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#### Concerns about the energy-efficiency of made-from-scratch food

I've noticed that if you make food from scratch, there's some pretty hefty energy requirements that go into producing it. I've been a little worried about these - in some cases, it seems that the energy you'd get from eating the food only barely covers the cost of making it from scratch, or worse, is actually less than the made-from-scratch energy investment.
I'm going to work out the math once I'm back ingame, but if my hunches are correct, then only the most high-end food is worth making from scratch, and it may be more efficient, energy-wise to eat raw pork straight off the piggy than it is to cook it into a recipe first. Watch this space.

Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink

### Replies

- Okay, got a little preliminary math done. The results are a wee bit troubling. My first subject was the humble Sammich, one of the earliest recipes available. Take a look:
  Grind 1 Pinch of Salt from 1 Allspice = 1 NRG
  Chop 1 Flour from 5 Grains = 1 NRG
  Fry 1 Bun from 1 Flour + 1 Pinch of Salt = 1 NRG
  Chop 1 Sammich from 1 Meat + 1 Bun = 3 NRG
  Total NRG cost to cook from scratch = 6 NRG
  Obtain 5 Grains from Chickens = 5 NRG (5 squeezes @ 1 NRG each)
  Obtain 1 Allspice from Spice Tree = 9 NRG (1 pet @ 2 NRG + 1 water @ 2 NRG + 1 harvest @ 5 NRG)
  Obtain 1 Meat from Piggy = 6 NRG (1 pet @ 4 NRG, 1 nibble @ 2 NRG)
  Total NRG cost to collect ingredients = 20
  Total NRG cost to produce 1 sammich = 26
  Sammich Restores = 22 NRG
  Net Energy Profit = -4 NRG
  Now keep in mind - there are skills that reduce these energy overheads. For instance, Animal Kinship II gives you 2 meat per nibble instead of 1, but you're still losing energy on that first Sammich regardless. You could also potentially cut out the petting and watering of the Spice Tree, but that leads to the eventual degradation of the plant, and even then it would only be enough to let you break even on the first Sammich.
  Furthermore, these numbers were taken with some of these cost-saving skills already in place. The skills used for these numbers are Animal Kinship II, Gardening I, EZ-Cooking II, Cheffery I, and Spice Milling.
  Considering a new player won't have most of these skills, it's going to be even less efficient for them. They'd actually be a lot better served by just skipping the cooking and eating the pork right after nibbling it off the piggy. That's a 4 energy profit right there, and it improves by 10 for every meat-per-nibble you get after the first (thanks to Animal Kinship.)
  If this trend holds true for other items that can be made entirely from scratch, then I'd like to heartily suggest bumping up the energy rewards for player-cooked food. The biggest advantage of cooking is the idea that you're self-sufficient, capable of using what you harvest in the wild to feed yourself effectively, but if this trend bears out with other food items, then there's no incentive to cooking.
  Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink
- i've done this equation before, and while it is troubling, i think the point of cooking [as it stands] is less about increasing energy yield and more about improving stack size efficiencies.
  or so it seems.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- Even looking at it by stack size, I'm not sure it really balances well. Meat is 10 energy and 50 in a stack. Cooked food are ten to a stack. That means you need to gain at least 50 energy per serving to break even.
  There are only two chopping board recipes that yield that, and one requires ingredients made further down the cooking tree.
  On the whole, that means that you really have to specialize to get your energy's worth.
  Posted 21 months ago by Riversong | Permalink
- Striatic is absolutely right. Besides, with higher level skills it becomes even more simple to just eat the meat straight off the piggy, for example with Animal Kinship VII a single pig can yield 48 meats!
  Posted 21 months ago by Aldaris | Permalink
- I'm sort of with Doc on this one. I love to do the cooking and thought the idea was a) to have fun but also b) to be self-sufficient on your travels. But even with good skills, it does seems like a waste of energy. It would be nice if some of the harder-to-make items gave out a bit more reward in energy. It may be faster to eat meat off the pig...but part of what I love in Glitch is the very complex nature of the quests and the fiddly things you get asked to do. And the food quests are fun, so fun. But it is a bit disheartening to then find out you can barely keep up your energy...
