Game Projects

Basic Stuff

Text-based

Farming/Cooking game heavily inspired by SV.

World Stuff

There's 3 "worlds" to keep track of, all three of which are 2D grids:

Farmland

Your House -- technically exists juxtaposed with farmland, but there's both an "inside" and an "outside".

The world of Towns.

Time system

All of your actions take time. You have a limited amount of time in a day, at which point you hibernate and respawn at the entrance of your house.

Your various actions will consume more or less time depending on the Tools you have equipped (which have various other properties as well).

Towns work a bit differently -- moving around them also takes time (which isn't upgradeable), however every day you need to pay a fee to stay in the local Inn. If you go there manually before you run out of time, it costs half as much.

The time system is global, so wandering around towns is a good way of advancing the days while waiting for something in your farm to grow or process. However the money cost can be problematic.

Farming

Farming is the core of the game that everything ties into. Plants have procgen names and a variety of properties:

Growth time -- a certain amount of days.

Lifespan -- how many days they live after being planted.

Harvest timing -- how often they can be harvested during their lifespan. Will always be less than their lifespan.

Yield -- how many product they produce per harvest.

Seeds -- how many seeds they produce after dying. Can be zero.

(Properties related to the ways you can process them)

(Price of both the raw material and all of its processed forms, as well as a "cook property" (more on the different types in a bit)

Any of these properties can be ranges, in which case individual plants (and their seeds) will take on fixed values within the range, but seeds that you buy will be completely random.

Seeds of the same plant can be combined together into hybrids, which randomly pick one or the other of their properties and permanently consume both. So there *is* a Genetics system but it's a bit difficult to find the best properties, which I write quite like.

Farmland Stuff

Your farm takes place on an infinite 2D grid -- it does take time to move around and you also have to extend your farmhouse into it, however so it makes sense to have the farm pretty close to your house.

That said though, there's a variety of properties associated with each tile that might make it better or worse:

Arability -- basically the maximum amount of crops you can plant there.

Rain -- how often it rains. If this is 1, then it rains every day, however this is rare. Any other situation and you have to water your crops on days it doesn't rain (which consumes time according to your equipment package) or their growth/yield/etc will stall out. After 3 days without water, they'll die altogether, and some rain stats are above 3.

Weed growth -- a number of days until the amount of weeds doubles, or a single weed is created if there aren't any. Weeding is more lenient -- you don't have issues until the amount of weeds is higher than the amount of crops, however because of the doubling effect, weeding consumes more time if you wait longer. Plowed land doesn't generate weeds -- you have to actually have crops placed first.

Element -- one of the plant-centric elements (like nickel). Can also be blank with a 50% chance. Affects synergistics (more on that in a bit), which can be positive or negative. If positive you're getting an extra bonus.

Solar power -- ((see advanced automation))

Aquifer -- ((see advanced automation))

You have to actually plow before you can plant, and plow again when all crops have died. Plowing takes quite a bit of time, depending on your equipment package.

Processing

Crops are worth more in a processed state. Same deal with Cooking, though that's a lot more involved and taps into this system as well.

To process a plant you need three things:

Enough room somewhere in your Farmhouse for the fixture that processes the plant (more on this in the Farmhouse section).

The actual fixture in question. They're bought from town shops with a fixed stock.

Time. The amount of time required is based on the plant for each type of product.

Plants that have been processed just sit there until you collect them -- no waste mechanics. However, obviously, you can't process more until they're done.

There's a variety of processing methods based on the type of plant, as well as more refined forms that require processed plants as input. These (and the resultant prices) are all properties of the plant or the specific seed if it's a range. They aren't necessarily worth reaching that final stage -- however they *might be* when you forward them to cooking.

Equipment

Equipment is a series of tools.

Your tools have an effect on how long everything takes, including movement (Boots). Each tool has multiple purposes, for example Boots can grant a bonus to both farmland movement and town movement. Different tools will be better one way or the other (possibly both, but that's rare).

The Tool Rack fixture stores all tools of a specific type. You can switch equipment of a certain type but it takes time -- though not as long as switching via Storage.

Farmhouse Storage Stuff

General storage is done via Boxes with a fixed number of slots.

