Add support for optional ingredients in Cooking

[xrtariq2594]

Currently, recipes only allow for mandatory ingredients in the input section. A nice upgrade would be allowing for optional ingredients in the recipe. Like, adding extra stuff to guacamole for increased benefits and effects.

[skaldarnar]

I guess this could potentially be modelled using different recipes, right? Maybe we can discuss here a bit how you would like to specify optional ingredients and their effects. You would need to specify the optional ingredient along with the desired effect (modifier) I suppose, like

"optionalIngredients" : [
    { "component" : "2*Cooking:salt", "effect" : "..." }
]

This would directly link the recipe to the properties of the resulting item. Can you think of a general way this could be defined?

[xrtariq2594]

Hmm, it could be modeled using different recipe prefabs. But, that causes issues when we have several minor variants and combinations of the same base food. For example, according to Wikipedia, Guacamole can have "tomato, onion, garlic, lemon or lime juice, chili or cayenne pepper, coriander (also known as cilantro) or basil, jalapeño, and/or additional seasonings." It gets more complex with things like bread, cookies, and cakes.

I suppose a mix of individual recipes per "base" food and optional ingredients is a good compromise. The above syntax was what I was thinking about for optionalIngredients. Technically, we could apply the same principle of optional ingredients/items to other things like potion, equipment, etc.

We at the very least need the name of the optional item and what effects it should have on the altered base product. We'll have an optionalIngredients list which stores elements of the type OptionalIngredient, a custom class containing the aforementioned two fields (name and effect). Though, we'll need some way to parse the effect.