Frontier cooking breaks the laws of the universe

[BugReportEnthusiast]

I've been writing the script and running the calculations for a super in-depth video analysis of each frontier cooking recipe, and i can't help but notice this reoccurring pattern.

Every cooked recipe weighs less, often substantially  less than the sum of its parts.. and it's not consistent between recipes
Some recipes with few ingredients weigh more than recipes with many ingredients, and it feels very bizzare.

The ingredients of stews are 0.75kg, but the result is 0.35kg      |  53% decrease in weight
The ingredients of bannock are 0.4kg, but the result is 0.2kg      |  50% decrease in weight
The ingredients of meat pies are 0.9kg, but the result is 0.3kg    |  67% decrease in weight
The ingredients of peach pie are 0.85kg, but the result is 0.3kg  |  65% decrease in weight
The ingredients of rose pie are 0.43kg, but the result is 0.3kg     |  30% decrease in weight

But where this really starts to go off the rails is with the unique recipes.

Thompson Family Stew: 1.65kg -> 0.35kg  |  78% decrease
Camber Flight Porridge: 0.89kg -> 0.3kg     |  66% decrease
Ranger Stew:                   1.85kg -> 0.35kg   |  81% decrease
Coastal Fishcakes:          0.91kg -> 0.21kg  |  76% decrease
Prepper's Pie:                    0.86kg -> 0.2kg    |  77% decrease
Lily's Pancakes:                  0.9kg -> 0.15kg  |  83% decrease
Dockworker's Pie:               1.56kg -> 0.2kg  |  87% decrease
Stalker's Pie:                        1.41kg -> 0.2kg  |  86% decrease
Breyerhouse Pie:                   1.9kg -> 0.2kg  |  90% decrease

Not only do these massive decreases in weight not make any sense in-universe (putting 1.5kg of meat in a 0.2kg pie..?), but like, why decrease the weight by that much in the first place? What was wrong with letting some recipes create heavy foods?
I get that some foods are designed to be taken with you, like bannock or sweet pies, but most items have no reason for these massive decreases in weight... it just feels out of place to me.

What do you think?

[PilgrimReaper]

I am in favour of a device created for my entertainment, taking place in a fictional setting, breaking the laws of the universe.

[xanna]

3 hours ago, PilgrimReaper said:

I am in favour of a device created for my entertainment, taking place in a fictional setting, breaking the laws of the universe.

This is an excellent sentence.

[xanna]

11 hours ago, BugReportEnthusiast said:

I've been writing the script and running the calculations for a super in-depth video analysis of each frontier cooking recipe, and i can't help but notice this reoccurring pattern.

Every cooked recipe weighs less, often substantially  less than the sum of its parts.. and it's not consistent between recipes
Some recipes with few ingredients weigh more than recipes with many ingredients, and it feels very bizzare.

The ingredients of stews are 0.75kg, but the result is 0.35kg      |  53% decrease in weight
The ingredients of bannock are 0.4kg, but the result is 0.2kg      |  50% decrease in weight
The ingredients of meat pies are 0.9kg, but the result is 0.3kg    |  67% decrease in weight
The ingredients of peach pie are 0.85kg, but the result is 0.3kg  |  65% decrease in weight
The ingredients of rose pie are 0.43kg, but the result is 0.3kg     |  30% decrease in weight

But where this really starts to go off the rails is with the unique recipes.

Thompson Family Stew: 1.65kg -> 0.35kg  |  78% decrease
Camber Flight Porridge: 0.89kg -> 0.3kg     |  66% decrease
Ranger Stew:                   1.85kg -> 0.35kg   |  81% decrease
Coastal Fishcakes:          0.91kg -> 0.21kg  |  76% decrease
Prepper's Pie:                    0.86kg -> 0.2kg    |  77% decrease
Lily's Pancakes:                  0.9kg -> 0.15kg  |  83% decrease
Dockworker's Pie:               1.56kg -> 0.2kg  |  87% decrease
Stalker's Pie:                        1.41kg -> 0.2kg  |  86% decrease
Breyerhouse Pie:                   1.9kg -> 0.2kg  |  90% decrease

Not only do these massive decreases in weight not make any sense in-universe (putting 1.5kg of meat in a 0.2kg pie..?), but like, why decrease the weight by that much in the first place? What was wrong with letting some recipes create heavy foods?
I get that some foods are designed to be taken with you, like bannock or sweet pies, but most items have no reason for these massive decreases in weight... it just feels out of place to me.

What do you think?

Don't forget that you spend about 15 mins 'preparing' before cooking. IRL, that means cutting, peeling, de-seeding, de-boning etc. Cooking creates waste. Looking at, say, a burdock root, there's a large amount you can eat, but also a lot that would get discarded as inedible. (This is also why meat bags from quartering carcasses weigh twice as much as the meat you can harvest from it - it has skin and bones and other inedible parts. I say this because it seems to confuse people and some think it's a bug.)

Also, cooking makes things lighter. The steam coming off the pans when you're cooking is water that is no longer in the pie/stew. In fact, an essential part of making stews is reducing the liquid. The water in a recipe from raw ingredients and added water doesn't all stay there, it is removed by the cooking process. (That 1kg raw meat cooks to 1kg steak is not really true in IRL, but I'm very glad Hinterland chose to keep that simple. Fish gets lighter when you cook it I think?)

Because of all that, the cooked recipes should be a little lighter. I agree the decreases you calculated are very large, but since the concept is valid, I don't mind Hinterland tweaking the numbers - even quite a lot - for game balancing reasons.

[BugReportEnthusiast]

13 minutes ago, xanna said:

Because of all that, the cooked recipes should be a little lighter. I agree the decreases you calculated are very large, but since the concept is valid, I don't mind Hinterland tweaking the numbers - even quite a lot - for game balancing reasons.