There are however more specific forms which have more slots but can only fit a certain type of item. These are also the type that can be utilized with Silver Pipes (more on that in the Pipes section).

Boxes consume Farmhouse fixture space, however a room demarcated as a "Storage Room" can fit a lot more Boxes than it could otherwise (since you can stack them together). Obviously you can't have any other fixtures in here.

All of these storage solutions have to be bought.

Personal Inventory stuff

You can only fit a certain amount of items in your Backpack. Various Backpack equipment holds more items and/or grants bonuses. They function like other Tools where you can change them out at a Tool Rack or a general storage area.

You can also buy Carts -- these work similarly but the downside is that movement slows down a good bit (depending on the Cart properties in question). Still, this is usually useful if you have a route planned out. There are different types of Carts for your Farm/Farmhouse and Towns, and they take up fixture room when not equipped to you, but a Cart Storage room does something similar to a Storage Room.

Pipes

Pipes allow you to automate various farm processes. They are however expensive -- you have to physically buy Silver, Gold or Bronze pipes piece by piece and connect them between the various rooms (one pipe per room node, plus another pipe between each set of fixtures or other endpoints).

There's four types:

Blue -- Handles better farming automation (more on that in a bit).

White -- Power (see next section)

Gold -- connects Plots to Storage within your Farmhouse. Basically allows auto-harvesting. You need two separate lines for products and seeds.

Silver -- connects fixtures within your Farmhouse (starting with a Storage Box).

Bronze -- connects Storage Boxes to town shops or transport nodes (the latter is quite expensive!). Also does the reverse (more in that section).

Better Farming Automation

Gold Pipes will automatically harvest viable crops and transport them to farmhouse storage, however that's only one factor in Farming.

Additional units exist that will:

Water crops

Weed

Plow/plant existing plots. In this case you need Blue Pipes that run from Farmhouse Storage to the machine in question.

These units have to be set up in a Farmland space with nothing else in it. They have a limited amount of connections you can make to them (the crop watering tile is based on the aquifer of the tile rather than the machine itself) as well as a power requirement.

These units then have to be linked to the appropriate Plot via Blue Pipes (one per tile and then another one to go from the tile to the plot in question).

To get power, you need Solar Panels which have different stats on how many connections they can make (which all get the same amount of power, the tile stat), and then they take the power rating of that particular tile and get connected to the machines that require it via White Pipes.

More on Bronze Pipes

Bronze pipes can connect storage in your farmhouse to town shops (for selling products) or transport nodes (for going to additional towns or entirely different provinces). The latter one there is expensive but it's a fixed cost so finding better routes is a good idea.

However, you don't automatically collect the money you make -- the shop just holds it until you manually pick it up.

Instead, you can connect shops to home nodes and then from there to:

Vault -- a fixture that collects money. Properties are the money it stores + the amount of connections that can be made to it. You can also place money in one manually (and will need to for the below).

Buyer -- will automatically buy products from the shop on the day update. Has property limits on the total quantity of buys and outgoing/sorted connections (always one input though). Buyers need to be connected to Vaults via Silver Pipes

Shopper -- allows you to buy items remotely. Takes a day to deliver it and can't be connected to anything else, but has limits on internal storage.

Farmhouse Mechanics

Your Farmhouse is expandable, but occupies farmland tiles when you do so. Expanding it also requires wood and stone which have to be bought and packed or carted back.

Wood will just create a room between your room and an adjacent spot of empty farmland. Other connections are also automatically made as needed.

You can also build Attics or Cellars. To do that you first have to reinforce your existing room with Stone. A room can have an attic or a cellar attached to it, not both. Additionally:

Attics need the room you build it from to be surrounded on all four sides by other rooms. You can however make an attic *from* an attic, so long as there's four attics around it, and do this endlessly. Attics are Storage Rooms -- more space for storage.

Cellars don't have adjacent room requirements, however they can't be placed adjacent to any other Cellar. They give you more room for Fixtures. They also aren't recursive -- at maximum you'll have cellars in a checkerboard pattern around your base.

Cellars are built entirely out of stone, while Attics are built entirely out of Wood. Attics *do* have to be reinforced if you're going up another layer.

