User talk:127,0,0,1

Hi, and welcome to GuildWiki. Here are the articles you requested. Quizzical 04:00, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

An introduction to A Tale in the Desert
(this was written about three years ago, so it's fairly dated by now)

What the game is about
Suppose that you wanted to design the perfect society. How would people spend their time? Would there be a powerful government providing many services for the citizens, or would the taxation to support it be viewed as oppressive? How would great artists and scientists be supported by society, or would they be supported at all? What major institutions and organizations would there be? And how do we pick who gets to decide all of these things?

There's just one catch. The society has to be populated by actual people. You cannot start by saying that everyone would always be nice to everyone else, the way that some utopian dreamers historically have, as a lot of people just aren't like that. There must be a way to deal with troublemakers, unless you're willing to put up with whatever trouble they might cause.

That is the challenge posed by A Tale in the Desert, the strangest MMORPG on the Internet. If all you're looking for is yet another clone of the games where you kill monsters to level, in order to get marginally better at killing still more monsters, then this isn't it. Surely your idea of a perfect society does not entail the citizens getting chased around by ogres and skeletons and tigers. There is no combat here.

That's right, I said "no combat". And hence no NPC message of, "Congratulations, you are the 27,806th player to take part in killing Bob the Really Big Dragon. Don't you feel special?" But there are puzzles to design, artwork to create, structures to build, technologies to research, and lands to explore.

There are forty-nine official tests in all, each so different from the rest as to require substantial explanation, even for a player familiar with the other forty-eight. There is, quite simply, far too much for any one single player to do everything, and most of it isn't purely grinding for levels. And even the tests are only a small fraction of what there is to do in the game. Surely your perfect society wouldn't only want to pass tests handed down from on high, and never attempt anything creative.

Players can write laws to be coded into the game, within some rather broad parameters. Convince enough players to support a law against running on Tuesdays, and it will be coded into the game. A number of the features which seem to be inextricably part of the game originated as laws created by players—and could be changed by players.

Mods won't ban you for being an obnoxious moron. Other players, however, might, and have more than one way to do so. And yes, that's ban, as in, your character is gone. Forever. Please don't come back. An excellent reputation is more valuable than a thousand debens of gold. But don't take that as meaning that you shouldn't annoy some powerful players from time to time; if only a few people hate you, there isn't that much they can do to you, however influential they may be.

We get some real scandals here, and not merely of the tame "some people in a guild had a fight and the guild broke up" variety that passes for scandals in other games. Competing notions of property rights, test ethics, environmental protection, or the "good of society" have served up plenty of scandals, and there are bigger scandals still from major property destruction, an attempt at foisting a welfare state on the populace, and even whispers of murder. Enough rope to hang yourself is standard issue here, and if that's not enough for you, you'll have the means to make plenty more.

Perhaps most importantly, most of the significant activities in the game are heavily skill-based. A pathetic puzzle entry will not pass its test, and putting in 12 hours per day every day for a year isn't enough to overcome that. Kids whose native language is some variant of "l33t 5p43k" and whose only hope for achievement is having a lot of free time don't tend to last long. That leaves a community far more mature than you'd expect from an MMORPG.

One person can make a difference. Numerous individuals in ages past have already done so, both for better and for worse. Some have been considered great heroes by one portion of the population, and vile griefers by another. Real players, and not just fictional characters in a storyline, have changed the way the game is played long after their departure.

Basic controls
Much of the point of the game is that there often aren't canonical "right" ways to do things. As such, the game includes no manual explaining how to operate all the different buildings in the game. There are, however, some basic controls with which to familiarize yourself.

Game controls rely heavily on the mouse. You can run to a spot by clicking on it. You can stop running by right clicking. You can zoom in by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the game window, and zoom out by moving the mouse to the bottom of the game window. Rotating the mouse wheel has the same effect. You can rotate the screen by moving the mouse to the left or right edge of the window. You can switch camera views with F5, F6, F7, or F8, and pressing F8 repeatedly toggles between two different views. Different camera views are better for different activities, so feel free to switch a lot, and experiment to see what works for you.

Depending on where you stand, there will typically be icons in the top right of the screen to pick up sand, dirt, mud, grass, clay, slate, or whatever else you're standing on at the time. Click the icon to pick up the item. In some cases, you'll have to move slightly to pick up another item. Slate, in particular, is the orange icon that only appears sometimes when you're near water.

