Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: zev_zev on October 31, 2020, 05:40:39 am
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People can't imagine cooking withiout salt. From antion times this mineral allowed people to save food from a long time, especially under war conditions.
But unfortunately, in DF, I didn't found a way to use rock salt in cooking.
My suggestion is to add one more function of mill - to mill rock salt. The resulting resource is stored in bags or pots, and using in cooking as ingredient, but not for all meals ( otherwise the game will become too easy ). Here some examples:
salt + raw fat = lard - a product that can be stored for 15-20% longer, ready for eating, and can be using in other meals.
salt + cucumber/tomato/onion/garlic = salty vegetables - stored in barrels, czn be stored for 20 - 25% longer, ready to eating.
salt + cabbage = sauerkraut - same as salty vegetables.
Well, I think that there may still be sea salt, as an imported product from human civilizations. But rock salt can only be handled by dwarves (dwarven salt, why not? we already got dwaven sugar).
Elves would joking to call dwarves "stoneeaters".
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You can add cookable salt by modding of current game.
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You can add cookable salt by modding of current game.
Yes, but I think that cookable salt must be canon.
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Salt is already in game. It's called !!FUN!!
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Salt is already in game. It's called !!FUN!!
Yeah, the best spice for any meal. :)
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The cooked meals never spoiling is a strange feature of current DF, which I am sure will be remedied whenever the food system is overhauled.
Other than salting, methods of preservation could be pickling, fermentation, sugaring, jugging and of course lyeing for the lutefisk. Freezing I suppose as well, though I suppose it is less of a workshop process and more of a general rule to be applied to all rottable objects; that low temperatures slows it down.
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forgetting smoking and drying. (if I remember correctly most apples/pears/etc.) were dried shortly after harvesting in the past.. along with much of the meat.
Pemmican.
Ideally cooking would be overhauled to allow you to specify or designate the ingredients in question.
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Proposals about the preservation of food might wait for an overhaul of food production, to make the player have to balance plentiful years with lean times.
And salt has other uses than food, such as some industrial process.
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Salt was in reality hugely important historically and is vert relevant to DF.
Salt is necessary for human diet, we simply die if we don't get some. I say this should be valid for dwarves as well! They'd become sick and unproductive if you fail to make saly available in the fort.
Many mining cities has been directly named after salt - Salzburg and Salzgitter in Austria. Because it was such a valuable commodity. This is right up dwarven alley to make a salt mine. And then sell it etremely expensively to the humans.
For your reading pleasure I recommend "The history of Salt" by Mike Kurlansky. A must read for anybody interested in salt! :) And a good read even if you're not but just like to read about obscure facts of history.
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Salt is necessary for human diet, we simply die if we don't get some. I say this should be valid for dwarves as well! They'd become sick and unproductive if you fail to make saly available in the fort.
I mean, you can absolutely get it from food without having to specifically add salt to things. Virtually everything you might eat already contains sodium and chlorine ions. You don't die if you stop eating salt-the-actual-mineral.
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Dwarfs don't need salt. If they did, Toady would have provided it for them.
Humans need salt in the real world. If they needed it in DF, Toady would have provided it for them.
Elves need raw meat of their enemies. Toady provided it for them.
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Dwarfs don't need salt. If they did, Toady would have provided it for them.
Humans need salt in the real world. If they needed it in DF, Toady would have provided it for them.
Elves need raw meat of their enemies. Toady provided it for them.
You....know the game is 53% complete and has decades left of development, right?
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It was tongue-in-cheek ;)
I think adding salt to the game would be just fine!
(47.04+X)% complete, hehe :) ... where X=progress toward next release.
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It was tongue-in-cheek ;)
I think adding salt to the game would be just fine!
(47.04+X)% complete, hehe :) ... where X=progress toward next release.
Ah, 47, yeah. Surely Steam is .53. :)
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The Steam release doesn't add anything new to the game though. Except more graphical work for new features.
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The Steam release doesn't add anything new to the game though. Except more graphical work for new features.
Depends if additional graphics, music and sound effects support, mouse control and a tutorial were part of the list of features they're calculating from I suppose.
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I see a potential problem with salt: Rock salt is relatively rare in the game, compared to the real world. As with coal/lignite type substances, and iron ore, salt is extremely common in the Earths surface, but rarer in the game. We could collect salt from seawater (the celts did) but it still would be a rather impossible problem in todays Dwarf Fortress game, to require all forts to acquire and provide milled salt. There are so few places to acquire it.
It's not just a food. Most medieval tanning processes involve salts. Salt can be used as a mordant for dyes. It is involved in some ore purification processes to make metal bars. It is used in a myriad of medieval industries.
So personally, I'm glad salt is not a requirement for the game just yet. It makes it astronomically easier to play.
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I assume that any food preservation techniques are simply abstracted during food preparation, in the same way that masonry and carpentry are done without visible tools. Butchered meat and prepared fish lasts much longer in game than unbutchered corpses and unprepared fish, so the process probably includes drying, curing, salting, smoking, or whatever other preservation methods are available.
The only thing that salt would do to the game is add another resource to be maintained, and since food can be preserved without salt (via drying and smoking) it really wouldn't change much.
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Whats about adding salt as trade good? It cost like silver, we can embark in saltwater biome and sell salt to caravans.