Doors are required for going out into Farmland from a room or going between rooms (outside of building a room, which automatically builds that first door to it). Cellars don't require Doors -- the staircase is automatic. Same deal with Attics, unless you want to connect Attics together.

Building on a tile destroys anything whatsoever that's there -- you get a dialogue box if this is a problem. Meanwhile, if Pipes or Machines are present, the tile has to be taken down manually (adding a door is a good way to get there easily).

Fixture Stuff

Each room has a set number of fixtures that can occupy it, maybe 4. You can move fixtures around freely once the Pipes (if any) are detached + there's nothing in them. Attics give you 8 slots solely for Boxes, while Cellars give you 6 fixture spaces.

Fixtures once packaged up become items and can fit into storage in ways that don't make sense. They do have to actually be empty, however. No matryoshka storage.

Starting Room

Your starting room has a Town Portal which can't be stored, a southwards-facing door, your Bed, and two general-purpose Boxes (which have some basic food that you can't get in the game otherwise). You expand from this point.

Fixtures will take up the entirety of your starting Backpack and you don't start out with a Cart. There's maybe 20 slots in there.

You start with a bit of money, but there are means to prevent softlocking.

When the day ends or you exit the town area via the home node, you end up wherever your bed is. As a fixture you can move it around, but there's only one and it can't be stored.

All Bronze Pipes flood in through Town Portals. You can buy additional ones *sometimes* that link to that specific town's home node, but they're pricy.

Towns

Towns are where you buy various things you need. They have a variety of Shops with a variety of functions. Each Town also contains:

Transport Nodes -- for connection to other towns along various routes (more on that in a bit). There's 3 types so if a town uses all three there will be 3 transport nodes.

Inn -- where you go to spend the night voluntarily or involuntarily.

Library -- Random useful local factoids + more advanced scanning services which cost money. More on this in the Library section.

Temple -- the temple prevents two different types of softlocking. More on that in the Temple section.

Towns can also have:

Home Node -- the home node transports you back to your bed, for free and instantaneously. Not all towns have one, but the starting town always does.

Starting Town

The starting town always contains a home need and some kind of seed seller within your starting money price range.

Town Layout

Towns are a square grid of rooms that accommodate everything within as well as blank tiles. Shops/etc can appear literally anywhere within the grid. Obviously this means that a town with 16 POIs wouldnt have blank tiles while one with 17 would have 8 blank tiles.

Towns have variable size, though Cities have more in them.

Meta-layout

Towns are connected together in a shatterloopian way -- to nearby towns, to the nearest City if there are no other connections or the city is physically close, and edges are also linked together via boat (unless already connected some other way).

Provinces have some fixed amount of towns / town connection properties / etc.

Provinces are along a 2D grid and some town in that direction will connect to the next province's opp port, so for example to go north you'd need one of the towns that's northmost along its line and would then connect to one of the southmost ones in the province to the north.

Travel

Traveling between towns costs a different amount depending on the type of route -- edge routes are the cheapest and city routes the most expensive. You can however connect to a city some other way if the generation lines up just right. Moving between towns also takes time (you do see how long this takes) and if it passes through a day/night cycle you get an additional charge that's more than staying in either inn would be. Typically takes a few hours, but both the cost and time are based on distance.

Province connections take longer and cost more -- a day or more. Also additional surcharges for lodging.

Provinces always have a home node *somewhere* within them.

Inn Mechanics

Inns allow you to peacefully pass a day/night cycle. Inn prices vary. You can either get to one before the cycle ends and sleep until the start of the next day for their usual rate, or get transported there when the cycle ends and pay double. If you're made of money this isn't a big deal, but early on it can be problematic, especially since not all towns have home nodes.

Your money balance can actually go negative. This is a problem if you get stuck somewhere without a home node, as you can't transport to a town that has one.

Cities tend to have expensive Inns as well -- this can be surprising and really mess up a plan.

Temple Mechanics

The Temple POI prevents three types of softlocking:

Having a negative balance (or just less than a route out) in a town without a home node.

Having no money period, nor seeds/a farm in general.

