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Question for Devs regarding food recipes


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I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics.

For example hummus really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.)

Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft.

The way recipies link up to crafting levels is pretty amusing sometimes too. A level 75 chef can make a cheese pizza from scratch - making and shaping their own dough and making the tomato sauce, but they have to be level 125 to put toppings on it, which is the easiest part of the whole process. But it would be pretty annoying if you had to start off buying cheese pizza and adding toppings and only gained the ability to make it yourself later on.

Given all of that I think it would be pretty interesting to hear how they decide which foods to include, how they adapt the recipies to fit the crafting system and how they decide to balance realism with game mechanics.

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@"Danikat.8537" said:I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics.

For example hummus really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.)

Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft.

I think one of the soup recipes use something like 10 sticks of butter ...

Can you even fit 10 sticks of melted butter into a typical soup bowl?

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@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics.

For example
really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.)

Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft.

I think one of the soup recipes use something like 10 sticks of butter ...

Can you even fit 10 sticks of melted butter into a typical soup bowl?

If you're Paula Deen? Or at a state fair (I saw a picture - I'm not in the USA - of deep fried butter, which is like a heart attack on a stick).

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@Hesione.9412 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics.

For example
really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.)

Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft.

I think one of the soup recipes use something like 10 sticks of butter ...

Can you even fit 10 sticks of melted butter into a typical soup bowl?

If you're Paula Deen? Or at a state fair (I saw a picture - I'm not in the USA - of deep fried butter, which is like a heart attack on a stick).

That all depends on what your definition of "Bowl" is. A stick of butter is 8 table spoons (tbsp). A random search I did found a soup/salad bowl of 32 fluid ounces, and each table spoon is half of a fluid ounce. This means the bowl will hold 64 tbsps, which is 8 sticks of butter.

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@Hesione.9412 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics.

For example
really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.)

Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft.

I think one of the soup recipes use something like 10 sticks of butter ...

Can you even fit 10 sticks of melted butter into a typical soup bowl?

If you're Paula Deen? Or at a state fair (I saw a picture - I'm not in the USA - of deep fried butter, which is like a heart attack on a stick).

I've also heard of deep fried coca-cola at state fairs! But I think that's kind of like the Glasgow chip shops which sell deep fried haggis and Mars bars (seperately) and promise to deep fry any food you bring them. It's more having fun with the idea and playing up to stereotypes to entertain tourists than trying to make something anyone would want to eat.

But yeah, soup with 80 tbsp of butter does not sound good. Although most of the soup recipes make 2 bowls, so I guess it's "only" 40 tbsp in each. Not that it's much better that way.

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As I don't understand sticks of butter or fluid ounces, I looked up metric cups and tablespoons. One metric cup apparently can hold 16.6667 tablespoons, just over 2 sticks of butter. I could not find any information online about the fluid capacity of single-serve bowls in New Zealand so, for science!, I grabbed a couple of sizes of soup bowls out of my cupboard. The shallowest one held 200 ml, which is less than a metric cup. The largest one held 500 ml, or two metric cups. For this test I did not fill the bowls to the top, but filled them to the point at which one would reasonably expect to fill them (could carry without getting one's fingers into any liquid, and would not slosh the contents onto the floor). My conclusion: 10 sticks of butter will not fit into a single-serve New Zealand bowl, let alone 10 sticks of butter plus any other substances.

This then brings us to the question of whether we should consider the food as only single-serve. Clearly, the one-person consumption items are one-person servings. This then brings us to the feasts. The question then becomes one of the ratio of stick of butter: other ingredients, and is this ratio realistic. For some items the ratio appears realistic. For example, the plate of steak and asparagus requires one stick of butter, which is used in conjunction with one slab of red meat (for frying the meat I presume). A stick of butter seems a suitable volume for frying a slab of meat. The question one might have about this recipe is why only one asparagus spear is used. While, admittedly, the recipe is called "steak and asparagus" and not "steak and asparaguses" or "steak and asparagusi", having only one spear of asparagus may be the source of disappointment when receiving this dish.

