This design revitalizes the chef role into a set of mechanics that are fun, interesting, and rewarding.

## Motivation

**Cooking is a boring, unrewarding, unintuitive, punitive mechanic, with no real goals, and no impact on the crew at large.**

In detail:

1. It's boring. Regardless of player creativity, the gameplay loop never changes: stick items in machines, click machines, put food on counters. Upgrades don't change this in any meaningful way.
2. It's inconsistent. Making a slime sandwich by crafting two slices of bread and slime jelly makes sense. Making a hamburger by putting raw meat with other ingredients in a microwave makes no sense.
3. Being good at your job isn't rewarding. Crewmembers might notice the effort, but mechanically, making more and better food doesn't reward you. Secondary goals exist, but the reward is cash and there's nothing worth buying as chef.
4. It's rote and punitive. All recipes must be followed exactly.Adding 1u extra salt to a fried egg results in a burnt mess.
5. Food is meaningless. It's available everywhere from vendors to xenobio. There's no mechanical difference between a complex meal and a raw ball of dough, except differences in nutriment/vitamin/plantmatter that you can make up in volume. Other reagents with side effects (sugar, capsaicin) are too minimal to matter or don't play a meaningful part in the cooking process.
6. It relies too heavily on other departments early-game. If botany and R&D aren't staffed, competent, and responsive, the first half of the round is a nightmare. This is less of an issue nowadays, with a wider variety of cargo orders, smart use of aquariums, and random produce in roundstart chef fridges, but needs to be addressed in any rework.
7. There's zero roleplay element. People walk by the counter, grab a piece of food, shove it in their mouth, and leave. There's no ceremony or reason to actually sit down with a meal like a real human being because the mechanics and in-game objects don't incentivize it.

## Goals

The goals of this new system are to fix these problems.

1. The role should be fun, interesting, rewarding, and encourage roleplay.
2. We can take inspiration from other servers, and even borrow implementations (except from Goon), but the result should be unique to our server, not a port.
3. Upgrades should be fun. Rote upgrades to food production with no meaningful variation in the gameplay loop aren't fun.
4. Cooking should be more interactive; a hectic juggling of tasks, timing, and preparation, not just clicking on UI buttons.
5. Better food should be better. Putting time and effort into food should come with upsides. These may be player buffs (with all the tuning/balancing that may entail, which should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle) or more interesting mechanical interactions like with many bartender drinks.
6. Recipes should accept variations in their preparation in sane ways, and give the chef some leeway to experiment and attempt new things.

## Proposal


### 1. Cooking With Jane

First, the "Cooking With Jane" system from Sojourn will be ported. This system:

- Uses kitchen implements instead of crafting menus.
- Allows imprecise ingredient inputs.
- Adds a stovetop (with 4 separate burners) and grill (with two grilling surfaces) to replace our existing one.
- Adds machine settings, such as cooking temperature and time.

### 2. Rebalance Nutrition

In order to incentivize actually engaging with cooking mechanics, nutrition values will be rebalanced across the board. Well made food should be better than poorly made food, which should be better than crap you can find in a vendor, which should be better than raw ingredients.

### 3. Implement the Autochef, a powerful R&D upgrade

R&D upgrades should give cooks *interesting* improvements, not just rote upgrades to machines that just make them do the same thing but faster.

The first R&D machine is the "autochef", a machine which links cooking machines and food storage structures to that will automatically teleport items and food throughout the recipe process.

Autochef upgrades allow it to perform more of the necessary work. For example, a tier 1 autochef may require dough to make buns, a tier 2 autochef may be able to make dough with flour and water, a tier 3 autochef would be able to make flour by grinding wheat, and then continuing the recipe.

Making food this way may add buffs to the prepared food, making it worth it to try and automate, and the chef can try their skill in building multiple autochefs and keeping them properly supplied and functioning at capacity,
similar to a modded industrial minecraft factory setup.

The current R&D upgrades which multiply cooking machine output may still have a place in the new system but I'm not quite sure yet. It will require some prototyping/playtesting to see where they would make sense and if they're
necessary.

### 4. Better player/food interaction

Add a host of new dining implements: actual serving plates and bowls. Introduce different behavior based on if implements are used on food (a fork on spaghetti works as expected, but trying to eat it with your bare hands causes sauce to fly everywhere. More mess types.) Dishwashing is a possibility.

Introduce buffet/catering tools to expand serving options. Chafing dishes, serving utensils. Cafeteria slop roleplay.

Introduce the "ordering console", a new computer that allows chefs and autochefs to input meals, and which crew can use to order food, and possibly have it automatically delivered. May also incorporate the "take a number" system that the HOP line has.

### 5. Food buffs and debuffs

The Cooking With Jane system already has a basic level of "food quality" that largely just affects its examine text and the messages you get when eating it. We can extend this system to provide small buffs for high quality food, and small debuffs for low quality food. Obviously sec/antag balance blah blah but things like small healing changes, speed boosts, possibly disease resistance or the ability to take on other species bonuses would provide a lot of mechanical variety. Species specific food, and possibly specific species buffs/debuffs.