Feedback Nerf This! - The Ultimate Juice?

So a while back on one of the threads someone was talking over the difficulty of the new hunger system (Which I have no problem with really) and I was once again presented with the mysterious ultimate juice. When I first started 1.0 I quickly set out to make a farm with ALL the crops just cause. I actually just last week finally obtained full crop status, and here's a quick thank you to all the people that donated me their seed(s) and especially LordBaconator for informing me that I could spawn a Naturalist NPC to sell me seeds.

HOWEVER, what I came to find in my food creation was that just like not all that glitters is gold, not all food is balanced in terms of acquisition. My chosen food source in 1.0 was goddamn Cheeseburgers because bless America.
So I set out to create farms for all the mats, Mooshi for milk, farm for wheat, hunting for meat, etc.

And I was happy.

Until the fateful thread which caused me to look up the actual ingredients for this god-tier Ultimate Juice. The food which (Pointlessly) fills the most health of all foods (Rare quality foods already fill your hunger meter completely with one item consumed, and Cheeseburgers give three buffs so what else did I need?)

However, let's compare.

Cheeseburger
This delicious blessed beast takes at base, 1x Wheat, 1x Alien Steak, 1x Milk, 2x Tomato, 1x Sugar, 1x Corn.
7 items, 6 inventory slots.
The items in to MAKE this food take three items that must be pre-crafted as ingredients, Bread, Cheese, and Relish.
Additionally you must learn to craft 4 items before learning Cheeseburger's recipe as the fifth. The previous item only requiring one less ingredient-cheese.
To craft them, you need to either constantly and regularly buy Milk from Terramart, or save up and by Mooshi eggs.
You also must regularly and actively hunt with a bow for Alien Steaks.
You must also farm wheat, sugar, tomato, and corn. Which are all thankfully on the beginning threat level planets.
It completely fills your hunger, and provides Energy and Life Boost buffs.


Ultimate Juice
This prideful-looking beverage is composed of 5 different crops at its base (Despite its description saying it has all the fruits), Toxictop, Oculemon, Feathercrown, Neonmelon, Boneboo. One of each per recipe.
5 items, 5 inventory slots.
No pre-ingredients.
Only ONE item, Pozest, must be crafted to learn the recipe for this food item.
To craft them, all you have to do is acquire the seeds for the crops and farm them.
The only one of these that is tricky is the Toxictop, which is on second-threat, toxic ocean planets. All the others can be acquired via seeds from vendors or on planets. Even Pozest can be crafted with crops snatched from Glitch villages. If you're mean.
It provides FIVE buffs, Energy, Life, Speed, Jump, and Rage, as well as completely (Over)filling your hunger meter.

Now I will give the benefit of the doubt and say yes, coming across a Large Flower Biome so that you can craft items to summon a Naturalist merchant with a Colony deed may be trickier than coming across the seeds for Corn, Tomato, and Sugar, and of course there is the price of the colony deed-but that's counter by the constant purchase price of Milk OR the price of buying Mooshis. The point is, I feel like for the effort to put into making Cheeseburgers is FAR more than Ultimate juice-especially if you have a setup like mine where my livestock for the cheese is in one spot, and my crops are in another-I gotta run all over the place to make cheeseburgers. Not to mention do it in trips because I have to craft relish in one trip, then cheese and bread, then the actual cheeseburgers-way more trips and inventory room taken up. It's grating. OR I can craft a food that gives me THREE ADDITIONAL BUFFS for WAY less work-see what I'm getting at? I feel it's unbalanced.

My proposition? Simple and amusing really:
Make Ultimate Juice follow a production process that reflects its description, and add more fruit as ingredients. The current crops seem to be divided into racial crops-Feathercrown and Eggshoot for Avians, Diodia and Boltbuld for Glitch-change the recipe on the Ultimate Juice so that it requires at least ONE of each race's crops-if not two. Bam. Balanced.

(Inb4 "don't encourage them to make easyjuice more work I like being lazy")

 

And the moment I told you about glories of Ultimate Juice, you started agitating to nerf it.
First off, Burgers and Pizzas are, like, one of the least efficient foods in game due to sheer amount of ingredients.
Second, you actually need to do some legwork for UJ ingredients, since they're less about "racial" and more about tricky biomes: Feathercrown plants (and thus seeds) aren't found anywhere outside Oasis biome, Grape - Colorful, Toxictop - Toxic, Neonmelon - Geode and Oculemon - Eyepatch. Sure, you can buy produce from traders and seeds from Naturalist tenant, but the first requires quite a lot of luck and second is not exactly a common knowledge. And where do Diodia and Boltbulb fit in this, they're needed only for Pozest?
Finally, it's more of a bragging rights reward, since by that stage you don't need much buffs anyway, not to mention that there is much cooler buffs (Mochacino - good energy boost, Spicy Ribs - Nova effect, Cyanider - strong Rage effect, Toxictop foods are the only source of Light effect, which can be turned into a powerful movement aid, etc.)

