Blog: Let them cook (The Dwarves, that is)

2024/06/21

written by Ryan Mattson‍

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If there are any People in Middle-earth™ that love food as much as Hobbits, it is Dwarves. Our first introduction to them is Thorin’s Company eating every morsel of Bilbo’s larder. This was a major part of Return to Moria’s focus on cooking meals as a ritual in the player’s day. 

After the initial release, this was a top target for improvement.  Cooking as it shipped in 1.0 was enough to give that sense of players coming ‘home for a meal’ but it fell short of taking a strong role in the player’s goals while exploring. It also left little meaningful choice when planning a meal. Instead of going out to seek eggs or grabapples it became a flat routine of just making roast meat over and over. It needed more to achieve our desire to have a unique gameplay purpose. We felt like we could align our cooking mechanic a bit more closely to the importance Professor Tolkien places on cooking and eating in his books.

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Mechanical Importance

One issue we wanted to fix with cooking was providing players with a reason to choose to cook one meal over another. We found a common play pattern was to cook anything you had ingredients for, because it refilled your health and satisfied your hunger. In fact, there were more nuanced effects, but those were often difficult to perceive in the longer-term context of the survival loop.

With the update to cooking, different meals now grant different buffs. Some meals will reduce energy drain, allowing you to explore the depths of Moria without tiring as quickly. Other meals provide Dwarves with temporary health regeneration over time, the better to take into a scrap with the Orcs. And yet others will reduce the stamina cost for restoring Moria and making repairing/restoring architecture more efficient.

And there is a common thread that ties those three different effects together.

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Meal Times

We organized meals into different meal times: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Breakfast meals, for example, can be eaten in the morning to provide their buff. Meal times are denoted by an icon next to the ‘clock’ below the player status (shown below).

You will also see the cooking station recipes divided up into different meal times. If the current game time is also a meal time, the icon for the meal time will be displayed on each meal that can be eaten to provide a buff.

If you eat a breakfast meal at breakfast time, you’ll be given the breakfast buff. (We’ll give this a better name before release.)

And in the case of the breakfast buff, you’ll be able to see that the Energy Cost Modifier is 0.5. (it is usually 1 without this buff.) This means all your actions that use energy will only use half as much energy, letting you explore for longer before you get tired.

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There's More!

In addition to the changes outlined above, we’ve also modified which meals are created at different stations, added some meals, and changed where certain meals and stations are unlocked. There’s a lot to explore in this substantial update for cooking. We’re excited for players to get their hands on this updated feature. We think it adds a lot more to the experience of cooking in the game.

The update to cooking is due to be released in Fall 2024 as part of our third major title update alongside the release of the Steam and Xbox versions of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™.  Join our Discord and keep an eye on the dev-updates channel for more sneak peaks of what's to come in the next update and choose the Forge Fire role to recieve alerts when we post in that channel!