Game balancing isn't really a good reason for this decision
These weight decreases only serve to make frontier cooking (which is already really strong) even more powerful, by allowing us to cram calories into a ridiculously small package
Bayerhouse pie is like.. 11,250kcal/kg. That's pretty nuts, especially since before this the upper limit was crackers 6000kcal/kg, and most items tended to hover around 3000kcal/kg
I don't mean to be negative or edgy, but i have very little faith in hinterland to properly balance this game given many of their additions to the DLC so far

[ManicManiac]

I mean, sometimes a video game just has to video game.   

Afterall, for example, we mystically transmute relatively a relatively small pair of leather gloves into much larger (speaking of material surface area) more-or-less perfect squares of leather (there are several such examples but won't bother citing and exhaustive list).

Also, we frequently mystically materialize plastic bottles, ceramic mugs, etc... whenever we need container for hodling liquids.

These things don't bother me though, because it's a video game... I think it's fine.  No video game should have to be expected to perfectly mirror reality (otherwise it probably would not be a very fun game... but instead just a mundanity simulator ). 
 

I'm not really bothered by the maths not being up to snuff with the law of conservation of mass (mainly because I'm not a physicist or chemist or mathematician)...  I am, however, much more bothered by the new food items coming with buffs and debuffs.  I mean, if I eat one kind of meat pie... and I carry more stuff... but if I eat an apple pie, I get a migraine.    Just feels like it was an odd choice, to me.

Granted, that the idea of foods having buffs and debuffs was already established with Go! Energy... coffee/teas... and Pumpkin Pies (for those of us who remember 4DoN), but I'm not sure yet if I like it on such a sweeping scale with so many items and their various effects. 

I'm all for player choice though, so of course... as I start to experiment more with the cooking features, if I find I still don't like all the side effects (both positive and negative), I just won't use them anymore.   

I think once I get done with my personal challenge "...Memory Lane...", I'll more thoroughly do some experimentation with the new recipes and hopefully get a better feel for it.  For now though, I kind of wish they had just been good nutritious food items (perhaps with at most a similar condition recovery we might see with teas or energy recovery that we see with coffee) without having to consider if an apple pie I eat was going give me a splitting headache or not. 

Granted of course, these are all just my first impressions about the cooking system.
That opinion might change once I have a chance to really get a sense of how it actually feels in-game.

Edited September 13, 2023 by ManicManiac
Edited to clarify...

[xanna]

Oh, I forgot packaging. The inventory weight of peaches and sweetcorn includes the can, and of maple syrup, the bottle. That's a huge weight reduction just there.

[BugReportEnthusiast]

4 minutes ago, xanna said:

Oh, I forgot packaging. The inventory weight of peaches and sweetcorn includes the can, and of maple syrup, the bottle. That's a huge weight reduction just there.

Most recipes don't have ingredients with containers. And even for the ones that do, removing 0.15kg (the can's weight) from the ingredient weight does nothing to make the numbers sensible
We're still condensing KGs of already prepped, ready to cook and consume meat as well as several other ingredients into like 200 grams, the same weight as 2 teas.

[hozz1235]

As was touched upon in this post, the weight/calorie benefit seems, IMO, the main reason for cooking these meals.  If that was equalized, it would make these meals far less desirable.

Edited September 13, 2023 by hozz1235

[xanna]

1 hour ago, BugReportEnthusiast said:

Most recipes don't have ingredients with containers. And even for the ones that do, removing 0.15kg (the can's weight) from the ingredient weight does nothing to make the numbers sensible
We're still condensing KGs of already prepped, ready to cook and consume meat as well as several other ingredients into like 200 grams, the same weight as 2 teas.

Oh yes, I know. As I said, I agree that the numbers are unrealistic. I was just thinking through ways that the product would be lighter that the ingredients. Also as I said, it doesn't bother me. There's a lot of suspension of disbelief in this game (and all games) and different people bump on different things. Your observations are valid, even taking into account what I've said that some reduction in weight is realistic.

[xanna]

On the balance of Frontier Cooking:

The items themselves are OP, as we've discussed a lot in the community. For me, the balance for that comes from the fact that the ingredients (flour, oil) are so heavy that I don't want to carry them around. So I keep a stock at a base and only cook when I'm 'at home'. However, the rapid condition loss of the recipes means that it's not practical to cook them at home and then use them as packed lunches for travelling/exploring/hunting etc. So I'm left with these OP recipes that I can only really use in a place where I'm already safe, not so much when the buffs will be useful. Would I cook a unique recipe to heal up my condition when I could just go to sleep instead? I'm not saying they're never useful - I can cook meat pies to take with me for a day that I know will include a lot of climbing, for example, but my initial concern about having OP food replace my every day diet of steaks has not bourne out for me. If the recipes were also realistically heavier than they are then that would be another way to discourage players carrying them everywhere, but the fast decay already does that for me, and right now it feels like the perfect balance to me.

Cooking 5 shifts the balance dramatically, I imagine. Cooking 5 removing food poisoning from even ruined food is not something I enjoy.

[odizzido]

This game has never made sense. It has been years since I played but I seem to recall things like axes and socks being 3-5 times heavier than they should be. This is just the minor stuff though as there are issues like putting on clothing makes you colder if there is wind.

Anyways I hope good mod support comes out around the time they finish making the game. I would love to change all the values of these things to more realistic values before going through the story.

[xanna]

It would be very interesting to play with realistic weights for inventory!

[hozz1235]

6 hours ago, xanna said:

However, the rapid condition loss of the recipes means that it's not practical to cook them at home and then use them as packed lunches for travelling/exploring/hunting etc.

If you have lvl 5 cooking, condition loss should not be a problem.

[xanna]

Yes, that's right