Decrease regular food cooking time to 1 hour.

[Cogliostro]

Taking something readily available like rice or potatos, cooks add some other ingredients, a stove and their skills to make a new kind of food from it, something more nourishing per gram than it was raw. The suggestion is to reduce cooking time for all "regular food" projects (not the different automatic ones like drying) to a meager 1 hour across the board, or with slight variations for difficult dishes.

This is in order to change the depressing current trend: you may have a lot of ingredients, and be quite able to feed your whole village, but the time it takes to prepare anything (usually 1 day) is depressing, when it gets multiplied by 20 days, 40 days, 100 days. Remember, that's real-life time, and we players don't exactly live forever.

[Piscator]

Well, this game is supposed to be slow-paced and projects of one to a few days are not really too long if you consider that they don't keep you from talking and role-playing and some players might be able to log in only once a day. It's definitely nothing for you as a player to die over.

I'm not really against the idea though of making food preparation more effective (you can't really reduce the time of projects that have no fixed duration), but only if either the gathering rate or the nutritional value of raw foods would be decreased at the same time. Currently preparing food very often devalues food in terms of total nutritional value.

[Cogliostro]

Yeah, there's definitely something that feels wrong in the way food works. I thought by making cooking itself a snap, and emphasizing getting the ingredients, tools, ovens for it, we might be able to tilt the tables a bit and make it better.

Oftentimes cooking is an inside job (not unlike 9/11), so you can only RP with whatever other poor fellows that are also stuck inside. And they usually don't say anything back. Everyone knows the main action is outside in the town square, of course. I'm not even mentioning the realism argument, it just blows chunks that every little thing takes a day minimum to prepare or make (and that's a SINGLE PORTION), even things like steaming some simple potatos or rice.

If it's difficult to make these projects take 1 hour instead of 8 because of coding reasons, OK, let's consider scaling up the cooked food output per day for the same projects. Making it 4x or 8x the current amount would be almost equivallent to what I first suggested, though still not as convenient, because with "1 hour cooking" you can set your character to cook, then login a few hours later and bring the food outside to your guests or friends. Scaling the outputs would be nice as well, but not as nice: you still would be stuck there for the whole day, right?

[Piscator]

The isolation inside buildings is a problem of its own and something that likely needs the attention of ProgD. From a RD point of view all we can do is either decrease the time you have to spend indoors or increase it to a point where there's always three or four chars working inside to allow some roleplay. (Of course not by just increasing project durations, but by creating a constant need of refined products.) I'm leaning towards the second option.

Anyway, most cooking projects have a variable duration, so you can make them last one hour if you like already. In those projects only the output per time ratio can be changed. Fixed duration projects usually take a day as this is the least annoying duration. Cantr is a game one should be able to play after work, in other words, logging in only at certain hours, so anything less than a day would cause much time to be wasted. One hour projects in particular are the most annoying kind as they require the player to log in every three RL hours to start a new project. Therefore we try to avoid one-hour fixed duration projects.
If we need fixed duration cooking projects at all is of course debatable.

[Arlequin]

Get a radio in the kitchen. Unlike harvesters or more social characters, cookers can listen to the radio all the time.