New cooking system is a total disaster.

[Sunwolf]

Ok, maybe "total" is a strong word but as it stands now it feels like an April Fools joke.  Coupled with the unmitigated mess that is the inventory UI and I'm finding my enthusiasm taking a nosedive.

Up to this point I had been cooking meat in cookpots as I haven't had to carry them around because I've been spending lots of time indoors getting a foothold on a new playthrough.  Today I started cooking meat on stones next to fires and the reports of misclicking and getting food poisoning are spot on.  While I'm still up in the air as far as the cooking system as a whole (though I'm starting to warm up to it), the radial menu has always sucked and this food poisoning right/left click thing has made it exponentially worse.

If you look at my earlier posts you'll find no one on these boards more excited about this game than I was.  My initial enthusiasm has been replaced by continual eyerolls at the terrible inventory/UI and downright disgust at this food poisoning due to misclick debacle.  When I first bought the game I was gushing about looking forward to playing it for years.  Now I find myself scouring the internet for rumors of survival games where any frustration comes from difficulty and the consequences of making bad decisions rather than the horrendous UI.

[Sunwolf]

I do that.  However, when I'm not at one of my bases, I don't have a cookpot with me as they're prohibitively heavy.  Is there another way to cook meat directly on the fire without having to go through the horrendous radial menu?

[ThePancakeLady]

1 minute ago, Sunwolf said:

I do that.  However, when I'm not at one of my bases, I don't have a cookpot with me as they're prohibitively heavy.  Is there another way to cook meat directly on the fire without having to go through the horrendous radial menu?

Yes. Drop the meat from your inventory, onto the floor or ground, use the RMB placement we always have had (or controller equivalent), to move it from the floor to a campfire stone or stove burner plate. Just like moving a rifle from the floor to a rifle rack. Same thing.

[MHDan]

9 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

Yes. Drop the meat from your inventory, onto the floor or ground, use the RMB placement we always have had (or controller equivalent), to move it from the floor to a campfire stone or stove burner plate. Just like moving a rifle from the floor to a rifle rack. Same thing

This is what I do, drop everything like a decoy and leave it next to the fire, then just move it to the stones. You can do this while inside a snow shelter if you place the fire close enough.

Admittedly I haven't played with mouse and keyboard since the update, just with controller, so maybe it is a bit more frustrating with left and right mouse buttons.

[nicko]

its easy with left mouse buttons. just drop the food as mentioned, right click drag drop.

You can also place a pot on stove and select what you want to cook or boil.

[Sunwolf]

Bless you people.  I don't know why I didn't try this.  It doesn't solve the issue of the masochistic's dream of a UI but it'll let me play the game without inadvertently killing myself, I'm on board.  Thank you!

[Stone]

Accidental eating is a problem but I've only done it .. twice .. and I lgetbthe frustration. I look at it now as part of the experience. While you would probably never do that accidentally in real life, in the sim context  i see it as part of the self discipline needed in survival routine. And the UI, and I say this maybe because I've lived through a lot worse, is good enough IMHO.

[Guest jeffpeng]

10 hours ago, Stone said:

While you would probably never do that accidentally in real life, in the sim context  i see it as part of the self discipline needed in survival routine.

I do commend and admire you for your ability to see "deeper wisdom" in something like that. I cannot. While I really do love the new cooking system, this particular "tidbit" is indeed a debacle.

[Hotzn]

Interestingly, I seem to be a rare example of someone who never ate raw meat by mistake. I presume this is due to my habit of avoiding the radial menu where I can. So the first thing I tried after realizing that cooking had disappeared from the fire menu was dropping raw meat on the floor and moving it onto the fire. Worked like a charm and I've never tried anything else since then.

[Stone]

Yeah, like @Hotzn, I generally do all my cooking and eating by first dropping it on the floor. 

[Hotzn]

10 minutes ago, Stone said:

Yeah, like @Hotzn, I generally do all my cooking and eating by first dropping it on the floor. 

