Best Ingredients for Developing Dishes?

Edit: Updated some of the values. ( 4 Nov 2012 )

Maybe if I were a good programmer -- but I'm not. Plus I don't think I can be bothered to use my human eyes and brain to sort this out by hand. *sigh*

Maybe Lazycat can do it? He is the best person at solving this sort of problem using his programming code. Let's ask him! I linked him the Ingredient Effects and anxiously waited for his reply. "No problem." OMG, he said yes.

I was too excited to sit still so I left to do the dishes. Within an hour, I got the result and the code itself!

Here's what I requested for :

A list of Ingredient combinations that would only give positive effect on the dish to be developed.

With a bit of editing, I came up with two tables.

1. Aged Cheese is not involved
2. Aged Cheese is involved

Aged Cheese is the only Ingredient that would give all the attributes a plus. However it can be difficult to get. You might want to save it till your Dish is nearly perfect.

Before you say IT DOES NOT WORK, please read the explanation after the Tables.

Table 1. Aged Cheese not involved

Table 2. Aged Cheese involved

Okay, Let's explain.

Why does it not work sometimes? It gets tricky when the Dish in development is close to perfect. Have a look at the pictures below. We can see, when the same Ingredients are put in different orders, we get different results because it follows two rules:

1. Whenever the attribute is over 100, it's set to 100
2. 1st Ingredient first. -- The game actually adds up the Ingredient 1's attributes to the Dish first, calculates it, and then adds the 2nd Ingredient's up.

Take P 1, Brain Up attribute as an example:
     Top-Class Pork does +22 to Brain Up, but Gold Ice Cream is already 100, so it's set to 100, then Gold Flakes does -11, so the final result is 89.

Let's look at P 2 Brain Up attribute:
     Gold Flakes does -11, to Gold Ice Cream's 100 -- that's 89. Then Top-Class Pork's +22 brings it over 100, so we get 100 as a result.

P 1. Top-Class Pork 1st, Gold Flakes 2nd

P 2. Gold Flakes 1st, Top-Class Pork 2nd

That's why, with Table 1, when your Dishes are close to perfect, you might not get the result you expect. However, with Table 2, as long as Aged Cheese is the second Ingredient, you can expect the attributes buffed up.

Tips and facts:

- Aged Cheese and Green Onion are the only two ingredients having no negative effects.

And of course, if the result is still not as expected after you've finished reading this, it is probably just me having some typos.  :p  Please do let me know. Thank you.

Many thanks to Lazycat again for being so amazing.  :D

Seebs made a really cool applet to help us find the best possible combination based on the ingredients we have, with this tool there is no need for guess work anymore.

"... lets you enter a dish's current stats, select the ingredients you have, and it'll tell you which combination gives the largest boost to stats." - Seebs

Here's a link to it : The Cool Seebs Applet  ( Thank you, Seebs! )

Have fun cooking!

- Enna