[Solved] Well at least they're not bitter

[TaeoG 233]

 

So, I pickle everything. I really don't want anything to go bad while the server ticks away without me there. But that seems to have resulted in this. None of the components had especially strong flavours, but throw them in a sandwhich and bam, flavour country. I get from reading the forums here that the mechanics behind food flavours is left intentionally vague on places like the wiki, but I hope I can get some tips on how to keep food tasting good while preserving them for a relatively long time. 

 

Or is it not even a bad thing for food to be ridiculous?

 

[Bunsan 323]

Each raw food gets a flavour profile. This is then effected by how that item is treated. Drainage of soil food was grown on. Preserving techniques, cooked or raw, wood used, level of cooking etc. so the item you use has a value for each of the tastes. When placed in a sandwich the taste values are added to give the value of the tastes in the sandwich. What it reports to you is where this taste value is relative to your characters desired taste profile. As the cook gets higher cooking skill the reported relative value of the sandwiches and salads get more specific until they are given as a +/- from the players desire.

Kitty explains the value of having food close to desired here.

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/8436-basic-question-how-food-saturationsatisfaction-works-now-after-797/#entry110226

Basically you get more saturation and need to eat less.

Honestly don't worry about tastes until you have your cooking levelled such that you have more accurate info in the tooltip.

[TaeoG 233]

Drainage of soil food was grown on. 

 

I didn't know this was a thing, is there a guide for that somewhere? What does it change?

 

As the cook gets higher cooking skill the reported relative value of the sandwiches and salads get more specific until they are given as a +/- from the players desire. 

[...] Honestly don't worry about tastes until you have your cooking levelled such that you have more accurate info in the tooltip.

 

Thats pretty cool, actually. Are the 5 profiles all that exists in the final result, or are there hidden things? ie does hickory smoked meat have something extra to it over oak smoked meat other than a higher savory score?

[Bunsan 323]

Searching forums usually finds the info. There was a lot of discussion on food around I believe the 0.79.07 update. Drainage is how much gravel is above the first stone layer. The player can change this. How this modifies the taste profile is information you'll have to go to code to find out. You can ask in IRC and someone will eventually see it and tell you where in code to look.

All taste is the 5 categories. There are no hidden variables. Again you'll need to go to code to find out details.

[TaeoG 233]

Ya, I could go into the code myself, I'm actually elbow deep in it for other reasons, but since this mod is based on "believability" I figured the higher level concepts that drive these low level functions would be fairly easy to explain, and would be showcased as features, not hidden away where the average player wouldn't even know it exists unless they fired up debug mode.

 

For example "like in real life, composition of the soil can change the outcome of the crops. Different crops require different nutrients and having them grow where water can easily permeate the soil, like on a gravel bed, can result in more nutritional/less nutritional/larger/smaller/??? harvest."

 

Maybe I'll take a stab at helping on the wiki after I tire of developing little addons for my server-goers.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

The forums and the change log pretty much already give all the information that you'd ever need. Other than some slight tweaks with numbers there really isn't that much intricacy in the system.

 

When it comes to taste profiles on sandwiches and salads, there are no disadvantages. No matter how disgusting the sandwich is, you're still going to get a slight benefit in saturation over consuming the individual ingredients. As it gets tastier, that benefit increases a bit. That's all there is to it.

 

Cooking over different fuels just does different changes to flavor profiles. So cooking over wood A might add 5 sweet and subtract 10 bitter, while cooking over wood B might add 10 sour and 15 savory. We're not going to post the exact numbers, because we want to encourage players to experiment around with different fuels themselves, and the fact that because flavor profiles are relative to the player's taste profile every single player is going to have different final results.

 

Drainage doesn't affect anything except for flavor profile, and it barely  that. There's no such thing as more nutritional or less nutritional food, and the amount of food that you get on harvest is the same no matter what, it's just a random value picked within a specific range that doesn't depend on anything. When you harvest the crop, it does a little scan for gravel around it, and uses the number from that scan as the seed in an RNG that picks random small values to tweak the default flavor profile of that crop for each of the five tastes. Although if you end up with two food of the same type that you then combine together (Like 5oz of tomato with one profile and 10 oz of tomato of another) it simply reverts the entire stack to the default flavor profile for that food, it doesn't try to average it or anything.

 

We keep the numbers vague because this isn't a system that you are supposed to try and min/max. It's there as a "this is neat" factor because in previous versions meals were 100% random in their benefits, and players wanted to at least have some sort of influence on the end result. The flavor profiles are based off of reality, so it should be intuitive enough that a steak is going to be more savory than say a banana.

http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Food#Taste

 

Every piece of food consists of five separate taste categories: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, and Savory. These taste values are affected by changes to the food such as cooking, salting, pickling, etc. For crops, the taste of the harvested product is dependent on the pH and drainage levels of the area. For animal drops, the modified taste values are completely random. Combining two pieces of a single food with different taste values will result in an item with the default taste values for that specific food. Note: The text displayed in the tooltip is entirely relative to the player's taste profile. A food that says "Not Sweet" means that the sweet value is less than the player's desired sweet value, it does not mean that the food has no sweetness to it.

