Guilds/Coastal Plains/Cooking/Theory

Back to cooking

Consider a Glazed Doughnut

In the middle of the Glazed Doughnut there's a hole that contributes nothing, but if the hole gets too large, you won't have a doughnut any more.

The Doughnut provides most of the bulk, and a bit of the flavor.

The Glazing provides most of the flavor, and a bit of the bulk.

Cooking works that way too!

• The radius of each base "doughnut" is always exactly 1000 seconds of duration (16.6 minutes).
• The distance between a Base and an Additive (measured in seconds of duration), determines the size of the hole.
  • The size of the base "doughnut" that's left, after you remove the hole, provides most of the bulk and a bit of the potency.
• The flavor of each additive "glaze" provides most of the potency and a bit of the bulk.

Servings

Your cooking skill level determines the number of Bases that you can use in a recipe, one Base per cooking level. If the number of bases in a recipe exceeds your cooking skill level, you will get muddled results. There are 7 ingredients per serving, and the general formula is Servings = (Na + Nb) modulo 7, where Na is the number of Additive Ingredients and Nb is the number of Base Ingredients. In a typical production recipe there will be one Additive Ingredient per Base, and 7s-1 of each Base ingredient where S is the total number of servings per Base. In other words, a level 5 cook might cook 5*(Na+34Nb)/7 servings, for a recipe with 5 different Additives each paired with an effective Base, which would yield 5*35/7=25 servings.

If your Gastronomy level is 7 or more, from eating Masterpiece Recipes, you will have a Critically Evaluate this Food menu on the kitchen, that will indicate the integer Duration (to the nearest second) and the integer Stats for that recipe.

Duration

The duration formulas, for a two ingredient recipe, are:

• Duration = Additive Boost + Base Bulk
  • Additive Boost, or simply boost is a proportional part of the potency of the additive.
    • If the recipe is 1:6 Additive:Base, then the Additive Boost will be Additive Potency * 1/7.
    • If the recipe is 1:13 Additive:Base, then the Additive Boost will be Additive Potency * 1/14.
    • If you know the duration difference between two recipes that vary only by ratio, you can back out the effect of the Base Bulk, and thereby isolate a hypothetical value for pure potency, even though the value can never be directly measured.
    • Potency fluctuates inversely with usage and perhaps with inventory. Rare herbs are therefore more potent than common ingredients and, to preserve their potency, should only be used as additives. (Don't use Oyster Meat as a base.)
• Boost = Potency * Na/(Na+Nb), where Na and Nb indicate the units of the same Additive and the same Base.
  • Na < Nb, as their relative amount is what determines their role in a recipe. (Only use Copper Pots.)
• Bulk = Duration - Boost
• Distance = 1000 - Bulk

If you use multiple different additives per base, and it's all determined based on distance whether you intended it that way or not, you'll kill your duration.

• MultipleDiffAdditiveBulk = 1000/Ndiffa^2 - Distance/Ndiffa, where diff indicates different additives that are associated with a base.
  • If there is only one additive, the equation collapses to Bulk = 1000 - Distance.
  • The consequent durations are added together, so if the Additives are at about the same distance the equation collapses to Bulk = 1000/Na - Daverage, so you can't possibly increase your duration by using multiple different additive.
• If you use more than one of a particular additive, it does increase the duration. If you use three units of a rare herb and 4 units of a seldom used base, you'd get nearly three times the duration, but only one serving.
  • Don't go there unless you are tuning a recipe to be a possible masterpiece. One unit of a rare herb is just as potent as three units of that same herb, and you wouldn't get poor nearly as fast if you made a huge recipe, say 1 additive and 104 of the base ingredient = 105/7 = 15 servings, and ate more often. At cooking level 5 you can easily get 80 minutes of duration with a single additive per base, and that's plenty of time for most activities.
  • Using multiples of rare herbs, even if you could afford it, would be a bad idea anyway as the potency of the herb would drop very rapidly, and you'd have ruined that herb for everybody.

Recipes will spoil after a few days. Each Pyramid of Renewal adds 2 days, Salt adds 2 days, and the recipe itself adds two days. That's a maximum of 18 days, but we're not there just yet.

Duration, which is just the Doughnut in actual practice, determines how long a recipe will effect your performance statistics.