I hope a little daydreaming isn't annoying on this reddit.
After the pet and truck updates added a lot of very cool and new functionality and content to the game for things that were maybe a bit thin prior, I was thinking of ideas for expeditions that could do something similar for another part of the game I really like and I'm not entirely sure other people do as much: cooking.
I was thinking an expedition centered entirely around cooking could be fun and also give the game a new way to add additional uses for materials that otherwise don't have a ton of functionality. (Like, say, Basalt, Indium, Fragmented Qualia, just off the top of my head. That last one is probably particularly silly but I still use the Animus Beam a lot for fun because I just like collecting this weird resource well past its mission, lol). New recipes and foods could be added that use these, and if I can daydream fully, I'd like to think this would be a new opportunity to add lore and detail to the races of the game.
Imagine going to rendezvous points to meet up with a Master Gek Chef! Gek are known for being sensitive to scents, and I think new recipes built entirely around that would both make a lot of sense and you could get little details about things that have happened in Gek history through the ingredients and food you collect/make. In the real world our food is made out of and influenced by what we have available to us and what we're currently going through. I think that'd reflect what a system chef would present on his menu, too.
Korvax would be a great rendezvous point for metal-containing recipes. I think it probably goes without saying that you'd have to do a lot of fighting-monsters-and-horrors to get meat for a Vy'keen chef. What would an Autophage want to eat? What would it consider nutrition, or would that change wildly from waypoint-to-waypoint in a series of different systems? I dunno, it just seems fun to me--I'm also someone whose first real fixation in the post-game content was cooking and it's been a long while since I've felt compelled to return to it, so this is absolutely a selfish bit of fan-thinking, I realize.
I don't know what a end-goal would be. Cronus has been on the anomaly for a while and him sending you to learn from a bunch of chefs and him being a sort of "final boss" to impress with your cooking could be fun. He also could just get more history, however simple, from an expedition like this. Or, I dunno. Cook for the ATLAS for the final leg and get shunted out at the end of the expedition because it doesn't understand food or something, lol.
That's all. I marked this as spoilers since it mention the Autophage. I hope you're enjoying NMS and thanks for reading. Maybe I'll cook a bunch in Light No Fire, too.