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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Help the Devs Food Drive - Ideas
ArchivedUser
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Just as it sounds - post your ideas for the Cooking profession, so the Devs don't gots ta think so hard.
It won't end horribly, trust me. I'll start: Mayonnaise and Corn Pizza, all ingredients available in a Medieval Society.
It won't end horribly, trust me. I'll start: Mayonnaise and Corn Pizza, all ingredients available in a Medieval Society.
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I'd like to see the first 10 levels or so spent learning basics like making a bread dough and cooking it to make loaves. Making a mayonnaise, tomato sauce, white sauce or other basic sauces. Taking whole milk and skimming off the cream, and using the constituent parts to make butter and cheese. Breaking down a whole fish in to fish fillets, or a chicken in to it's individual cuts. Plain roasting a whole chicken or fish - really simple things.
From there, progression could be taking those basic skills and applying them to other animals - breaking down sheep, goats, pigs, cows and any number of Verra specific animals they may introduce, learning to turn individual cuts in to various things like different (node specific) hams, cured and/or smoked meats or fish, salamis, sausages or other smallgoods. Learning to use milk from different animals to make butter and cheese, and learning to make different (node specific) cheeses including soft, hard and blue varieties, and including techniques like aging, smoking, waxing and flavoring.
You could also then take the basic bread dough you learned right at the start, and turn that in to a pizza using the tomato sauce, cheese and salami you learned to make, but you could also take that bread dough and turn it in to a steamed bun filled with any number of things, or turn it in to a different (node specific) bread type to pair with that same nodes specific smallgoods and cheese (and even oil and vinegar).
The scope of what could be done with a cooking profession is so expansive, a simple list of recipe ideas could never do it justice.
...Well maybe Pizza could be a high level item, beef stew a medium, and meat filled buns a low level.
Meat Bun: Hot, portable, filling, nutritious. Made with flour and Mysterious Monster Meat #14.
Critical Cooking Success?
Add Bacon.
Think about a tavern - they were the defacto restaurants and the owners would serve whatever they had the ingredients for as well as whatever they could make. meat pies, stew, bread, cake, ale, even sweets in the form of fruit treats..Taverns were jack-of-all-trades unlike say a baker. Not much connection beyond ingredients and I believe the Devs said they would be regional...meaning regional dishes.
I would like to see it the way you described - you make the ingredients parts, sauce, cheese, then you make the Pizza, but I think that is more of a Processing skill and not a Cooking one.
If you learn a single technique, you can transfer that to hundreds of different things, many of which no one has ever done quite the way you would then do it.
Learn to make jam, and you can make jam out of almost anything you want (fruit, vegetables, flowers, bacon).
Learn the basics of making a cake, and you can then make a cake in literally any flavor you can think of (chocolate, vanilla, bacon jam).
There may be some conflicts, and potentially some alterations - but that is why you learn the technique, not the recipe.
If all you do is learn recipes, then all you will ever be able to do is regurgitate recipes.
I had a big long post typed out illustrating what taverns used to be like 500 years ago (spoiler - taverns only ever had one food offering, it was almost always a stew cooked in a cauldron over an open fire - it was closer to Aragon eating Eowyn's stew in Return of the King than it was to The Prancing Pony in The Fellowship of the Ring).
But then I realized no one but me in interested in the history of restaurants and hospitality, and no one would read the 2,200 words I'd written at that point (seriously).
So, since it had nothing at all pertaining to the game, I didn't post it. Instead, all I'll say is that while the tavern owner in a game like Ashes may be a jack-of -all-trades in the kitchen, a tavern owner in 16th century Europe was someone that could make a stew, pour a beverage and make a bed (sometimes).
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I'd also like to point out that if you have to rank a stew and a meat bun in terms of difficulty, since a meat bun is literally a meat stew wrapped up in something, it would have to be considered more difficult than just a meat stew.
As to your comment about a processing skill - I could see butcher as a processing skill, and I actually think that would be a fantastic idea.
