Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Thoughts on food

I'm listening to the DevLine Recap, and I had some thoughts of how to deal with the food issue.

The buffs from food are minor, and that's fine, but the real issue is that the buffs are short-lived. There's simply little practical value buffing before a fight, because almost all bonuses last at most 3 rounds, and the game has no pause, so drinking e.g. resistance potions before a fight is useless. By the time the fight starts you will have worked through a good percentage of the buff time.
I'd like to see buffs from food and potions lasting something more like 15 rounds than 3.

I can definitely agree that buffing before a fight is pointless because of the short duration. Buffs in general are pretty short and it's hard to justify using them a lot of the time, because buffing costs AP. Depending on a lot of factors, including AP costs of the buff, it can potentially take away one precious turn away from the time you are buffed, for lack of AP to do anything else.

15 rounds seems like too much, that's 90 seconds out of combat.

In another thread, I noted that the problem with food's healing wasn't just limited to food. Potions also suffered from diminishing returns as the game continued, because both health and magical healing increase as your level increase, but item-based healing does not scale. Food gets the worst of it though.

To that end I suggested that food's healing effect should be heals X amount per turn every turn, but you can't use another food item until it wears off, and potions should be a percentage-based heal. (That does have the problem of potions being sucky early on, and I didn't realize there were at least 4 potion qualities until now.)

I can't sleep until I get some more thoughts down.

I'm now level 16, in the Dark Forest, and potions are no longer useful The Large Healing potions heal only slightly more than the Minor Heal spell, except that the Minor Heal lasts for 3 turns. Food is long a distant memory. It shouldn't be this way. We need a New Food.


The first rule for the New Food is: All food has to heal X amount per turn for a few turns. It has to heal more than it does now, because most food's healing value expires partway through Cyseal.

The second rule for the New Food is: You can't use another food item until the timer on the first one has expired.


I'm thinking of Tiered Food, and how an overhaul of the crafting system and crafting UI can help make Tiered Food possible. Actually, maybe what we need is a special Cooking UI, distinct from the crafting UI.

Right now, I think that any food item can be crafted with 0 crafting. That should change. Food should be divided into Tiers, and each tier has to be significantly better than the previous tier.

The basic foods can still be created with 0 crafting. The next Tier of foods has to heal much more, and require some crafting.

The crafting UI will need to be changed and expanded. Just dragging and dropping one item onto another is not going to work for the New Food. No, instead crafting food will work more like it does in real life: You add in more ingredients. These ingredients add their effects to the creation.

When you go to create food, you can have a maximum of 2 + Crafting Rank ingredients. Mix and match and see what effects you get. Some effects may cancel each other out. The stacking of effects and base HP values will let the user increase the effectiveness of food in a relatively simple way, and can limit the amount you need to increase food's healing by.

Not all things can be ingredients for New Food. Completed meals like Dinners and Pizzas and Pies that don't make sense to combine with other ingredients. However, you CAN combine Dough and Tomato Sauce and Fish and Peppers to create a New Food Pizza that is more effective than just the Dough and Tomato Sauce version, or a Lettuce plus Cheese plus Carrot plus Tomato plus Potato to make a New Food Dinner more effective than a base Dinner.

Good ideas Stabbey !!