''MEAT STEW''


Coleman H.

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I've had this idea since watching an old western with my grandpa around the time the new pot and tin can update aired. 

Why cant you cook a simple meat stew?

All you need is a slab of meat a few cups of water and the pot and wallah, stew!! 

The various meats have different properties in the stews and if wanted you can also make a reishi stew (works different from the tea since this is a meal and not tea).

Possibly the ability to find other veggies for the stews like wild onions or potatoes.

 

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While I second stew, and veggies, as a concept. I can't see a reasonable, consistent-with-existing-game scenario wherein you would actually find any viable vegetables.

As for stew, what I had been thinking today was that you could add spices, etc. to the stew to improve recovery times, or to lessen the likelihood of contracting disease from otherwise risky meats.

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As much as I'd like the implementing of stew it wouldn't add much to the game from a practical point of view. Another recurring suggestion is makng broth from bones and oter leftovers from carcass harvesting, which would give some extra calories and add a craftable and indefinitely renewable hot beverage.

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It would be nice to expand upon both the cooking and clothes crafting recipes/blueprints. Asking for a craftable hat has been going on since clothes crafting was implimented...

As for the stew we do have meats, we have foods in cans....vegetables in a can could be added, we have cattail stalks, we have rose hips, and we have mushrooms. The root of the cattail which we don't seem to harvest is starchy like a potato....I've made a meal with less...

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10 hours ago, Doc Feral said:

As much as I'd like the implementing of stew it wouldn't add much to the game from a practical point of view. Another recurring suggestion is making a broth from bones and other leftovers from carcass harvesting, which would give some extra calories and add a craftable and indefinitely renewable hot beverage.

Certainly something i'll readily support. Soup > stew for me anyway.

On 18.9.2018 at 5:07 PM, Coleman H. said:

Possibly the ability to find other veggies for the stews like wild onions or potatoes.

Bit of a stretch in that climate. But you can always add tomato soup / other instant soup stuff - which could certainly be more common. I wonder if you could make a stew with flavouring from fish/crabs/mussels tho...

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While it would be fun to make soups and stews, what would be the advantage? You can already cook and eat the meat, so boiling it into a broth wouldn't add anything extra. A hot meal is a hot meal, and we don't get a warmth bonus from eating a freshly cooked steak like we do with hot drinks, so that might be the only advantage. 

I do second the idea of having more dried goods on hand. Rice, beans, barley, rolled oats, etc. should be pantry staples in most households, so to find nothing of the sort is a bit of a stretch.

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1 hour ago, Silverhour said:

While it would be fun to make soups and stews, what would be the advantage? You can already cook and eat the meat, so boiling it into a broth wouldn't add anything extra. A hot meal is a hot meal, and we don't get a warmth bonus from eating a freshly cooked steak like we do with hot drinks, so that might be the only advantage. 

I do second the idea of having more dried goods on hand. Rice, beans, barley, rolled oats, etc. should be pantry staples in most households, so to find nothing of the sort is a bit of a stretch.

In theory under survival situations you are generally better off making a soup or stew than cooking over an open flame or on a pan etc. That way all the nutrients and fats etc cook into the broth rather than being lost sizzling into the fire or seeping into a rock. Also you can extract calories from more marginal bits of the animal.

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also, without getting into a big cabin fever discussion, perhaps more engaging indoor activities like reading, cooking (prepared dishes like stew, soup)  could negate cabin fever  or at least slow the rate of risk accrual during those activities. If I was in a survival situation I imagine a hearty stew would be a pretty big morale boost compared to a charred piece of venison. 

Maybe also stews etc could negate the intestinal parasites from carnivores - downside it's  slow cooking so you need a lot of fuel and it takes ages.

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4 hours ago, DaveMcD said:

(...) Also you can extract calories from more marginal bits of the animal.

4 hours ago, DaveMcD said:

...

Maybe also stews etc could negate the intestinal parasites from carnivores (...).

I agree. One of the reasons why i advocate for (bone marrow) soups: good nutritional value from something that could already be in the game. There is no risk from parasites since parasites eggs are inside muscle tissue and not inside the bones. It just makes sense to me. Aside from that - dealing with the parasites should be only a matter of temperature and preparation anyway.

But then we have no need for watching nutrition intake since malnutrition is not a thing. Stew / soul food for 'fluff' and morale i can see as an alternative however.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Well, to be more precise, the pronunciation is quite different for a french, "V" vs "W".  ;) And it doesn't mean anything, "Voilà !" is just used to designate & underline something. If used like this, that would mean something like "here's the result, you can admire it !".

To go back on the subject of meat stew with our "french touch", you should look for the famous recipe of "boeuf bourguignon". ;):peaches:

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  • 3 weeks later...