 

THEY REMOVED PIZZAS AHHHHHHH

Also Oasis biomes can show up on startier tier planetss, As do Colorful, Neonmelon seeds can be bought off Naturalist vendors which like I said are merely Colony deed and Giant flower biome furniture away. Oculemon and Toxictop are the only real challenges cause Toxic planets, but again that's second tier, you can get there in a couple of hours, no problem.

And yeah, you never NEED buffs-they're just handy.

 

Shh, slices are still here, don't worry

I never said it's hard, I said it requires some legwork. Gathering the full collection of sandstone statues, for instance, isn't hard, it's just tedious since you need to run around quite a few desert planets.

Then what is your issue?

 

My favorite food will continue to be Spooky Doughnuts and Choconuts. They also heal to full and only use 3 non-stackables so you can make 10 ish per inventory. They provide (energy 293s, rage 293s) and (energy 675s) respectively. I take 6 of them with me at a time and never need food. Sometimes they will get within 30 minutes of rotting.

 

Well, mine are Spicy Ribs (Nova for the win!), Grape Juice (disposable speed buff), either Cyanider or Spooky Pies (cheap, and when there was a fight that was longer than 3 minutes?), Mochaccino (lower buff than Choconut, but it doesn't fill you entirely, meaning you can slap some buff on top of it) and Fish Pie (now that's truly an imba in terms of nutrition)

 

I like the ultra long buff duration on the energy increase because it lets me sprint for longer distances while simultaneously not providing me with any self-induced risk or inconvenience. I find that a lot of the time if I have a speed or jump boost it ends up getting me killed or causes me to not be able to spike ball around very well.

 

All donuts, what a diet It's cool that there's no stomachache in Starbound universe
I'm very fond of alien juice, since I chose light EPP augment for one of my characters, it adds a nice lowgrav/light effect which is cool on slippery cliffs.

Otherwise I'm quite ok with the recipes as they are. I agree that the purple/blue outline doesn't always reflect how difficult it is to craft a recipe though, and that it's often longer to make cheeseburger than ultimate juice.
I'd probably be even happier if there were indeed some places/dungeons where the buffs really made a difference and encouraged crafting complex dishes.

 

For a period of time I unloaded trucks on a diet composed exclusively of water, rolls, doughnuts, and Mellow Yellow. Don't underestimate my ability to handle a doughnut.

 

Was that doughnut filling enough to last you entire day? And was it spooky?

 

Ironically enough it was about 6 doughnuts a day. Two at a time.

 

Donuts are definately amazing. the roast dinners though are what I find myself preparing to make the most though. they need more poultry and rib dishes.

as for the OP, you leave rainbow juice alone! if anything needs refining, its salsa! Who eats salsa on its own, from the can!?

 

I just spawned two chefs. The Apex one sells me cheeseburgers, the Floran one sells me toxic-tarts. Between them I've got all the food buffs and low-grav I'll ever need.

I still have massive farms and make my own foods tho because I like cooking.

Basically once you get colony deeds and a few kitchen items, there's no challenge to hunger at all. Same with the fuel capacity/efficiency once you have a mechanic and engineer on your ship. That's okay with me though. At the lower levels, stuff like finding food and fuel is a necessary challenge, but if I had to hit a moon between every three jumps now I'd get bored of it real fast. Now I only cook and hunt for fuel when I actually feel like doing it, instead of being forced to do it at regular intervals that could interrupt the stuff I actually wanted to be doing.

I think the Ultimate Juice is the same way. Mooshis aren't that expensive, so all the ingredients to a cheeseburger are pretty easy to find and harvest. It's a good reward for the effort when you're a low level character. To get the Ultimate juice you have to do more exploring/colony building, and your reward is an easier food that you don't have to think about as much. Like, you've got survival down, why make it a chore? As a game mechanic, I think it works rather well.

 

Yeah, who does that...

 

Don't judge me ; w ;

 

I love spooky donuts! They're so good, my crashes each time I eat one! Literally! Well, I DID kinda screwed with food files I shouldn't have and the spooky donut was the only food effected, so yeah lol