  Posted 21 months ago by RM | Permalink
- You mean we're not supposed to be eating the raw pork? :D
  Posted 21 months ago by Essie Kitten | Permalink
- i'm of the opinion that cooking should not lead to net energy increase.
  that's not how cooking works in real life, anyway.
  cooking should make unpalatable raw materials palatable.
  cooking should greatly improve stack size efficiencies.
  cooking ought to have mood enhancing effects [it is tasty]
  cooking ought to help speed skill learning a bit [brain food]
  cooking ought to create foods that release energy over time. saving on "feeding" actions.
  cooking ought to do a lot of beneficial things, but i don't think pure energy in vs. energy out ought to be one of them.
  pure energy acquisition seems like it should be more of a harvesting issue and not a transformation issue.
  cooking makes foods tastier and better, not more energetic.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- oh .. additionally ..
  the game currently has a concept where you feel more full each day the more food items you consume. eventually you get to the point where the game won't let you eat anymore.
  i think that cooked items ought to count less against this limit then "raw" ones.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- I'm of the opinion that they haven't tried to balance cooking with the rest of the game, just applied some stats to foods that seemed reasonable at the time and will figure out better numbers later. And, I said it without triple-spacing. ;-)
  Posted 21 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink
- @Striatic, do you really understand why cooking was invented in real life? Three reasons: one, it's safer. Properly prepared food has less risk of being host to disease than uncooked food. Two, it's easier to store; cooked foods tend to last longer than raw foods. Third - and this is the big one - cooked food is easier to digest than uncooked food. The human body spends less energy to process it, can process more of it before it's passed out of the body, and thus gets more energy out of eating it. The extra time spent cooking a meal is a small price to pay to have what is effectively a more nourishing meal.
  So I think your first argument kinda falls apart: it does work that way in real life. Food can and should provide more energy than its individual components, and should be nourishing enough that it justifies the effort put into cooking it in the first place. After all, if it was more efficient to just eat most food raw in real life, humanity would've never refined cooking into the myriad of techniques that exist today, and we'd all be doing just what Glitches can do - eating food straight off animals or plants.
  Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink
- i understand all of that.
  it depends completely on the food you're talking about, and is what i speak to when i say "makes unpalatable raw materials palatable".
  the performance gains you're talking about are really very small and not consistent across all foods. in as many cases as it increases energy efficiency i'd imagine it would result in a net loss due to discarded foodstuffs during preparation.
  the primary reason we cook food is because it is safer, not to make food more energetic, effectively or not.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- also, from a gameplay perspective, there are already three major branches of the skill tree devoted to energy yield.
  there's animal kinship, for harvesting meat. big energy yield.
  gardening/harvesting, for harvesting vegetables. big energy yield.
  meditation, for "free" energy. big energy yield, albiet slow.
  cooking doesn't have to result in big energy yield. there are already a number of ways to generate energy. skill tree ought to be more diverse than that.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- They sure don't sound small, when they're enough to drive the evolution of our species. And they're not going to be universally consistent across all food. But they are present and worthwhile on most foods that we eat on a daily basis, and that's the problem with Glitch food right now.
  Early food items that are readily available just aren't efficient enough, and therefore cooking isn't really worthwhile - not until late-game, when you're basically swimming in raw materials from just a few harvests. Cooking doesn't help your self-sufficiency at all. There is no reason to cook early on except to fulfill quests - you're just too inefficient at it. It's a waste of time and resources otherwise.
  Cooking is also the second most populous skill line in Glitch. Only soil-and-plant skills are more common than cooking skills. Cooking skills make up right around 20% of all skills in the game, if my math's right. A cooking skill is one of the first three skills available to a newly-created level-1 Glitch. That tells me that cooking really was intended to be something even a newbie should be doing. But as it stands, they shouldn't, because their energy limited and they aren't making efficient use of resources. They're shooting themselves in the foot if they do.
  A whopping eleven tools in Glitch right now serve no purpose than to either cook food, or help you obtain ingredients used to cook food. No other purpose has this many tools devoted to it. Even mining and making use of the products of mining only uses six tools. That tells me that cooking was probably intended to be a very big part of the game. And right now, it isn't. Time spent learning cooking skills is wasted compared to time spent on mining, alchemy, and plant/animal harvesting skills, which either get you efficient raw food straight out, or earn you currants which can be used to purchase food.