You can get to a lot of menus by clicking on yourself, and clicking through the various options that come up. This includes everything from dropping items to changing your character's appearance to assembling various items to tweaking chat settings, and many more. Feel free to experiment with the settings; you can't seriously mess yourself up by clicking on the wrong options when you're new.

Most buildings can be operated by clicking on the building to bring up a menu that gives you whatever options the building has available. If the building belongs to someone else who hasn't given you access, you won't be able to use it, though. If you're not sure what the resources to build something using a building are, try to build it and the game will give you an error message listing what you need.

In the bottom left of your screen will be a box with a couple tabs above it. One tab will list the items you're carrying, along with the total weight and bulk. If the weight or bulk of the items you carry exceeds 500 (this can be increased by various means later), you won't be able to move until you drop something.

Another tab on a newly created character will say Citizenship, and list a bunch of simple tasks for you to do in learning to play the game. This will disappear when you complete the tasks and close the window, and you'll get other similar checklists later, and can have many such lists up at once, most of which you're ignoring at any given time.

In the bottom right of your screen will be a chat box. The game map is enormous, so while there are hundreds of other players around, they might at any given time all be far enough away from you that you can't see them; being able to communicate through the chat system is critical. You can read messages from other players and from the game in the Main window. There will also be a regional chat tab, in which you can chat with other players somewhat near you. If you join a guild, you'll get another chat tab for that guild, to chat with players in the guild. You can open a private chat tab with another player with /chat (name). Any chat tab which has had another message added since you last clicked on it will turn yellow. You can chat in most chat tabs by having the relevant chat selected, typing your message, and pressing Enter, though you cannot chat in System or microphones.

Some institutions
Some games have many, many NPCs that you can talk to for a wide variety of purposes. A Tale in the Desert mostly avoids that, preferring instead to let players set up the various organizations needed for society to function. There are, however, a few things built into the game.

The one that you need to know promptly upon joining is the school system. Schools have many skills that they can teach you if you pay the required tuition. There are seven different types of schools, one corresponding to each discipline. Any two schools of the same type are completely identical, and you'll really only need to visit one of each. Which one you visit is normally dictated by convenience, as most players prefer to deal with the schools near where they live. You can find schools on the map (F3), labeled "SArch", "SLead", etc. If you stand near a school building, click on it, and click learn, you'll be given the option to pay for various skills that the school can teach you.

There are also universities, which also teach you various skills, though different skills from schools. Universities work differently in that, before a skill can be learned at a university, a lot of resources must be donated to it to unlock it. Once the technology is unlocked, anyone can learn it for free by going to the university and asking. As with schools, there are seven types of universities, and at the start of a telling, all universities of the same type are identical. However, donating the necessary resources only unlocks the technology at that particular university, so some universities will offer skills that others of the same type won't.

The official challenge to meet in the game is the 49 tests. There are seven disciplines, and seven tests in each. Officially, we win the game if we get enough people to pass enough tests to build the monuments. How much this really matters is of some dispute, with some seeing passing tests as the point of the game, and others finding the tests pretty much irrelevant. Each discipline also has an initiation, which is sort of a mini-test which might be vaguely related to the tests in that discipline.

The tests vary far too much to give a description of each here, but perhaps the most important category of tests for a newbie to know of is the art and thought tests which need to be judged. A computer can't tell which artwork is the best, so it is left for players who see a piece to rate it, and the piece rated most highly will pass the test. For thought tests, in order to rate the puzzle, you must first solve it.

There is also a level system, though this works very differently from how levels in most games work. You get one level for passing citizenship, and one for passing each initiation. Each test has an associated list of principles, which is a list of things to do to make progress on the test, much like how citizenship works. You gain a level by passing the principle associated to any test, though this is far, far, easier than passing the test itself.

Levels do not directly make you stronger, but rather, unlock additional content. For example, if a test requires level 10 to begin, then you cannot do anything on that test while below level 10. Once you reach level 10, you can do the test. Additional levels beyond what is needed to unlock a test have no benefit directly related to the test, so if a test requires level 10 to unlock it, a level 10 player may compete against a level 50 on an equal playing field. This is quite unlike a lot of games, where if a level 50 fights a level 10, the level 50 is going to win, no matter what the 10 does, and even if the 50 isn't really trying. As of this writing, the level system is very new and controversial, so it is likely to get some sort of changes.

