Make Food Good

[Pandarsenic]

TL;DR
Make the chef better by making advanced foods more useful and helpful without taking away the value of vended foods and late-shift donuts

What do

• Diversify nutriment/protein/vitamin more; have them serve different purposes instead of just being nutriment with slightly different healing properties and parallel metabolism.
• Protein leaves the system at a slow metabolic rate and provide a mild lasting mood boost (larger for lizards?) and a decrease in hunger accumulation as long as it's in you.
• Vitamin leaves the system quickly, provides less nutrition, but provides a significant short-term mood boost and small amounts of all-type healing. Possibly, overdosing provides a big negative mood and toxin damage (but should only be possible if you're grinding food to extract it).
• Sugar (and things containing it) gives the "too much junkfood" mood penalty or something like it if you're consuming more sugar than other types of foodchems so you end up with nothing but sugar in your stomach - something like the "medicine hurty " moodlet? Not a concern with basically any sweets, since they never(?) have more sugar than anything else
• Sauces, Condiments, & Seasonings: If it's not overly complicated, having salt, pepper, BBQ sauce, mayonnaise, etc., provide a mood boost for being taken with foodchems in small quantities would be nice.
• Donuts no longer count as a breakfast food.
• Breakfast foods are good to the 20 minute mark instead of 15?
• Trash-Eater or whatever the trait is called gives no mood penalty or boost for any specific food, but gives a small "ayyy I ate things" mood for when you get nutriment from the act of eating. Alternatively, remove it altogether/replace it with traits that give you the tastes of a different species instead of "lmao I eat the trash"
• Chefs who refuse to actually make real food but who ALSO won't let other people make food in the kitchen get fuckin' jobbanned for griff (not a code change but whatever).

Why do

• viewtopic.php?f=2&t=30737
• Protein Value: Meat dishes are, generally, the hardest to make. It requires the intervention of another department (monkey cubes, synthmeat, meatwheat, chicken farms, mouse hunting + butchering, ) to produce in significant quantity. This change means that if you can actually acquire significant amounts of meat, people can have SATISFYING MEATY DISHES that make people not have to go back to the kitchen as often.
• Vitamin Value: Allows finer control
• Sugar Value: Apparently people are eating sugar pills/drinking beakers of sugar to deal with hunger???????
• Donuts: A chef can make a dozen types of breakfasts (toasts, eggs, McGuffins, waffles, pancakes...) with the absolute laziest being hand-fried eggs. If there's no chef and you really want the mood boost, you can get your coffee from a vendor. Donuts should be good for quickly quashing hunger and nothing else.
• Breakfast Time: A slightly longer period means that people can go to the chef for them right after they finish basic job setup like starting the engine, doing a first run of mining, making a healing virus, etc., even if RNG is a little unkind or something goes mildly awry.
• Trash Eating: I'm so goddamn sick of chefs laying out a spread of deep-fried organs and nothing else god damn shit fuck motherfucker
• Jobbans: I'm so goddamn sick of chefs laying out a spread of deep-fried organs and nothing else god damn shit fuck motherfucker

[Pandarsenic]

I'm necromancing this as an alternative to https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/67156 and https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/67181 because I was reminded by

do you know what vitamin is

[Pandarsenic]

Breakfast (which adds to donuts being the most overpowered food in the game but don't tell coders)

Do tell coders

[FantasticFwoosh]

Is this to continue the theme of MRP? Medical already has too much of this kind of content with cobby-fermi chem.

Much the same way trek-chems used to deal with healing as directly as nutriment does for food, suddenly having metabolic rates would mean you have to pop a flinstones vitamin gummy or your tirazian rock-lizard OC goes into a coma because they only process salt. Im not against all of it, as long as the player has cues to help make sense of it without a wiki.

Yeah, slam the food traits too, i really dont care that your quirky catgirl oc can eat literal garbage in less than 5 minutes for a room of ivory tower admins to chuckle at, just be choice orientated instead like vegetarian/vegan.

[Pandarsenic]

Much the same way trek-chems used to deal with healing as directly as nutriment does for food, suddenly having metabolic rates would mean you have to pop a flinstones vitamin gummy or your tirazian rock-lizard OC goes into a coma because they only process salt. Im not against all of it, as long as the player has cues to help make sense of it without a wiki.

Ideally, the only players who should care are those attempting to cram all the vitamins they can into something to become a Magnesium-based lifeform.

In practical terms, what it would mostly mean, ideally, is:

Protein: things that are meaty keep you full longer
Vitamins: things that are fresh and things that are processed by the chef are good for quickly feeling better
Sugar: You cannot sugarpill yourself to fullness without consequence, though I'm not really convinced it's a real problem while desserts and junk food from vendors are still good for a quick fix
Sauce/condiment/seasoning: Adding these to foods matters and is useful, but not gamechangingly strong. (Could even add a trait for a favorite condiment, similar to the pineapple-lover trait)

Deviant Tastes: I will not be sad to see it go with iamgoofball's goofkitchen. If you want to eat gross stuff, don't let me stop you, though.

[Farquaar]

I like this framework since it avoids a common pitfall I've noticed with other suggestions for a food rework. I often fear that some coder one of these days is going to make chef "useful" by giving him healing/buff potions like the bartender (used to have?).

I've always loved chef because it's a creative job. There is no true *meta* food- you can slather the front table with mass-produced slop, or made-to-order thematic dishes. Either way the crew is fed, but you can be as cool and flashy as you want to be.