The butter:other ingredients ratio appears suspect in other recipes. For example, the "plate of roasted cactus" uses a one:one ratio of butter to prickly pear. My research into prickly pears in NZ suggests that these can be consumed raw as a type of fruit, with the ""taste and texture of a crisp, juicy rockmelon with just a hint of passionfruit." In this case, frying such an item in butter leads to questions of taste, and also the appropriateness of adding 3 cinnamon sticks and 3/5 of lemon to each pricky pear. Butter may be the least of the concerns here.

The opposite may occur for other recipes, which appear to have a dearth of butter. For example, "turnip casserole" uses an entire turnip, but only one stick of butter. Perhaps the butter is merely the means through which the pile of cinnamon and sugar and egg are bound to the turnip. The addition of cinnamon and sugar to a turnip is likely an acquired taste. Also, this definition of "casserole" is unlike any casserole I have made.

My research into recipes has been unable to locate a dish that contains 10 sticks of butter. I would be happy to provide further scientific analysis if such a recipe could be identified.

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I would think that what those of us in the USA consider one stick of butter might not be what is standard on Tyria. It could be the equivalent of a 1/2 or even 1/4 stick the North American standard for butter sticks. Of course if a missing step in the game recipe is to turn X number of sticks of butter into clarified butter or ghee then that could account for the excess since the process removes the water that bulks it up. Making clarified butter is results in about a 1/4 loss in volume.

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Oh my mistake! Only 4 sticks. I didn't account for the sub-recipes outputting more than 1 result https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-66531

However now we need to deal with the issue of reducing 12 bowls of other soups into 1. The starting bowls have to start tiny or the final bowl has to be huge or both otherwise that is going to be one very viscous "soup".

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  • ArenaNet Staff

I got curious about what kind of information we had handy that might answer this question, so I turned to Linsey Murdock, one of our lead designers and the person who worked on food and recipes for GW2 launch back in 2012. She checked out this thread, was excited to share some of the basics with you, and passed this on to me for you all.

From Linsey:

Ok so, I personally designed all the food recipes for launch and there are a few principals that I went by and a process I used to do so, some of which has carried forward through all of the development on cooking since launch.

RULE NUMBER ONEWe do NOT eat the sentient creatures of Tyria. There is no charr steak, no grawl chops, hylek legs, centaur loins, harpy wings, tengu drumsticks, or quaggan blubber in any cooking recipes. There might be something named for a creature like Ettin Stew, but it is not MADE out of Ettins. Now, a discerning person might say excuse me, what about choya spines? Well, that is a story. Choya were originally NOT a sentient creature and the rewards team planned to have them pretty heavily in cooking recipes for Path of Fire. Cactus is good eats. BUT THEN, we found out that the choya had VILLAGES and DANCED in circles. To me, that indicated a society and took them out of the running for food. However, it had already been built and accounted for in the economy balance and we didn’t have time to redo all that work. So we renamed everything to use “Choya Spines” which are the needles they shed. We decided this would be OK because we decided that harvesting those spines would not harm the choya. It’s like fingernails. They regrow. A little flimsy, but it let us sleep at night.

RULE NUMBER TWONo gross food. No Monster Mystery Meat Stew. Ideally, it should all be REAL recipes distilled down to their simplified Tyrian analog. We have had some exceptions to this rule sneak past me. I am but one woman. I was not able to stem the tide of candy corn brittle.

RULE NUMBER THREEAvoid single use base ingredients as much as possible. I really tried to make sure that if I was going to include a particular vegetable or herb or what have you, that it would be used in multiple recipes.

RULE NUMBER FOURAvoid made up ingredients. I made a fundamental decision to use real world vegetables, fruits, and herbs without renaming them into Tyrian versions. I did this because I wanted to take advantage of players real world knowledge of food to help train them on how to make food in GW2. Again, a few exceptions snuck past me like Winterberries, and one exception I personally made affordance for, which is Omnomberries… because it amused me. Fun fact, the icon for Omnomberries looks like a Mangosteen, which is a tropical fruit I got to try on a trip to Hawaii once!