Stew would be so very, very wonderful!  You could add cattail tubers and mushrooms and *poof* tasty yum yums!  Great meal, extra dense in calories, helps you stretch out the use of your meat, heat bonus, health bonus - all around bonus!  Stew would be so great! 

I  definitely vote yes!!!  :x  :coffee:

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On 19. 9. 2018 at 8:06 AM, Doc Feral said:

As much as I'd like the implementing of stew it wouldn't add much to the game from a practical point of view. Another recurring suggestion is makng broth from bones and oter leftovers from carcass harvesting, which would give some extra calories and add a craftable and indefinitely renewable hot beverage.

Hi, just wanted to point out something - you kinda contradicted yourself - the stew would bring much from a practical point of view - it would be a renewable re-heatable meal. I also understand your point about the bone marrow soup - I think its a decent idea, and makes sense realistically - but I believe there is a reason why its not in the game already.

Ever wondered why there is just about 10 kg of meat on a deer? Doesnt that seem as a bit too little, for a whole deer? The amounts of meat harvestable from animals has been kept down on purpose to limit the calories a player can get from a single animal kill. Simply to force the player to hunt more. So it is unlikely Devs would include another harvestable item that has a purpose in gaining calories, even though you are right that it would make a lot of sense.

For these balance reasons, I like the idea of a stew, which uses existing meat more then I like the idea of a bone marrow soup.
Besides, if bones were harvestable, people would push for other uses for them - like bone tools, and I think its safe to say Devs dont want to include bone tools into the game as they would make forging more obsolete, and remove that challenge of having to forge them.

I like the idea of vegetables. Assuming that finding them would not be easy, but they would be renewable, unlike the current plants which are a one-time thing. If the stew recipe required meat and vegetables as well, it would further make it a harder-to-get kind of item. Making it more balanced, due to its obvious value as a meal, which can be re-heated for the "warm core" bonus. I imagine 1 wild onion, 1 kg of meat and 1 l of water in a pot would make for a suitable recipe of a 1,5kg worth of stew, which can be re-heated in a pot at any time. To further make it more balanced, this stew would degrade much faster than a steak would.

@loriaw You are onto something there. I like your ideas for the vegetables, and I definitely agree with your points on the spices. Think you could come up with something like a list of commonly found veggies or spices that would make sense to be located at Great Bear? It could go a long way one day.
We only recently had a cooking overhaul with the cans and pots, but that in itself was a big step-up to the old cooking system. TLD keeps gradually becoming better... and I can foresee another cooking overhaul in the future. A list like that could one day help incite discussion on what would be realistic and balanced as implementable if such cooking overhaul one day becomes a possibility. I am hopeful, especially with recent Hinterland reinforcements in the Dev team, and the separation between teams Wintermute and Sandbox. If we can get a list like that together, it might be worth its own thread so that we can discuss it further as a community :) 

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10 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Hi, just wanted to point out something - you kinda contradicted yourself - the stew would bring much from a practical point of view - it would be a renewable re-heatable meal. I also understand your point about the bone marrow soup - I think its a decent idea, and makes sense realistically - but I believe there is a reason why its not in the game already.

I like the idea of vegetables. Assuming that finding them would not be easy, but they would be renewable, unlike the current plants which are a one-time thing. 

I think having a new source of calories would be more "practical" than having another way to warm up, since water and a couple roots wouldn't add much else to the meat. Waiting for the stew to be hot by the fire would warm you up no less then the stew itself, by the way, so it would be a welcome "quality of life" item but not so relevant.

I don't think vegetables could be really renewable in the eternal winter if even lichens don't grow back.

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@loriaw Wow, you really went up and beyond of what I expected. Much appreciated :D - but really, a list of these suggestions can be of much worth down the road. One thing I want to mention, though - as much as I would wish for a much, much more advanced setting of survival options, cooking options, etc - we also need to think of other people. You and me, we both probably have a lot of survival knowledge that your average TLD player will not have. Especially the new players. You might remember the old situation with water. Tons of new players died of dehydratation in the game once their drinks and toilet water ran out, because they didnt figure out the way to boil the snow down. Something devs thought would be "intuitive" and obvious, wasnt for many people. And the game received some slashback because of this as many people wanted their money back or left the game behind simply because one of the most basic of needs was too difficult to figure out on their own for them. I remember teaching a dozen of newcomers how to boil water before the can and pot update, who came to these forums simply because they didnt know how to obtain more water.

So, the question is - how could we add this much content and make this "more advanced" cooking simple to learn for the new players? I think @BareSkin had a decent idea in this post. The cooking recipes could be "crafted" in the crafting section, or there could be a new "crafting" section that would deal with cooking recipes. Additionally, with higher level in cooking, new recipes could be unlocked along the way. 