The only reason I would be hesitant is in regards to the number of professions it would take to produce finished food. Even if this is an issue though, it could be partially avoided if a butcher as a processor was also providing components for other crafters to use for finished products (pelts, various things to an alchemist, bone to - whoever would use bone etc.).
Much props on being a pro chef, but most of us aren't.
I can make jam - but I'd have no idea how to make "Bacon Jam" nor would even think of it until I travelled across the endless Ja'tar sand sea to the Metropolis of Kath and see someone do it there.
Thus I think to discover more exotic recipes you need to get out and meet different chefs in different regions. I could be a Max level chef - but if I live in a desert, I'm not gonna know how to cook a fish without ruining it.
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I'd imagine that the Taverns we'd have in our High-Fantasy (not pre-modern) would be bigger than the a one-pot, one-food pub. And Taverns in the Middle ages and later were just as competitive as they are today and that meant different offerings of food. True, most were far from extravagant - but I want more than one recipe for my tavern..
Sauce:
http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2014/6/7/food-and-drink-in-17th-and-18th-century-inns-and-alehouses#.WwXPOS_MzVo=
It mostly depended on the Bar - obviously traveller way stations were much less competitive than city ones and a lot depended on the Chef's/Owner knowledge.
You're the expert though, if you say a meat bun is harder than a stew I won't argue, I thought a meat bun was just cooked meat, bread, and gravy.
Will be pretty sweet travelling to a faraway node to indulge in a local speciality ^^
@Noaani I would love to read that essay ^^
Since we know that gunpowder isn't a thing in Verra, any time I'd compare historical accuracy (which I know is foolish in a fantasy setting, but I do it anyway), I'd go back to before gunpowder weapons were popular in Europe - the 14th or 15th century, or thereabouts.
Also of note, two of the three people in the source above wrote about experiences they had after the start of the industrial revolution had begun, which did have quite an impact.
You're right that someone living in the desert may not have had the opportunity to master cooking fish - you can't master a technique until you have the material to practice on. However, if that person has mastered pan cooking, grilling, poaching, steaming, broiling and baking, bring them some salmon and they'll figure it out in no time. The fun part is then you get to watch as they incorporate that in to the cuisine that they know and understand. None of that requires a recipe.
This is reminiscent of how Cajun cooking came about - people that had a rich history with food (French, though specifically from Canada) suddenly found themselves in an area with totally different climate and different produce to use. They took the techniques they already knew, observed the techniques of people already in the area they now found themselves (Native Americans and African), and a new classic cuisine was formed.
The thing with recipes is - every single one of them was written by someone. It's not like they just 'exist'. The people that write them are people that have broken the idea of what the product they are trying to make actually is.
To me, if we are trying to make a cooking profession in Ashes that resembles actual cooking professionals, then having players learn techniques is paramount.
Every game I've ever played, the cooking profession has been little more than a home cook with a big recipe book.
I'd like to think Ashes can do better.
@Diura I'll write it back up again and post it here sometime soon.
It would be great, but I think it's asking too much. I would be happy with discovery of recipes via experimentation (will eventually be exploited through guides) or ingredients or through travelling and sampling/deconstructing.
Actually, the Devs could make every player's experience unique with cooking by having us learn our recipes by experimenting as stated above - but instead by having a secret random number generator create semi-unique recipes for each player.
For example a Hypothetical Tier 2 dish with Tier 2 ingredients: Honey'd Ham could require 3 Ham, 2 Honey, and 1 Dash of Pixie Dust for one character, and for another, 1 Ham, 4 Honey, and 1 Dust.
Assuming the Ingredients are balanced so no RNG discovered recipe is harder to produce than another player (by having the same tiers and thus similar production costs), then this will be a really good way to encourage discovery and would actually be a relatively easy to implement a dynamic and indvidual experince WHILE avoiding much of the danger of online guides telling you "combine 3X, 4Y, and 2Z, discover Pancakes."
tl;dr Each cook must experiment to find their own unique recipes for the same item (recipe discovery via experimenting, but semi-randomly made for each player) Online guides will become mostly useless. The devs need only create recipes, and then balance ingredient market costs with the invisible dice rolls of their goods.