General starvation with no means of sating it.

To get around this you can petition a local temple for assistance. The rewards can be (your choice):

A set of 20 Snailseeds (terrible stats across the board, including sell price and inedible but at least you'll have *something*)

Free passage to the connected town of your choice. This can even be a city, and helping the local Temple might be a cheaper alternative to getting there on your own.

Some basic food.

Sleeping and eating is covered during this time -- lodging is free while basic food can be requested and incurs a debt that'll have to be repaid.

Temples task you with building a starting farm for someone like you -- you'll gather wood/stone/etc and build the town Portal, door, 2 boxes and bed from scratch. Also gathering the basic food for the house + whatever amount you've been lended by the Temple. You'll be provided with a terrible cart if you don't already have one and will gather resources around the build site which have procgen layouts. The last step is an incantation that turns the land into arable farmland. Then you gather donations from the POIs in the town for starting money -- there's always exactly enough and no more (some POIS will just refuse it, and this is true for every time you do this).

You can gather your own food if you want -- this is more viable than asking the temple for aid there because you have to pay them back anyway + put some in the storage boxes. That said, though, if you're starving they'll feed you back to normal and that will accrue a debt.

Each temple puzzle has a fixed layout, so if you need their aid again you can remember where everything was.

Food Mechanic

You have to eat a set amount of calories per day. This is pretty easy to achieve with a good farm, or you can buy products at shops if they exist and have calories.

Food in its various forms (particularly cooking) will grant bonuses to one thing or another that last for that day. You can eat other food to get other bonuses and whatever the higher amount is takes precedence (bonuses don't stack). Basic food doesn't do any of this -- it's probably berries or something easily gatherable during the temple puzzle.

You can not eat for a day without side effects -- this is a full day after the last day you ate, so if you ate before bed, the next day will be that day.

On the second day though you'll get a hungry debuff that makes moving around take real time (indicated by a progress bar). The third day the amount of time will double.

On the fourth day of not eating you'll wake up at the starting town's temple and will involuntarily start the temple puzzle for food.

Not every town has edible food for sale, or you might have no money or whatever. Bringing some with you is a good idea but that can be tricky with a starting backpack and hauling back fixtures.

To recover hunger you need to eat the calorie debt -- like on the third day eating your calorie requirement will only set you back to the second day of effects, then the first day, then from there it's a normal meal while the others don't grant benefits.

Libraries

Libraries give you useful local information, categorized into Books in different sections of the POI. They give you:

Individual books for every single item that's sold in the town, as well as its location(s). The info here are all of their various properties. This isn't visible in shop menus so without a library visit you're shopping blind. They can be pretty handy when you start growing stuff as well. Synergistic combinations with other local seeds are also listed within these books. (You'll have to find out the other combinations yourself). These books are alphabetized and heavily organized within the library POI.

Information about specific towns in the province -- which towns (or provinces) they connect to, the POIs within (but not their contents). Again, heavily organized.

Information about adjacent provinces -- a count on all POIs (but not where they are), how they connect to other provinces, etc.

Books are items, so you need backpack space to carry them around. At the entrance if you have unbought books you can buy them and then also return them to this specific library to get the full amount of money back.

You can also buy Bookcases (at a Furniture Store), a fixture that stores and can sort books in a custom way, and has more storage slots than a Box.

Bookmaking

You can also buy a Bookmaker fixture here, along with Paper, Graph Paper, Notebooks and Pens. This has a couple different functions. Like everything else these items can be sold back for their full value.

The Bookmaker fixture will allow you to copy a page of a book onto a blank page and then stitch these copied pages together (or unstitch or destroy them). This consumes a Pen.

If you want to make tables that compare or aggregate data, you'd use graph paper instead, but same deal. Paper and graph paper can be freely combined in whatever order you want. Books do have a maximum number of pages -- beyond, say, 20 you'd need to make a new book.

Created books can be named and can go into your bookshelves as well. They can't be sold, however.

A Notebook + a pen will allow you to copy various things from the world like shop listings, farmland tile properties, plot information, etc. These are all streamed so they update in real time. Each notebook has 20 pages and its pages can be ripped apart like other custom books.

