It doesn’t seem quite right that you need food crafting level 5 to switch an oven on to bake a pie.
I’m terrible at cooking but I can stick a pie in the oven for my dinner and have it cook successfully!
Making the raw pie is the bit that needs the cooking skill, not turning the furnace on.
I would agree with you.
But I watched my friend who doesn’t know how to cook try to make a frozen pizza a few years ago. It was a strange experience.
First he let it thaw before cooking it despite the directions.
Then he added a ton of veggies on top which is a great idea but which obviously changes things cooking wise.
Then he decided to cook it at 350 for 30 minutes instead of following the directions which said 425 for 20 minutes.
This is all despite me encouraging him to follow the directions.
Why? Who knows.
The pizza obviously did not come out well.
Moral of the story: even IRL, cooking a pre-prepared pie takes some degree of cooking skill.
I enjoyed (and can relate to) your story!
However I don’t think that it’s a failure of cooking skills that was the issue there… 
Personally I’d rather they remove the cooking on furnace part entirely. Feels like it’s an unnecessary step added for the sake of “realism”. Increase spark cost and crafting time proportionate to furnace cooking, and just give cooked item directly as crafting result.
With instructions on temperature and time or without? 
At some point you had to figure that out.
Plus, have you tried to cook something in an oven with an open fire?
good point, the raw pies don’t come with instruction manuals 
In boundless the instructions have to be memorized. Then you know them forever, unless you do a skill reset and forget them.
Still though I get his point. Maybe all raw items should be cookable in a furnace with level 1 cooking?
It’s genetic memory from ancient Oortian ancestors, and your skill point changes are willfull modification of epigenetic switches.
You’re just turning your genetic memory of cooking on and off.
Hmmm, I must have missed the temperature setting and variable timer on the furnaces! 
Maybe we need to just have a more generic “Common Sense” skill 
Maybe the furnace should work like the forge. With a mini game where you have to add coal or keep the temperate constant by regulating airflow and stuff.
As long as I’m not adding flour, sugar, and water and hoping it doesn’t accidentally turn into whipped cream because RNG, that sounds fun.
No one else became a baker while stuck in lock down?
i literally havent baked more in my life than in the last couple of months…
its not that hard to look up the directions to follow, if they have the common sense skill.
tie cooking and other skills you unlock to your attributes… or your level and be done with it…
Not feasible considering how many items there are that uses the furnace, and there’s no material quality variety (so minigames will be either success/fail which imo is bad, the good thing about forge is the many possible result).
I think if cooking has a different station and has a minigame like centraforge (but distinct, having a reskinned forge system is just boring when there’s a lot of potential system to explore), and each food having quality (it can be the classic “perfect minigame = highest quality, total failure = base quality”, or similar to forge where players can aim to extend certain properties of food like stronger effect, longer duration, or even unique related effects), then that’ll definitely be fun.
But as it is right now, I still stand by my opinion that it’s better to just remove the furnace cooking step entirely and just add it to spark cost/crafting time and directly craft a cooked pie.
Haha…or, if you’re like me, you follow the instructions and then as you remove it from the oven, drop it on the floor.
Couldn’t agree more
How about removing cooking items from the furnace entirely and giving us an oven? 
Could even add a stove top and other things like egg drops (@Eggshaker don’t be scared)
I’m sure there was a dev art post with some new crafting stations teasers, and a food crafting station was among them, but I can’t quite seen to track it down!
How? I don’t even know how one would do that
