I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild lately (maybe I’ll actually finish it this time) and noticing how much more rewarding it is to gather ingredients and experiment with different recipes for cooking. The buffs you get just make it so much more worth the effort. In No Man’s Sky, out of hundreds of recipes, there are only really a handful of “buffs”. Most of them just replenish small amounts of hazard protection or life support, something which you can do easily and with better results without cooking. And don’t even get me started on how ridiculous Cronus is.

It’s clear that Hello Games put a lot of work into this feature so I think a proper upgrade to make it more worthwhile is in order. Here are some examples of various temporary buffs that can be added to cooking recipes:

Immunity to various hazards, with different recipes for each hazard type and varying durations.

Reduce the rate of stamina, hazard protection, jetpack, or life support depletion

Sentinels ignore you

predators ignore you

Increase mining beam yields

Increase total health/shield

Increase the chance of rare fauna spawning when dropped on the ground

Increase movement speed

Add your ideas in the comments

In addition to new buffs from consuming recipes and feeding fauna, we should be able to grow edible plants and raise noncompanion livestock in our bases. Some recipes might be a bit OP if we can just grow the ingredients so they might require rare ingredients that we need to go hunting for or take a high risk to obtain. But in general, adding new buffs and letting us grow more ingredients would, in my opinion, make cooking a more worthwhile endeavor in No Man’s Sky. What do you guys think?