suggestion Reduce Cooking Times with Hotter Fires

[Kauffy]

I also added this as a misfeature/design bug, because I'm not sure if it's intentional.

The short version is that, currently, it appears that cooking times for identical items do not vary at all with the temperature of the fire that is cooking them.
I tested this by starting multiple fires next to each-other (there's a LOT of meat in a bear), and then adding 1kg pieces of meat to each fire. The cook-times for the meat were as-expected, but adding additional fuel, which increased the temperature output of the fire, did not alter the expected cooking time at all, which is not expected behavior.

[Kayosiv]

I'd agree with this. With the newest update cooking times for food seems to have gone for 20 minutes to over an hour an a half for full sizes of meat. This is undoubtedly to balance out that we can plop food down and go do other things while it cooks, but it still feels silly to have food take hours to cook with an inferno next to them.

[Kaisentlaia]

I'm not sure I would like that, unless there was a way to decide the fire's temperature. Right now the more stuff you add to it the hotter it gets, so long fires would cook everything faster... but I really like being able to do other stuff while I'm cooking.

I saw someone suggesting a way to build different types of fires with different temperatures/characteristics, that could be interesting and work well with cooking times based on fire temperature. Irl a fire would get hotter if it was burning a lot of wood at the same time, but keeping track of every single piece of wood, its burning time, and temperature output would probably be a nightmare from a development point of view.

[scuttlebum]

On 6/27/2018 at 9:27 AM, Kauffy said:

The short version is that, currently, it appears that cooking times for identical items do not vary at all with the temperature of the fire that is cooking them.
I tested this by starting multiple fires next to each-other (there's a LOT of meat in a bear), and then adding 1kg pieces of meat to each fire. The cook-times for the meat were as-expected, but adding additional fuel, which increased the temperature output of the fire, did not alter the expected cooking time at all, which is not expected behavior.

I agree with this. Hotter fires reducing cooking time would make sense. That would help save time / amount of firewood needed per session. I've often found myself wondering why my meat isn't browning quicker or water boiling quicker, even with a 50 degree Celsius flame.

 

On 6/29/2018 at 4:03 PM, Kaisentlaia said:

Irl a fire would get hotter if it was burning a lot of wood at the same time, but keeping track of every single piece of wood, its burning time, and temperature output would probably be a nightmare from a development point of view.

Though I can see why the above comment might be a big factor as to why this hasn't been implemented!

[JErosion]

or that putting coal into a potbelly raises the temperature up to 80 degrees C... i'd rather see coal prolong a standard fire but with the furnace maybe it should take further actions to raise the temperature like some sort of bellows. Fire is Fire but a steady stream of air can turn burning wood from an orange glow to white hot inferno.

[ajb1978]

Ehhh hotter is not always better.  Too hot, you can burn the outside of the food while the meat remains raw inside.  When cooking over a fire you really have to carefully position your pan in the Goldilocks zone.  Not too hot...not too cold.  If the fire were super hot, like a fully loaded forge, you would have to move that pan farther away from the fire to avoid just outright ruining your food.

Especially when large cuts of meat are concerned!  Low and slow--that's the rule when cooking big cuts of meat.  100C in the oven for a couple hours, your roast is perfect.

[JimmyPL56]

I agree, the temperature of the fire should effect cooking time.

Also, freshly boiled water should give you a warmth bonus like tea and coffee.

[grahambird80]

I agree that cooking time should be reduced by the temp of the fire, if not cooking time certainly the time it takes snow to melt and then boil.

Perhaps in the future the larger range cookers oven compartment could also work to allow for a roasting of meat

[Kauffy]

On 6/29/2018 at 1:03 AM, Kaisentlaia said:

 Irl a fire would get hotter if it was burning a lot of wood at the same time, but keeping track of every single piece of wood, its burning time, and temperature output would probably be a nightmare from a development point of view.

From a developer's perspective, this is actually not at all difficult to do (you're tracking only a few properties of a few items, and then doing a periodic calculation on them in aggregate), however, it would toilet player interest and be uncharacteristically complex for this game.

I do stand by my original statement, though-- even if you had a huge piece of meat, in reality, to get it to cook more quickly, you might cut it up into smaller pieces. This could simply be implied by having a shorter cook time for a hotter fire. The other thing I'm noticing that's a little bit of an annoyance is that you may wind up with several small amount of one item (e.g., 0.14kg of rabbit parts x 5, or 0.07 litres of dirty water). It would be nice to be able to just combine the meat together into one cook (and, dare I say it, but I'd actually like to see some food recipes in this game ).

For the water, what's frustrating is that if I wind up with some amount of dirty water (this happens either because a fire burns out, or because of a bug playing the game on Linux that sometimes causes it), I don't want to boil that fractional amount of water by itself, but in order to combine it with more dirty water, I have to melt more snow, then take the melt, and then they are automatically combined in inventory. I guess what I'm looking for is a "pour into"-- and the ability to add things to containers that are on cook surfaces when they're off.

In the words of Carl Weathers: ".. you got a stew goin'!"

[Soul Sojourner]

On 7/10/2018 at 8:39 PM, ajb1978 said:

Ehhh hotter is not always better.  Too hot, you can burn the outside of the food while the meat remains raw inside.  When cooking over a fire you really have to carefully position your pan in the Goldilocks zone.  Not too hot...not too cold.  If the fire were super hot, like a fully loaded forge, you would have to move that pan farther away from the fire to avoid just outright ruining your food.

Especially when large cuts of meat are concerned!  Low and slow--that's the rule when cooking big cuts of meat.  100C in the oven for a couple hours, your roast is perfect.

This was my thought when I first noticed it when I came back to the game. First I was like, wtf shouldn't I be cooking food faster with a hotter fire? But then I thought about this.

So I just assumed it was another one of those things we "pretend" happens. We put the food to cook in different spots and cook it in different ways than what we actually see, in order for it to cook properly... we're just skipping the details of it.

[Kauffy]

I think people are just defending something to be contrarian.

As it is now, it doesn't matter the temperature of the fire, it makes no difference to the items you apply it to: food, snow melt, etc.

[ArchJudge]

How about having the selectable option to forcefully cook something faster (placing the hot ash around the cooking pot, at the expense of the fire's duration) with the risk of receiving light burns if it results in a failed action (instead of damaging Condition directly, it would just add red negative max health at a rate of 1% to prevent overdoing it that takes 1 day per 1% to heal without other medical requirements)

 

Alternatively taking 5 minutes to upgrade the fire with an already prepared fire spit (3 sticks, 1 line, requiring a work bench to craft, limited uses) to add a 3rd inefficient meat only cooking slot would be a nice addition

[Kauffy]

The solution I'm seeing to some of this is to eliminate "cooking slots" and replace them with "cooking area"-- so whatever you can fit into the cooking area can be cooked at the same time, though there may be some "prime" cooking area and some warming cooking area.

This mechanic might be in the pipeline, though, if they plan to graduate the cooking stages (i.e., something being cooked can actually be undercooked or overcooked, and something that has completed cooking can begin burning-- and with water, once it's boiled, it begins to boil off a bit).

The reason I'm in the forum right now is that I thought something like this happened already, but it looks like I've found a bug-- the fire barrel in the barn in PV, with the grill on top of it, even though it has cooking slots, no dragged items will stick to them. I can place food or a pot on the grill without a problem, but the food does not cook and the pot still behaves like it's not on the fire/the fire is out, where I can only pick it up or not.

[nicko]

They did reduce cooking times with the last patch, to me they seem fine now. and yes the devs said they are aware of the placement issues and fixing it. So next patch all  should be good.