"Simmer_chiyen;c-17928291" wrote:"crocobaura;c-17926968" wrote:"Simmer_chiyen;c-17926102" wrote:"crocobaura;c-17925510" wrote:
When using fresh ingredients the amounts are substracted from the cost total per meal. Maybe the spaghetti from the fridge costs only §6 because they don't use any fresh ingredients. So if you cook spaghetti with some fresh ingredients you pay only for the ingredients you don't have, but the costs of fresh ingredients used from your inventory isn't factored into the total cost.
Um, the §6 cost is indeed when a sim doesn’t have any fresh ingredient. My point was that acquiring those ingredients directly from the fridge is §6, but actively (realistically) buying those ingredients from a market stand would cost us more than §58. This reflects a heavily imbalanced economy for food preparing.
I’ve retrieved another point of reference—a serving of spaghetti in a Dine Out restaurant has a price tag of §16 when the markup is set to 125%, which means the supposedly base cost is roughly §13. None of these are anywhere near the cost of getting the ingredients...
You can make a party sized serving of spaghetti from the same amount of fresh ingredients as a single serving. If you are worried about costs you could try making larger meals. Also, when you buy ingredients directly from the fridge, you aren't getting the fresh ingredients like fresh tomatoes and fresh pasta, you are probably getting canned tomato juice and dry pasta. Canned tomato juice is strangely cheaper than fresh tomatoes in real life too.
I guess the latter point can be one’s own head cannon if they choose so. The game doesn’t provide such mechanics though—the quality of food is determined by the quality of produces and the skill level of sims. The §58+ ingredients are all of normal quality, hence the final dish quality wouldn’t be any higher than all from a fridge, assuming that the cooking sim doesn’t have exceptional cooking skill.
Economy-wise, that still doesn’t make much sense. Even if we serve in party size (§25), the cost difference is still more than twofold. Moreover, my previous restaurant reference point stands nevertheless, unless we’re to believe that sims’ restaurants all use canned ingredients...
