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Trenix

[Solved] Help with meals

13 posts in this topic

I really don't get how any of it works at all and that's why I've left it out the whole game so far. What's with the whole sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and savory stuff. What exactly am I aiming for? Also when I first saw this interface, I got really confused with all these numbers above slots. Thank god the wiki showed me the older interface, which told me that these numbers were ounces of the food you'll be consuming to make the meal. That oz indicator should really come back, it's more user friendly for new players. Anyway I made a salad and it became savory, what exactly does that even mean? The salad UI has a bread icon which shows that it's optional, but aren't sandwiches better? So what would be the point of wasting your bread on a salad?Another thing that I'm confused about is warming foods, I saw a video where Dunk cooked some soybean. That whole mechanic made absolutely no sense to me, do all warmed foods give you something? If so, what? From what I see, it doesn't seem to change taste whatsoever. Also what temperature should I be cooking vegetables and fruits? Help anyone?

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Every player has their own individual "taste profile" which changes depending on the world seed. This profile is a number for each of the categories that your player finds ideal. When your cooking skill is low, the tooltip is only going to say X, or Not X; meaning that the number for that taste for that particular piece of food is either more or less than the number in your profile. As your cooking skill increases, the tooltip will show more and more descriptive messages so it is easier to figure out how close the food is to your profile. You are aiming for something to eat that has the exact same numbers for each taste as your profile does. If a specific taste is close to what your profile is, at a higher skill level it will say "Perfectly" - that is what you are aiming for. Perfectly is in the middle of the range of tooltips, meaning that foods can have too much of a taste, or too little.

 

The "oz" was removed from the new interface because it doesn't fit, and the horizontal style of the UI with all of the new slots makes more sense than the old vertical one. As for the two separate tabs, bread actually isn't used at all in the salad tab, which is why it is off to the side and does not have a number. The slot is still there so that you can easily switch back and forth between sandwiches and salads, without having to take the bread out. When you are on the sandwich tab, the bread is over with all the other ingredients, and has a number above it showing the qty being used. When you are on the salad tab, the bread slot is purely storage. Sandwiches are better in the fact that you can eat them all in a single bite, and it can contain all 5 food categories, but they are half the size of a salad. If you would rather use 4 ingredients, but make a larger piece of food so that you don't have to use up as many inventory slots to store the food, then a salad is better.

 

If you made a salad and it became savory, that means that the combination of all of the items that you put into the salad resulted in a savory taste number that is higher than the number in your taste profile. The combining of foods is ultimately additive, and not an average.

 

All of the cooking with the exception of meat is solely for changing the taste profile. There is no ideal temperature that everyone should be cooking food to, as each player has a different taste profile. All meats must be cooked to at least the rare state in order to be edible, but any further cooking beyond that point is once again solely for changing the taste of the food.

 

Now to the point of the whole system: the closer the taste numbers for each category of a specific piece of food is to the taste numbers of your specific profile, the more saturation the food gives. This means that if you manage to create something that matches every value perfectly, you will have to eat far less often than if you eat something your player finds disgusting. Originally the taste also affected how much nutrition you got from the food as well, but this system wasn't behaving as expected and resulted in the majority of players being malnourished even when constantly eating, so it was removed.

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Thanks, very informative. This should definitely be added to the wiki, it was very helpful. But one more question, if I'm making a salad and all my foods were not bitter except for one which was perfectly bitter, would my salad end up being perfectly bitter? I assume so since you said they're not averaged, right? Or is it like doing basic math where lets say three not bitters would become somewhat bitter?

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It would likely end up being somewhat over perfectly bitter. It's not an average, but it is additive. So if you have a perfect number X and you add itty bitty amounts Y and Z to it, you will end up with more than X, which might throw it above the "perfectly" range.

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What if everything was perfect, would it be above perfect?

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Like I said, it's additive. If perfect is 5, and you combine 5 perfect items, you would end up with 5+5+5+5+5 = 25, which is higher than perfect, so the taste would be too much.

 

Edit: To clarify this a bit, an example might help. Let's say it's the day after Halloween, and I have a bunch of candy. To me, reese's, caramels, tootsie rolls, butterfingers and jolly ranchers are all "perfectly" sweet when they are eaten individually. Now let's take all of that candy, and mix it up in a bowl to make a "candy salad." If I actually sat down and ate that salad as a whole, it would be pretty disgusting and likely ridiculously sweet for my tastes.