@Devs
Sorry to bother your busy day, but I think this might be worth thinking about.
However, since we know that crafters will have several dials they can use to alter and personalize the stats on items, it seems only fair that cooking has a similar uniqueness to it (and alchemy).
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While a bit of a read, the following is how I'd go about it, if it were left to me.
First of all, I'll go over a description of how the consumer of the end product interacts with the system, then I'll go in to how the crafters involved get it to the consumers.
A player logs in, and one of the first things he will want to do is get his "meal buff" up and running. This requires a trip to a tavern, as that is the only way to get said buff.
He arrives at a local tavern, or perhaps a tavern he knows has meals he like. He selects what he wants from the menu (the player will likely pick a specific buff, but in terms of RP it is a menu that the character selects a meal from). The tavern owner (or an employee of his) then prepares the meal. While he is waiting, the consumer can participate in tavern games, of maybe the tavern has put on some entertainment that day to pass the time until the food arrives.Once the dish is made, the tavern owner (or a staff member) take it out to the player, who then consumes it - receiving a buff that lasts 2 hours (continues to count down while offline).
The player, knowing full well that he will be online for longer than two hours then purchases some food that is better designed for travelling purposes - hard tack, pemmican, jerky etc. He also picks up some drink that will last him (whiskey, rum, wine etc).
Using this travelling food increases the duration of the "meal buff" the player received from the tavern for an amount of time (30 minutes, 60 minutes, doesn't matter). These items can only be used when the food buff has less than 30 minutes left to run.
If the player pays a small amount of attention to his meal buff, he would be easily able to maintain it for his entire play session, but since the buff timer runs down even if the character is offline, the player will need to buff his character each day at the tavern - assuming he wants the buff.
Right, so, consumer perspective out of the way, now on to those that make it happen.
First of all, food starts with producers. Farmers growing crops, [whatever the name of the animal husbandry professions is] raising animals, gatherers gathering wild produce, hunters gathering wild game, fishermen getting fish.
I only see a place for a two possible processor professions (in regards to the three tier profession system) in the whole chain - one being the butcher that was mentioned earlier in this thread. All livestock and game would go through to a butcher, rather than directly to a cook. I'll get to the other processor later on.
When a butcher gets his animals, he breaks them down, with some parts going to a tannery for leather, some going to an alchemist for potions, and the rest either goes to a cook for making food, or gets turned in to smallgoods - which then go to a cook to make food.
Rather than getting a "chunk" of meat, the botcher gets specific cuts. Some of these may sell at a premium, some may sell for significantly less. Each cut has it's own specific best uses, but may be used in a variety of ways.
When the cook has his food to work with, he has two types of things he can do. He can make travelling food - the hard tack, pemmican and jerky from above - or he can make meals to be eaten in a tavern. Making travelling food is much like what cooking in most MMO's is, you get a recipe, you obtain the ingredients, you craft a massive batch and you put it up for sale on the market.
Tavern meals are different though. For a start, meals only last 10 minutes from when they are made until they no longer produce a buff when consumed. This means the meals can't be made until a player that wants one asks for it to be made - basically, these meals are made to order.
What the cook can do, however, is he can prepare food that is used to make these meals. He could make sauces, make pizza bases, everything up to the last crafting action - and he could then turn this over to a tavern owner to finish when customers come in. Obviously the cook could be a tavern owner himself, but the cook doesn't have to be a tavern owner, and the tavern owner doesn't have to be a cook (just as someone selling weapons in a store doesn't have to be a smith).
The tavern owner prepares a menu to offer customers. The game could supply him with dozens of different cuts of meat, dozens of sauces, dozens of vegetables and such, and the tavern owner needs to work out what he will use, and what he won't use. He won't want to use everything, the storage space needed would be a limiting factor on how many prepared items he could have to work his menu out from.
