Too Many Food Options, Too Little Purpose! Cooking Overhaul!
There's just way too many food options.
Not only does it make the cooking menu take ages to open, but it's hard to navigate, isn't it?
They aren't in alphabetical order. I have no idea what order they're in. I don't think it's cost, either. And since there's so many even if it was cost, it doesn't really tell you anything. I'm fairly certain in earlier games higher cost food filled your hunger more and was also harder to cook. It was linear "Higher skill -> Higher cost -> Higher hunger fulfillment" scale. But in Sims 4 it's just random recipes in random orders at random prices assigned to random skills.
Also, incredibly america-centric way of thinking, but I am unfamiliar with half the menu nowadays so I tend to gloss over those items entirely when looking through food. (I even made a mod to boil the menu down to a small handful of basics to improve the menu opening type, navigation efficiency, and, frankly, make it only foods I'm personally familiar with lol). Almost every new food is a global cultural food which is definitely neat, but people tend not to eat a global variety of meals, so it feels a bit bloated IMO.
So here are some suggestions:
- Every food, if it doesn't already, should provide a different level of hunger.
- Lower hunger filling foods should be faster to cook.
- Foods should have an "Efficiency" rating from 1-10 that reflects these two stats. 1 means fast but low hunger. 10 means slow but full hunger. This would make certain foods every day staples (scrambled eggs, mac and cheese) and others special event foods (turkey dinner, lobster thermidor) instead of everything being easy to toss together on a wednesday afternoon.
- Food should sort by "efficiency" or "alphabetical" by default.
- Using ingredients should add 1 or 2 to efficiency. If it's already at 10, the food gets a special moodlet that slows hunger for a while.
- MAKING MULTIPLE SERVINGS SHOULD TAKE LONGER.
- Food Preferences in CAS allow Sims to assign 1-3 favorite foods and 1-3 detested foods. These foods get bonuses/detriments when eaten/cooked.
These would make choosing different foods have purpose. No more cooking a family meal of EVERY food and just eating two if you're really hungry, and no more cooking a really cheap food and being satisfied with it the same as the most expensive meal possible.
Additionally, for the menu bloat-
- New sort tabs in the Cooking menu for different types of food based on culture
- All non-basic starter foods should be learnable INDIVIDUALLY so you can choose which foods your Sim can cook in the first place. This would DRASTICALLY speed up the cooking menu loading time if it only loaded recipes you knew.
- Learning a recipe could be done using one of the multiple cook book items we now have. You would cook the food very slowly the first few times until figuring it out. Then it would become available in the normal menus. Recipes would require the associated cooking skill but NOT automatically unlock.
- A "Food Culture" preference allows Sims to identify with a specific food culture. This would give them a different set of "starter' recipes. A Sim fresh out of CAS with the "Hispanic Food" preference would have basics available like chicken nuggets and mac and cheese, but instead of scrambled eggs they might have heuvos rancheros. A Sim with the "Batuu Food" preference would have Felucian Garden Spread instead of a Garden Salad. This would also help menu bloat, and would make cooking feel more personal.
- Foodies would learn recipes as they learn cooking skill same as the way the game works now.
And some more out-there ideas-
- Current cooking speed/hunger values would be around 6 or 7, so some foods would now be more efficient than ever.
- Higher cooking skill could also lower the cook time of all foods and/or there could be a new mastery perk to cook all foods at a 5- worse foods get better hunger fulfillment but take longer to cook, and better foods simply take less time to cook, maybe?
- Group Cooking would make ALL meals cook faster.
- Kids should have Picky Eater preferences that can change on a dime and prohibit huge chunks of food options at once, maybe refusing to eat anything but 2 or 3 meals.
- Favorite Food Discovery Moments
- Eating one food a lot as a teen would make it important to a Sim as an adult and give them good moodlets
Essentially, I think cooking needs to matter more and should be overhauled.