Curious why it takes 5 raw steaks to make 1 charred meat?

Originally posted by comet_65cali: As what I always understood, it was getting GOOD meat vs bad meat, hence why you get more with a hunting bonus.

Originally posted by Blue Hasia: It's a game

Gas for vehicles also use gas cans as the symbol for gas. but it takes thousands of units of gas to fill the vehicles.

We are not putting thousands of gallons gas into the bike or car.

once you understand that most items in the games are based off of a *unit* and not some common weight or volume you understand that its a game and is not reality

Actually gasoline works if you look at it in metric.
- a Molotav takes 300 gas: a 12 ounce bottle is just over 350ml of capacity, making up for the oil and rag.
- Mini-bike with a 1000 gas capacity? 1000ml=quarter of a gallon and that makes sense for a small-displacement.

Sure. But the gas item is represented by a gas can- You're not literally holding 10000 individual gas cans each holding 1ml or whatever. You're holding 10,000 units of gas; metric or otherwise, it's a unit of gas, not an entire gas can with a drop in it.

Same with the raw meat- It's a nebulous amalgam of units of meat- Not entire individual steaks. Individual steaks is what you get when you commit to a cooking recipe (IE, charred meat).

As for the Mechanical reason behind WHY it is 5 units of meat to 1 crafted recipe, it's so that 1: the skill that buffs meat gain on harvest can do so without giving a false impression of how much it's providing you (if it dropped as 1, +20% is....still 1, because it rounds down. So the skill would have to be +100%, +200%, etc, which doesn't match the other skills and makes it sound better than it is.)
and 2: so that with the Master Chef skill you can reduce the meat cost for a meal. IE, Meat stew takes 5 meat, but with high level master chef it takes 3. It also, although this aspect is unused at this time, allows for recipes to use LESS than '1 steak' worth of meat, IE, Maybe down the line there could be a steak tartare that uses 1 unit of raw meat instead of 5.

In the end, it's all game balance and game design. Every 1 raw meat is not 1 whole stake; It's a nebulous representation of a resource that only takes form when you do something with it. Just like every 1 gas isn't a gas can with 1 drop, just like every piece of iron isnt that exact size and shape, just like wood you harvest from a tree isn't actually coming off the tree as perfect pieces of lumber. It's an icon to represent the resource.