Hello survivors! We’ll resume our insights into very specific gameplay elements that we re-worked in Dead In Vinland. And today, because we didn’t had our usual share of pizzas last friday, we’ll talk about FOOD and cooking!
Blodeuwedd likes to cook, but don’t say that she’s a housewife!
She’ll split your skull in two, and cook your brain
Cooking is an important step in Dead In Vinland: it means you have reached the point where you start to think about your comfort! It’s very time and resources consuming, and at the beginning of the game you surely can’t be picky about your meals, but in time you’ll feel the need to heat your food, and to several benefits: remove potential side effects from raw food (diseases, but also some raw food causes additional depression…), have more nutritive meals, and also we kept the system where higher tier food deteriates into lower tier before going completely rot.
That is to say, your good meals may turn to crap tomorrow, but at least they’ll still provide some food to your characters. That’s a first step towards food preserving (more on that later).
For Dead In Vinland, we wanted to upgrade a bit our cooking system. The whole concept worked, but was not executed in the best way. This time, you have a new customised pop-up where you can manage your meals!
Cooking pop-up. Yum yum!
Cooking now is a bit like crafting, it’s split into two different steps.
First you’ll have to open this menu, and choose the different recipes you’ll want to cook. All the recipes are showed here, with the ingredients and how much stock you have for each.
You should also note that EVERY recipe consumes Fire Intensity too. You have a reminder of how much Fire Intensity you’ll lose if you cook the selected recipe, so if you pay attention you shouldn’t lose your fire (which would NOT be a good idea!)
So for example, you can cook Raw Meat into Roasted Meat. You’ll just need a Raw Meat. And it will lower your fire. Same for Raw Fishes. Meals are now composed of Vegetables and Fish/Meat.
And then, you can also make some soup out of Vegetables, with the addition of some Non Potable Water (you’ll boil it either way, so we decided to use Non Potable instead of Potable Water)
Let’s recap on how to cook:
Maybe not THAT sandwich
Choose your recipe IF you have the right ingredients –> You place a character on the cooking slot –> You click on NEXT –> Time passes –> Results!
System-wise, each recipe will have a chance to succeed. If failed, you’ll make a Crap Meal instead. If successful, you’ll have a chance to trigger a “critical cooking”, that is to say the meal will beome TASTY, and so will have some upgraded stats. Yummy!
That’s it! Pretty simple once you get used to it, and definitively more clear than in Dead In Bermuda. You know have real control over your meals.
Talking about food, we expanded our food list to 14 Perishable meals + 3 Non Perishable ones! You won’t be stuck with fish, meat and fruits forever, you’ll now be able to try new things!
HINT: we cheated to have this much food in store…
Dryer
As I said earlier, food deteriorates over time, so if you don’t want to have to take time to hunt and cook everyday you’ll have to find a way to preserve food.
That’s what the dryer is for! We kind of mixed two preservation techniques in one system: salting and drying.
You now have slots on your Dryer that you can fill with Meat and Fish, but also special slots to dry Fruits! Of course, you’ll be able to upgrade your Dryer to have more slots available.
To dry Fish/Meat, you’ll also need to salt them beforehand. Salt is a new resource that you can easily get by boiling sea water.
The food you put on your dryer will now have to rest a few nights in order to become preserved. Each night, each food will have a gauge that will progress towards preservation. However, you’ll also have a risk that food will be stolen by a wild beast. If it rains, you’ll also have a chance that they will rot.
So you’ll have to plan your food drying carefully!
A bit of trivia: at first, we wanted to add another aspect to the food system with specific regimes for characters (obviously, veggies characters gaining depression when eating meat, or just refusing it). It can add another fun layer of characterization, but we dropped the idea just because of the theme… We didn’t imagine having vegan vikings (good post-rock band name though!). So we’ll keep the idea for a more another modern sequel, if any ;)
That’s it for today! Next time… I don’t know what we’ll talk about! Surprise surprise!
