In survival sandbox games, it is likely that you will come across some kind of cooking and food mechanics.
Sometimes this can lead to other mechanics like farming. I want to hear your thoughts and ideas on what kind of mechanics you like from other games or things you have thought about yourself.
Things such as:
What kind of ingredients and how to get them
How food is cooked
What benefits or buffs that cooked food should give
Whether food should be required for survival and whether food should spoil
I was thinking of having different ways to cook things, such as over a campfire, grill, maybe even a stovetop!
And nyes, food naturally spoils which could add a more realistic feel to your game. An idea would be adding something similar to a smoker that way food that is smoked will stay fresh much longer!
Adding onto what I previously said, having food cooked over a campfire should give a little more buffs than other ways because it would feel more authentic! And maybe, for smoked things, they have less buffs but last longer before spoiling!
this should really only be a thing if cooking/food and surviving is a central part of the game (ie; Dont Starve). In most cases it doesnt do much cuz you can just die. For example, the Constant Seed version of hunger is flawed, as you can just die to reset the hunger bar
so nobody really gave a specific idea so here’s what i have in mind:
the “fun” idea
since you have the falling sand engine, what if cooking was entirely physics based? a telekinesis spell would move foraged foods or creature corpses over fire, and anything classified as “meat” or “vegetable” react with fire to turn into their cooked versions.
and with creatures that have poisonous or inedible parts, the displacement spell could be used to remove them before cooking. otherwise, a debuff would be applied upon consumption
i can open this idea up more if it sounds interesting, or you could go off your own creativity with the intricacies of the system
the “game design” idea
cooking in games like Terraria, Don’t Starve and its kin is surprisingly diverse, and it mostly depends on the game’s leniency to certain gameplay traits: (left to right: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Noita, Don’t Starve)
Terraria and Stardew Valley follow a very similar system of foods being merely the same in function to a potion, with regenerative properties or buffs being their sole purpose
Minecraft’s food system is… well, an arbitrary addition to give the game a resemblance of difficulty and survival. It’s still similar in being glorified buff and HP restoration but has a little more involved production cycle (smoker and furnace establishing a gameplay loop based on advancement, coal, and raw food items)
Noita is unique, because alot of the matter that exists in the world can be eaten. There is no food system (hiisii chef doesn’t count) but the alchemy and wide variety of edible element substitutes that. the fun idea comes from Noita because you have to interact with the falling sand engine to create the buffs that you desire.
Don’t Starve isn’t about food, but the culmination of many passive and overlapping difficulties that the Constant throws at the player. food is, similarly, healing and a volatile resource that must be kept in check. that being said, Don’t Starve’s The Gorge event had a simple yet great example of how food mechanics interact with the gameplay loop:
the crude schematic here displays the following:
resource is gathered to fuel the crock pot, and leftover resources are spent or amassed towards an upgraded tool. tools allow for harvest of raw food. alongside the fuel, raw food is turned to edible food that replenishes the hunger meter, which is a requisite condition that must be continuously satisfied.
this loop motivates progression by slowly increasing the curve of surplus resources, which are continuously made easier to amass by obtaining the tools via spending the resource itself. that’s the general concept of a strong gameplay loop that integrates food and cooking mechanics.
whichever one best fits your idea of the game, however i’d say the Don’t Starve Together; The Gorge type of gameplay loop or the Noita way of things (which is p much the “fun idea”) would work best
cooked meat gives a buff when eaten
however, the potency/duration of buff for the eaten pixel depends on how much it is cooked
this is determined by a variable, for an example the variable ranges from 0-100 and 70 is perfectly cooked
anything above or below that variable give diminishing returns in buff power, maybe in a parabolic formula?
meat here is defined as a special type of matter. when in contact with fire, a line can be drawn from the center of the whole object that contains meat to the closest pixel of fire. if the line collides with any other material, the meat does not cook unless the collision happens with something like a metal, which naturally transmits heat. the closest pixel of fire is the “center”, and the pixels surrounding the center point have a diminishing value in how much their effect is in the cooking process depending on their distance to the center (a multiplier of 1.0 to 0.0 in how much heat they contribute). then, the sum of the heat is the speed of how fast a pixel of meat cooks.
now, meat pixels cook slower in relation to how much they are cooked. a fully cooked piece of meat might get a 0.25x cooking speed multiplier so that it’s harder to burn it accidentally, and the pixel also transfers more heat to the neighboring meat pixels. this also means that the meat object does not cook as a whole, rather pixels on the surface of the object that face the fire cook first, which transmit leftover heat towards their neighbors. you would have to spin the object to get all sides properly cooked, and cooking large objects made of meat would be much harder due to the large interior size.
a player would have to use the displacement spell to rid the creature corpse of poisonous/inedible parts, then chop it up to make smaller pieces, and then place the meat on a makeshift pan made of a sheet of iron alloy atop an active fire.
all of this came to me in a dream and i havent written a single line of code in my life so