Beyond these, the game doesn't lay out many official institutions, instead letting the players set things up to fill in the gaps. Probably the most important things to know about are the forum (http://www.atitd.net/forum/) and the wiki (http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3). While few things are documented in-game, players have documented how a lot of things work. The forum is a good place to discuss various aspects of the game, such as what is a "fair" way to approach a test, or to find potential trading partners. The wiki is open for any players to edit, and has an enormous amount of information, ranging from well-written guides on how to use various technologies to wild speculation about how things that no one has yet figured out may or may not work.

While trading is an important part of the game, there are no NPC traders. Trades must be made with other players, at terms mutually agreeable to both. There are no official prices on goods, and there isn't even an official currency. There will be some player-made currencies, but it's up to you what to accept or refuse. Since any currency is unofficial, if you accept scrip, there may be no guarantee that future trading partners will give you anything of value for it. The best designed currencies typically come with at least a promise from the issuing group of players that it can be turned in for some goods, if you can't find any other players who want it.

Scandals
Due to the nature of the game, any introduction would be incomplete without warning you about the scandals. Players will certainly fight with each other for various reasons, and while sources of some fights are easily predictable, there are always unexpected scandals. The most important thing to remember is not to take anything personally, no matter what happens. In particular, anything that someone says to you or about you in tests in the leadership discipline has a decent chance of being a lie. The second most important thing to remember is that scandals make great entertainment if you're not part of the scandal.

Probably the most important source of scandals in the game is tension between what is good for individuals and what is good for society as a whole. There are many ways in which society can gain if everyone cooperates, but it is in each individual's personal best interest not to cooperate. Some will argue that there is no dire need to cooperate, and everyone can do what is in his own best interest, and society will be fine. Others will insist that it is essential that everyone work together, and loudly praise those who cooperate and insult those who refuse.

For example, consider university donations to unlock technologies. Pretty much everyone will agree that it is important to unlock technologies, as most of the game isn't accessible if no one does this. But people will disagree on how important it is to unlock them faster, who should donate the resources, and where the technologies should be unlocked.

Once a technology is unlocked in one place, everyone can easily go pick it up at that one place. Seeing this, some may say, let's open all the technologies in just one region, and everyone can go there to pick it up. But if asked which region should be the one, most players will choose their home region. It is certainly the case that most players who donate to universities donate primarily to universities in their home region. Because of this, technologies will often have several times the total resources required to unlock them donated in total before anyone one particular region is complete.

A relative handful of players are aggressive about trying to get their neighbors to donate to the local universities, to the point of calling those who refuse freeloaders or worse. More common are players who refrain from the name calling, but spam messages about how much more the local university needs of this or that and beg for donations to the point of being obnoxious. Still, such zeal in trying to open new technologies may well be beneficial if it leads to all of society getting the use of various technologies sooner than would have otherwise been the case. It is perhaps less beneficial when the enthusiasm is over unlocking something at the local university after it is already open in six others.

A historical example of a major scandal is clear cutting from the first telling. Clear cutting a tree instantly provided 250 times the normal wood from that tree. However, the tree gave no wood at all for the next week after it was clear cut. When the technology was first released, a few overly eager players went out and clear cut many, many trees, making it quite difficult to get wood in some areas for the next week.

There were some attempts at banning clear cutting outright, all of which failed. There were several laws which restricted it, though, including saying that trees near a school or university could never be clear cut, and any tree which was repeatedly used to gather wood could not be clear cut for the next week. The net result was that clear cutting was used on a lot of fairly remote trees to make gathering wood far easier than it had been, while for players who wanted to gather wood without the technology, it wasn't significantly harder than it had been before.

This was the compromise that held for the duration of the telling, though there were plenty of players who wanted to change it in one way or another. Wood producers and consumers wanted to relax restrictions on clear cutting somewhat, most notably by repealing the two day waiting period between when a clear cut tree regenerated and when it could be cut again. Environmental advocates found clear cut trees to be quite ugly, however remote they were, and repeatedly pushed for a full ban on it. One person even took advantage of the law against clear cutting marked trees to mark every remote tree she could find.

There are many, many other things deliberately coded into the game to give players chances to fight. But what would be the fun in playing a game without such challenges?

Third telling cooking
The original post had parameters for individual ingredients, which I've deleted because they made the post about four times as long. The game never explains, cooking works in such and such a manner. All it does is let you add amounts of various ingredients to a cookpot, cook them, and then it either tells you that the mean didn't work, or that it gives you particular stats for a particular duration. Trying to figure out how it determines the stats and duration is harder. As you can see, the formulas are rather complicated.