Them's the rules. Now the process.

Every single recipe in the launch game is based on a REAL recipe. You can make this stuff at home.* Again, I wanted to let players rely on real world cooking knowledge to help them discover food recipes. Admittedly, the launch game cooking recipes are largely to my personal taste. There are lots of recipes in there that are my personal favorites, friends/family favorites, or classic western favorites. There is even more than one family recipe in there. I also wanted there to be a lot of simple obvious recipes. Like, meat and bread should make a burger. Add cheese and you have a cheese burger. For the less obvious recipes, I used the same kind of process that I use when I want to cook a recipe I have never made before. I search the internet for at least a dozen versions of the recipe I have in mind and look for the elements that seem to be the common core elements of the recipe. If one home cook likes to put some kind of weird, out of left field ingredient in a pretty normal recipe which makes their version unique, I did not include such things. If ten out of twelve recipes use lemon juice, but one uses vinegar, and one is all about lime, I’m using lemon juice. Common denominators here, people.

So that is mostly it. There were some other bits of madness, like how certain types of buffs were related to certain types of food. Like pies are healing, spicy things relate to conditions, and magic find is found on other sweets. This is less important to the question and more important, is not a rule because once a pile of other designers that weren’t me started making recipes, my madness fell apart and there aren’t as clear delineations of what buffs go on which types of foods.

*Note from F.A.: Linsey is correct! A lot of GW2 players have done exactly this. Check out Pixelated Provisions and Terrible Trio Creations if you want some GW2 recipes to try for yourself.

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Thanks @Fire Attunement.9835 and Linsey Murdock for answering! That's really informative.

I had a love-hate relationship with levelling cooking because it always made me hungry and often made me wish I was having some of the stuff I was making in the game instead of what I actually had.

Also thanks for making me aware of Terrible Trio Creation. I'd seen Pixelated Provisions before, but not that one. I'll have to try some of their recipies at some point. (It's not GW2 but I might try their klah recipie too. I've been meaning to make some more for a while and I like the idea of including cayenne pepper.)

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@Tekoneiric.6817 said:I would think that what those of us in the USA consider one stick of butter might not be what is standard on Tyria. It could be the equivalent of a 1/2 or even 1/4 stick the North American standard for butter sticks. Of course if a missing step in the game recipe is to turn X number of sticks of butter into clarified butter or ghee then that could account for the excess since the process removes the water that bulks it up. Making clarified butter is results in about a 1/4 loss in volume.

I went with the USA definition of a stick of butter. Those of us in a number of other countries do not have sticks. I thought it was a colloquialism until I was told about a year ago that butter in the USA can come in actual sticks.

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I was coming here to link Terrible Trio (but Linsey beat me to it) as I've made their Charr Meat on a Stick several times and it's always glorious. I recommend that one highly. Due to my available kitchen stuff I use wood skewers soaked for 3 hours as recommended and cook under a broiler rather than over a grill, and I'm still in rapture at the results.

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@Hesione.9412 said:

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:I would think that what those of us in the USA consider one stick of butter might not be what is standard on Tyria. It could be the equivalent of a 1/2 or even 1/4 stick the North American standard for butter sticks. Of course if a missing step in the game recipe is to turn X number of sticks of butter into clarified butter or ghee then that could account for the excess since the process removes the water that bulks it up. Making clarified butter is results in about a 1/4 loss in volume.

I went with the USA definition of a stick of butter. Those of us in a number of other countries do not have sticks. I thought it was a colloquialism until I was told about a year ago that butter in the USA can come in actual sticks.

Just out of curiosity what does it come out in other countries? Butter crock or just a small plastic bowl or something? Never actually shopped for groceries in another country actually.

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:I got curious about what kind of information we had handy that might answer this question, so I turned to Linsey Murdock, one of our lead designers and the person who worked on food and recipes for GW2 launch back in 2012. She checked out this thread, was excited to share some of the basics with you, and passed this on to me for you all.