I'd like to clarify that I only do this in TLD.

In that other survival game where my avatar is a lawyer trying to survive in a pre-apocalyptic 21st century city setting, I only place the venison in frying pans before cooking. I tried dropping it to the floor once and wanted to move it onto the kitchen counter with my right hand, but my girlfriend NPC started yelling at me for it, and I lost 8% condition. Luckily, I had found some flowers the day before which I still had in my inventory, so I could drop them as bait and withdraw from the confrontation. Rested for an hour to regain some condition before going back into the kitchen.

[Boston123]

On 7/27/2018 at 7:43 PM, Sunwolf said:

I do that.  However, when I'm not at one of my bases, I don't have a cookpot with me as they're prohibitively heavy.  Is there another way to cook meat directly on the fire without having to go through the horrendous radial menu?

Which is funny to me, because IRL the weight of a waterboiler (cookpot, kettle, etc) is largely irrelevant in face of the sheer utility of having a fireproof container to boil water in.

[Stone]

@Hotzn I think I'm playing something similar. The condition loss from that sort of .. female NPC..  is huge for stuff like that. On the medical radial if find that chocolate treats that. If I hadn't worked that out I'd be dead by now.

@Hawk you're right. Just imagine if you met another survivor and the first act of kindness you show, to build trust, is to make tea and then you only make enough for one..!? What will they think of you..

 

 

 

Th

 

 

[Thrasador]

I don't like the arbitrary added numbers of designated cooking areas...

So you can now cook ONE thing on a forge or the fire barrel in Forlorn Muskeg, or TWO things with a campfire?

You should be able to place things closer together on the cooking surfaces to make better use of the hot surface, instead of sticking ONE thing in it's designated circle...

Or maybe as your cooking/fire skill goes up you can apply up to six hot stones around your fire instead of just two?

As your cooking skill goes up do things take less time to cook?

I don't know....I'm a Taurus, I'm stubborn, and I don't like change.

I would rather this cooking was a paid update I didn't buy, or I could turn this off and revert it to the old way or something.....

I don't play this to play a short order cook mini-game...they have plenty of those for my phone already if I want to play them....

[White_SnowTree]

On 2018-08-31 at 12:18 PM, Thrasador said:

I don't like the arbitrary added numbers of designated cooking areas...

So you can now cook ONE thing on a forge or the fire barrel in Forlorn Muskeg, or TWO things with a campfire?

You should be able to place things closer together on the cooking surfaces to make better use of the hot surface, instead of sticking ONE thing in it's designated circle...

Or maybe as your cooking/fire skill goes up you can apply up to six hot stones around your fire instead of just two?

As your cooking skill goes up do things take less time to cook?

I don't know....I'm a Taurus, I'm stubborn, and I don't like change.

I would rather this cooking was a paid update I didn't buy, or I could turn this off and revert it to the old way or something.....

I don't play this to play a short order cook mini-game...they have plenty of those for my phone already if I want to play them....

I do find 2 cooking spots around a fire to be a bit ridiculous- we have more then 2 rocks around the fire- but the system is already fine as it is. 

 

It’s not perfect, but it’s still an improvement. I would never want to go back to the old cooking system

[Spakerman]

I would just wish there were some other 3 and 4 slot designed stoves scattered around.

[White_SnowTree]

46 minutes ago, Spakerman said:

I would just wish there were some other 3 and 4 slot designed stoves scattered around.

Definitely a possibility with Episode 3 having a new region 

[ThePancakeLady]

2 hours ago, White_SnowTree said:

I do find 2 cooking spots around a fire to be a bit ridiculous- we have more then 2 rocks around the fire- but the system is already fine as it is. 