So he may offer a steak of [insert native Verra animal here] with a sauce and a vegetable. He may offer a fish from a nearby stream with a different sauce, and may even offer different ways of cooking it. In essence though, each "meal" is a combination of a protein, sauce and vegetable, starch, and served with a beverage and a sweet.
Using the resources the tavern owner has at his disposal, he is able to write a menu as he sees fit. He may want to only offer steaks and such, in which case his tavern may be popular with tanks, as going there gives them a range of buffs to chose from (protein would surely be paramount for a tank). He may instead want to be a fish restaurant, which may provide a large range of buffs that appeal to mages (omega 3?). Or, he may simply offer a solid range of many things, so that a whole group (or raid) could meet there and all find something suitable.
Rather than having to provide a full database of items that contain each possible combination of the above, the developers simply need to only have a database containing the components needed to make the meals, and each meal buff simply being a combination of the appropriate 6 fields from that database. Doing this adds an almost unlimited amount of flexibility to a system, without the developers needing to do nearly as much work.
A few things *I* would do with the above is I would make it so that all components of the food (but not drink) sold as a single meal in a tavern need to have been prepared in that tavern. I'd also add spoilage to this prepared food (three or four days). I would only apply this to the prepared food however, not to the raw products. I would also add in a few classes that have particular needs - a necromancer may only eat raw meat, all priests may be vegetarian (or all members of one specific religion - that would be more interesting), may be all rangers can only eat food grown wild - so totally unable to eat anything if it contains farmed food.
In order to differentiate one cook from another, I'd give them all skill bars - 1 to 100 - for each technique they use. Cooking steak, cooking fish, making sauces, cooking tubers etc. Rather than being something that you work on to get to 100 and then call it done, as you perform a task, the appropriate bar goes up 1, but every other bar goes down 0.1. This means you can be really good at a few things, or fairly good at everything, but not a master of everything at the same time.
I would also add a racial component to this, where each race has a small number of items that they are able to produce better than any other race, and that provide a unique bonus to their specific race.
The only thing these bars do though, is provide a bonus to the quality of any preparation made for a tavern meal. You don't actually "lose" by having them at zero, you just don't gain as much as what someone else may. However, since a tavern owner doesn't need to do the cooking themselves, they can simply hire people to prepare the things that they (or the cook they hired) are not as proficient in.
Now for the second processor, I don't have a name for this at all, but this person would be grinding grains (wheat, corn, oats, etc) in to flour, which can then be sifted to differing levels to provide different types of flours to cooks, who can then turn it in to different types of bread - and other items. They would be taking produce like olives to extract the oil from them, and they also process various types of milk to make butter and cheese, and may be also dries or preserves fruit, vegetables and fish in various ways which can then be used in making food (or potions, I'm not fussy).
Now on to specialties. I wouldn't want to have individual players having their own specialties - I'd much rather see node based.
I'd like to see two types of specialty - the first is simply a specialty in that this node makes this product better than any other node. The second is a exclusive - this product can ONLY be made at this node.
Specialties that are simply better at a specific node than at other nodes would be base produce, specific beverages, smallgoods, bread, cheese and butter. While any freehold could grow cherries, they may be considered to be generally superior if they come from one specific region. Or maybe a specific river has a better environment for salmon, so salmon from that river are generally considered better.
Exclusive specialties would be restricted to specific dish combinations in taverns.
Specialty status is granted, rather than pre-determined or decided via RNG. In order to be eligible, a node needs to be at least level 4, needs to have three freeholds growing the specific product, or taverns serving the specific combination. An application can then be put in for the item to be considered a specialty, and is granted if that node produced the most of the specific item over the previous week.
Each level four or above node would be limited to having a total of 4 specialties total.
A specialty provides a small bonus to the finished product made with it, and can stack. You don't need to use specialties only from your node to produce a finished dish, you can source them from all over the world via the caravan system (I'd like to see people attacking a caravan full of hams).
On top of the above, I'd like to see a brewing profession. This profession would take grains, malt them, and using yeast, hops and water, make beer. Or he could ferment any one of a number of things and distill the resultant product down to make spirits. Or he could take grapes and make wine.
