Smaller default meat sizes.

[TROY]

After extensive testing of the new cooking mechanic system I have some suggestions.  First, the cooking times are incredibly excessive for the amount of meat being cooked at once.  Also, the cooking times being so different from one meat to another feels REALLY arbitrary. Red meat is red meat.  A kg of moosemeat shouldnt take any longer to cook than a kg of rabbit.   Lastly, with this new system in place, I'd like to suggest that maybe its time to make the default size of meat portions .5 kg? 

[ajb1978]

I agree with "Red meat is red meat."  1kg of rabbit should take as long to cook as 1kg of moose.

I'm sorry sir, but that's where our agreement ends.  The cooking times for 1kg of meat are largely appropriate, compared with my personal experience cooking meat in an oven, on a stove, on a campfire, in a dutch oven, and smoked.  Also, I would not want my default to be .5kg cutlets, because that would mean even more clicking to drop, even more clicking to cook, etc.  I would rather have meat cutlets be user-defined.  If you want to cut a 1kg steak that takes an hour to properly cook, cool.  If you want to hack off the meat and wad it up into an 8kg sphere of deer that takes a full 8 hours to cook, so be it.  If you really want to chop that entire bear up into 0.1kg bait nibblets....well that's stupid, but go for it.

[MrWolf]

I just wish there was a way to cut existing raw meat pieces smaller.  I pulled 1kg of meat off a deer carcass (at one time).  As I walked to the fire I had just started, I realized I should have taken the meat in .5kg chunks and could have cooked it all in half the time.  I don't think there's anything I could do with already having a 1kg piece of raw meat.   That said, I wouldn't want to see the default size be smaller than 1kg, it works well when harvesting and cooking large amounts of meat.  I agree with @ajb1978 - if I choose to take 4kg of meat at once, I wouldn't mind getting a single 4kg piece.  And, I'd like to have the ability to use a knife or hatchet to cut that raw meat into smaller pieces (or just cut a piece in half) later on if I want to.

 

[Doc Feral]

When I want smaller pieces I select all the meat and then de-select unti I'm one click away from zero. Of course, you can still have 0.4 or 0.5 pieces if particularly unlucky, but I wouldn't cry havok.

[MarrowStone]

That also raises the question of what it would do to the cooking skill... half sized meat means double the cooking experience for the same amount of food...

The cooking times are pretty good as they are imo. any shorter and I wouldnt be able to multitask as well while cooking. Not to mention you can still pass time while cooking. It also gives me time to write in my jpurnal when I have nothing else to do.

[Doc Feral]

Just to explain what I'm saying. You kill a wolf which has 4.8kg of meat. You select all the meat for harvesting, then you start subtracting 0.5kg at a time, until you'll end up with 0.3kg selected for harvesting. At that point you can harvest and repeat until you'll have a large amount of small steaks. As said before, a 4.9kg or 5.0kg wolf would have been rather disappointing for this mechanic.

Now we'd need a TLD scholar to tell us how many pieces you'll obtain by quartering based on the weight, so it would be possible to calculate the meat amount of each piece and see how the decimals go. In the previous example, if quartering makes two chunks they would give 2.4kg each (0.4kg pieces) while three pieces would give 1.6kg each (0.1kg pieces).

And remember, eat unsafe meat in large chunks because it won't multiply the risk for parasites.