Cooking System Overview + Get a Postcard Signed by the Team!

Hello everybody! A good Friday to all! Jérémie here with a new post to delight and inform you! I’ll be talking about what we’ve been ‘cooking’ on the cooking system recently, and I hope you’ll appreciate the new information I’m about to share with you! As usual, this post is for patrons only, so please do not share it!

But before that...

Get an Exclusive Postcard Signed by the Team!

It’s that time again! Don’t forget to upgrade your current pledge to Hero or Legend before June 1st, 2025, if you would like to get an exclusive postcard signed by the Paralives team!

You can change your pledge tier through this link. As usual, it’s possible to upgrade your membership for just one month to get the postcard and then downgrade afterwards. Don’t forget to make sure your address is up to date on your Patreon profile if you are already on the Hero or Legend tier!

This was our last postcard from December 2024, done by one of our fantastic in-house artists, Chloé! There are a few easter eggs and references in there. Our next postcard’s illustration has some great significance, but I’m not saying much more here, hehehe.

Cooking Basics

Previously, we’ve talked a bit about cooking in Paralives here and here but we focused mostly on what the food looked like and our thought process behind the kind of recipes we had in the game. Today I would like to talk more about the gameplay side of things!

A few of the many recipes we’ve added to the game so far.

Recipes are sorted by their complexity level and when you create new Parafolks, they will start with a few level 1 and 2 recipes. The recipes they start with are not always the same, so two Parafolks will not automatically know the same recipes. You can think of this as our representation that not everyone starts their culinary journey from the same place!

Anisa and Lea both know different recipes, and this difference is what makes being together great. The UI for the list of recipes (and other things in these screenshots) are still subject to change.

When cooking a recipe of your level or below, there are no base risks of messing things up, but if you attempt something a bit more complex, you’ll have a chance to fail, producing a mess of inedible foodstuffs that you will want to throw away or risk getting sick.

Eighty percent is still a pretty good chance, who could even mess up eggs on toast anyways?

By crafting these delightful treats, you’ll level up your Cooking skill (which will level up faster if you are cooking a more difficult recipe), which will then lead you to...

Learning New Recipes

We think that having a bunch of different ways to learn new recipes will be fun. Some of them will be more straightforward than others, some might require a bit more exploration or interacting with different gameplay systems, but we didn’t want there to be only one track to learn all recipes.

The simplest method to do so is by leveling up your skill. Whenever you level up Cooking, you’ll get one new recipe from your new level (or one level higher than that), so leveling up is a good way to add new meals to your repertoire.

We can now make pancakes - flipping these babies takes some technique! Also, the chance to make eggs on toast successfully is now a whopping 100%

• Assisting another Parafolk with cooking a recipe will also allow you to learn it, so cooking as a group, with friends or even Townies could yield surprising new ideas for the kitchen!

• If your Para has high Food Knowledge, eating something might allow them to figure out the recipe of what they’ve just eaten.

• Looking up recipes on your computer is a way to pass the time and maybe get a new notch on your culinary belt.

• Finally, Together Cards can be used to teach recipes to other characters in your group. Pretty useful if you want other members of your household to have more options when it’s time to plan dinner!

Roberto knows the recipe for the Frozen Cheese Pizza (you put the pizza in the oven and then it’s ready). Is the rest of the group ready for such new information?

Future Considerations

We are pretty happy with the cooking system at the moment, but through playtests and design iterations, we might tweak some things in the future, like:

• The price of meals

• The time needed to level up the cooking skill

• Some details around learning new recipes (i.e. if you learn food by eating it automatically or you have a chance to do so, etc.)

• Tweaking the recipes you start with if you have a Food Talent

• Adding new ways to learn recipes, like watching a cooking show or reading a cookbook.

• The chance to succeed cooking more difficult meals (being angry or sick, for instance, might lower your chances of succeeding at cooking)

• And more!

That’s it for me today! Hope you’ve enjoyed this new information about our cooking system.

Jérémie 🍕🍕