attention all beestation chef players. this is an official survey that asks a simple question…
would you enjoy an update in the cooking food works…
if so do you have any sudgestions / other codebases to point to.
please avoid peanut posting and offtopic. this may or may not have effects on theoretical content in production… no promises are made 
I’d enjoy more options and variety in cooking and its mechanics.
I wish we had more specificly tailored foods for each species, with a lot of human foods being inedible for others - Maybe the recipes could require the player to read from a specific cookbook, a random one the chef spawns with, and others orderable from cargo/obtained from the library.
From there, the chef could then spawn in with only the knowledge to craft the food from their originating species.
Similar to the dessert book, you could have specific categories of food only gained from cookbooks too.
Cooking is fine as it is, just add to it and it’d be fine, maybe add more recipes to turn otherwise inedible shit into food.
More food variety would be fun since I would very regulary find myself just making the same few dishes every shift due to it just being what’s accessible at the time due to botany shenanigans. Being able to prepare vegtables into more dishes on their own would be nice because I always struggle serving moths servicable meals if I don’t have meat wheat, since the vegetarian menu is very limited.
im contractually obligated to warn that this would require a delayed chems PR so directly PRíng that would be a bit difficult
I expect nothing - Coding for ss13 looks like hell.
Personally Im waiting for the newfood update. I wish the mechanics themselves were reworked, using the crafting menu to cook is archaic and unorganized as shit.
The round as chef gets quickly boring the moment you do copius amount of food (which doesn’t take long). You can do a gimmick to prevent this, like makin a menu and making people sit down and pick a plate and dessert, but since eating 2 extra bites of anything makes you fat for the rest of the shift, it’s not that optimal to serve dessert. You can also make paper bags with food to go , but its kinda meh that you have to come up with gimmicks to enjoy the role because the variety of food doesn’t actually change anything besides the sprite of what you are eating. You can just spam pizzas for different species and raw meat for lizzards and call it a day
I’ve tried as the HoP to order food from chefs to fill up the main hallway of each department. So each department would have like a lil’ small buffé of food close by. One problem I found with that is the amount if food you’d need to make. it’d take half the shift to even slightly make enough food to fill a single table in each department… Even once offered the cook to remodel parts to make it cozy for a lil’ open floorplan break room.
I do have faith in the department break room “gimmick” (not sure you can call it that).
Wasn’t this something @RKz was already working on?
Slightly related but i’d like for the chef-bot and bartender-bot to be introduced since they pester them for specific drinks and food and if they complete the order they get some credits, it would help the bartenders and cooks to go out of their way and make very specifics foods and if they don’t it would encourage them to learn even more, perfect for a new players server.
I agree with people here that we need more varieties in term of food and recipes… I’ve wanted to do a gimmick once or twice about opening a Japanese restaurant and there was not a lot of options to work on, so I had to improvise with my trusty pen to rename most of the food. I’d love to see more exotic dishes. More sandwiches, more bread/dough based stuff and not just burgers and pizzas, more meat varieties and desserts other than cakes, more fish stuff too… carp meat is rare… and maybe more veggies stuff for our friendly moth friends that are often ignored in term of menu or any other species in general.
Cooking is fun due to how you can just make personalised dishes for everyone, but the crafting menu as it is makes cooking more of a process of gathering ingredients than actually cooking them. Everyone can do that.
Having mechanics like having to grill steaks for a period of time on one of those grills from tgstation, where if you do it too long it turns into a burnt mess, would already be massive. Having timer based mechanics to cooking would actually make you feel like a cook and add a lot of “prestige” to whatever you end up putting on the table.
Adding any mechanic would be great really. The most fun in a recipe you can have is preparing the ingredients, rather than mindlessly clicking button in the crafting menu (making dough, cake batter, …)
Do keep the crafting menu visible though. It’s well categorized and a easy in game reminder of what ingredients to gather. Having to open the wiki to be aware of the ingredients you need everytime would quickly get annoying, and it’d allow one to choose recipes more easily too
But for the love of god, never port those tg bots you have to feed with different types of food for money rewards.
Also, no matter what change you decide to make -
PLEASE remove that xenobio crossbreed which allows you to infinitely spawn food. If you make chef jobs harder, it’s going to make xenobio decide to come to kitchen and spawn infinite amount of food.
No, random scientist, you are not helping me do my job, you’re invalidating the 40mins i spent harassing the botanist for vegetables and preparation of what i actually want to be on my table (to fit a theme) solely to spawn ungodly amounts of food.
Even more of a hot take, please up the amount of food one person needs to feel full. Since most meals got their nutrition value buffed, which gets even higher with high yield vegetables/upgraded microwaves, food stands barely empty out, if ever. It’ll also give incentives to science/botany to come and give better food, so that everyone’s fed properly.
God no, the last thing I want when interacting with the crew and showing off my meals is for random bots to spam requests that feel more like a mini-game than an actual roleplay experience.
Make chefs’ role more important and less bypassable, and make it a bit harder. That is how you’ll encourage players to do a proper chef job.
So why not allow us to create ART? Implement a way to “draw” with food stuff and whatever you drew will add it to the meal! So you can spell out “I LOVE YOU” or more appropriately “AA?”. And then name it of course like a proper work of art!!
I also had the idea of removing vending machines if there are cooks on shift start.
Wouldn’t work, not all cooks actually… cook, and Oozelings usually depend on vending machines for emergencies, even in real life despite having restaurants and food services we have vending machines, credits are on greyzone since our economy system is non existant
You can activate them and deactivate them iirc in other servers where they have a better economy is an extra income when they don’t tip you(or the chef doesn’t know how to to put them to sale) it’s not a feature for the 5000hs chef main, but for thr **new players ** since Chef/Bartenders are usually picked they help get familiarized with recipes, doing different dishes and even have that small pressure of a timer (otherwise they leave but in the big scheme of things them leaving doesn’t affect you because the tip they do doesn’t count much due to our non-existant economy)
Obviously you can always learn by having people request you food, bartenders have a much higher learning moments than chefs due to people asking for very specific drinks, most of the time chefs get ignored and barely get a thanks(without counting random cargo bounty) it’s just another tool and option to learn.
I do agree that they could use what you said on your last sentencr
Because you take 2 bites out of a dish and you’re full for the next 40 minutes.
Make crew rely more on chef, for chef to get requests for food and special requests.
Having rp-breaking robots requesting this type of shit will just suck. If you want to do something similar, at least do it through more rp renewable cargo bounties.
However, it’s a difficult thing to make crew rely more on a chef without making rounds where a chef isn’t present a total mess.
Do Miners mine? Do Chemists make chems? Do Roboticists make robots? Checkmate.