You can title pages whatever you want and freely change them.

Desks can also be bought (at a Furniture Store), which will let you view some fixed amount of individual streamed pages all in the same bordered table-thing in the UI. They also have a bit of book storage. Both of these properties depend on the desk in question.

Library Scanning Services

Libraries also allow you to scan for something specific in the town matrix, like a specific kind of seed or a shop that sells crates or whatever.

You have to specify the limits to it -- this province, a range of them, a direction, etc. The more you're doing here the longer it'll take + the more it'll cost. At the end of the game time elapsed, you'll either get a book with the information or you'll get all your money back.

I'm not sure what all the scanning targets and options are, but it should be pretty extensive. Also costly.

You can also glean more information about towns here than you could in books -- this is cheaper obviously and only takes a day for the current province or a bit more if it involves other ones.

Like other books, this information is an item and can be copied/etc. If you don't have room, the scanner person will hold scanned books with infinite storage space for later perusal.

Game Goal

The game goal is accruing some huge amount of wealth and donating it to the Temple HQ. It's possible to find it by accident (it's a few provinces away) but unlikely -- employing scanning services is a better option.

Since the game is kind of a sandbox, you can continue playing after you've beaten it, but you get a few perks from the Temple Cart:

No movement slowing, unlike other carts.

Contains its own expandable mobile base area -- storage, fixtures, whatever you want. No portals or pipes though. No attics or cellars either, and creating another room eats a cart. 4 fixture slots per room, fixed.

You can also place small farms in here that automatically water and weed. This has to be a room with nothing in it and the transformation process permanently consumes a cart. Revoking it is possible but you don't get the cart back.

If you're in a temple, you can use it to warp to any other temple in the province -- and harbors are clearly indicated.

A special fixture within it that gives you an unlimited amount of basic food.

Another special fixture that will do one-day scanning for free. Aggregates scanned book storage with libraries as well.

Sizable storage accessible within the Cart as well (it just feels like you're bringing the cart inside itself, though you can't enter it or use its travel feature). Putting fixtures in the cart will go to the cart storage, and then you'd need to go into the cart to bring them back out.

Cooking

Cooking is a complex system that processes edible products further. It serves two purposes:

Making *very* valuable items that are worth more than the sum of their parts

Making food that you eat for excellent bonuses.

In any case these systems work basically the same. The former one is the main use, so I'll talk like that's the default here.

Cooking has three steps associated with it. The first two can be done independently and these processed forms are just items that can be stored for later use (via Bowls, which can also be made out of bottle gourds)

Spice blend -- blends spices together. Some combinations ruin the dish altogether. You can also do singlets. Blends can be stored for later with the consumable Bowls.

Processing -- processes a single food item in various ways, using tools. You can also use the base form -- some are already processed (like purees). Processing has grades and some process+product combinations are difficult to achieve a high grade for without really good tools. This can again store things for later via consumable Bowls

Cooking -- the most complex step. Also uses tools which can ease some of the issues herein. Uses some kind of archetype -- some are harder or easier than others and the resultant value reflects this.

More farming stuff

The farming tile's Arability stat determines how many seeds you can plant there, however you might want to plant different things or mix old and new crops.

For that, there is a Plots system.

Plots are a set of the same seeds all planted at the same time. While seeds are different so they might sprout at different times, they're helpful for watering/harvests and automation more generally

More on Cooking

Cooking is a process where you're trying to get all ingredients within some ideal range of heat at the same time. The ranges vary by ingredient, and while more ingredients lead to better stews, it *also* makes this puzzle more complicated. It's therefore important to add ingredients at the right time. Processing changes the values here, and can alter the resulting properties as well.

You get a little progress bar on each ingredient to see if it's in the right range, but you dont know how they react to heat -- that's found in cookbook pages that you've compiled and can place around the cooking station.

Spice blends give multipliers, either to specific types of ingredients (with more of a multiplier) or the dish as a whole (with less). They do however also have their own cooked/burn ranges so need to be factored in alongside other ingredients.

The value of a dish is based on the value of the ingredients + the processing grade + the amount of ingredients in a dish. Processing grade is a multiplier on the ingredient in question, though it also changes some of its cooking properties. Then spice blend multipliers are applied after all those other calculations.

