Thoughts for food

[Jumpy]

Alright.

With the new food spawns on the map I think it's a good time to actually push some thoughts ahead and basically have people come together to express what they think should change with food/fishing/gathering altogether. This isn't about mining or collecting reagents, only food. All food.

First and foremost...

Fishing

As it stands fishing is boring, dull, and in need of a dire rework but that's besides the point and far longer to actually put in action than the changes I'll suggest here. These are a mix of my ideas and some other people's ideas that I liked.

Rare fish that require a higher level of fishing (King Crab, Rainbow Fish) should lead to better recipes. As it stands a rainbow roll is the exact same as a maki roll and a crab plate is literally worse than the easier-to-obtain fish soup, nearly as bad as salmon filet which only requires salmon.

RNG is fun but it should be brought in another way. By hitting level 20 you basically mostly roll King Crabs (which are bad as it stands) and never really fish any seaweed, which is needed for rolls in the first place. The higher level you go, the worst off you are. I propose instead that you either:
A) Get the ability to avoiding fishing a certain type of fish as you go up in level, allowing you to have a bit of control on the fact you can't get seaweed for the life of you
B) Keep things like seaweed at a decent % chance since it is required for recipes and can only be fished, not grown.

Lures are not my idea but I love it regardless. If you want to focus on catching something specific you should be able to attach lures to your fishing rod and give them a static number of tosses before they decay. Make one for seaweed, too, because god I have 500 fish I can make rolls with and 2 seaweed.

Quality could be a way to show more progress with the fishing levels; as you go up your chance of catching X fish of Y quality rises. Separate the fish so they don't stack and lose their quality; sure it'll clutter the inventory but that's fine if I can get an ultra salmon which sells for 3x the normal price. Furthermore, the quality of the fish should it be used in recipes can ensure that the product at the end has higher power bonus floor: An ultra bream used for a maki roll would ensure its power is at least 3, still capping at 5. That way you get both the quality component and the monetary component.

Besides that, making fishing more exciting overall should help. Fishing should be relaxing, a bit slow, but easy enough and not needing constant actions/attention.

Gathering

Gathering is pretty nice and the addition of food spawns makes it better. I do think that it could benefit from having region tiles rather than static spawns, meaning when you enter the desert you'd know that rope root spawns there, but you wouldn't know exactly where it spawns since the spawns would be randomized with tiles being tagged with a biome. This is more of a code-related idea obviously which could even be transposed to the tiles themselves if one was truly dedicated to making mapping easier in that aspect, though the work on that is crazy.

Cooking

Allowing people who have 100% cooking to edit the name and description of their food is something we were told was coming soon™ and it's still a change I look forward to.

The whole cooking and unlocking hidden recipes with experience is definitely interesting, too, so long as the scaling is equal all across the board (ie: someone cooking from fish shouldn't be better than someone cooking from farmed crops or than someone cooking from foraging).

Adding different stat boosts is another idea for those high-end foods; something that grants agility or mana or elemental resistances and so forth seems great and will have people focusing on a certain food for more than the reason being that it's easy to grow tomatoes.

Racial recipes seems like another idea worth tinkering with. Having each race start out with a different recipe which always benefits from a slight effect will surely make people happy. Yes, Razuka get cheese. And it'd boost bio pow. Something that flows with the race; cosmic power for Felinae's fish special, fire power for Drakanite's roasted boars, and so forth. Humans can have their recipe change depending on their racial passive (since those were descents originally), and Nimble should have the worst recipe of them all because it already grants another bonus. It would still obviously be the best racial to pick, mind you. This would allow races to have more depth as they give an outsider their traditional meal. Some races could even make it something significant. Some hiddens could grant access to new recipes as well. A witch's special brew? Communion wine from the blessed of the church? Even lollipops for letting the medic heal your booboo.

We can make cooking amazing. It's all right there.