  What I'm suggesting here is that Cooking be tweaked to make it relevant throughout the game. There's no way Cooking in Glitch will be a perfect abstraction of real-life cooking, but at least it should be just as rewarding.
  Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink
- "They sure don't sound small, when they're enough to drive the evolution of our species."
  you're overstating this.
  cooking food allows us to persist on a number of otherwise unpalatable foodstuffs, so we can move into regions we would otherwise not be able to and engage in hunting or agriculture there .. but that's more about hunting and agriculture than it is about cooking, as cooking only enables these activities in certain cases.
  currently glitch presents no palatability problems with, say, eating raw pork, so cooking isn't going to produce effectively increased energy yields by allowing us to eat it.
  cooking has the most skills in glitch only if you don't take learning time into account at all. most of the cooking skills have next to no learning time, and the amount of energy one puts into learning the cooking branch on the skill tree is negligible compared with other skill sets. why should such a small investment be rewarded with disproportionate power?
  the reason there are so many cooking skills and items is because that was they were developed first - probably because they were the easiest to develop for. you want players to feel like they are in a "kitchen", so lots of tools. it is also easy to create food based art assets, as many of them are just variations on a theme.
  cooking should be a rewarding skill, but i don't think high energy yield is the right way to go. it's so cold and mechanical compared to the other more lifelike benefits that cooking and food can offer.
  devs could make pork innately unpalatable without cooking, but other than those raw to edible conversions it just seems weird to gain surplus energy just by putting two different foods together in a dish.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- I only object to weirdness when it makes something unnecessarily confusing. I'm good with surplus energy. It doesn't get in the way of cooking or eating. It may be cleaner to start off higher level foods with higher energy ingredients, but that's pretty close to trivial in a fictional world for me.
  Posted 21 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink
- I think the problem that we're discussing isn't why we should or shouldn't cook food, but whether the energy expenditure is justified. As I see it, there are currently four direct ways to regain mood and energy: consuming food and drink, meditation, quoins, and donations. I'm leaving new day refills and leveling refills out for now because they're relatively infrequent in comparison.
  Quoins are probably the least helpful on that list unless you happen to be near one of the spawn points for the rare full refill kinds. Also, the cap of 100 per game day is very easy to reach.
  Shrine donations are largely dependent on your ability to make large amounts of currants for items. Currently, one of the best ways is mining, but I'm sure other options will open up. Someone could probably test/verify this, but I can't imagine it would be hard for a relatively dedicated miner to buy food and drink exclusively and still put in a full day's work.
  Meditation is limited by a direct ratio as far as energy gained per day. With meditation 1, my cap is roughly 2/3rds my full energy amount. The other balancing factor there is time, both spent meditating and waiting for cool-down timers to expire.
  That leaves cooking, which is actually a conglomeration of the various harvesting skills AND the ability to put them together. In the real world, if you spent more energy gathering food than you regained by eating it, you'd starve to death. Which is what seems to be happening. Unless I'm getting a large number of items when I harvest, I'm losing energy by cooking them. AND the cooked food takes up more room than the raw materials. I should be able to make up or even gain a small amount in this process, although I'd assume diminishing returns.
  Personally, I've never achieved a full belly, but it's out there. That would actually make shrine donation the only way without a cap, but I question the validity of that as a sole approach to regaining energy.
  No wonder a lot of people turn to no-no as a solution.
  The real question is what is the intended balance of energy expenditure vs. gain and where should it "balance?" Granted, I've only been playing this game the last two test sessions, but I'd rather not see this devolve into an argument of "real world" vs. "game world" elements.
  Posted 21 months ago by Riversong | Permalink
- i could be wrong, but am pretty sure that the higher level cooking skills like master chef, especially when paired with higher level skills that reduce the energy cost of various activities and increase the yields of harvesting, are well worth it in net energy gain. it would be interesting to see where various break-even points are though!
  Posted 21 months ago by katlazam | Permalink
- you do gain energy from harvesting and eating raw, especially pork. people do regain more energy than they spend when they just nibble. same with gardening. that aspect of it is functional. I think cooking should be break even or slight up or down on energy, plus major benefits in other areas.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- I always assumed that higher levels of competence were supposed to support the eventual selling of food to other players, and that was another expected pay off for cooking and advanced cooking skills. But that's not really there either, maybe because there aren't any buffs associated with cooked food (or am I forgetting something).
