Potential Food Mod: Giving those edible items a purpose!

[Ajores]

First off: I was kicking around in the creation kit and trying to fiddle with it. Running through a few tutorials but I'm specifically looking for the food objects. I would like to see if I can simply replace their given effects with my own, and then there are a few more advanced things I'd like to try to do but they aren't essential right now. Does anyone know where the food items (and meal ingredients as well) are listed under and if I can change their buff types? I'd like to recreate food in Skyrim to give it a much needed purpose, because as it stands I feel like food is a very useless mechanic that could have served a purpose with a little more fleshing out.

 

Read on if you want to read some of my ideas behind this:

 

So I was thinking today: Bethesda has done a great job flushing out enchanting, smithing, and alchemy, but it really doesn't seem like they really found a purpose for cooking in this game and that kinda disappointed me. There's basically no real point or practical benefit to cooking your own meals or eating in general. Potions are more than abundant enough to do most of what cooking offers and they do it much better. So the issue really is that there's just no incentive for any kind of gamer to want to eat, unless you'r a die hard RP-er. Even then though, wouldn't it be nice to be better rewarded as an RP player for doing your RP business?

 

In fact, isn't that exactly what the Rested bonus is? Sleeping in a bed is practical for all kinds of players, power gamers and RP-ers alike. That little bonus is a nice incentive, yet it's not so huge that it's "key" that you snag it at every opportunity available (though if you did, you'd certainly would level up faster). It's both a totally different kind of bonus than what a potion offers, and it's a small one compared to what other mechanics in the game function like. For that matter, when you worship at an alter or a temple, you're also rewarded (and again, it's a little bonus that all kinds of play styles can appreciate).

 

So after all that said, giving basically no practical incentive to eat food just seems too silly! What I'd like to do is create a mod that changes all the given effect of each food item and recipe, and give them entirely new effects that are as minimal as possible (so not to be OP) but to add a more practical buff. Here's my thought: Potions give strong but short buffs, so why not have food give moderately weaker but longer lasting buffs? Eating raw and common ingredients will give you something to the tune of a small increase in health that lasts 6 minutes (I think that's around 2 Skyrim hours), where as the more rare ingredients and cooked items will give you larger health increases, health regen, or even stamina or magicka increases and regens that last twice as long (something like 6 skyrim hours).

 

...At leat that's what I'm thinking right now! I'm sure if I got involved with scripting (which I would have to learn but probably could manage something) I'd like to really go beyond just changing the given food values to slightly altering the whole "eating" system around it (such as a "You are Full" debuff that prevents you from eating anymore, etc).

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started? Tips?