Chef Archive

Recently, I did a little testing of how the values on the resources effect the resulting item. This was just a simple test of limited extent, but shows some glaring info. I have Cooking 4, Entrees 2 and Mixology 2. I made several Stewed Gwouch from different organic resources. I used the same water, which had an overall quality of 674,in each food creation. I used wild corn, domestic wheat, berries and carnivore meatall from Naboo. All initial food characteristics are from great successes.

Wild Corn (flavor 314, energy 336, quality 388) produced gwouch with values of 85sta, 104s and 3uses. Flavor experiment base value2%, Nutrition experiment base value 9%, Quantity experiment base value 11%.

Berries (flavor 463, energy 143, quality 990) produced 87sta, 108s, 4uses. Flavor base 2%, Nutrition base 8%, Quantity base 24%.

Carnivore Meat (flavor 891, energy 469, quality 958) produced 93sta, 115s, 4uses. Flavor base 3%, Nutrition base 10%, Quantity base 23%.

Domestic Wheat (flavor 221, energy 763, quality 457) produced 94sta, 115s, 3uses. Flavor base 3%, Nutrition base 13%, Quantity base 12%.

Going by the schematic for Stewed Gwouch, flavor, energy and quality all have equal importance, so I would have expected the carnivore meat to produce the best results in all categories. It is clearly evident that there is something else at work here. Obviously quality effects the number of uses as both high quality resoures produced the most uses to begin with and had the most potential for increasing with experimentation. Wheat had the most room to increase with nutritional experimentation and had the highest energy.

I was very surprised that wheat started with such a high duration value of 115s, which was as good as the carnivore meat, and the higher flavor experimentation base value. I would have expected the berries to be better than wheat in the duration value, since berries had a higher flavor and higher quality. Maybe there is something inherent about wheat over the other organic resources. A test using a variety of wheats would be needed to see what happened then.

The result of this simple test shows clearly that chefs can't rely on the schematic information to determine what resources are best to use for a food. Obviously quality will give you more uses. Energy seems to be a big factor inthe length of duration and the value of the stat boost. I find quantity is easiest to experiment on and flavor the hardest so quality doesn't seem that important. Energy seems to be the stat I will be looking for mostly when wanting to compare organic resources. Of course, all of this might only apply to Stewed Gwouch. The description does say it is flavorless, so maybe the flavor just gets baked out of it when cooking it. Even still, my simple test clearly shows that the Draft Schematic experimentation information percentages are not giving us the complete picture.

Ok, I did a little more testing. This time I created Almond Munchies. I used the berries and corn listed before. I used two kinds of herbivore meat. They were almost identical except their flavor values.

Herbivore Meat 1 (flavor 388, energy 493, quality 305) produced 41qui, 273s, 3 uses. Flavor experimentation base 2%, Nutrition base 6%, Quantity base 14%.

Herbivore Meat 2 (flavor 66, energy 508, quality 307) produced 41qui, 273s, 3 uses. Flavor base 2%, Nutrition base 7%, Quantity base 14%.

Here it is clearly evident that flavor doesn't matter much in this recipe. I don't know if there is some bug or improper implementation of the experimentation process. I justknow I will be focusing on energy and quality for my food resources, until some new information comes to light.

Good data! What were the decay resistances of those two herbivore meats?

Hide, wood and metal boosts flavor a lot in recepies (test it with gwouch, caf, starshine, synsteak for example). I've found that some schematics will never get high flavor values. Things like Trimpian for example (beans, meat and water). I already listed my conclusion on this in other threads, I'd just like to add another hypothetis : Schematics are bugged in the way that values have been interchanged for some of the organics. What I means is that even if it list flavor for meat, the game does not consider it flavor, while malleability (just an example) for hide or wood is considered flavor for game mechanics.

There's a post on swgcraft.com where some of us are trying to figure out this problem. It's on the general crafting forum and called "Experimentation..." A lot of testing still needs to be done but it looks like Decay Resistance is more important than Flavor of a given ingredient. This is possibly what you're seeing on you 2nd test.

Here are the decay resists for the organic resources I used.

Herbivore Meat 1 decay 391. Herbivore Meat 2 decay 724. Berries decay 77. Corn decay 693. Wheat decay954. Carnivore Meat decay 164.

In the Almond Munchies recipe, we see no difference between the two herbivore meats. The energy and quality are similar enough to ignore those two values. So we can look at flavor and decay resistance. They differ greatly but if flavor and decay are given equal weight to each other then the two herbivore meats come out to be pretty much the same. So either both flavor and decay are equally important to Almond Munchies or they are both unimportant. You would need something with equal valuein one category but different in another.

Going back to the Stewed Gwouch, there is information that shows that decay might not be a factor. If decay matters then Corn should be better than Berries. The two are similar in flavor but differ greatly in decay. Wheat and the Carnivore Meat are fairly close when combining flavor and decay into one new stat.

I think the formula is simpler than decay being involved at least for those two food items. I think if you make the experimentation formula 66.6% energy and 33.3% quality, you getamatching prediction of which resource will provide the best results in the duration and boost value categories when compared to the actual Stewed Gwouch results. You also would get a good matching prediction for Almond Munchies, as I triedsimilar tests with them. I would say quantity is all quality based.

As far as experimenting goes in general, I think Flavor is the hardest category to change. Greatest chance for failure or minimal success. Quantity is the easiest to experiment on. I can get great successes pretty regularly.