The "Herbalism and Cooking" update is coming along great. However this update is a great deal of work. But as you will see below, it will all hopefully be worth it!
Here are some of the highlights of this update:
Invasive Weeds and Plants!
Weeds and small plants/herbs in the game will have their own algorithms for growing and reproduction! They will grow, spawn seeds, and drop them and grow again!
You can grow weeds/herbs just like any other plant with the farming skill. Beware however, that these newly grown plants can now drop their seeds and spread!
At a later time, I plan to add slowly add this algorithm to all plants and trees in the game. For now, I will test it with small weeds and plants.
Herbal infusions!
And of course, the main content of the update, using herbs to make liquid infusions! You can already cook herbs onto food, now you can make complicated herbal infusions with liquids! Grind up herbs and place them into boiling liquids and let the steep and make the liquid more potent. These created herbal infusions will give you bonuses to your stats! I will explain more of the specifics of this later of course.
Full Control over Liquid Management!
You are now able to transfer and dump liquids of any size between containers! You can now micromanage your liquids in any way you choose. This will be very useful when making herbalism infusions. This also takes into account the dilution of its contents, like herbal infusions, so be careful!
Development
At this point, all of the code, framework, and initial testing is complete for this update. However there is still a bit of work to do. After more final testing, the rest of the content needs to be added and tested.
In addition to all of the content. A great deal of code work has been done to implement this update. There is a bit more to test this time around, but so far everything is looking stable and there are no issues! I also fixed some very large bugs dealing with items and inventory since i have diving really deep into my code for this update :)
Stay tuned!