- This is the complete guide to third telling cooking in ATITD. Theory from a number of other threads is gathered here, and updates to those threads will be ended with this one now available.

Some basics
The basic method for using a kitchen is rather simple. The kitchen should be upgraded with a copper cookpot which has been emptied since the last time a meal was cooked there. You must have some cookable ingredients in your inventory. Click mix and you will get a window to pick the ingredient you want to cook. Click on your chosen ingredient and you can choose how much to add. Once added, food can never be removed. Once you have added at least seven debens of food, you can cook the meal by choosing to cook using the copper cookpot.

Kitchens can be upgraded with an iron cookpot as well. This uses an old bugged system. A kitchen which does not already have an iron cookpot should not have one added, and if you are given the option to cook using an iron cookpot, you should not use it. The only plausible exception is if you want much weaker stats from a meal, that is, much closer to zero, as could occasionally happen if cooking only for masterpieces and not for stats.

The cooked meal will have one serving per seven debens of food used. The game takes the integer part, so that 13 debens of food gives only one serving, not two. Eating from the meal will reduce the number of servings remaining by one, and once all servings are gone, food can no longer be eaten.

The base time that a meal lasts is two days. Two additional days are added for each of the first seven pyramids of renewal that have been built. If such a pyramid is completed, it adds two days to the freshness of meals that have already been cooked. An additional two days are added if the meal contains salt. These “days” are in Teppy-time, and are slightly longer than real-life days. A few hours before a meal expires, the message on the meal will change and eating the meal will give only negative stats. Once the meal expires entirely, it cannot be eaten.

Muddled flavors
The game collects the various ingredients to find how much of each is added. There is no difference between adding 10 camel meat at once or adding 1 camel meat to a meal ten times, as all that matters is the total amount added. Likewise, the game disregards the order in which ingredients are added, so 6 camel meat and then 1 onion is the same as 1 onion and then 6 camel meat.

Any ingredient which is tied for the most in the meal will be a “base” ingredient. Any ingredient which is in the meal but not a base ingredient will be an “additive”. If the number of base ingredients in the meal (additives do not count here) exceeds the cooking level of the person who cooks the meal, the meal will be “muddled” and give no stats. Likewise, if the meal contains more than 21 distinct ingredients, it will be muddled and give no stats.

Reactions
The hard part of cooking is figuring out which ingredients to cook. Each ingredient corresponds to a point in the plane, or more precisely, in the compact subset [-1000, 1000] x [-1000, 1000] or some other subset isometric to it. The points for most known ingredients are listed in the third reply to this thread. Given two points, one can compute the distance between them in the l² (Euclidean) norm by the distance formula or Pythagorean theorem.

Each additive will react with the base ingredient to which it is nearest. Each additive must react with exactly one base ingredient. A base ingredient can easily react with several additives or none at all. There is some measurement error in determining the points below, so if the base ingredient nearest a given additive is not much closer than the second nearest ingredient, what you compute as the second nearest could conceivably be the nearest. If the nearest is nearer by at least 10, that should be more than measurement errors could mess up.

Potency
Each ingredient has a potency which varies with time. Potency can be computed as (some constant) times (the number of debens of food that have been cooked) divided by (the number of debens of that particular ingredient that have been cooked). At the start of the telling, ingredients had their number of debens cooked initialized to a positive number, not zero. All ingredients were the same, except that the starting value for herbs was 1/4 of the starting value for everything else. Potency is a global phenomenon, so one person cooking a meal will change the potency of everything for everyone else. Potency is only updated at discrete times, so if you cook two meals an hour apart, all ingredients will probably have exactly the same potency both times.

Because potency is a global phenomenon, it is important that most of the debens of food cooked be from a relatively small subset of ingredients, so that everything else can have greater potency. I’ll return to this topic later.

Duration
The duration of a meal is how long the stat changes it gives will last. For example, if a meal gives +20 strength with a duration of 1 hour, then your strength will be increased by 20 for 1 hour, and then after an hour, will revert to its previous amount.

Each ingredient in a meal contributes to the duration. If a base ingredient reacts with n > 0 additives, it will contribute 1000/n seconds to the duration of the meal. If a base ingredient does not react with any additives, it contributes nothing to duration. If an additive is a distance d from the nearest base ingredient, it subtracts d seconds from the duration. Thus, the way to get the best duration is usually to have one additive react with each base ingredient.

