Cooking Surface Area: Something interesting I saw in another game with a surface-area based cooking system

[Kauffy]

There is another survival game I picked up a while ago that is the polar opposite of TLD, called Stranded Deep.

Instead of snow, it's set following a plane crash on a series of deserted islands. I tried it out, found it "not ready to be enjoyable" and put it away.

I picked it up again yesterday and felt it was "good enough" to start playing it a bit.

The cooking system is interesting, even if a little awkward. Basically, anything above the flame will cook food. This means that by using right-mouse drags, you can move stuff on top of a fire (though that's not how it's "supposed" to work), and whatever you can fit there will cook. The same is true for the stove you can build. Think of a TLD fire barrel-- you can just place whatever will fit on a grill, and it will all cook.

I can see it much more difficult to balance, although that might be resolved by using different sized models for the relatively different sized pieces of food. Personally, I find it kind of frustrating now, TLD, to have the cooking slots, when you could clearly fit additional pots/pans/cans/slabs of meat onto the available area that is, e.g., on top of the stove, especially since this only becomes a "frustration" to the player, in that you could simply go outside, with the same fuel, and start three fires right next to each-other and have six cooking surfaces. Additionally, cooking .1 kg of rabbit takes up just as much space as the giantest piece of bear-- the timing is different, obviously, but it becomes a much bigger chore to cook, say, three rabbits in succession when they would all fit together on a stove or grill.

In Stranded Deep, the system is definitely awkward, because the click-dragging placement is physics-based, rather than "plotted" like TLD's, so it's really easy to throw a piece of meat, or knock another piece off the grill placing one, but that's really just a tuning issue. I think it would work a lot better with the plotted placement system.

I know it seems weird to want to overhaul that after it "just" got an overhaul, but it was just an observation I made of an actual implementation of something I had previously theorized might be better.