LE Immersive cooking

[stebbinsd]

Cooking in Skyrim, for me, is really boring, and also pointless.

 

First of all, there's only two types of cooking equipment in the game (only one without DLC).

 

Second, the recipes are extremely picky about which ingredients you use (e.g. Elsweyr Fondue only takes Eidar Cheese Wheels, even though eight eidar cheese wedges would equal the same weight. In the real world, your stove wouldn't know the difference).

 

Third, with the exception of Vegetable Soup, Venison Stew, and Elsweyr Fondue, food doesn't seem to serve any purpose outside of roleplaying. For example, five carrots weight a total of 0.5 pounds, and restore 5 points of health. A single Potion of Minor Healing, available at the very beginning of the game, restores five times that much for that same amount of inventory space.

 

Fourth, there's no skill to it. All the recipes are spelled out for in you when you activate the cooking spit (even though there's no reason why your character would know these recipies from memory). Heck, at least with smithing, the recipes don't show up until you've learned the corresponding perk!

 

Fifth, there's no actual "cooking" involved. You just put the ingredients in a pot, heat, and serve.

 

Here are some suggestions I have to make cooking a more immersive experience:

 

Suggestion No. 1: The Cutting Board.

 

Add this station to every kitchen area. This allows you to reduce the size of your ingredients while simultaneously getting more of those ingredients. You can run food and ingredients through single-ingredient recipes to go from chopped, to diced, to minced.

 

For example:

1. Put a carrot through the cutting board, and you get 5 "chopped carrots."

2. Put a chopped carrot through the cutting board, and you get 5 "diced carrots" for each chopped one you use.

3. Put a "diced carrot" through the cutting board, and you get 5 "minced carrots" for each diced carrot you use.

 

Bigger food items (such as venison or cheese wheels) would create more "chopped" versions of those foods than more lightweight ones.

 

Suggestion No. 2: Hidden Recipes.

 

No longer will recipes appear on-screen when you open up the cooking spit. Instead, cooking spits and Hearthfire ovens function more like the Atronach Forge: You put ingredients inside, activate the cooking spit, and see if your concoction yields anything! You have to experiment!

 

If you give the cooking spit a recipe it doesn't recognize, it will simply spit out a "mistake," a food item which does nothing, weighs nothing, and is worth nothing. Shades of the "mistake" from Paper Mario on N64.

 

Instead, the recipes would be written down on sheets of paper or full-fledged cookbooks and sold by food vendors and inkeepers for a base value of 1 gold for the sheets, and 5 gold for a ten-recipe cookbook (much like how apothecary merchants will sell potion recipes). The new Recipe for Elsweyer Fondue would be sold by the Khajiit Caravans.

 

Speaking of "new" recipes, that leads us to ...

 

Suggestion No. 3: Complex recipes.

 

While the game itself only recgonizes the "basic" recipes I complained about in my Fifth complaint, there's a way to get around that: Recipes to create the ingredients you need for other recipes! For example, recipes may call for chopped, diced, or minced ingredients, which don't appear in the game world, and can only be obtained by putting whole ingredients through the aforementioned cutting board.

 

For example, there's a suggestion for the new Elsweyer Fondue recipe. This table shows what the Khajiit Caravans' recipe would tell you to do, compared to what you, yourself, are actually supposed to do:

 

http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj93/dstebbin/SuggestionfornewElsweyerFondueRecipe_zps0efb46c2.jpg

 

These three suggestions, I believe, would make cooking a thousand times more immersive and fun. Furthermore, it doesn't sound like it would be very script-intensive.

 

Any takers?

[reyzark]

wow, thats a nice and immersive feature, i want to see that mod on the nexus.

[stebbinsd]

Wow... this thread went dead real fast. I was hoping for a sightly better reaction than just one person. :(

[Aridyan]

Well, you did only post it today. From my perspective, this idea sounds awesome- but probably not something I'd use. For a game like Skyrim, immersion is great and everything, but this is more like a mini-game to further distract the player. Of course, that's only my own opinion, this could be a very cool mod.

[Mattiewagg]

Something to remember is most people come to this forum to posts requests, not necessarily look at them.

 

Most requests that are picked up aren't "chosen" because they have more responses but because the modder likes them.

 

The more complicated, the less likely to be made. Many modders don't have time at all - it's not that hard to think of a new project, so it's rare we're not doing something. But if I ever had a whole bunch of free time and wasn't working on my current WIP (see my signature) I would do this.

 

Saying "I thought this would generate more of a reaction" doesn't help you much. Yeah, generating a reaction MIGHT make this more plausible but it won't help a whole lot.

[stebbinsd]

Well, you did only post it today.

Actually, I posted it yesterday. I posted my own reply because I noticed that this thread wasn't even on Page 1 anymore, despite it being only a day old.

 

The more complicated, the less likely to be made. Many modders don't have time at all - it's not that hard to think of a new project, so it's rare we're not doing something. But if I ever had a whole bunch of free time and wasn't working on my current WIP (see my signature) I would do this.

 

Frankly, this seems counter-intuitive to the purpose of this board. The more complicated a project is, the more likely somebody is to request it rather than make it themselves (because the more complex it is, the less likely the thinker-upper is to have to the skills needed).

[Aridyan]

Sorry, it said it was the same day for my timezone >.>

[lofgren]

It's best to think of this board as a ghetto where mod requests can be contained so they don't clutter up every other board. If an individual modder decides to take up your request, that's just a happy coincidence. If a mod is too complex for you personally your best bet is to organize a team of modders to make it, not post it here.

[Mattiewagg]

 

 

Well, you did only post it today.

Actually, I posted it yesterday. I posted my own reply because I noticed that this thread wasn't even on Page 1 anymore, despite it being only a day old.

The more complicated, the less likely to be made. Many modders don't have time at all - it's not that hard to think of a new project, so it's rare we're not doing something. But if I ever had a whole bunch of free time and wasn't working on my current WIP (see my signature) I would do this.

Frankly, this seems counter-intuitive to the purpose of this board. The more complicated a project is, the more likely somebody is to request it rather than make it themselves (because the more complex it is, the less likely the thinker-upper is to have to the skills needed).

It's good to remember that modders do what they do, and put a lot of time and effort into it.

 

It's not counter intuitive. The purpose of this board isn't to get your mod requests filled - it's to post you ideas here. Maybe someone will pick them up, maybe they won't, but if they do it's because they either decided to be generous or didn't have the time. It they didn't, that's normal. Modders not filling requests isn't being mean or not doing their "service". It's deciding not to put time and effort into the idea because they don't want to.

 

Also, getting a small amount of interest is very normal for mod requests. Falling off the "front page" is perfectly fine. It means no one was interested. Bumping it likely won't help.