terms all the stats, the more xp you gain. water happens to have a decent amount of stamina nourishment. not really a whole lot but certainly enough to get some xp for it. wood on the other hand ....

honestly i dont see why it shouldnt require more of a time investment to skill up, they're all secondary so you only have to do it once after all

-barcode

My point isnt that they should be trivial to level up, my point is that the cost of levelling the near useless smoke box to a usable point shouldnt cost the same amount as getting almost every armor book in the game. Or buying 4 stacks of steel. I dont mind things being harder to level than buying 10 stacks of water from the vendor but the 90 stacks of wood i used to level the smoke box would have taken over 100 hours by my estimation. That kind of investment should be reserved for something that is actually strong like ogh lore, not a goddamn smokebox. Also if cooking were to change to be a slowly levelled thing, then non max lore food would have to be better than it is. As it stands any food made with sub 50 lores is garbage and only 70+ lore food is really worth eating. If all tools took 20 stacks of actual food products to max that would be fine so long as the tools like the baking stone and smoke box, which have much rarer and harder to gather materials, require proportionally less. That is of course assuming that food was less lore reliant. I personally do think that levelling the cooking pot/baking pot/steaming pot are all too easy, but the focus of the post is really that the 3 tools listed are COMPARATIVELY far too difficult. Also the smoke pot cost is just absurd and laughable, especially considering the incredibly limited use it offers.

 

[barcode]

some kind of lack of reading comprehension.... if you put real mats in you'll get far more xp out of it. go kill some pigs and put the carcass in the smoke box with just enough wood so it will work and see how your gains fare

they should revamp how the skills are gained so only dishes that are prepared properly will give you gains on the cooking tools. perhaps make it sophistication based? 'this dish is not sophisticated enough for you to gain any xp from cooking it'.

-barcode

 

[Anachroniser]

some kind of lack of reading comprehension.... if you put real mats in you'll get far more xp out of it. go kill some pigs and put the carcass in the smoke box with just enough wood so it will work and see how your gains fare

they should revamp how the skills are gained so only dishes that are prepared properly will give you gains on the cooking tools. perhaps make it sophistication based? 'this dish is not sophisticated enough for you to gain any xp from cooking it'.

-barcode

Sophistication sadly isnt a good metric as then everything would just be 11 spices/juices or whatever else and then 1 or 2 actual ingredients. The point of my response was that the variance in the difficulty of levelling was the issue and was more relevant to the actual post but also to the last statement of your comment that they should require more investment. More investment would be fine but there needs to be a payoff or some comparable reward, to have an investment similar to high end alloys to be able to cook a piece of food is absurd. It wasn't that I didnt understand your message it was that I was responding to only part of it. For what you said about xp though it could work but it would be quite easy to cheese an extreme amount of xp with minimal consumed ingredients. If you have xp gain based off of total nourishments then cooking bone tissue would be one of the easiest ways. If it was based off of soph then fruit juice with trace amounts of salt and herbs would be incredibly easy for everything but the spit which doesnt accept liquids. Also could just throw some herbs at meat and get good soph there. The point is that whatever you decide to have xp scale with, there is a trivially easy way to optimize for it. Even then, the difficulty in levelling the various cooking tools should at least be comparable. If you want an example of an easy higher soph food, just take fruit juice add a little salt basil and pepper and you will have plenty of soph. Adding a few more herbs would take it even higher. The other issue with soph based food is that soph is kind of a hidden mechanic and cooking food good for it is often difficult for newer players while also requiring that you make counterintuitive and bad food. The other problem is that food soph scales with cooking skill, and low skill food has next to no soph.

 

[barcode]

suggested sophistication since it already exists as a stat and kinda-sorta suits the job. I don't know what the best way is to evaluate the 'difficulty' of a dish but something like that would be appropriate to use as a metric for if it should give you xp or not at your current cooking level.

i fully agree that the other cooking tools could really use some love as theres no real 'dishes' that can be made from them and no tangible benefit for their use. i certainly wouldnt lump the current effort it takes to level them anywhere near what it takes to get high end metals.

also sophistication goes much higher than most 'chefs' realize. i think black roe was like an 11 soph food, and most fruit drinks can get you up in that range, maybe up to 15 or so, but other dishes can get you well over 20. if the levelling limits were done aggressively, it could be quite difficult indeed to max out cooking with just sophistication as the bar. of course that kind of thing could be left for bragging rights, bonus points should be able to bring you to the cap without needing to go crazy, and supposedly at 60 skill you'll be at full quality, just missing a bit in volume (tho i dont know if anyone's tested this kind of thing)

-barcode

 

[Anachroniser]

From the levelling of cooking I did, the names of food at 70 and 100 lore were different and I think that they had different stats (though I'm unsure about the stats on them, will probably test this specifically soon). I think the 70 skill is full quality but reduced durability hasn't carried over yet to cooking. Things like the baking stone and the smokebox really need some love as really the only use I found for the smokebox was some weird mana/healing food which was worse than what you could make with some fruit juices and a fermenter. The only use I had found for the baking stone was diluting your flour with water to get an increased volume of worse food but you can do that with a baking pot too. While the investment for these isn't as high as something like ivoryhide or tung lore, it was still quite high (more than bloodsilk lore will probably be) and for little to no real benefit. So, I hope the investment is brought down to be a bit more reasonable and in line with comparably beneficial lores.

The reason that I have a problem with sophistication is that it would require you to optimize for a stat in food that really doesn't do too much and is somewhat obscure to newer players. I'd be willing to be that a good portion of vets don't even understand soph and soph food especially. Maybe an aggregate of the number of ingredients, the quantity, the soph and the nourishment could be used to determine experience gain? That would at the least not require you to optimize a stat that was rarely, if ever, used.

 

[barcode]

if the names were changing then certainly the stats were too, so it seems SV has more work to do, or maybe its just the crafting skill itself (cooking) and not the appliance skill that can be set to 60, tho i'd think they would have it work for both

-barcode

 

[TroGuard(TheBrown)]

Currently there are only a handful of cooking tools in the game many of which will see very little to no use by the vast majority of players. one reason for this is the notable investment to lore one up to max to even be able to determine if it is in fact a useful tool. most of these can be done with 10 or so stacks of water and is quick enough to do. For the smoke box the baking stone and the turnspit, that method will not work. Additionally these have far lower exp gains than the other tools. Where 10 stacks of water got my baking pot, cooking pot and fermentation jars all to max, it took over 80 stacks of wood to lore up the smoke box.

This is frankly absurd. In mo1 pricing a stack of wood was about 40g for much of the game's life. Wood is slow to gather. This would mean that learning how to use the smokebox would cost over 3000 gold. Next to nobody in mo1 even used the smokebox and i've found little reason to use it in mo2. This means that to just go and test recipes with it you have a massive investment that cant easily be farmed.

The baking stone has a similar problem. It requires a viable recipe on the baking stone to lore up. The only recipe i have found for that requires flour. Rye nodes are only 500 raw rye apiece and take a full day to regenerate. Then you have to grind that into flour to even use for lores. I only managed to get my baking stone to 10 lore due to the fact that almost all the rye nodes were depleted every time I tried.

The turnspit has the same problem but at least it accepts most any solids so it isnt as oppressive. that said it still required about 40 stacks of non water ingredients to level. Collecting that is an absurd task even with a molva and by hunting campodons.

All I ask is that these 3 cooking tools be brought in line with the other ones. especially considering the difficulty in obtaining flour and wood it should require less of them to skill up. also more than 40 stacks just to get lores up is absurd.

the reason why it took so much wood is because in a smoke box or on a turnspit <wood> only factor in 5% of the any available recipe for these tools , if its anything like mo1.

if you make a "blackwood" smoked whole rizar carcass then the ratio should be 100 carcs - 5 wood because anymore and the system is just gonna give you an error.

however i still agree. "cooking tool" should encompass all the tools and level them all up etc

 

[Anachroniser]

the reason why it took so much wood is because in a smoke box or on a turnspit <wood> only factor in 5% of the any available recipe for these tools , if its anything like mo1.

if you make a "blackwood" smoked whole rizar carcass then the ratio should be 100 carcs - 5 wood because anymore and the system is just gonna give you an error.

however i still agree. "cooking tool" should encompass all the tools and level them all up etc

While mostly true the ratio of wood it accepts is actually dependant on the wood, you can make a dish 50% dapplewood before it becomes inedible in mo1, however you could only use about 20% ironwood. I havent yet managed to make inedible food in mo2 yet so I cant say for sure if that system will carry over. In mo1 you could use 100% spongewood and that's what I used to level in the mo2 alpha. IIRC in mo1 I used steppe rush but that wasnt an option this time around. It could however be that using 100% spongewood is not a very efficient way to level, I haven't tested other methods as this seemed to be the simplest way in the alpha when the mat supplier was right there.