Thoughts?

3 hours ago, Doc Feral said:

I think having a new source of calories would be more "practical" than having another way to warm up, since water and a couple roots wouldn't add much else to the meat. Waiting for the stew to be hot by the fire would warm you up no less then the stew itself, by the way, so it would be a welcome "quality of life" item but not so relevant.

I understand your point about bones, and their caloric value. I really do. Please, try to understand mine. Having each carcass worth of more calories would alter the balance of the game, a lot. Like I already pointed out - the amount of food on each animal carcass is nowhere near realistic. Neither is the "amount of calories" obtained from a serving of meat -  1kg of rabbit being just 500 calories? Plenty of other community members had a field day over this already (including myself in the past :D)
As you can see, these parts of the game are not very realistic.

So, adding bones to the amount of meat on the carcasses would increase the caloric yield of each animal kill, affecting this balance. In order to "balance it out", I am affraid the Hinterland would have to scale back on the amount of meat, available on the carcass.  That is a problem. So, now, instead of having 10 kg of meat on a deer, we would only have 7. Instead of 5O on a bear, we would have 40. But now, there would be option to harvest bones for marrow - so the caloric "value" of each animal would remain the same, but the amount of meat would be cut down to balance the issue. The amounts of meat already seem very unrealistic. Scaling it even down is just going to make the "TLD realists" scream out more that it makes no sense. It does - from the balance point of the game, not from the realistic point.

Not to mention the people who would scream for bone tools. Unless the option would be to collect "bone marrow" straight off the animal.

If that was the option, I would like to see bone marrow collection be an option, available only to players with higher "carcass harvesting" skill. Lets say level 3, maybe even 4. I dont think it would be "unbalanced" that a more seasoned hunter is able to get more calories out of a single animal, as opposed to some beginner. That way, the meat amounts dont have to be affected, and the amount of bone marrow you could collect would be really small. I imagine that cooking a soup out of it would make for a small amount of valuable natural renewable food, if we compare "caloric value-to-weight" ratio. And the fact that this type of food could be re-heated to add the "core temp" bonus.

The caloric value of vegetables was not really that important in my opinion. It was more of an issue of "game difficulty" - cooking a steak just needs a steak. Cooking a stew would be more difficult task, because you would need the meat, as well as the vegetable. Again, the purpose is to "up the challenge" in the game. Food is not all about calories - its morale boost is also important, and minerals and vitamins are as well. That would be the purpose of the vegetables.

2 hours ago, Doc Feral said:

I don't think vegetables could be really renewable in the eternal winter if even lichens don't grow back.

Of course not. But that is not really the point. Great Bear is a biiiig island. Thing is, I doubt you could really "run out" of the vegetables the same way you could run out of firewood to burn. I would see it work the same way firewood does right now. Every once in a while, certain locations would spawn an object, something called a "frozen plant" - which you could harvest, similarly to harvesting logs into firewood with an axe. Now, to make it more balanced - pulling out a plant like this would cause calories and time - not a lot, say 10 mins, but even that is a concern if the weather conditions are bad. Tools may make it easier, at the cost of durability damage. Or, a nice idea that @loriaw had with a stick - could be that the plant would only be harvestable with a stick as a tool - maybe the stick would break mid-way, causing the harvesting to fail like campfire starting, and you would lose the stick (but gain a tinder bundle, I suppose?)

The reason I want veggies renewable is simple. To make its cooking renewable, and available even some 1000 days in when the "set" resources have already been harvested - to prompt players who live the long runs to have a reason to go to these specific places in search of the vegetables. Interloper setting of "progressively poor world" could also have an effect that would decrease the amount of veggies spawned this way. 
The value of adding vegetables in your case is underrated. Food is not all about calories - its morale boost is also important, and minerals and vitamins are as well. 

I always disliked that "plants" are a one-time thing. Eventually, you could harvest out all of the "natural" resources on a big island, yet you can always find processed medical items washed up on the shore. That reminds me of a different idea i want to write on these forums. Point here being that natural resources should not run out, the civilized ones should.

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You are preaching to a choir here. When I started out, there was just ML, the game had some 15 bullets if one got lucky, and surviving past Day 50 was an incredible accomplishment. It was impossible to last 100 days because by then, all the matches and clothes were lost in the entire map. Everything had to be learned through trial and error, no tutorials. 

That said, there is difference to learn some simplified controls, and learning to do everything down to detailed leatherworking. I am not saying I wouldnt want it - but it would have to be done intelligently, so that the controls to it would not be impossible to figure out. My thought would be that the "skill" books, once they were finished, would add notes into the game with crafting recipes and some simplified tutorials on how to get those things done. 

