So right now, there is no incentive to actually cook any of the complex food items except for the novelty of doing something different or to unlock the recipe in your list; with or without cooking pot upgrades, it's more efficient to just cook raw meat or fish in terms of energy gain per slot in the food pot; this has been a thing constantly brought up, and I think complex recipes of all colors should yield more than one item to make up for the space they take to process as has also been suggested before-- but that isn't what this suggestion is really about.

In order to give the green-tier (and i suppose purple tier if we want to be fancy) complex recipes some tangible use, I suggest opening up more farming options for Bigs/Tiny to watch your compost for more variable amounts of time (6 hours? 24 hours for purple tier recipes?) for green-tier food items like jam and yogurt-- I suggest also always having all "tiers" (a green, a blue, and a purple) of food option suggestions available, so people can choose if they want their farm to be monitored for 6/12/24 hours.

Ideally I suppose you could make the argument for using 3-4 green tier items, keep the 2-3 blue tier foods for the current conditions, and then 1-2 purple tier items for some semblance of balance? Though I'd personally be in favor of just keeping a 1-2 ratio for everything, since most of the farmed food can't even really be cooked yet.

I highly support this. I find myself with the time to check in on farming being a bit erratic, so some days I don't even bother because I feel I'm "wasting" the time so to speak by giving food to watch my crops, knowing I'll only take advantage of a portion of the time I've "purchased." Having varied increments for different food items/tiers would be much appreciated.

I support this even if I never use it. The hassle of making 3 complex recipes is not worth the time for it, and I always completely forget my farming. But I guess for people who use it, it would be worth it.

@DerpFox

Honestly, I never use it as it stands either... And barely farm at all, even for the daily rewards. There is just not enough benefit to the exchange at the moment, and I think it will take more work than only this suggestion to make it worth it. But optimistically, it could become more worth it in the future if they are willing to do the profession reworks needed to make farming more useful.

@Reave I agree with you. I'd even go a bit further, it's the whole craft/cooking chain that is broken. There are many basic items we can't do anything with (ex: guppies / clay / pine cones / etc), intermediary items we can't do anything with (flour / yogurt / etc), intermediary items we can't craft and are rare in the MM or as a drop (dyes / etc), and items that have weird recipes (for example all yarns*). Some other items are so common without any use it's crazy, I have 2000 candles, what do I do with that?

* white yarn needs cotton + white dye. That's the most unlogical thing. All the yarns are in the form of cotton + dye. The right thing would be that white yarn is only cotton and colored yarn should be white yarn + dye.

I know when I'm off-topic there, but it's getting seriously frustrating. All of this was already present in beta, some of these at the time you could think "eh it's only beta the rest will be there when the game finally comes out" but the game has been on prod for 6 months now. Everything is linked in a way or another, but nothing moves. As an IT professional, this is completely mind-boggling.

@DerpFox

Oh don't worry, I completely agree with ya on all fronts; all professions need rehauls in a bad way-- I really hope they focus on fixing them and tying up all the random nonsensical chains and dead ends before they start adding more... The professions need to flow into each other and be fulfilling to the gameplay loop as a whole. Most of them need smoother leveling curves as well. My lukewarm hot take is that the achievement feature should have been put way on the backburner to fix what site functions we already have, instead of being what is currently being focused on.

Even after it launched, a few separate people have had some really good ideas on how to fix most of them & tie them together more professionally(heh), and I wish the community could get more traction behind that again. I know it's not our jobs to fix the game for them, but it's hard to just not say anything. :/

This has all of my support! This would be absolutely incredible - I hardly use the farming as it is and it's a bit tedious, and it's annoying if I give food for 12 hours just for it to go to waste if I can't plant everything I need in that time frame. Having 6/12/24 hours with green/blue/purple tiers would be amazing, and probably a good way to balance it out.

I hope they implement this!

Thank you for the support! It's simple in scope, but I think even this little change would streamline and make farming much more approachable for everyone. :)