So for example, a casserole archetype that has Rushreed Noodles, Farberries, Yardbean paste, Yardbean and a spice blend of Pine Bark and Lily Stamen, with all ingredients at a 1.2x grade would have its value be:

Rushreed Noodles = 30 x 1.2 = 36

Farberries = 20 x 1.2 = 24

Yardbean paste = 100 x 1.2 = 120 x 3 = 360

Yardbean = 50 x 3 = 150

Pine Bark = Bean multiplier x3

Lily Stamen = Total multiplier x1.5

So your base value is 36+24+360+150 = 570 (the bean bonus is already accounted for). There's 4 ingredients so this gets multiplied by 1.4x (+0.2 for each ingredient past 2) = 798. Then the total multipliers trigger, which comes out to a 1197 value.

That seems like a really valuable dish, however there are a bunch of ways this could've gone wrong:

If the spices dont work together right, they could be neutral or even negative. More on this in the spice blend section.

There's no guarantee of getting that crucial 1.2x grade in all processed ingredients.

If you added the ingredients together in the wrong sequence, some would burn. Burning kills off all values of that particular ingredient and can even have a negative effect, though you still get your 1.4x bonus. Same deal with undercooking.

Getting a recipe right can therefore be pretty complicated, as well as replicating it for that matter. You can add 10+ ingredients to a recipe if you want, which would potentially push you past 10k, or crazy spice blends for huge multipliers, but both of these create unforeseen complexities.

You also can't remove ingredients once placed into a cook, so if you've messed up it's better to just make a weaker dish than risk burning what you have.

Cooking Stats

Cooking Stats are all over the place.

Essentially what's happening is that each second at 300F, each ingredient is accruing 1 point of heat. You can turn the temperature down to a minimum of 200 or up to make this actual happen faster or slower. Faster works better once you know how a recipe works, so you can make more of it, whereas slower is better if you're still experimenting and want a bigger margin. You can't turn heat off. It probably makes more sense to have my own degree scale here so the speedup/slowdown makes more sense.

Anyway, ingredients have stats that look like this:

Cooked range -- two values of heat accumulation. If the ingredient is within that range then you receive the full set of properties. If it's below then it has "uncooked" effects, whereas if it's higher you get "burned" effects.

Uncooked rate -- the rate at which the ingredient accumulates heat while uncooked.

Cooked rate -- same but for the cooking range. The lower this is and/or the bigger the range, the more leeway you have.

There's no rate for burned because you've already ruined the ingredient by that point.

(( Uncooked effects ))

(( Burned effects ))

Just to make this extra hard, you don't have a visual clue of when something is cooked or burned -- you have to constantly be referencing the paper and graph paper you have around the cooking station. Getting a cooking station with more note space is going to be pretty essential for complex recipes unless you've thoroughly memorized a combination.

Cooking stations run even while you're not looking at them. If you're savvy enough, you can prepare multiple recipes at once. Cooking doesn't consume Time, though processing / assembling spices, and moving both raw ingredients and processed recipes does. So once you start cooking, you're not concerned with Time passing and respawning you in your bed randomly (with the dish still burning elsewhere). Conveniently, you can switch between Cooking Stations in the same room.

Spice Blends

Spices are a collection of tags.

Taste Gradient -- these contain a floating value as well. Tastes are paired: sweet/bitter, sour/fatty, salty/watery, umami/bland. These gradients are based on the spice blend as a whole, so if something is too high in the bitter direction, appending sweet values will scale it down.

The actual bonus in question are attached to the above gradients -- the closer you get to the maximum, the better that property becomes, and if you go in the other direction it becomes negative.

Taste gradients max out at -3 and +3. If you go too high or low the spice blend is ruined. This is quite annoying since you're adding things together one at a time, so you can ruin a spice blend altogether (and the spices that go into it) if you choose poorly.

Bonuses do however stack. A spice that has a 1.5x multiplier with beans and another one with a 1.2x multiplier with beans will end up being a 1.7x if you get them to blend. Basically the parts subtract 1 and those get summed. 2x + 3x would therefore be 4x: (1x+2x)+1x.

