Quality of life improvements for Cooking
Mar 27, 2021 15:18:22 GMT -8
healer, tellurius, and 1 more like this
Post by Space on Mar 27, 2021 15:18:22 GMT -8
Ever since I started bulk-cooking Dried Squid, it's come to my attention how horribly inconvenient it is to cook large quantities of anything, especially for non-donators. These are the current qualities of the cooking system that contribute to this:
Here are my thoughts on each aspect, and what I would suggest to improve the cooking system:
- A player's ETC inventory has 32 slots.
- All of Duey's ingredients, such as Salt, have a maximum stack of 200.
- Tangyoon can only cook a maximum of 99 items at a time.
- Tangyoon and Duey are not located in every town, and there are only two towns where they can both be found (Orbis and Ludibrium). Tangyoon can be accessed in any town via Shizen, but this is a donator-only feature.
- The recipe for Dried Squid calls for 1 Butter-Toasted Squid and 8 Salt.
Here are my thoughts on each aspect, and what I would suggest to improve the cooking system:
- Provide a means to expand the player's inventory size.
I don't think it's fair to expect a user to completely clear out their ETC inventory to make a couple hundred Dried Squid. I've got quest items that won't go into the storage NPC, so I'd need to ferry these to a mule or a friend first. I know that inventory expansion is a planned feature according to several of Yoh's posts, but given that "the future is immeasurable," who knows when this will happen? - Increase Duey's ingredient stack size from 200 to 1000.
A single stack of Dried Squid takes 4.5 ETC inventory slots to make (200 Salt, 200 Salt, 200 Salt, 200 Salt, 100 Butter-Toasted Squid). Increasing the stack size would make the ferrying of ingredients much more tolerable. Given the cooking system's current state, the maximum amount of Dried Squid that one can cook with an inventory completely dedicated to cooking is 700. This takes 5600 Salt to do, which takes up 28 of the player's 32 inventory slots, while the other 4 slots hold the 700 Butter-Toasted Squids. If Salt had a stack size of 1000, the same amount of Dried Squid could be cooked using only 10 ETC inventory slots. - Increase Tangyoon's maximum cooking quantity from 99 to 100.
It's frankly just annoying that I need to spend an additional batch doing the leftovers since Tangyoon apparently can't comprehend 3-digit numbers. Everything Tangyoon makes, barring the Watermelon Icecream Bar, stacks up to 100 anyway so it would only make sense if he could make 100 at a time. Currently, I have to make 8 batches at Tangyoon (7 batches of 99 and 1 batch of 7) to make 700 Dried Squid since attempting to enter any value higher than 99 will result in him saying "How many did you want to make? Speak louder. I could not hear you" which cancels the order. - Add a Duey NPC on the opposite side of Kerning City that Tangyoon resides.
This makes non-donators have to walk back and forth across the city, but at least somewhat eases the burden on those who may not want to completely clear out their inventory to do a little bit of cooking. Currently, non-donators must travel to Ludibrium for effective cooking, as this provides the shortest distance between Tangyoon and Duey. Cooking in Victoria Island is extremely inconvenient as the only town with Tangyoon is Kerning City, which does not contain Duey. One must travel between a city with Duey back to Kerning, and considering that spawn points are random when return scrolling/using the cab, it can be a chore to ferry ingredients between the two NPCs. Donators merely need to consider which Duey is the closest to a Palanquin NPC, and can effectively cook in any town as a result. - The recipe for Dried Squid is great, and I wouldn't change it!
The actual contents of the recipe for Dried Squid are totally fair, as the price of Salt is 50 mesos each. A Butter-Toasted Squid has an NPC price of 139 mesos, making the effective price of Dried Squid 539 mesos each. The only thing that deters me from making these for all of my friends is how dreadfully inconvenient it is to utilize the cooking system to this degree. I cannot honestly say that the amount of mesos saved by cooking this recipe is worth the amount of hassle that I have to go through to make a large quantity of it.
