I’ve always loved cooking in videogames. This might be due to my superb ability to burn everything I try to cook in real life, or it might just be due to how fun cooking can be. Regardless, it’s a gameplay factor I’ve always loved to play with, whether it be modding Minecraft to live out my dream of being successful at making maple syrup bacon, to playing Stardew Valley. Solely to cook.
With that, I’ll segue into my suggestion: I’d like to see a strong cooking system on Potterworld. I’ve spent ages scratching my head, trying to figure out a good solution to optimize cooking so that it’s both more enjoyable to partake in, and more rewarding. Currently, the system is grinding out mob loot, pop it into a crafting table, and go through the crafting sequence for status boosts. While this is fine as it is, not a huge amount of players seem to normally use this system or might prefer the potions system over it.
More Rewarding System
The system is currently, I suppose, a system. You can either use food to increase your stats against mobs or private PVP on housing/in arenas. However, usage of food/potions and other magical items are banned in tournaments, as dictated by the official tournament rules on the forums, and players normally don’t like playing with extra stat boosts, as they want to increase their skill level when fighting other players. That being said, the main purpose of food is to battle mobs. And that’s fine! However, this means there isn’t necessarily a purpose to cooking unless you desire to grind, and instead make it so that fewer players use the system.
To toss around an idea to fix this issue, let me present the idea of leveling, albeit a different leveling from the past professions system. It’d be a form of leveling system similar to how some MMOs treat cooking professions. Each 5 or so levels, you’ll unlock a reward that is either given to or craftable by the player, that relates to cooking in some way. However, this leveling system would not limit what you can cook. Additionally, the higher the level you are, the more effective your cooking would become, boosting the stats of different foodstuffs.
Instead, the system would have an exponential form of leveling, similar to how the leveling system works for years. The harder it is to obtain the ingredients for the food, the more XP you’d earn as a result. It would make it so that those able to obtain higher quality ingredients can progress faster through the level system, but would also give more of a sense of freedom to potential chefs. Here’s a little bullet point section to sum up the ideas.
An Enjoyable Process: Part 1
While not as important as incentivizing, the process of collecting and crafting food items seems like an afterthought of the gameplay. It feels like a rehash of the current potions system but makes less sense. The only difference between cooking recipes and potion recipes is that food provides a percentage increase, while potions provide a set number increase. While this is perfectly fine on their own, each recipe calls for the same ingredients and feels very indifferent between the two.
The idea I’ve come up with is a lot more lifestyle-oriented than mob grinding: Cooking-specific items. Similar to the old professions system, there would be actual food types of items that you’d be searching for or buying, and these would be used alongside plants that you can already find in the wilderness. This would give the cooking system more uniqueness from the potions system, while still retaining its charm and similarities. Along with this, it’d make it so you’re using proper ingredients such as cheese or eggs in a meal, instead of throwing the bones of a werewolf and some fur and hoping it’s edible.
There could be various methods to obtain these. More store-bought types of ingredients would be obtainable from vendors located around towns, while more produce-related ingredients could be found out in the wilderness, on some of the small farm areas currently located on the map. Along with this, region-specific ingredients could be located in harder to reach places, like ice in Wigtown, salmon in Portstead, or pumpkins Edgebrook.
This form of the system would encourage exploration in the towns, as most of the houses are distinctly empty, and the only thing to do in towns is questing currently. While this doesn’t necessarily fix that issue, it contributes towards making towns a livelier place, with more shopping venues and uniqueness to each town. Alternatively, there could be a form of questing implemented to unlock different kinds of materials.
To add as a final thought before I summarize this idea in bullet points, ingredients that could be obtained in the overworld could be handled in one of two ways. One, they could be given a timer, limiting when you’re capable of harvesting them. However, a drawback to this is it would severely limit players from crafting food in a timely fashion and might feel constraining to players if all they’re doing is waiting on a timer to be able to craft a single piece of food.
Alternatively, there could be a similar system that might help prevent the constraint. This system would make it so you’re capable of harvesting a few of the ingredients at one time but sets the time limit up if you exhaust the resources. This time limit would be based on the rarity of the material and could range from 10 minutes to 24 hours at most, possibly with options to reduce the time, at a cost. Additionally, players would be able to purchase multiple accessible nodes if they had the money, each node growing exponentially in price the higher the quality of ingredient, with town exclusives being significantly pricier than normal nodes. While this doesn’t necessarily fix the issue of constraining players, it greatly reduces the constraint and gives players more freedom, without making it so that you can get stacks and stacks of the same ingredient in one day, at least without paying a handsome price. Now here are some bullet points to summarize what was stated above, along with additional ideas that didn’t fit in the explanation.
