Roast in embers - starting with turnips

[Sami]

Been working on a new cooking method, roasting in embers. For starters this will be featured as a recipe to cook turnips in traditional fashion, but related cooking options will be likely expanded in the future.

It's been surprising amount of thinking and coding to get it done but now it appears to be working nicely. Browsing the code I also came across some earlier preliminary definitions for ember-roasted turnips so we've been on the edge of adding this somewhere in the past. And no wonder, as it can be considered one of the essential dishes. Back then, who knows how many years (or decades?) ago, it must have been too costly for the current schedule - or just simply misplaced under the other workload.
But now ember-roasting code is finally there, and in the next patch you'll be cooking turnips the new way.

Roasting in embers requires good amount of embers so it can't be expected to work in the remains of just any little fire. The fire should be burning for several hours before enough hot embers will remain for the method to work. For this reason roasting in embers is usually proceeded after substantial fire was lighted anyway out of necessity. It takes about an hour for turnips to cook in embers. For the convenience of timing you can start roasting in embers already when the fire is clearly dying and about to burn out soon, given that enough embers has been produced already. The game will notify about the lack of enough embers  so the necessary conditions can be figured out quite easily.

Because of many little tricky things, ember-roasted turnips will be featured as hardcoded cooking method in the same fashion as general roasting (of meat and fish).
However,we'll likely add cookery tag [embers] or something to allow the condition requirement and cooking method to be utilized in recipe modding too.

Now, after this is finalized I'll continue with checking about the possibilities of adding pit-roasting, as it would be also essential an turnip recipe for mass cooking them.
Pit-roasting is more demanding task so I don't know just yet if it reaches the stage of only preliminary definitions or actually starts rolling. But something will be cooking in the dev. chambers nevertheless...

[JP_Finn]

Awesome!

When schedule permits, field dressing animals and pit-roasting “robber’s roast” would make a great follow up recipe.

[PALU]

So ember roasting would fall somewhere in between the current "cook over fire" and "baking on the residual heat" cooking modes?

I think it's important to ensure there's a reasonably generous time window for the ember cooking, as in real life you can start a fire, go craft something (or cut trees) and check periodically to start cooking when the conditions are suitable, while most crafting can't be interrupted and can have wildly varying durations, so the in game resolution isn't that great if you're not just standing idle. Once crafting becomes interruptible, it might be useful to introduce interrupts for conditions when a nearby stove is ready for baking/ember cooking.

[JP_Finn]

—snip—
Once crafting becomes interruptible, it might be useful to introduce interrupts for conditions when a nearby stove is ready for baking/ember cooking.

I think a message similar to cooking complete would suffice. I.e. when stew or roast finishes now, we get message stating it smells like x is ready. Maybe add a message: you see the embers look good for roasting. But that might be bit odd if one isn’t planning on ember roasting. 

[PALU]

That message is also weird if your work location doesn't have a line of sight to the stove. Smell carries around corners.

[Plotinus]

Browsing the code I also came across some earlier preliminary definitions for ember-roasted turnips so we've been on the edge of adding this somewhere in the past.

I remember stewed turnips from a very old version, maybe 2.92 (and checking news.txt says they were added in 2.80 along with boiled turnips). Back then it was a menu item you could select but the interface was much less detailed than it is today. It definitely wasn't as realistic as the new embers. This was back when cooking was a blocking task, that you couldn't do something else in the middle of it.

There was also "veggie dish"

From the changelog of 3.10:

* It's now possible to bake flat bread in the embers of a
          burned-out campfire in addition to baking it in a
          fireplace - which previously was the only option.

[Evuul]

Good Initiative!

When normally roasting meat pieces, it is supposed to rest on a stone while cooked?

Always good news when you start improving mechanics.


 

[Sami]

Good Initiative!

When normally roasting meat pieces, it is supposed to rest on a stone while cooked?

It's left on player's imagination, as no special conditions or caring for the roasting pieces is needed. Can be done in many ways. Hold it in a stick, rest on a stone, rest on a ground where terrain suits, and so on.

Always good news when you start improving mechanics.

Well, it seems like whenever we're not adding new features/mechanics we are either fixing or improving the existing features/mechanics.