EDIT 5/12/22: You are free to use/reuse/redistribute this mod however you want, no permission/credit required.
I no longer work on the mod, but I do keep getting requests to port/translate etc. I am posting for anyone who wants to use it, you can. This is here mostly in case I miss a message which is likely since I don't check the page often.

Version 1.5 and 50% Version Now Live!

Let's be honest - the cooking and food system in Skyrim seemed cool at first, but then you realized you had to eat like 37 apples to get the equivalent of a basic healing potion, and most people stopped wasting their time lugging it around. You also might have liked the cooking in hearthfire, only to realize how hard it was to make them for some, again, fairly unimpressive stats.

This mod aims to fix that by doing a few things:

1. Food heals more. Basically, the more time and effort put into making a piece of food corresponds to a higher amount of health/magicka/stamina gained. Simple food that is found in the world like veggies and raw meats sit at the lowest healing, with basic cooked food (simple soups and cooked meat) right above that, then the more complex/harder to make food (think Hearthfire recipes) above that. food also has been re-balanced to not heal instantly, but instead over time. Different types of food were also given different types of effects to make them have some sort of running themes throughout. tomatoes, for instance, restore magicka now, and things made from tomatoes now also generally restore it as well. Alcohol is also included in this mod. Alchemy is not.

2. The effects do not stack. You can't guzzle down 7 cheese wheels and be back to tip-top shape in no time. Well, you actually can still, but now you only get the effect of one cheese wheel. To be more precise, food heals a few different stats; health, stamina and magicka, varying for each food. Each healing effect for each stat does not stack with additional effects for the same stat, meaning a food that restores stamina will not stack if you already have the stamina restore from another food active. you can however combine them, so that you can eat one food that restores health and another that restores stamina.

3. Re-balanced some of the recipes. Some foods required a fair amount of somewhat rare ingredients for something that was ultimately worthless. others required salt when you can easily cook a piece of meat without it. This mainly looks at things like butter, salt, garlic, and milk, which are fairly rare or not needed to make basic foods, and moves them to be a sort of gateway into the better tiered foods. Some foods that weren't craftable before now are.

4. Added a few other new tweaks and changes. Raw meat now has a chance to give parasites, whereas raw fruits and veggies now have a small chance to cure disease. Food should also be found in slightly smaller quantities, making food slightly rarer. Its still pretty common, just not as common.


Healing values were generally balanced around vanilla harder difficulties. If you're playing on novice and it feels like you're a god, well, that's because its novice. I have absolutely no knowledge about how combat overhaul mods effect the balance of these, but they will probably be ok. maybe. If you do find something that you feel is actually legitimately broken, feel free to let me know in the comments and I'll take a looksie.

COMPATABILTY
This mod overwrites the effects of foods and a few recipes, as well as the leveled lists of food barrels. If another mod changes those, one of them will overwrite the other. You won't CTD or anything, but things might not do what you intend them to. This would mostly apply to Needs mods, as it depends on how they implemented the hunger checks and whatnot, my mod might overwrite the part that restores hunger, or their mod would overwrite my healing stuff depending on load order. It is possible that I make a patch for popular requested mods in the future.

IS COMPATIBLE WITH iNEED

Other than that, you shouldn't have any real problems. There's no scripts or anything, but do let me know obviously if you do find some bugs or something.

Note: the less healing version is a standalone version of the main file, use one or the other. The only difference between the two is the less healing version has ~50% less healing for each food item, and is a bit better balanced when not playing on the hardest difficulties