This could include leather tanning as a part of animal harvesting skill. Sewing skill would allow the player to maintain clothes better, and create new types of simple leather clothes (aka the ones that we have right now, for example). Cooking better and more advanced recipes as a part of cooking skill. Cleaning the gun and gun maintenance as a part of the gun´s skill. Better bow, arrow crafting and maintenance as a part of the archery skill. Better fishing hooks, baits, fishing snares as a part of the fishing skill. And so on.

I can even see that combinations of skills could result in obtaining even more advanced options - say combining the skill of animal harvesting and sewing together would teach the player to create much better clothes, using those tanned out hides. (I dont think they would have much better stats then the primitive ones, but they would be lighter and more durable, seeing as those better cured pelts would last much longer). Combining animal harvesting and gun would allow for something like a "pouch" crafting accesory. Archery plus animal Harvesting = quiver. Fishing and cooking skills together could include a bonus to obtaining more fish oil out of fish.

These sort of things and integrations would be really nice to see in the game. But, the more difficult the controls would get, there would have to be some way of "subtly teaching" the player to do it. Even more seasoned players might not remember everything. That is why I think the skill books could leave some vague instructions in the Journal.

There could be more skills - medical knowledge, herbalism and farming (you mentioned greenhouses - there could be some around the map for all we know, though I doubt anything would grow in them cause of the temperatures anyways). But, who knows... the roadmaps mentioned that there was a "wish" to include seasons in the game... perhaps one day, the TLD wont be a permanently frozen wasteland, but there might be a season during which the plants would grow for a while. One can hope.

But to see so much content added we are talking of years and years of development. I believe these are more likely just a lovely dream, I reccon.

For the time being, I would like to see these things end up in the game:
Better, more realistic afflictions, illnesses and all things medical. Mainly, progressive injuries - (not curing that sprain for a while could end up with a fracture, with worse detriments and longer curing period - ignoring a treatment of fracture for a while would result in permanent damage. These sort of injuries.)
Better, more varied cooking. Possibly food preservation.
Some sort of mental health system. Hidden, but present. Things looking up bad make the player more hopeless - decreasing chances further, making cabin fever more realistic, preventing long-term starvations or hybernation playstyles. On the other side - keeping needs fullfilled means campfire lightning goes over better, so does sewing, the player lasts longer with fatique, that sort of thing.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Wow this post  is amazing! I love the idea of stew. I think it ought to:

- make food last longer

- Make predatory meat like wolf and bear safe to eat

- add a warming up buff

- if mushrooms or other medicinal herbs are added to the soup  you ought to get the medicinal benefits too.

I would also want to add to the list of cookable food that can be gathered to include:

- Kelp from fishing shacks and the shore

- oysters from the shore

- clams from the shore

- geoducks from the shore

- seaweed from the fishing shack and the shore

- the bottoms of the cat tails

- in places with weak ice you ought to be able to have a chance for lotus roots

- certain trees ought to have hibernating creatures like squirrel and racoon both of with can be processed for food and tools.

- Beavers ought to be hibernating in a few of the lakes. Beaver is good for food and fur. Beaver hat is a thing in Canada. Also they add the danger of beaver fever.

Bones ought to be available to add a lot of value to food sure, but once they have been through a few boils they should be able to be rendered down for glue. This is especially true for hooves and horn. So bones could be used in several ways as well.

I suppose we would need a new tool as well...a shovel..... perhaps building a fire can thaw the ground for diggin up tubers? If we can craft a hammer and a knife why not a shovel too?

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  • 2 weeks later...

I feel late to the party, but I think there might be ways to implement different recipes to the game, without making them overpowered or breaking the continuity of the game. The devs have wisely been very careful about adding new items in world that might harm existing playthroughs, and ruin an ongoing story for someone. 

 

I think there could be ways to use existing items in game to make recipes that have different effects. For instance, maybe meat plus water makes stew, and perhaps that meal might negate the hydration loss caused by the meat. Or, maybe a stew with carnivore meat plus mushrooms negates or lowers the chance of parasites.

 

From there, it really comes down to imagination and the devs comfort with adding new effects to the game in a non-gamebreaking fashion. If you add things like canned food, or mushrooms, you could make meals that have different effects, and not all of them would necessarily be positive. For instance, venison plus rose hips and salty crackers might make a tasty biscotti that adds health over time, but if you make it with bear meat or sardines watch out! It lowers your stamina bar more quickly when you run for the next 24 hours. 

 

This could allow the players to experiment and gauge the risk/reward of using more items to make a tiered level recipe system with greater positive and negative effects that they discover as they go and gain cooking ability. 

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