We’ve had some interesting changes lately like ants and food mood buffs, but I feel that the single most obvious, deadpan part of food is being underlooked - actually rewarding people for engaging with the chef.
The title isn’t a call to buff food - it’s a bit of wordplay.
I believe that chef-made food should properly buff you. The buff should last at least 5 minutes, though I think 10+ is good, people do not eat that often.
Instead of making a code mess out of it, just give the chef an innate ability that lets him apply buffs to foods he makes. You pick a buff, you apply it to a dish created by you, now the person has an actual reason to visit you, and there’s actual reasons to hire a chef. Scale the duration with the existing mood thing we have, just make it longer. Then the chef has a reason to make something fancy for you, so it lasts the 10+ min instead of like 4.
Buffs should be varied, but the main catch is you can only have one. That way we can put things that actually feel meaningful like tool speed or regen on this instead of “chance to heal 1 oxy damage every 3 ticks” (exagerration).
I kinda like this, like how chaplain can do certain stuff because of the job, maybe certain foods when made by a chef could confer bonuses so like, there’s a desire for certain things? It’d be hard to stop it from becoming just like sec running up to the bartender “quad sec please in a flask”
Buff the buffs!
Stuff like: raising your crit threshhold, some minor stun resistance, maybe even a tad more speed on top of the 10% you normally get for staying well-fed.
Give people buffs they actually want, the current mood buff is mostly just ignored by players.
I think it’s a good idea. A crew that fights on a stomach full of high-quality chef-made food should be better than a crew full of cargo-bought pizza!
The buffs should indeed be buffed, complex dishes could end up giving ‘‘stats’’ advantage while the other remains minor but worth picking, this could go well if it goes similarly to Removes hunger debuffs + Oozeling blood changes PR with my proposal on a comment to give an increasing negative debuff the more hungrier you are.
I like it! Just make so that there is no way to see in advance what kind of buff you get when you eat, so as to stop low effort behaviour (eg I look at the food, immediately grab the healing sausage and leave).
That way you need to either talk to the chef or even better, try different foods eating one at a time, and then after finding the buff you like, maybe ask the chef “hey dud, I liked the hotdogs, can you make more pls?”
This, but with the important caveat that actual chefs should be able to tell what buff a food has applied. This also means that if some superfood gets added as a drop anywhere, the chef can ID it.
I’m not sure if adding more buffs to our already broken game is a good idea. For example… if this adds a source of regen to the game then we would have thease sources of passive regen/self tending (that i remember):
New chef buffs
Nanites (many)
Xenobiology (many, but not many are reliable)
Vitrium froth (you can chug as much as you want for passive healing)
Healing chemical cigars (or just healing chemicals in general)
Self tending
Dionas, alien golem, shadowpeople etc get passive healing from their species
Antags usually can get other sources of self healing too but I’m not gonna try to list that
Strawman, average crew member doesn’t go around collecting heals like this.
Even if someone like an antagonist or security went about collecting heals, it’s already possible to become senator armstrong easily, to the point where adding a minor food regen won’t matter at all.
I do not believe that the regen is a particularly meta option unless you are playing an explorer or miner to begin with. Other buffs that offer more utility or help with a job will likely be preferred.
I feel like giving food minor regen shouldn’t be a problem tbh! I would also like to propose
That soups should have a chance to heal any virus
(I’d say specifically chicken noodle but I don’t think we have that in game?)
The admins don’t want you to know this, but you can spike peoples drinks. I have served over 500 quad sec and bacchus flasks to security. If they complain, why the fuck are you drinking on the job dumbass its your fault.
Food already does have buffs somewhat, nutriment and vitamins have a chance to heal any damage each tick. Pretty shit healing but if you get punched once or twice it’s usually enough.
Character aspect could be fun for like character gimmicks, like give me the option to boost all my sweets and play heavily into “I’m a baker I bake things”
I also don’t think regen from food, especially minor regen, should be a problem tbh. If people are going to powergame, there are many other ways of doing so via nanites, OP chems, etc.
I’m not saying that adding something like that would make things broken for the regular crewmember (not much more than what we can already get from nanites), I’m saying that over time adding more and more minor buffs piles up and we get to the point that becoming senator armstrong can be accomplished easily even by non antags.
I just don’t think that adding more and more buffs over time is a good direction to go, especially since we don’t buff antags nearly as often as we add thease sorts of buffs.
The admins don’t want you to know this, but you can spike peoples drinks. I have served over 500 quad sec and bacchus flasks to security. If they complain, why the fuck are you drinking on the job dumbass its your fault.