An Enjoyable Process: Part 2
This section dives into something a lot more diverse from the current gameplay: A removal of set recipes. Currently, there are a couple of the same recipes for each type of magic, and each recipe is more effective if you craft it’s higher-level version. This is very limiting and constraining, and you’re essentially making rehashes of the past level’s tea or cake. My final main idea is to completely dissolve this form of cooking, and instead make it so ingredients contain attributes. While there isn’t necessarily a drawback to a recipe-based system, it can get incredibly repetitive and limiting.
This form of the system would instead assign different forms of attributes to each ingredient, the rarer the ingredient the stronger the attributes. You could toss up to 3-10 ingredients into an oven or another type of object, and just see what happens. Additionally, each ingredient would have a specific type assigned to it and lacking variety in the ingredient combination would result as something akin to ash, or foodstuff that restores a very limited amount of hearts, with no status change.
Additionally, to keep the new Revelius crafting system, you’d be required to prepare certain ingredients to use them for cooking. This system would employ more complexity and customization to cooking but would make it an overall more enjoyable experience. When combining ingredients with conflicting attributes, the stronger attribute would be the dominant one in the recipe. Along with this, attributes could be stacked to make more powerful foodstuffs.
While it might be more complexed in thought, expressing the idea to players might be more simple than telling them where to find all the specific items and go through the entire crafting process. Instead, it’s simply tossing whatever you find labeled cooking ingredients and hope for the best, learning what makes a good foodstuff as you go. This would diversify cooking, and make it feel less of a chore and less pointless. You’re the one who dictates what you make instead of the game, and it gives players a sense of creation and usefulness.
When it comes to experience gain, it should be based on what form of materials is used in the process. Each ingredient has a set amount of XP gain tied to it, and the more rare ingredients you use, the more exponentially high the XP gain will be. To put this into perspective, if you added three common ingredients with 500 XP each into a recipe, you’d get a foodstuff worth 1500 XP when you created it. However, if you had two common ingredients worth 500 XP, and a rare ingredient worth 1000 XP, it’d be worth 3000 XP. If you had two rare ingredients and a single common ingredient following the same values, it’d be worth 5000 XP. Essentially, the rarer ingredients you use, the more XP you’ll gain exponentially. This would encourage players to collect and use rarer ingredients, shortening the lengthy process of leveling. Here’s a basic table to explain it, if it seems confusing. Just to clarify, the ingredients that you could use in cooking would not be limited to 3, but this is just to explain the idea. Along with this, common ingredients would have no boost at all. Of course, this is entirely hypothetical and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Using a form of GUI, the current cooking menu could be split into two. You could click on an oven to access the menu to input the ingredients you’d want to combine, which would only have a 5-second delay or no delay, as players greatly disliked the previous cooking gameplay due to the high delays and lack of active gameplay. The second half would be for preparing foodstuffs that require to be prepared, most likely all foodstuffs except a limited few. This could even be expanded more, making it so there are a couple of cross foodstuff combinations, such as milk and egg combinations to create a batter. This form of combination could increase the rarity of the ingredient, as well as change the attributes and result once placed in an oven.
Additionally, there could be very specific combinations that result in special effects, such as speed boosts, XP gain boosts, gold boosts, mob drop boosts, and more. However, these kinds of advantages would be very limited in obtainability, and only a result of incredibly specific combinations of high-tier ingredients.
For a small final thought, before I list all the bullet points, I believe a good way to help players with the system is recipe books. Although these wouldn’t be used for the actual crafting, players could obtain certain papers that describe a combination of ingredients for a potent foodstuff. Rarer recipes could be obtained from future quest NPCs to guide players to the harder to figure out combinations. Additionally, NPCs related to cooking and foodstuffs could drop hints to players about locations of hidden quests, specialty ingredients, and ways to obtain recipes. Both of these are ways to guide players through the system, giving hints without hand-holding, letting players feel as though they figured something out without being told exactly how to do it.
