Species Food Feedback

[EOBGames]

Now that both of my species-inspired food PRs (see here: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/59412 and https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/63174) have had time to marinate, I think it's about time I gathered some concrete feedback. Ideally this should focus on the code side of stuff (recipes, nutritional value, ease of access, variety, flavour, etc). I can't personally do much about sprites.

As an additional prompt: I know that there are issues with the recipes, nutriment values and the overall value of the food received versus the inputs- but I'm not sure of specifics. So please, let me know.

[carshalash]

My BIGGEST issue at the moment is the UI for moth food in the crafting menu.

Certain moth foods need big buffs value wise, people have said it's really hard to get all of the ingredients together for them.

[PotatoOfChaos]

Biggest issues that come to mind are the moth food UI and some lizard food requiring aquarium fishes.

The UI thing is self explanatory, whilst the fish problem is very easily noticable once you actually try to make one of the dishes that need them.
You basically just have to roll a slot machine hoping you get the ONE rare and unique fish that'll be useful for ONE piece of food, and that's all at the expense of the cargo budget.

Some more minor things just come down to "[x] food is too hard to make" but i don't have any concrete examples on me, and it's more of a personal thing. ( and some sprites but you've already mentioned that )

Other than that i absolutely adore the work you've put in, i can't wait to see it get more fleshed out and tuned.


Also ethereal food when?

[Farquaar]

I said it before, but: why on earth does the moth food not have cloth in it? You had one job, lad

The lizard food is cool though.

[EOBGames]

If you guys can get some concrete examples of stuff being too hard, or hell, even just point me towards some dishes that you think are too highly tuned, I'm open to changing the recipes or increasing quantities gained from the recipes. I've got some ideas already for the sauces (tomato and bechamel) giving multiple portions per craft as an example, if you think there's more that could benefit from something like that I'm happy to take those suggestions.

[EOBGames]

I said it before, but: why on earth does the moth food not have cloth in it? You had one job, lad

The lizard food is cool though.

Partially for thematic reasons (why expend time, effort, space and money making raw plant material into cloth when you can use the raw stuff, especially when you're a species that's lacking in all four of those things) and partially for the sake of making stuff more interesting (there's only so many jokes you can make about moths eating clothes before it wears out and becomes boring). I feel like the number of stuff containing cotton and such could be increased (there are a few, the cotton salad and cotton soup come to mind), but an entire PR of just cloth-based foods would have been dull- which is why I didn't do it.

[BrianBackslide]

I don't feel that any of the Lizard foods are too difficult to achieve outside the aforementioned fish dishes, but I do think having no ability to produce Vinegar or Quality Oil and forcing us to deal with the chef's console is frustrating as hell.

Mothic food however, has some real problems.
1. Firstly, the Mothic Cuisine crafting page has some formatting problem that causes everything to be squished to the side in compact view.
2. There's a HUGE reliance on the chef's console for everything but the most basic dishes. Yoghurt, Ready Donk, Pesto, Tomato Sauce, Vinegar, Cornmeal, and Quality Oil are minor to enormous money sinks for the recipes that require them. Lizard food also has this problem, but I argue it's not as bad as those items tend go straight into a dish, (Canned Snails, etc.) rather than being required for a mere precursor ingredient.
3. Speaking of, precursor ingredients that require progress bars. Again, anything requiring Pesto and Tomato Sauce are big offenders here such as Fried Eggplant and Polenta, which requires FIVE progress bars to make. Just... Why?
4. Numerous dishes will eat your bowls forever. Skeklitmischtpoppl/Squeaking Stir Fry (1), Big Baked Rice (3) and I haven't tried it, but I suspect Ozlsettitæloskekllön Ede Pommes/Loaded Curds (1) as well.
5. I'm pretty sure Toasted Seeds/Engine Fodder is toxic, but I only made it once, and that's hard to tell as a Deviant Tastes Lizard.
6. Curd Cheese and Mozzarella is a pain in the ass to mass produce, being able to only make two "batches" at a time or you'll just get a cheese wheel. I get it though and this one is just whinging.

Could we get a chef's ingredient box for Lizard/Mothic cuisine? So we don't have to beg the stoned out Botanists to do simple tasks like growing red onions? Every time they just give me regular onions...

More in general stuff are the things that require the oven. Trying to get your botanist to grow the corn low potency so you can fit more in an oven is difficult enough. Then you have the bigger dishes that you NEED to finish because there's SO MANY mouths to feed and you're stuck waiting because you can only cook 3-4 at a time and everyone's staring and oh my god will this oven hurry up and they're getting mad they're climbing the counter oh no oh god they're going to eat me now aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAH.

[cybersaber101]

Alright, my feedback on Moth and lizard foods.

The biggest issue with it right now is the layered crafting coupled with the awful crafting menu; with Fried Eggplant and Polenta- 1 cheesy porridge + 1 eggplant + 2 bread slice + 1 tomato sauce + 1 mozarella being the worst example with about 4 crafting menu's and several instances of waiting for the oven in a dish not particularly special or interesting to be worth the effort, emperors roll and Fleet Salad being other special mentions for being brutal to create.

My other biggest issue is being unable to consistently serve mothic or lizard cuisine(barring 1 or 2 of the same food items from them) without very substantial preparation for both the amount of money you'll need and the produce required.

Other issues include: Unable to create important ingredients like vinegar and highquality oil, certain fish are such bad rng ive never seen their dish made since it's addition.

[ilikesaying]

Yeah no the mothic food has a heavy reliance on the food console and a heaping pile of credits. The lizard food is less egregious but still locks some foods behind the food console.