 

It’s not perfect, but it’s still an improvement. I would never want to go back to the old cooking system

Well, at least we don;t have to use time and burn calories, to wander around, dig our stones and rocks buried in snow and ice, then lug them back to our campsite, before we can even build a fire. I mean, if we want more "realism", we can ask Hinterland to add that bit, and see how "great" it is, to spend hours in the snow, finding stones and then assembling the fire ring, before we can make a 4 cooking spot mega bonfire.

... It isn't "realistic", but it makes sense for balancing reasons in game. I'm fine with it. My gal does not have any desire to go gathering and carrying stones around in subarctic conditions, just to make campfires with an extra cooking slot or 2. 2 slots limit vs hypothermia or frostbite? Yeah, 2 slots limit wins, IMHO.

[White_SnowTree]

22 minutes ago, ThePancakeLady said:

Well, at least we don;t have to use time and burn calories, to wander around, dig our stones and rocks buried in snow and ice, then lug them back to our campsite, before we can even build a fire. I mean, if we want more "realism", we can ask Hinterland to add that bit, and see how "great" it is, to spend hours in the snow, finding stones and then assembling the fire ring, before we can make a 4 cooking spot mega bonfire

Well, primitive firemaking has not been updated into the game yet 

 

I don’t think us 4 years ago would have thought that we would be at this point, which such a map and with a “real-time” cooking simulation. We have no idea how realistic they plan to be in the future development of this game

[Celeblith]

In case any devs are watching, I'd just like to throw out that personally I love the cooking system (I'm on ps4 so I think the radial situation is more forgiving to us). Just so you know that OP doesn't speak for all of us. 

[NardoLoopa]

4 hours ago, Celeblith said:

In case any devs are watching, I'd just like to throw out that personally I love the cooking system ... Just so you know that OP doesn't speak for all of us. 

+1

[Sunwolf]

Posting an update to this.

Overall I like the new system.  The radial menu self-poisoning thing was the killer.  Now that it's fixed, I give it a thumbs up, though I'd like to see an option to alter the size of one's campfire and thus the cooking spots around it rather than having to build several separate fires right next to each other when one wants to conduct a mass cooking session outdoors.

[Celeblith]

2 hours ago, Sunwolf said:

I'd like to see an option to alter the size of one's campfire and thus the cooking spots around it

One the one hand, I can see why this would be cool, however I think the campfire size thing is an instance of a rule in place for balancing purposes. Kind of like how a crafting table would easily fit inside one of the houses in the fishing camp in coastal highway, but it's outside because each potential base has to have something wrong with it, be it a small stove (or no stove), an outside crafting table (or none), no beds, bad lighting, being difficult to get to or too close to predator patrol zones, etc. Campfires are convenient in that they can be constructed (unlike stoves which have to be found), but they're inconvenient in that they have to be built outdoors/not on wood and they only have two slots for cooking. 

tl;dr some of the game's rules are not true to life because the game is a game and not a simulation. 

All that said, maybe they could make campfires adjustable in size at the cost of, say, having big fires taking longer to make than little fires, each piece of firewood buying less time with big fires than with little ones. needing so many rocks in your inventory to build a bigger fire, and/or something else. 

[NardoLoopa]

3 hours ago, Sunwolf said:

Overall I like the new system.  The radial menu self-poisoning thing was the killer.  Now that it's fixed, I give it a thumbs up . . .

I imagine Hinterlands would enjoy it, if you changed the hyperbolic title of the thread if this above is the case. (not even sure that's a forum option, but I'm sure it would be appreciated) 

[Hotzn]

8 hours ago, NardoLoopa said:

I imagine Hinterlands would enjoy it, if you changed the hyperbolic title of the thread if this above is the case. (not even sure that's a forum option, but I'm sure it would be appreciated) 

You used to be able to do this, but they changed the settings at some point, unfortunately. I would vote for at least being able to edit the title of a thread later on. I used to update the title of my survival stories when new updates/hotfixes came out (eg from "Survival run v315" to "Survival run v315-322"), to illustrate that the run is incorporating the changes. That's currently not possible.