Conclusion
I know this suggestion will probably not be accepted- It’s an extremely complicated, fleshed-out idea describing a very complicated cooking system. However, I’m suggesting this anyway because it’s something I’d love to see in the game. This is not a high priority of Game Design, but at some point, I’d like to see a rework of professions to the point where I both have fun with them, need to put massive amounts of effort into achieving their completion, and feel rewarded when doing so. I took several days designing this idea, and I’m sure there are several issues with it. However, thank you so much for reading through what seems to be around a 3k word essay. If you are confused on any of my points, please ask and I’ll elaborate. With that, have a lovely day!
(Spreadsheet of potential ingredients if you're into that sort of stuff)
With that, I’ll segue into my suggestion: I’d like to see a strong cooking system on Potterworld. I’ve spent ages scratching my head, trying to figure out a good solution to optimize cooking so that it’s both more enjoyable to partake in, and more rewarding. Currently, the system is grinding out mob loot, pop it into a crafting table, and go through the crafting sequence for status boosts. While this is fine as it is, not a huge amount of players seem to normally use this system or might prefer the potions system over it.
More Rewarding System
The system is currently, I suppose, a system. You can either use food to increase your stats against mobs or private PVP on housing/in arenas. However, usage of food/potions and other magical items are banned in tournaments, as dictated by the official tournament rules on the forums, and players normally don’t like playing with extra stat boosts, as they want to increase their skill level when fighting other players. That being said, the main purpose of food is to battle mobs. And that’s fine! However, this means there isn’t necessarily a purpose to cooking unless you desire to grind, and instead make it so that fewer players use the system.
To toss around an idea to fix this issue, let me present the idea of leveling, albeit a different leveling from the past professions system. It’d be a form of leveling system similar to how some MMOs treat cooking professions. Each 5 or so levels, you’ll unlock a reward that is either given to or craftable by the player, that relates to cooking in some way. However, this leveling system would not limit what you can cook. Additionally, the higher the level you are, the more effective your cooking would become, boosting the stats of different foodstuffs.
Instead, the system would have an exponential form of leveling, similar to how the leveling system works for years. The harder it is to obtain the ingredients for the food, the more XP you’d earn as a result. It would make it so that those able to obtain higher quality ingredients can progress faster through the level system, but would also give more of a sense of freedom to potential chefs. Here’s a little bullet point section to sum up the ideas.
- Leveling is there to achieve rewards. The more food you cook, the more XP you’ll get. Along with this, leveling could boost the effects of food, increasing their benefits.
- Each level’s experience requirement grows exponentially to encourage players to cook the more difficult food but cap the exponential gain when it’s reaching over 100 food items to level up to prevent it from becoming tedious.
- Reward players every 5 or ten levels, and cap it at around 50, 80, or 100 levels.
- Have rewards either be craftable or just flat out given, but be related to cooking in some way. Potential rewards could be custom 3D furniture models or the previous cooking rewards from the old professions system.
- Have all recipes available off the bat. While players might be able to zoom through the first couple of levels, they’d be stopped by the exponential growth requirement later on. However, this system would grant players the freedom to craft and form of stat boost they’d like without a limit being put on them.
An Enjoyable Process: Part 1
While not as important as incentivizing, the process of collecting and crafting food items seems like an afterthought of the gameplay. It feels like a rehash of the current potions system but makes less sense. The only difference between cooking recipes and potion recipes is that food provides a percentage increase, while potions provide a set number increase. While this is perfectly fine on their own, each recipe calls for the same ingredients and feels very indifferent between the two.
The idea I’ve come up with is a lot more lifestyle-oriented than mob grinding: Cooking-specific items. Similar to the old professions system, there would be actual food types of items that you’d be searching for or buying, and these would be used alongside plants that you can already find in the wilderness. This would give the cooking system more uniqueness from the potions system, while still retaining its charm and similarities. Along with this, it’d make it so you’re using proper ingredients such as cheese or eggs in a meal, instead of throwing the bones of a werewolf and some fur and hoping it’s edible.
There could be various methods to obtain these. More store-bought types of ingredients would be obtainable from vendors located around towns, while more produce-related ingredients could be found out in the wilderness, on some of the small farm areas currently located on the map. Along with this, region-specific ingredients could be located in harder to reach places, like ice in Wigtown, salmon in Portstead, or pumpkins Edgebrook.
This form of the system would encourage exploration in the towns, as most of the houses are distinctly empty, and the only thing to do in towns is questing currently. While this doesn’t necessarily fix that issue, it contributes towards making towns a livelier place, with more shopping venues and uniqueness to each town. Alternatively, there could be a form of questing implemented to unlock different kinds of materials.