  I think a lot of people think that cooking is a bitch, but at least now we know why! Very interesting discussion.
  Posted 21 months ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- Wow, rereading this after last test, I'm nearly more confused as to what I'd like to see done reward-wise with the cooking. I got up to Master Chef 1 at the end of the test and didn't get much chance to use it, so I'm not sure yet about the energy spent vs. gained at higher levels. I also ended up resorting to no-no powder for a while just to stop losing energy cooking while I was mining; however, I think based on some threads and some in-game discussion, that they may have tweaked the no-no powder because after a while it seemed like I wasn't gaining any XP points for certain actions while on the no-no. So I quit messing with it except for a couple times later for a session of rock grinding and tool repairing, which both take up loads of energy. Anyway...all of this notwithstanding, I still love the cooking skills and quests. So much fun. It'll be interesting to see if they do add a bit more reward to the cooking in the form of energy or whatever...
  Posted 21 months ago by RM | Permalink
- Personally, to get round the energy drain, I buy 50 buns at a time (4c each!) and keep a stock of meat around so I can make sandwiches on the fly for a fraction of normal energy costs. Games are all about optimisation, right?
  Posted 21 months ago by teacup | Permalink
- It depends upon the player. Optimal play isn't necessarily optimal fun.
  Posted 21 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink
- "Personally, to get round the energy drain, I buy 50 buns at a time (4c each!) and keep a stock of meat around so I can make sandwiches on the fly for a fraction of normal energy costs. Games are all about optimisation, right?"
  it only takes 3 energy to make a bun from components, and you can purchase energy with currants from vendors at a 1/1 ratio.
  so conceivably making the bun is cheaper than buying it for 4c, though only if you don't take into account the crazy energy and time required to gather the ingredients.
  the only way to "beat the vendors" is via pork fountains, and those primarily require mining and refining, not cooking.
  http://www.glitch-strategy.com/wiki/Pork_Fountain
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- I don't know whether the math of cooking is going to be changed, but something has to be done to make it more attractive.
  On my first go round I ignored mining ( boring) and concentrated on cooking ( fun, fun, look at all the toys).
  It was a constant struggle to maintain enough energy to keep going and frankly if there hadn't been piggies and egg trees around to fill the gaps I would have died several times.
  XP benefits from all the actions? Not hardly. I leveled up slowly, and gains were more from quests and donations that from making fortifying gruel or Lemburgers.
  Finding room for all the ingredients was a hassle, and inevitably there was always some missing birch syrup or oil that I'd have to go buy from a vendor.
  Now, most of the time I enjoyed this.
  If your goal in the game is to have fun filling time doing interesting things, then cooking works. There are more steps, more variety and more time(slightly less now thank goodness due to increased speed on fruit changing and spicing) involved in advancing cooking than anything else. But, there's very little reward for advanced skill. And if you want to be able to do other things in the game, level up, take on more quests, roam about, amass a fortune, then cooking is not the way to go. It is the lowest rung on the ladder of energy freedom.
  Posted 21 months ago by caley dunn | Permalink
- +1 @Caley I did what you did and I agree 100%! To me, it is more efficient and rewarding to just buy Earthshakers and cooked food. You can't imagine my joy at running into a cooked food vendor! What a relief! And thank you, Doc for working out the math. It confirmed what I was beginning to suspect since cooking made me feel like the proverbial frog in a well: 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, going nowhere fast.
  Posted 21 months ago by GreyGoose | Permalink
- holy moley.... i read that whole thing... and i think i need someone to pay me :p lol
  it also appears that straitic and doc were debating two different things and off topic.
  Doc is totally right that the energy used versus gained does not work out well for the lower level glitch's. Learned the hard way by this poor glitcher!
  Striatic thoughts on what GOD deems worthy glitchy food is definitely interesting.
  I'm more curious to see what a dev response to the concept of energy gain in food is though. Since they ... er... made it up anyway.
  In the meantime, i will only buy the cooked food or fondle more pigs.
  Posted 21 months ago by RainyRain | Permalink
- "it also appears that straitic and doc were debating two different things and off topic."
  we were discussing whether or not food is energy efficient and whether it needs to be or ought to be energy efficient.
  that is certainly on topic.
  Posted 21 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- "that is certainly on topic."
  It doesn't matter.
  Posted 21 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink