By “functional tables”, I mean tables which you can place large meals or potion brews onto. While these objects are placed on the tables, they cannot despawn under any circumstances until they run out of uses- and they will even remain on the ship if you respawn it or hop servers. You can also choose to destroy whatever’s on the table if you need to make space. Something like this enables you to make high power meals or brews without needing to worry about if you’ll waste their effects- they can always travel with you. This is just a simple suggestion, but one I feel could work.
Edit for answering questions/concerns
It would make sense to have a mat, yes. My thoughts are that you only had one slot to store things like this, so it could change between a mat or a table depending on what you place on it, or you could even change it in the shipyard menu.
If this gets to be too big of a problem, you can always limit the types of brews and foods you can place in the slot to prevent it from being completely busted. Yes, this can include interchange brews being locked.
If power brews on this slot become too much of a problem, the ability to set them in the slot can always be removed later on.
Why do some people look at a perfectly good and reasonable QOL suggestion or small feature suggestion, and replying with one edge-case/loophole, and then providing no alternative solutions? Some of yall just like to nitpick perfectly fine suggestions to pretend like you are participating when it’s just to avoid actually reading and thinking about a suggestion. At least try to give benefit of the doubt for an edge case or loophole…
(Also sorry for a mald reply that’s completely unrelated to the suggestion, I just felt like mentioning this)
there can be limits on what you can or can’t place as far as brews are concerned to prevent it from being too powerful, interchange brews can be one of them because that specifically would be too powerful
I think this is a great idea! I dont see the problem with power brews or anything, and if a problem turns up, its easy to fix! Just a thought, but what if you could use this as an effect for your crew and deckhands! This would be a one time use, using the entire brew or meal, and no, you cannot interchange your crew. Overall a great idea!
even if its not about interchange brews or other specific cases, brews and buffets in general arent designed to just be 5 uses potion/meals that can be used one at a time whenever necessary.
the duration of a single use of them isnt even far from a single meal or drinkable potion, so basically the solutions are
case 1: brews and meals get much shorter durations in general, but thats not really deserved considering their current use. they werent made to be saved
case 2: the duration is reduced specifically for those placed on the tables, which is an odd unintuitive limitation thats id definitely prefer to avoid
or case 3: the most abusable effects arent allowed to save, which is really up to debate whats considered unacceptable and is even worse in term of weird, unintuitive limitation that you need to guess beforehand
at this point, theres really no need for that ability to save whatever you placed, especially considering the few examples you gave