To add as a final thought before I summarize this idea in bullet points, ingredients that could be obtained in the overworld could be handled in one of two ways. One, they could be given a timer, limiting when you’re capable of harvesting them. However, a drawback to this is it would severely limit players from crafting food in a timely fashion and might feel constraining to players if all they’re doing is waiting on a timer to be able to craft a single piece of food.
Alternatively, there could be a similar system that might help prevent the constraint. This system would make it so you’re capable of harvesting a few of the ingredients at one time but sets the time limit up if you exhaust the resources. This time limit would be based on the rarity of the material and could range from 10 minutes to 24 hours at most, possibly with options to reduce the time, at a cost. Additionally, players would be able to purchase multiple accessible nodes if they had the money, each node growing exponentially in price the higher the quality of ingredient, with town exclusives being significantly pricier than normal nodes. While this doesn’t necessarily fix the issue of constraining players, it greatly reduces the constraint and gives players more freedom, without making it so that you can get stacks and stacks of the same ingredient in one day, at least without paying a handsome price. Now here are some bullet points to summarize what was stated above, along with additional ideas that didn’t fit in the explanation.
- Switch cooking ingredients from mob drops to ingredients specific to the profession
- Instead of obtaining ingredients from mob farming, you’d be going out on the search for ingredients. Either you could purchase some off the marketplace, go searching through markets in various towns, or travel to certain locations to collect specific items to be used in cooking.
- The quality of ingredients would be based on a couple of factors.
- The level-wise location. Each town has a different level zone to it and should affect the quality each ingredient has. Areas like Greenshore Harbour and Gnollberg Port would be the highest quality ingredient locations.
- Area Specific ingredients: It’d range from storebought ingredients to ingredients found in certain locations all around the wilderness, to the town specific ingredients.
- Rarity: Some ingredients might only be a chance drop, a secondary ingredient found in nodes. These would be rarer, and to an extent better, than their base ingredient.
- Add quest compatibility with cooking. If you want to be able to access a certain material, you need to complete a quest to do so.
- Either keep the current node timer, or change to a system where you can collect materials from a node until it’s exhausting while being able to affect the speed of collecting ingredients with 2nd party services, such as purchasing access to multiple nodes. These nodes would still have time limits but would be based on the rarity of the material, ranging from 5 minutes to 24 hours.
- Some rare ingredients that are exclusive to towns themed around the towns and obtained in more unique ways.
- Markets located around the world, selling different kinds of common cooking ingredients for small to large amounts of gold.
- Use of farms and caves placed around the world, containing more produce related and uncommon ingredients.
- Legendary ingredients, only obtained through very select and possibly limited ways, such as hidden quests or hard-to-get-to locations.
An Enjoyable Process: Part 2
This section dives into something a lot more diverse from the current gameplay: A removal of set recipes. Currently, there are a couple of the same recipes for each type of magic, and each recipe is more effective if you craft it’s higher-level version. This is very limiting and constraining, and you’re essentially making rehashes of the past level’s tea or cake. My final main idea is to completely dissolve this form of cooking, and instead make it so ingredients contain attributes. While there isn’t necessarily a drawback to a recipe-based system, it can get incredibly repetitive and limiting.
This form of the system would instead assign different forms of attributes to each ingredient, the rarer the ingredient the stronger the attributes. You could toss up to 3-10 ingredients into an oven or another type of object, and just see what happens. Additionally, each ingredient would have a specific type assigned to it and lacking variety in the ingredient combination would result as something akin to ash, or foodstuff that restores a very limited amount of hearts, with no status change.
Additionally, to keep the new Revelius crafting system, you’d be required to prepare certain ingredients to use them for cooking. This system would employ more complexity and customization to cooking but would make it an overall more enjoyable experience. When combining ingredients with conflicting attributes, the stronger attribute would be the dominant one in the recipe. Along with this, attributes could be stacked to make more powerful foodstuffs.
While it might be more complexed in thought, expressing the idea to players might be more simple than telling them where to find all the specific items and go through the entire crafting process. Instead, it’s simply tossing whatever you find labeled cooking ingredients and hope for the best, learning what makes a good foodstuff as you go. This would diversify cooking, and make it feel less of a chore and less pointless. You’re the one who dictates what you make instead of the game, and it gives players a sense of creation and usefulness.
