RD issue: oven/baking

[Surly]

Okay first off... why on earth do you need a wooden bowl to bake cookies? For making pastry dough, fine. But baking cookies? Why does the RD hate prepared foods so much?

On a separate note... I urge the RD to consider many more automatic projects in the oven. The pastry dough projects require doughrollers, wooden bowls, a kitchen table... would it be so unreasonable to allow such a high level project to have automatic cooking, to balance it in some way?

[Sunni Daez]

Okay first off... why on earth do you need a wooden bowl to bake cookies? For making pastry dough, fine. But baking cookies? Why does the RD hate prepared foods so much?

On a separate note... I urge the RD to consider many more automatic projects in the oven. The pastry dough projects require doughrollers, wooden bowls, a kitchen table... would it be so unreasonable to allow such a high level project to have automatic cooking, to balance it in some way?

I totally agree

[Nakranoth]

I actually agree with you... but wouldn't this better fit in suggestions? As well as the one about water? Or do you just want to complain about it without suggesting anything?

[Talapus]

Some of the projects need it more then others. Meat pies for example are produced at 27 meals per day of work. This would bump production to 39 meals per day of work, and light to carry as well.

[Surly]

It's not a suggestion, its a question. Plus its generally pointless to suggest something... you have to make a RD member think it was there idea if you want it to go anywhere.

[Surly]

Think its safe to safe my sneaky plan has failed

Moved to suggestions in order to draw RD attention to it.

[Surly]

I went and crunched the numbers...

Cookies (with no tools, except the doughroller and wooden bowl) = 172g per days work by an efficient cook. This equates to 4.1% healing per days work.

Cookies (with doughroller, wooden bowl, machete, axe and scythe) = 261.86g per days work by an efficient cook. This equates to 6.23% healing per days work.

Popcorn (with no tools) = 363.7g per days work by an efficient cook. This equates to 6.49% healing per days work.

Cookies (with axe and scythe) = 589.4g per days work by an efficient cook. This equates to 10.52% healing per days work.

Now, lets consider this again: cookies require a significant investment in machinery and tools. They even require a tool for cooking. They also require three different resources (wheat, sugar and wood). They require iron level tools to prepare (the carving knife and chisel are required for making the doughroller) meaning it is not an easy multiple worker product. Popcorn however requires just an oven, and two resources (corn and wood) - no tools required at any point.

Yet popcorn is better by at least 50% How is this justified? I suspect it is just a case that the RD has not addressed this yet. But my question is: why not address these kind of anomalies instead of putting so much work into new implementations?

As for a possible way to improve cookies: Make the baking automatic (this by itself raises the amounts per day to [halftooled/fully tooled] 250.42g/499.83g, 5.96%/11.9%). Double the amount cooked per day, and the amount of pastry dough produced today. Give an incentive to an expensive and more complicated cooking process. Maybe even consider making cookies a highly efficient double food?

[Arlequin]

Or decrease popcorn healing rate...

If we keep increasing food production efficiency the production scale will range from abundant with no tools to humungously outrageous with tools and machines.

[SekoETC]

Yeah, popcorn could be decreased as it's not particularly healthy in real life either. In fact, corn in all its forms is rather poor and those people who eat it regularly in real life also boost their meals with beans to get the needed nutrition.

I don't see the reason for a bowl in baking, unless it's a container, which are generally not required in Cantr.

Automation could also be reasonable, seeing that bread is also automated. Even though in real life cookies require a shorter baking time so they need more tending to, if you can leave bread unwatched in Cantr then why not cookies as well?

[the_antisocial_hermit]

Because decreasing the popcorn is a negative way to get people to try and make more complicated things. Adding to the other is a positive way. Don't penalize people by making something worse to make something else better, reward them by making something truly better.

Don't half-ass it.

[Arlequin]

Making popcorn doesn't require wood if you use primitive ovens. Or coal in coal ovens.

I don't think people will make too much efforts to gather everything needed to make complex healing foods if there's a handy, simple and efficient medicine being overproduced by locations with an oven and many idle characters farming tons of corn.

Traders often fill their remaining cargo space with low value things, and so any location big enough to host advanced machines might be supplied of healing food faster by trading with corn fields than by employing several citizens or merchants to keep the supply of many different resources, making all the tools and machines, keeping them in active hands and finally producing those rare medicines that may give just a slight advantage to their travelers and warriors.

[Frits]

Well i don't agree on that remark the hermit made. The issue is prepared healing foods and there are many others such as ice cream, salad and apple pie. If you compare them all you'll probably find that one prepared healer is about 3 times better than the worst with all the others in between, then if we think that is too much of a difference we tweak them so that the best healer worsens and the worst one gets better. Otherwise you throw it all off balance, killing gets too hard and bears become cubs.
Another thing is the differences add to the game, making it more exciting as long as they are not so big every cantrian will flock to a single location. Some areas are fertile and life is easy, others are harsh and hazardous.

[N-Aldwitch]

Well i don't agree on that remark the hermit made.

I disagree entirely. It plays on the mind of the player. And might I mention, this is different to playing on the mind of the character. I was going to quote her for emphasis.

[Surly]

Frits, I'm afraid I don't understand at all how what you say has anything to do with this issue. Perhaps you could explain it to me, linking it to my example?

And Arlequin, that is indeed a difficult issue. However, the way to solve that is not to say: "its too hard to address, we'll just leave it the way it is and hope nobody notices".

[wichita]

Okay first off... why on earth do you need a wooden bowl to bake cookies? For making pastry dough, fine. But baking cookies? Why does the RD hate prepared foods so much?

On a separate note... I urge the RD to consider many more automatic projects in the oven. The pastry dough projects require doughrollers, wooden bowls, a kitchen table... would it be so unreasonable to allow such a high level project to have automatic cooking, to balance it in some way?

Rewriting this to be a bit less pretentious and inflammatory....

I think it would be reasonable to allow some more automatic projects on the ovens. It would be a nice way to boost the efficiency of the cookie baking process (the numbers posted above are nice, helpful, and provide rational support to the suggestion) and put it on par with popcorn, which I feel is more readily obtainable when tooling and the number of resources is considered. I also think we could do without the bowl on the cookie baking process. I think it will be a nice simplification that could help encourage more players to spend time baking and making fancier prepared foods.

Does that seem a bit more friendly way to organize and present ideas?


Moving this to accepted. We have been trying to further refine food preparation, even before a few very critical people quit RD....