Food Processor, Dedicated Crafting Station for Complex Recipes

Similar to the processor, a dedicated crafting station for advanced food recipes (need a lot more resipes and uses for some harvested plants). Would have the look of a kitchen. would have an option to auto-craft selected food recipe whenever the neccessary ingredients are available in the based and until its storage is full. i.e it would be expanding the current processor mechanics with a checkbox to craft automatically. using only its limited output storage would prevent overproduction but with other base modules able to pull from it, it creates the possibility of implicit automation chains.

We don’t have that much interior stations to build for our bases and break up rooms filled with mostly lockers… nor is there much motivation to go out and harvest various bio ingredients to do something with it.

Prepared Meals (like Threemoon Temaki) could not just fill the food + health bar more - some good foods may perhaps allow go over 100, others might also temporarily boost some biomods or give slow health regeneration over time, allowing to add a greater diversity of recipes.

Furthermore a dedicated food storage would help - with a special ability to fill your food bar to 100% on interaction - this would consume only a part of a food item inside; as much as is needed to fill up the bar.

EDIT: Some further suggestion on managing food and water drain in bases that would work well with this: https://subnautica2.nolt.io/10975

While I don’t have any objection to a cooking station, specifically, I would like to say that Subnautica 2 is already giving me generic survival game vibes, e.g. with the addition of the processor workstation complete with real world wait time. Before you know it, there will be so many “workstations,” the games will feel exactly like that: work, not play.

Personally, I don’t play “survival” games for a reason and not just because they’re all doing the exact same boring, repetitive things – things Subnautica is also beginning to do, imo. I cringe every time another players mentions Valheim or Raft or some other generic “survival” game. The IP is too special to turn it into a grindfest complete with “timers” that waste our actual life-times.

the balance to strike is to add meaningful advanced content that offers some extra advantages without being a necessity. And i agree grinding, i.e. repetative trivial tasks are bad design - i found that great games in this genre offer an automation layer for late game to solve this.

Subnautica (all versions) lack long term replayability, so once you are done exploring the game is to shallow with little else to do. Valheim has indeed more to offer without being too repetative - that’s why people reference it. But Valheim also lacks a good automation layer (wood and stone mainly, though people found ways to automate that regardless). Then again, its not even released yet.