When it comes to experience gain, it should be based on what form of materials is used in the process. Each ingredient has a set amount of XP gain tied to it, and the more rare ingredients you use, the more exponentially high the XP gain will be. To put this into perspective, if you added three common ingredients with 500 XP each into a recipe, you’d get a foodstuff worth 1500 XP when you created it. However, if you had two common ingredients worth 500 XP, and a rare ingredient worth 1000 XP, it’d be worth 3000 XP. If you had two rare ingredients and a single common ingredient following the same values, it’d be worth 5000 XP. Essentially, the rarer ingredients you use, the more XP you’ll gain exponentially. This would encourage players to collect and use rarer ingredients, shortening the lengthy process of leveling. Here’s a basic table to explain it, if it seems confusing. Just to clarify, the ingredients that you could use in cooking would not be limited to 3, but this is just to explain the idea. Along with this, common ingredients would have no boost at all. Of course, this is entirely hypothetical and should be taken with a grain of salt.
IIngredient Type | 1 Ingredient Boost | 2 Ingredients Boost | 3 Ingredients Boost |
Uncommon | 1.2x | 1.4x | 1.6x |
Rare | 1.5x | 2.0x | 2.5x |
Epic | 2.0x | 4.0x | 6.0x |
Legendary | 3.0x | 6.0x | 9.0x |
Using a form of GUI, the current cooking menu could be split into two. You could click on an oven to access the menu to input the ingredients you’d want to combine, which would only have a 5-second delay or no delay, as players greatly disliked the previous cooking gameplay due to the high delays and lack of active gameplay. The second half would be for preparing foodstuffs that require to be prepared, most likely all foodstuffs except a limited few. This could even be expanded more, making it so there are a couple of cross foodstuff combinations, such as milk and egg combinations to create a batter. This form of combination could increase the rarity of the ingredient, as well as change the attributes and result once placed in an oven.
Additionally, there could be very specific combinations that result in special effects, such as speed boosts, XP gain boosts, gold boosts, mob drop boosts, and more. However, these kinds of advantages would be very limited in obtainability, and only a result of incredibly specific combinations of high-tier ingredients.
For a small final thought, before I list all the bullet points, I believe a good way to help players with the system is recipe books. Although these wouldn’t be used for the actual crafting, players could obtain certain papers that describe a combination of ingredients for a potent foodstuff. Rarer recipes could be obtained from future quest NPCs to guide players to the harder to figure out combinations. Additionally, NPCs related to cooking and foodstuffs could drop hints to players about locations of hidden quests, specialty ingredients, and ways to obtain recipes. Both of these are ways to guide players through the system, giving hints without hand-holding, letting players feel as though they figured something out without being told exactly how to do it.
- Switch from crafting set recipes to throwing things into a pot and see what happens, to diversify cooking, and make it feel more unique and creative.
- Prepare ingredients to be able to craft with them, and change their qualities occasionally.
- Set higher-tier ingredients to have higher XP gain tied to them.
- Add a multiplier bonus to recipes containing multiple rarer ingredients, to encourage using higher-quality ingredients.
- Ingredients have attributes assigned to them and can be combined to result in either two things.
- The similar attributes stack, and benefit each other.
- Conflicting attributes will result in the more dominant and powerful ingredient getting the attribute, while the other attribute is negated.
- Add specific combinations that result in highly-desired effects.
- There are different categories of ingredients, and you need at least 3 ingredients with different categories in a combination unless you want to obtain something akin to ash.
- Involve NPCs and questing in cooking. Include recipe books that describe certain combinations, or hint at locations of hidden quests, along with harder to find locations containing rarer ingredients. Additionally, chests and mobs can also contain secret recipe books.
Conclusion
I know this suggestion will probably not be accepted- It’s an extremely complicated, fleshed-out idea describing a very complicated cooking system. However, I’m suggesting this anyway because it’s something I’d love to see in the game. This is not a high priority of Game Design, but at some point, I’d like to see a rework of professions to the point where I both have fun with them, need to put massive amounts of effort into achieving their completion, and feel rewarded when doing so. I took several days designing this idea, and I’m sure there are several issues with it. However, thank you so much for reading through what seems to be around a 3k word essay. If you are confused on any of my points, please ask and I’ll elaborate. With that, have a lovely day!
(Spreadsheet of potential ingredients if you're into that sort of stuff)