The more specific the ingredient, the higher the base bonus, so tier-1 is the dish as a whole, tier-2 would be a category like "beans" and tier-3 would be a specific form, like "bean paste". Generalizing works better with more ingredients, but specializing tends to make more sense. Granted you also have to deal with the above system, so spices that are easier to work with are going to have more utility regardless of how good the actual bonus is.

Spicemaking

There's a specific fixture for this which can also hold notes (pretty important since you don't know where taste gradients of any ingredient are).

Spicemaking works by adding 1 unit of each spice in question. The taste gradients are based on the total ratio here -- so Pine Bark with 1 bitterness and Lily Stamen with 1 sweet, if you add 1 of both they cancel out, but adding another Pine Bark would being the bitterness up by 1. You do see the gradients change, but you need notes to understand how they work.

Each spice in question gets ground into 3 units via a mortar and pestle.

Spicemaking Elements

Each spice has one of the shatterloop six associated with it.

The first spice sets the element, and future ones will update it only if they're compatible with the current blend element. To be compatible it has to either attack or defend the existing one. You'd need notes to see what element everything else is -- there's no limits in the UX and if you choose wrong you ruin the spice batch.

This does add an extra layer of complexity to a spice blend.

Ingredients Processing

Ingredients can be processed before adding them. This can change their Grade, but the downside is the margin for Cooked goes down or it advances at a quicker rate. This makes the ingredient harder to work with when actually cooking, but the price bonus is hard to argue against.

Grade appends +0.X with each tier and alternates between reducing the range (it starts here) and increasing the cooked heat saturation.

Each type of processing is linked to a set of ingredient types (say, dicing which is pretty universal, whereas noodlemaking explicitly requires flour). The X above is higher with less generalized forms. This in turn requires processing tools which can be bought -- they give you some chance of achieving a grade, sometimes different ones for different ingredient types. Never more than 90% or less than 10%. Also the grade you actually achieve depends on the tool. Obviously those with higher grades and better chances cost more (and are probably harder to find too).

Like the other implements, the Processing Station is a fixture that stores some amount of tools, some amount of Notes and allows you to bulk process stuff.

Failing to achieve a grade ruins the ingredient, including a bulk supply of it.

Cookbooks

Cookbooks are a convenient way of spreading relevant notes for a recipe around -- they're like other books but sticking them in a fixture will automatically pull out all the relevant notes, and allow you to update the rest of the cookbook easily into the notes area as well.

Food removal

Considering how complicated the Cooking system is already, it doesn't make sense to pair it up with eating. Also the bonuses overlap too much with tools so there isn't a whole lot of utility with that system either. So it makes more sense to nix this system altogether.

Seed Removal

The setup of Plots makes seeds with variable properties way too complicated and there's enough inherent randomness already present so I'm going to nix variable ranges for seeds and genetics more generally. This now means that Plots always finish at the same time and give chance-based yields on products or seeds, which is easier to do in batch.

Tools Simpgrade

There aren't enough properties to go around here, however some aspects are just different, so Tools only affect Time spent and are concentrated in the following areas:

Farming -- bonuses to Plowing, Planting, Weeding, Watering and Harvesting.

Boots -- bonuses to walking around your Farmland, Farmhouse and Towns.

Backpack -- personal storage is still important, however this will also grant bonuses to working with your personal inventory on a Time basis

Gloves -- cuts down processing time for various fixtures (cooking prep, using transformative fixtures)

Temple --> Bank

The Temple system is *way* too complicated for its intended purpose. So instead, there are Banks that will loan you out some money but you have to pay it back as a percentage of your total sales moving forwards. Negative balances (because of Inns) are pretty bad because sales will just adjust your balance rather than get you out of the hole you're in. So I'm thinking there are Plans instead:

Get you out of the red.

Give you 20 Snailseeds.

Give you enough money to get to an adjacent town or Province if you're in a Harbor.

Percentages + interest rates vary by the Bank in the area, with Cities being worse. Some banks will essentially put you deeper into the hole. You do *not* want to end up in this position, even though you're *technically* avoiding a softlock.