From Linsey:

Ok so, I personally designed all the food recipes for launch and there are a few principals that I went by and a process I used to do so, some of which has carried forward through all of the development on cooking since launch.

RULE NUMBER ONEWe do NOT eat the sentient creatures of Tyria. There is no charr steak, no grawl chops, hylek legs, centaur loins, harpy wings, tengu drumsticks, or quaggan blubber in any cooking recipes. There might be something named for a creature like Ettin Stew, but it is not MADE out of Ettins. Now, a discerning person might say excuse me, what about choya spines? Well, that is a story. Choya were originally NOT a sentient creature and the rewards team planned to have them pretty heavily in cooking recipes for Path of Fire. Cactus is good eats. BUT THEN, we found out that the choya had VILLAGES and DANCED in circles. To me, that indicated a society and took them out of the running for food. However, it had already been built and accounted for in the economy balance and we didn’t have time to redo all that work. So we renamed everything to use “Choya Spines” which are the needles they shed. We decided this would be OK because we decided that harvesting those spines would not harm the choya. It’s like fingernails. They regrow. A little flimsy, but it let us sleep at night.

RULE NUMBER TWONo gross food. No Monster Mystery Meat Stew. Ideally, it should all be REAL recipes distilled down to their simplified Tyrian analog. We have had some exceptions to this rule sneak past me. I am but one woman. I was not able to stem the tide of candy corn brittle.

RULE NUMBER THREEAvoid single use base ingredients as much as possible. I really tried to make sure that if I was going to include a particular vegetable or herb or what have you, that it would be used in multiple recipes.

RULE NUMBER FOURAvoid made up ingredients. I made a fundamental decision to use real world vegetables, fruits, and herbs without renaming them into Tyrian versions. I did this because I wanted to take advantage of players real world knowledge of food to help train them on how to make food in GW2. Again, a few exceptions snuck past me like Winterberries, and one exception I personally made affordance for, which is Omnomberries… because it amused me. Fun fact, the icon for Omnomberries looks like a Mangosteen, which is a tropical fruit I got to try on a trip to Hawaii once!

Thanks for the very interesting response. I hope someone finds a place to put this in the wiki.

I think a Tyrian cooking show online would be an interesting way to lure people to the game. Sort of a come for the food; stay for the adventure.

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This is a great thread about my favorite GW2 crafting and it even has a dev reaction, holy kitten!Thanks for brightening my saturday morning.

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:Thanks for the very interesting response. I hope someone finds a place to put this in the wiki.

I think a Tyrian cooking show online would be an interesting way to lure people to the game. Sort of a come for the food; stay for the adventure.

Or maybe a Guild Chat episode? Please?

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@Head Kracker.4790 said:

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:I would think that what those of us in the USA consider one stick of butter might not be what is standard on Tyria. It could be the equivalent of a 1/2 or even 1/4 stick the North American standard for butter sticks. Of course if a missing step in the game recipe is to turn X number of sticks of butter into clarified butter or ghee then that could account for the excess since the process removes the water that bulks it up. Making clarified butter is results in about a 1/4 loss in volume.

I went with the USA definition of a stick of butter. Those of us in a number of other countries do not have sticks. I thought it was a colloquialism until I was told about a year ago that butter in the USA can come in actual sticks.

Just out of curiosity what does it come out in other countries? Butter crock or just a small plastic bowl or something? Never actually shopped for groceries in another country actually.

In Britain it's either sold in a block (wrapped in plastic or grease proof paper) or in a plastic tub.

I suppose the blocks are similar to sticks, just wider and shorter (not quite a cube, but a short rectangle), but I think they must be bigger too because you'd have to be making a lot of something to use a whole block in a recipie. Most are 250g - 500g.

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Me: Yea ill quickly rush cooking to 500 and thats itDevs: Every one of these cooking recipes holds the key to both world domination and immortality in it's very source code!

Jokes aside stop making delicious stop in games, it's making me hungry and I can't eat a Peppercorn-Crusted Sous-Vide Steak irl every day out of financial, health and ethical reasons.

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