There could be a “satisfaction” system that makes cooking actual dishes more usefull.
All foods should also give the “satisfied” or “unsatisfied” status effect :
Plain food like apples and bananas should give the unsatisfied status effect if eaten much so people just don’t rely on eating from their 1000 apples just to not cook and cooked meals depending on its rarity and ingredients and if the meal is made out of good ingridients should give different satisfied levels that also increase with cooking skill.
Satisfied status should make hunger drain slower depending on the tier and unsatisfied should do the opposite, also you shouldn’t get the unsatisfied effect just for eating one apple and the unsatisfied effect could be neutralized by eating a cooked meal that gives satisfaction
This makes foods that are better eaten plain like bananas and grapes even more worthless then they already are, since now you’re removing their entire gimmick, which is that you don’t cook them but eat them as is
This is just an annoying feature to food that basically exists for no reason other than to force players to cook and to punish players for eating food that’s supposed to be eaten uncooked?
Could be like irl where if u eat too much of the same food (for example just eating uncooked food or the same type of food like 5 times in a row) you get bored of it. This makes it to where you don’t want to eat more and can basically work as the satisfued and unsatisfied status effects.
We’ve decided that people eating junk from the floor isn’t what the game needs, se we are adding diseases to the game!! Enjoy getting the black plague!
Food already has no good reason to exist in the game; this doesn’t help it, especially given how the player is probably going to have (and use) a giant stock of food that doesn’t do well with Cooking.
Apparently diseases were planned in AA, although I don’t know where to find the image I vaguely remember one causing you to explode if you use your magic (I think).
I remember Vetex saying something like the food laying around islands are supposed to be enough to get by so starving shouldn’t be a real concern. Which makes me wonder why cooking is even in the game since potions give better effects.
The only decent food only status effect is recovery but healing potions do that better even if there’s a cooldown. And you don’t need to spend 10 minutes fishing for decent fish.