This particular profession I envision as being a master of large scale batches, but the batches could take several days per step.
The player may press the grapes, and then ferment them for several days. The wine could then be filtered, and then put in barrels to age for potentially two to three weeks (longer aging makes for better wine).
Aging is also something I'd like to see with cheese and smallgoods (and lumber, as an aside). To me, the idea of having to actually age or cure a product for crafting seems like a fantastic mechanic to mix in with the potential of sieges. It would mean products could have wildly fluctuating prices based on when a large batch of an aged product hits the market - and people will be more reluctant to put large batches down if they know the aging process will coincide with a potential siege.
To me, this creates interesting situations.
Lastly, the tavern itself. I'd like to see a tavern owner able to have a voice chat channel exclusive to patrons of the tavern, and any employees he may have. This gives the tavern owner the opportunity to offer entertainment, perhaps in the form of music (especially if there are playable instruments), or they could simply hire someone to tell jokes.
The tavern owner should be able to design a sign for their tavern - which would obviously need to meet community standards and be approved by Intrepid (would be happy to see this in the cash shop, as I firmly believe custom content like this is the best form of micro-transaction). This sign could then form the icon of the meal buff on the taverns customers have on them.
When all combined (ability to hire cooks with different specialties, ability to spend more money to obtain various specialty foods from around the world, ability to control the tavern atmosphere, ability to design a logo) this makes it so a tavern can function somewhat like an actual business.
Add in the ability to franchise out, and the ability to sell the tavern and you have yourself a fairly good system, imo.
Kroppkaka (or easily translated to Potato dumpling, "corpse cake if directly translated")
(like most things back then it was a butcher for the eye :P)
Ingredients:
1 yellow onion.
1 1/2 tablespoon stuffed spices.
2 kg of raw, uncooked potatoes.
2 dl of wheat flour. 2 teaspoon salt.
2 tablespoon of wheat flour for extraction.
100 g Lingonberry
Swedish hash (was a dish made by leftovers from the weeks meals)
Ingredients:
Very simple food, could be early cooking skill. Basically milk, potatoes and dryid fish.
Ingredients:
Ingredients:
Nice recipes @Foxzer you make me so hungry, first one reminds me of cowboy food.
Crown Roast (lamb)
Bit extravagant, obviously a jack-of-all-trades crafter can't make it.
Also found that. Lots of recipes, no pictures.
"The salted pork is particularly good."
Every MMO I've played, making a food item has been mechanically little different to making a sword.
If I roll my eyes in regards to the way food is represented in a game, I have no doubt anyone with reasonably in depth knowledge of any of the other professions are also rolling their eyes.
Ten years ago, this was excusable.
Now though, with the exponential increase in the cost and manpower in making these games - and the subsequent increase in player expectations of these games - I think it's about time MMO developers started trying to make the in game professions at least superficially resemble the profession they are trying to portray.
It isn't hard, all that is needed is someone on the development team that understands the subject matter.
Personally, I'd like a system where making a sword feels different to making a cake.
Mans stole my thread
Example:
Eggs
Cheese
Fish
Extra Fancy - put it in a "chicken Pot Pie" pie crust and 'lid'
Short/sweet with ingredients we can expect in the game. Perfect for the Devs Developing the Dietary Database to use to make their life a bit easier and cooking a bit more....flavorful
Us hype-train fans always talk about things we want, or theorycraft about what should be, or talk about ways to make the systems "better", but we rarely contribute in a meaningful way. So here our chance to help them out!
Post Food!!!!
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil.
- 700g/1lb 9oz stewing beef, diced.
- 200g/7oz lamb kidney, diced.
- 2 medium onions, diced.
- 30g/1oz plain flour.
- 850ml/1½ pints beef stock.
- salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste.
- a dash of Worcestershire sauce.
Edit: hmm the image isnt showingAlso you must have a fine bone china tea set. Elf bones are preferred for this, but humans are acceptable.
And that is how you make the perfect cup of tea ^^