[TaeoG 233]

 

The forums and the change log pretty much already give all the information that you'd ever need. Other than some slight tweaks with numbers there really isn't that much intricacy in the system.

 

Fair enough, although forums and such can be painful. Hunting through thread that may or may not be directly related to find the few posts that are relevant... blegh. I'll have a closer look at the changelogs

 

 

When it comes to taste profiles on sandwiches and salads, there are no disadvantages. No matter how disgusting the sandwich is, you're still going to get a slight benefit in saturation over consuming the individual ingredients. As it gets tastier, that benefit increases a bit. That's all there is to it.

 

So my disgusting sandwiches still saturate a bit? well that's good. It seemed to be like I needed 3 sandwiches to achieve what 1 was doing before, but I bet that was just in my head.

 

Cooking over different fuels just does different changes to flavor profiles. So cooking over wood A might add 5 sweet and subtract 10 bitter, while cooking over wood B might add 10 sour and 15 savory. We're not going to post the exact numbers, because we want to encourage players to experiment around with different fuels themselves, and the fact that because flavor profiles are relative to the player's taste profile every single player is going to have different final results.

Wow, that's cool. Something I likely never would have realized as well. There is a passing mention on the wiki, and I stumbled across someone mentioning hickory smoke for smoked stuff, but I didn't realize it applied this much. I'll definitely be experimenting.

 

 

When you harvest the crop, it does a little scan for gravel around it, and uses the number from that scan as the seed in an RNG that picks random small values to tweak the default flavor profile of that crop for each of the five tastes. Although if you end up with two food of the same type that you then combine together (Like 5oz of tomato with one profile and 10 oz of tomato of another) it simply reverts the entire stack to the default flavor profile for that food, it doesn't try to average it or anything.

huh. Well then I guess it doesn't matter at all. I can't picture a single instance where I didn't combine foods I've harvested, so that little bit of information must get lost every time. That must apply to meat as well. Its a shame that's lost actually, now that I think about it.

 

 We keep the numbers vague because this isn't a system that you are supposed to try and min/max. It's there as a "this is neat" factor because in previous versions meals were 100% random in their benefits, and players wanted to at least have some sort of influence on the end result. The flavor profiles are based off of reality, so it should be intuitive enough that a steak is going to be more savory than say a banana.

 

That's true, it's definitely intuitive up to a point, especially once you realize/are told that the flavour values shown in the tooltip are relative to your own preferences. I would never want to see the actual numbers, which is part of the reason I didn't just fire up the github and have a look at the code.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

 

Fair enough, although forums and such can be painful. Hunting through thread that may or may not be directly related to find the few posts that are relevant... blegh. I'll have a closer look at the changelogs

 

If you ever have a question about something and can't find the answer on the forums, you are more than welcome to hop into IRC, or to create a post on the forums like this one. There's quite a few of us who have really good memory about where to find the info, or are just great at the search function in the upper right, but we can usually respond fairly quickly with a link to the post that has the information you are looking for. I myself am more likely to just write out another answer though, as a way to help have more official info out there to find. Although if I've already written up a big long post explaining something and I think it covered everything, then I'll just link that.

[TaeoG 233]

I appreciate how helpful you've been. You've replied to every thread I've made and every question I've posted. Its been over a decade since I've IRC'd, but I may just jump on there. 

[TonyLiberatto 364]

Never really care much for the whole taste system, but reading the forum I just realized the cooking is then the only skill that cannot be used as an advantage in a Multiplayer environment. If each player have it's own requirements the perfect sandwich for my friend may end up being the most disgusting thing for me.

When playing on a server most people will take functions so they can maximize that skill and benefit the community and/or sell their wares.

Smiths get a real advantage in that people will pay for a tool from a good Smith.

Even things like Animal husbandry can have its rewards, as they can select breed horses for the fastest and big animals for more meat.

Now cooking has always been a communal thing on all primitive societies and the sharing of food creates and maintain the bond.

BTW this is not a suggestion or a complain, just an observation. I am very thankful for the dev's that at least I am able to play the mod without a consideration for taste.

Is just that in all the towns that I see they all have one sandwich table and the first person that gets there and find missing one ingredient will replace it for whatever is more accessible, the second person will just make sandwiches with what is already in the table. 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

The display on the food is tied to the skill level of the person who created it though. So if Player A has a master skill and creates a salad, they can hand it to Player B who can then see the master-level tooltip and let player A know how it tastes to them and how they need to tweak it for a better salad for player B.