This presents a problem where the chef has to micromanage their bank account and constantly do bounties/customer bots, especially for ingredients that are required and have no other source. Chemistry and Botany seem to be ignored when it comes to some of the ingredients, especially since the food console should be an alternative instead of a requirement.

Lizard Cuisine only has most of its food locked behind 4 plants, Korta Nuts, Potatos, Onions and a nutrition-heavy plant for biomass to get monkies for organs and meat. These 4 plants can easily be grown and harvested even if there are no botanists, due to being available from the start and having a very low cost.

Moth Cuisine does not have this, requiring 3 ingredients only obtainable from the produce console, one of which is just plain stupid to have, locking literal tomatos behind the console, which just seems to only sap money instead of benefitting the chef.

[Pandarsenic]

My main issues are the same as with all other cooking - awful interface, poor rewards for the effort you have to put in

I think it's pretty damn good outside of the flaws it inherits from the system it's part of though

[carshalash]

I suggest a different pool (heh) to draw from for fish used in lizard food.

Perhaps make a cargo order for "tirizan fish"?

[BrianBackslide]

I should add that Kæniatknusksolt (Kenyan Salad) creates crevice spike due to chili oil from the chilis + lime juice.

[EOBGames]

I should add that Kæniatknusksolt (Kenyan Salad) creates crevice spike due to chili oil from the chilis + lime juice.

Man, I hate unintended reactions.

Anyway, with regards to reliance on the produce console (as I've seen in a few comments), I'm happy to make the more general ingredients such as cornmeal, yoghurt, vinegar, quality oil etc. accessible, but for things like Ready Donk or canned foods like the desert snails I think the produce console is the only way that's really fitting to acquire them.

[Vladoricious]

As awesome as the foods are, I do echo the concerns about things being a little to difficult to get together. Tourist bots and bounties are annoying to use, but when ingredients exist only in the grocery console, there's little other options. Personally, I'd like to see ways to actually obtain ingredients without the grocery console. Some examples of ideas I had:

Desert snails get turned into a "fish". The aquarium has an option to be filled with air and it has temperature controls, so why not a hot, air filled "aquarium" to raise your own snails in?

Quality cooking oil moves to a new plant (olives, coconuts, peanut?) OR an existing plant (corn, soybean, koibean (because carp are oily? idk)) OR even produced from butchering animals and getting fat, which can be ground into oil (???)

Vinegar would make sense as fermented apple, grapes, wheat, rice, or oats. But those are all taken. Even green grapes. Golden apples are NOT taken, though, so fermented golden apples could make golden apple cider vinegar.

[Pandarsenic]

I should add that Kæniatknusksolt (Kenyan Salad) creates crevice spike due to chili oil from the chilis + lime juice.

Man, I hate unintended reactions.

Anyway, with regards to reliance on the produce console (as I've seen in a few comments), I'm happy to make the more general ingredients such as cornmeal, yoghurt, vinegar, quality oil etc. accessible, but for things like Ready Donk or canned foods like the desert snails I think the produce console is the only way that's really fitting to acquire them.

Could we get (unless we already have) species cuisine crates that offer a selection of ready-to-go ingredients and seeds for a complete selection at a lower price than using the console for each thing individually?

[BrianBackslide]

Cheesy porridge turns into Virus food due to Water (from the cornmeal porridge part) + Milk.

[MagmaExploiter]

Both of these chef updates provide huge background flavor and I like them a lot. A huge amount of thought went into the design of the dishes themselves, and it shows.

I've done the lizard menu extensively (minus the fish dishes) and dabbled a bit in the moth menu, mostly the lizard-safe foods. I'll echo much of what's been said already: though I think it's fine to have some intermediate steps to get to a final dish, it doesn't mesh very well with how clunky our current cooking interface is, though that's more a criticism of the system itself. A few foods have their reagents mix weirdly, particularly the Kenyan salad, which was pointed out. Some things do rely too much on the produce console - I think it's a great feature, but should be used more as an alternative source for when botany isn't running well/at all, rather than a sole source of many crucial ingredients. In practice it's not that hard to run a couple bounties and be set for a good while, but as said before here, some things should be available elsewhere.

Anyway, with regards to reliance on the produce console (as I've seen in a few comments), I'm happy to make the more general ingredients such as cornmeal, yoghurt, vinegar, quality oil etc. accessible, but for things like Ready Donk or canned foods like the desert snails I think the produce console is the only way that's really fitting to acquire them.

Exactly what I would've suggested, yeah, some things only really make sense being brought in from off-station. The canned tomatoes in the mothic menu are the worst offender on this, though - I'd ditch them entirely and just use regular tomatoes instead.

Other than the huge flavor (no pun intended) the new foods provide, one of my favorite things about these PRs is how much use they're getting out of existing ingredients that were previously underused. Before the lizard menu dropped, I rarely saw much use for garlic or onion, and before the moth menu dropped, red onion wasn't even used at all. This is something I'd really want to see more of in future kitchen content, there's still a lot of obscure cooking ingredients that are only used for one or two things, such as mayonnaise (used exclusively in chicken sandwiches) and parsnips (which did get at least one new recipe in the moth update, on top of a niche botany use when aluminum was added to them a while back). Adding new ingredients to be used for new foods isn't a bad thing and was very necessary for the lizard menu in particular, but focusing new recipes on using existing items is a big plus.

The mothic menu does have a heavy reliance on the oven, which does make it a little annoying to make some things in big batches - again though, this is more a criticism of the system itself and probably outside the scope of this thread.

And the most heinous oversight of all: the Hua Mulan congee doesn't count as a breakfast food.

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