Tell us how much energy each food item gives when buying it
The tooltips that tell us how scrumptious an item is are fun and all, but I'd like to know if I'm spending 45c vs 54c on an 10 energy item before I actually buy it.
I'd also like to see how many of something I already have in my pack when I'm going to buy something. For example, if I need 10 "ice" blocks for a cooking quest, but already have 3 in my pack, then when I'm buying more ice it would be great if it said "you have 3, how many do you want to buy?"
+1 for both ideas. Once you've earned the cooking achievements, there's little reason to go back and make more dishes if the energy and time input isn't made up for on consumption. Without a sense of consistent gains from cooking, there's little reason to take the time. Beverages make more sense, due to their mood and supplemental effects.
Re tiff's comment: I have gotten to wondering what the overall energy cost of cooking some dishes is versus the energy returned from eating that dish, but haven't had the chance to add it up yet. I guess it would depend on what skill level you are at, but making something like a cheese sammich would involve energy spent for:
- squeezing chickens for grain
- making flour from the grain
- frying up a bun
- massaging and milking a butterfly
- shaking the butterfly milk
- compressing the butterfly butter into cheese
- "cooking" the bun and cheese into a cheesy sammich
There's a whole lot of energy sapping steps involved, and I wonder what skill levels you would have to be at before you break even, then before you get a 2 for 1 return on you energy expenditure, and so on?
Next test I'll see if I can track and add up some of these things for curiosity's sake!
and not just energy, but resources for some of the things (like the yummy gruels needed for some street projects) makes them pricey, time consuming, energy and inventory slot expensive for the 10-20ish energy you get from cooking
thinking like that makes my brain hurt..
and thus I just buy BBQs from the food cart 50 at a time :)