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Alright thanks for the help, I think I know enough to finally use the mechanic now.

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Thanks very much, Kitty, also from my side - even I knew many of it already, this still was very enlightening!

Trenix is right: you should post this information on the wiki, instead of answering every single thread about it.

You basically said all there is to say, but many players don't frequent the TFC forums, let alone read this thread.

Surely you already have concrete plans for the wiki page and just are too busy to get to it yet, but you maybe could add a link to this thread on the wiki for the time being, I think that should save you a lot of time and effort :)

One last question on the topic: I may have missunderstood, but I seem to remember you stating in the past, that a flavor being X instead of Not X without a high enough cooking skill meant that it's within the range of your preferred taste. Yet you wrote now above that it meant that it's over your chars preferences, so that something ridiculously sweet would still display as sweet wihout skill?

Has there changed something, or just don't I remember correctly?

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One last question on the topic: I may have missunderstood, but I seem to remember you stating in the past, that a flavor being X instead of Not X without a high enough cooking skill meant that it's within the range of your preferred taste. Yet you wrote now above that it meant that it's over your chars preferences, so that something ridiculously sweet would still display as sweet wihout skill?Has there changed something, or just don't I remember correctly?

 

Nothing has changed, so either you aren't remember correctly, or I made a mistake in my previous post.

 

Let's say a player with low cooking skill has a profile that likes a sweet value of X.

 

The player picks up a piece of food that has a sweet value of Y.

 

If Y > X, the player sees "Sweet"

 

If Y < X, the player sees "Not Sweet"

 

If Y = X, I have no idea because that is such a rare case to happen for a raw ingredient. :)

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Hm, but I honestly see no point in this information then. It tells me practically nothing regarding my taste, doesn't help with cooking at all.

If says Not Sweet or Sweet makes absolutely no difference, since the range from Perfectly Sweet to Ridiculously Sweet is still very wide, so why bother with this feature at all until you get your skill high enough for accurate information?

If it was as I said (and I at least think to remember you stating), that Sweet meant food to be about my characters taste, then I at least had luck finding at one taste my char likes, and I could somewhat use that in early cooking.

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Since the tastes are additive when you combine them to make salads/sandwiches, even these low level tooltips are still helpful. For instance, if you come across anything that says "Sweet" you can assume that it is "too sweet" and you will need to only combine it with food that says "not sweet". You are still going to end up with a "sweet" result, but you have better reasoning as to why. The same can be done with combining foods that all only say "not sweet". You can try out different combinations until you get a final product that says "sweet", and you will know that combination of "not sweet" items results in too much. You can then use process of elimination to see if any specific "not sweet" ingredient in the meal is throwing it over the "sweet" threshold, and remove it from your ingredients.

 

The player has a desired taste profile of X

 

Four ingredients have taste values of A, B, C, D. All four say "Not Sweet" which means that individually,

 

A < X

B < X

C < X

D < X

 

Now make a meal using just ABC, if the final product says "Not Sweet" you now know that

 

(A + B + C) < X

 

If you make a meal instead using ABD, and the final product says "Sweet" you now know that 

 

(A + B + D) > X

 

Using basic algebra, you also now know that 

 

D > C

 

It isn't an ideal way of figuring it out, but that's the whole point of leveling up in the first place.

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Well, does knowing that D is sweeter than C really help my cooking?

Ok, I guess this first unskilled information is here for the sake of consistancy and to give the whole cooking skill progression more sense and it doesn't really have to help me, especially since a tasty food now only effects saturation. With the "old" nutrition based system I would care much more!

Anyway, I did my duty as my forum title implies and just did some thorough research: and you are indeed right! Nowhere could I find information that differs from what you stated here, thus I stand corrected!

Sorry Kitty ...

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I personally find such information very useful. Once you can rank your ingredients in terms of a taste, you can make better decisions on which ones to use.

If you rank, from not sweet to sweet:

 

1A

2F

3D

4C

5E

6G

7B

 

And you know that DCE is not sweet enough, you know to try DCG next. Heck, you can figure out the perfect combination before it even tells you exactly how far you're off.

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