Additives also give a potency bonus to duration. If an additive comprises a fraction f (which must by definition be in the interval (0, .5)) of the meal and has potency p, then the additive will add pf seconds to the duration. For most meals, this is very small and can be ignored.

Stats
Each additive contributes to the stats of a meal. Base ingredients also contribute a little, but do not contribute very much, so their contributions can usually be ignored. Stats from base ingredients is the reason why meals often give non-zero stats to attributes which are not affected by any additives.

Additives have intrinsic base stats as given in the first reply to this thread. A blank spot is a base stat of 0. Base stats are fixed and do not change with time. With the exception of oyster meat, the way that the base stats were probably determined is that each ingredient had all seven stats initialized to zero. One stat was chosen at random and set to +1. A stat was again chosen at random and set to +1. Another stat was chosen at random and set to –1. Finally, one last stat was chosen at random and set to –1. The choices were independent, so an ingredient could easily have a particular stat chosen two or three times. Setting a base stat overwrote the previous value, so a stat set to +1 and then to –1 would end at –1, not 0.

To find the contribution of an additive, you must first compute the base ingredient it reacts with, and then all other additives which react with the same base ingredient. The additive's contribution to a given stat will be (the ingredient’s base stat) times (the ingredient’s potency) times (1000 minus (distance of the base ingredient from the furthest additive it reacts with)). Note that the last quantity is not necessarily the distance of the additive from the base ingredient it reacts with. For example, if a base ingredient reacts with two additives at distances 100 and 400 respectively, the 400 figure will be used in computing stats for both additives.

The stats contributions of all ingredients are added together, and then a small positive number is added to this. The resulting sum is then divided by the square root of its magnitude, so for example, +25 would become +5, or –36 would become –6. This is not quite the same thing as taking the square root of the sum, which could sometimes involve taking the square root of a negative number. This final figure is rounded to the nearest integer by some means, possibly involving floor or ceiling and not the usual rounding. This procedure is done for each stat to get the stats that result from cooking the meal.

Practical use
In most cases, what you want to do is to pick reasonably potent additives that give the base stats you’re after. The number of additives you should pick is your cooking level. For each additive, pick a nearby cheap ingredient to use as the base ingredient. As nearer ingredients mean both higher duration and higher stats, closer is better. This isn’t as big of a deal as some may think, though: the difference between a distance of 100 and of 200 for all the reacting pairs in a meal is only about 5% to total stats. Given a choice of a cheap base ingredient and an expensive one which is slightly nearer, the cheap one is usually the better choice.

If the number of additives you want is less than your cooking level, then pick very cheap ingredients as the additional additives. Adding pairings such as camel-onions or cabbage-tilapia can add considerable duration and cheap servings.

Make sure that you pick a different base ingredient for each additive and that distances don’t get crossed up to have two additives react with the same base ingredient, while another base ingredient reacts with nothing at all. The simplest way to do this is to use my suggested pairings in the second reply to this thread. The middle column allows for more expensive base ingredients than the far right column, but nothing really all that expensive. If all base ingredients are chosen from the same column, then reactions shouldn’t get crossed up, but there’s a small chance that such an error could occur if you mix bases from different columns. If two additives want the same base, scrap one and pick a different additive.

When a meal needs to have decidedly high-end stats, you may want to have several additives react with the same base. This can be tricky to do right, so you’re on your own here. Be sure to have a couple bases that only react with one additive to get some decent duration. Make sure you don’t go over the 21 ingredient limit and get muddled flavors.

Once you’ve chosen your bases and additives, make a meal consisting of some fixed quantity for each of the base ingredients and one of each additive. The amount of the base ingredients depends on how many servings you want. If your cooking level is n and you want s servings, then 7s/n of each base ingredient (rounded down) will give you about the number of servings you want.

Determining potency
Potency can be computed directly if you’re willing to burn a couple debens of the item. Pick a nearby base ingredient (a distance of less than 1000) and make meals of 6:1 and 13:1 with one deben of your test ingredient and 6 or 13 of the cheap base ingredient. Critically evaluate the meals to get the duration, subtract the durations from each other, and multiply this difference (in seconds) by 14 to get the potency.

You can get a pretty good approximation with only one deben by making a 6:1 meal as before, and subtracting the theoretical duration without the potency bonus from this, and then multiplying this difference by 7. This could easily introduce errors in potency of 10 or 20, but with potencies in the thousands, this usually isn’t a big deal.

