Artydea: The Chef's Secret Sauce, Mess Technician Food Buffs.

Development Ideaguys
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The Pitch:
At roundstart, the Mess Technician begins with

Secret Sauce
A bottle of a cooking sauce with premium, secret ingredients. This propriety blend of herbs, spices, and essences is said to bring-out the best in any meal, drink, or dessert when in the hands of a master.

The bottle contains a limited supply of ‘secret sauce’, a new chemical necessary for ‘gourmet meals’.

A gourmet meal restores a large amount of hunger, and has a slowly-metabolizing, low-strength boost to some stats dependent on the recipe. A gourmet salad may possess several potent vitamins and minerals, aiding a marine to slowly (very slowly) recover from organ damage and toxins. Similarly, a hearty stew will help you grow into a big strong adult with hair on their chest! By this, I mean help a touch with broken bones and pain.

These meals are made in large batches that are initially inedible. A chef needs to portion them into between 5-10 servings (like pizza, cake, or breads) that fully nourish a marine, meaning they can’t stuff themselves on a lot at a time. Due to the large size of the platter or bowl they’re served on, they also cannot be taken into the field easily. The effects will ideally last for 15-30 minutes.

Why It’s Good For The Game:
The goal is not to give the marines a cartoonish supply of food-shaped stims or chems. Hopefully, this will give players more of a reason to play Mess Technician, give players more of a reason to talk to the mess technician, and to cover some annoying aspects of the game which are frequently only addressed late in the game with more potent chems from research, often too late to distribute them.

With long-lasting and minor effects, the ideal game flow is that perhaps a group of pals or a section of a squad sit around the canteen to have a meal and talk, and then deploy. If someone catches an early broken bone or punctured lung within the first fifteen minutes, they could hopefully recover by the twenty-fifth or thirtieth minute without needing to go through a ten-minute process of medevac or Walk of Lame back to the LZ and dropship. There’s not enough to feed the whole battalion, though! Better secure the kitchen so the chef can make on-site meals and actively feed the battle, or extract a bottle from the AO or Liason’s briefcase so you can get quality meals dropped in the next supply crate.

I also see this as a good place to begin a template for, say, foraging or groundside chefs. While a project for a later date, scavenging flora or fauna from the AO for meals unique to that map could open a good amount of roleplay and immersion within the setting.

An Artydea is an ideally low-skill idea that I myself could feasibly accomplish without needing to hope that some other developer likes it enough to do it for me. However, due to how my motivation works, I would be almost entirely unwilling to work on a project without a good chance of it being implemented.

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good idea though, something with a little bit of substance for the MT could be good.

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While I like the idea a lot and I think it could be expanded to having a Field kitchen and does make the MT much more useful! I can see this even leading to more RP in the field for Marines as well, a place to unwind maybe while awaiting medical treatment or to make fob duty less monotonous.

However I think giving these foods buffs like being able to repair bones would make it an issue and could kill the idea outright because of balance issues. However something like helping bloodloss or delaying organ damage not curing it could be a good idea as this wont make too much of an impact and if a marine is heading to fob for a surgery anyways having a good meal that helps the docs too could be nice.

Also I don’t think foraging should be a thing, I think like all non combat roles they should be confined to safe and locked down areas to keep them from just running around the maps.

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MT is inherently a roleplay role, and this would be very difficult to balance (that walk of lame is actually pretty important for xenos actually taking people off the frontlines without needing to cap them)

you can also do a field kitchen without having special buffs, this just gives it a meta reason to exist

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I dont like the idea of a buff because it will be min/maxed.

I fear that with a limited supply it would turn out that the same 6 marines show up to canteen immediately and demand the same “best” food and a spare for later.

Mt would devolve into a role where you have to rush to make the same best dish… and if you dont know what you are doing…will be bullied out of your own kitchen.

All for a buff that will have to be coded, added, tweaked, and bitched about

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Very much agree with this sentiment.

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While in essence I agree with the conceit that shipside roles should stay shipside, the bulk of shipside activity is locked to the first and final half-hour of a round (assuming a hijack) in the current game. Unless someone really sexy comes-up with a way to shift that a bit, some degree of groundside work shouldn’t be frowned upon.

Part of this idea was actually inspired by some of the variation in strategy that groundside Surgeon and static comms brought-on: pushing marines from simply barricading the LZ and historical points like Hydro, and pushing them into different kinds of supply lines and strategy. While I don’t think that the pursuit of a minor buff would seriously shift marine cading strategies, kitchens are usually in a great place!
Sorokyne and LV have kitchens within sight of an LZ, whereas Kutjevo and Solaris have kitchens at some of their most prominent marine FOBs. I could see these as a great way to not just include more dynamic play for the Mess Technician, but also as a more engaging strategy for marines: A hearty stew won’t repair your bones as efficiently or fast as a surgeon would, but you could remain awake and active while standing guard or RPing with other marines as the food does it’s work - further ensuring that there are bodies around these points who can still actively play and contribute to the round.

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Those are all valid points, and ones that I considered while I was writing it up.

Intentionally, one ‘meal’ can be split into multiple servings, allowing for it to be spread amongst multiple marines, so not just one person is benefiting from it. Additionally, simply making the meals on a large bowl/platter as an excuse for them being too big for storage - like long arms - would mean that in order to bring seconds on a dish intended to last 15-20 minutes, you’d need to . . . carry some pork chops in your hands all the way to the caves. While it’s not impossible, I feels that the micromanagement of needing to drop your food on the ground repeatedly to wield your gun would be prohibitively tedious to maxxing minimal effects.

Once again, I have no interest in making active combat buffs. No speed boosts, no radiating light, and no increasing vision radius: the idea is that they will passively help with the annoyances of the game such as blood loss and broken bones, should they be gained early on in the round. These are not the same scenarios that see stims or Unga Juice utilized in.

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I think you maybe misunderstood what I meant by confined to safe areas. I don’t think these roles need to stay exclusively shipside by any means, my issue was with the foraging part you mentioned where these roles can move around the map. I think setting up a space to cook in the fob or kitchen if its secure is fine and follows the rules most shipside roles follow when on the ground, but when they are then incentivized to explore and roam to find things is where the issues come in. These are technically important roles that serve functions like doctor and mp and as such need to be safe and not in direct harms way. Obviously the MT doesn’t quite make the cut as “important” like the roles above are but they should stick to safe areas like the fob or kitchen if someone secures them for them. That is what I meant by safe and locked down if that clears things up, I love the idea though of making the MT have a presence on the ground and would make the role more desirable in general.

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Ah, gotcha. Well, that’s why you have the marines do it. There’s a more apparent and personal benefit to grabbing the chef the Ice Root from Sorokyne so they can make a dish that heals burn damage very slowly over a long time, or even because it’s a map with a close-to-LZ kitchen and Bravo wants something to do which will meaningfully impact the quality of their nest.