Still, I don’t recommend either of the above procedures most of the time, as doing it excessively will decrease the global potency of items to be used as additives, as well as burning expensive ingredients. You can usually make a pretty good guess at ingredient potency without having to do formal testing.

Rare herbs will always be high potency, as they can’t be cooked in large quantities if they never existed in large quantities. You’re likely to not have the rare herbs you might like, though, and they’re expensive to buy.

Another major factor influencing potency is how useful the base stats are. Even relatively common herbs which give useless base stats such as only negative stats will usually be fairly potent because they aren’t often cooked. Endurance is probably the stat in highest demand, and strength and dexterity get used a lot for carry recipes. Herbs that give positive strength and negative dexterity will not often be cooked for carry recipes. Constitution and focus are the least used stats, so herbs giving these stats won’t greatly increase their use.

Pick the stats you want in a meal and try to pick herbs which give only those stats. Try also to pick herbs which give negative stats to things you don’t care about. For example, if you need a very high strength recipe which is not going to be used for carry, herbs that give positive strength and negative dexterity will probably be pretty potent. As another example, if you want a constitution recipe, herbs which give constitution only will probably be pretty potent, but herbs which give endurance and constitution both will be far less potent as they will often be cooked for endurance recipes.

Relatively rare ingredients which are not herbs may also be useful as additives, most notably the rarer mushrooms. Note that their default starting potency is only 1/4 that of an herb, though, so you can’t get especially high potency ingredients by going this route. Ingredients which are commonly used as base ingredients will not make good additives because using them as base ingredients greatly decreases their potency.

Best practices
Note that in most cases, the quantity of an ingredient only matters in determining whether it is a base ingredient or an additive. If an ingredient is known to be an additive, then the precise amount of it doesn’t affect stats at all and only has a very small effect on duration. If an additive is too expensive to reasonably be used as a base ingredient, then you should not use more than one deben of it. If you want more servings, add more of the base ingredients, not additives.

The problem is that adding a lot of debens of additives will decrease their potency. If you’re using pairings like cabbage-tilapia just to bring the number of bases up to your cooking level, adding extras of the cheap additives is fine, as both are ingredients that would commonly be used as bases. If an ingredient is commonly used as a base, however, the low potency makes it unsuitable for use as an additive.

The threshold for “too expensive to reasonably be used as a base” is lower than some might think. Even you have 50 debens of a fairly rare herb, you still shouldn’t use it as a base ingredient, as that spoils its use as an additive for everyone else. A simple rule of thumb is that herbs should not be used as base ingredients unless they give only negative stats. There are a handful of exceptions for extremely common herbs, but even for these, there isn’t much reason to use them as bases.

Because oyster meat gives only positive stats, and a base value of +3 end rather than +1, preserving its potency is more important than most other ingredients. Please do not ever use oyster meat as a base ingredient for this reason.

Masterpieces
Masterpieces are not yet well-understood. In order to be a masterpiece, a meal should have relatively long duration and involve a reacting pair which is uncommonly used. These may not be all the criteria that go into making a masterpiece. If you want to cook your own masterpieces, the basic method is to make a lot of long duration meals with uncommon pairings and some of them will be masterpieces.

When you eat a masterpiece, you have a chance of gaining a gastronomy point. You get one permanent perception point at 7 gastronomy, and another at 49 gastronomy. You also gain the ability to critically evaluate dishes at 7 gastronomy, which will report the duration (if positive) and the base stats of a cooked meal without using a serving. This is mainly useful for getting the duration, as eating it won’t tell you how long it will be until it wears off.

Eating herbs off the ground
If you eat an herb off the ground, it gives you temporary stats based on the herb for a couple minutes. If you have eaten from a kitchen recently enough for that meal to still affect your stats, then the herb's stats will stack with the kitchen stats. Furthermore, eating the herb off the ground will reset the duration timer. By stacking several herbs in this way, it is possible to get extremely high stats, though this takes great effort.

Acknowledgements
While I did most of the theoretical work myself, apart from that which is too obvious to credit to anyone in particular, there are a few exceptions. I don't know who first found the effect of cooking levels, but I first heard of it from Rehpic. As best I know, the 21 ingredient max is due to Teti. Zackron did gathered some data to verify the base stats of some common ingredients. I don’t know who first discovered kitchen stats stacking with eating herbs off the ground.

While I did the testing of rarer ingredients myself, it was with mostly with donations provided by others. A big thank you to Somebob, Zapster, Rehpic, Calixes, and dozens of others for the donations to make finding the herb parameters possible.