Dismissing the current handling of food preferences as fluff is far from missing the point, if one understands the reason why it was effectively dropped from the game--which I do. Dismissing it as fluff is also perfectly acceptable if one suggests ways in which its meaning can be safely re-introduced--which I also do.
Actually, I was arguing for food preferences to be re-introduced, and you argued
against that when you said:
If you have a two-favorites system, though, I have to wonder why you'd bother hunting for a "true favorite" when you already have a "good enough favorite"? I mean, it doesn't really solve the problem that there's literally no way to be sure what that secret favorite is other than to perform the almost certainly impossible task of trying to have EVERY FOOD IN THE GAME . . . If the solution to it is to make a second, easier target, why have the impossible-except-by-blind-luck target at all?
Who said that discovering a (hidden) favorite food was important at all, let alone necessary?
But that goes back to my original problem with the system: If it's not important, almost never happens, and the player would probably not even be looking to discover when it even DID happen... why are we bothering?
For the same reason that preferred foods already exist. Nobody needs food preferences, forts & individual dwarves would run just fine without them. But, every once in a while, we pick a special dwarf. Maybe it's a weaponsmith who just cranked out an artifact adamantine pick. Maybe it's the Axelord who singlehandedly beat back a goblin siege. Maybe it's a child whose parents were killed in front of her. Maybe it's the all-too-rare noble with actually good skills & traits, and useful preferences. Maybe it's a crippled veteran, burned and maimed, with no eyes and only half a hand, whose sole remaining pleasure in this world is the kind of soup his father used to make. And for those players who want to do something kind for those dwarves, it'd be nice to have the ability to do so.
You are explicitly arguing that food preferences
aren't and
shouldn't be needed, so suddenly saying that your argument is that food preferences
are supposed to be necessary is giving me some whiplash.
The dynamic that I suggested (hidden "true" favorites, which will probably not be attainable, and visible "favorites-so-far", which almost certainly are attainable) is a nod to the old/current system of "hit-or-miss" specific food items, and maintains consistency with the other existing preferences, which are similarly highly selective.
In contrast, the whole "flavor / nutrition" dynamic is a sharp break from the other preferences, and is a direction in which I both hope and expect the game will eventually go . . . and take the other preferences with it. A dwarf that likes "rose gold" is nice, but I think a dwarf that likes "copper and its alloys" is nicer. Similarly, dwarves that show a marked preference for sweet foods, or smooth liquors, or meaty flavors, etc., is just more realistic, not to mention being far easier to satisfy.
These are two mutually exclusive systems. Which one are you actually backing?
The problem with the argument you make at the start of that paragraph is that you rebut it in the next sentence.
Hardly. I'm simply illustrating that, under my suggested system, individual preferences can safely be ignored, as long as you plan out a food supply that hits all the nutritional requirements and flavor types (which any good overseer should be trying to do anyway), but it also leaves the door open for catering to the selective whims of a specific dwarf, should you ever be so inclined. That's complexity, not contradiction.
But you
just said that you were suggesting that individual preferences
shouldn't be safe to ignore. That's definitely contradiction!
But not having complete control over local growing conditions is sheer realism, one of the cornerstones of DF. Seriously, as long as the player ensures a healthy stock of at least 1 of each of [starch, protein, milk product, fruit, vegetable], and maybe salt as an electrolyte/preservative, that should satisfy most of the nutritional requirements, and any noticeable vitamin deficiency should take years to become noticeable. That could be the "baseline" embark, that covers all the basics, and anything beyond that is just (almost literally) gravy--exactly as it should be, when pioneering a new fort in the wilderness. Menu diversity is greatly desired, but not strictly required. Dwarves shouldn't really expect to have good food, or even a good cook, until they're established enough to get a greater variety of foods & seeds through trade.
This is objectively
NOT how food in Dwarf Fortress works.
Case in point, my last fortress straddled biomes that were temperate and tropical, so I managed to get nearly every surface vegetable with seeds growing, building up a giant stockpile of extremely varied foods.
What did my cooks actually prepare?
Eggs.
One roast of turkey eggs, goose eggs, more turkey eggs, and guinea fowl eggs, one roast of goose eggs, goose eggs, turkey eggs, and goose eggs, one of turkey eggs, turkey meat, turkey tallow, and goose eggs, and another roast of goose eggs, guinea fowl eggs, goose eggs, and capers.
This is because the farms were west of the food stockpile, while the bird nests, butcher, and kitchen were south of the food stockpile, so the bird eggs and meat were placed closer to the kitchen, and therefore, as long as I had eggs, they were always the highest possible priority for cooking.
Dwarf Fortress AI does not decide to randomly pick up one of any kind of object that satisfies the parameters of what it is looking for, it goes for the closest object that satisfies the search parameters. Without having the capacity to explicitly declare kitchens are to have varied foods, they will not have varied foods, and the preferences are even harder to fulfill because it basically mandates players constantly babysit their food stockpiles individually forbidding foods they don't want constantly in every single roast. (And that most definitely is even MORE fine-tuned micromanagement than DF should strive for or is realistic.)
This is
especially true if you have a flavor-based system with a "mead hall" style of setting up different kitchen workshops to keep specific types of food available. If you're going to demand that players keep different types of flavors available, the player needs to have some sane way of actually telling their cooks to make those flavors available.
You have to ask what actual gameplay value is being created for the player/how it impacts the decisions the player will make for the amount of complexity you're adding. Not just for Toady's coding time, or the fact that it can introduce bugs, but also for the players, themselves, who now have another large table of data to track with little intuitive way to understand how to actually fulfill the goal of feeding your dwarves a balanced diet of purely organic kale salads with cranberries to satisfy their fiber and vitamin C needs.
That's very true. On the one hand, it should be common sense that when you want to found a successful colony, you DON'T send your dudes out with nothing but Cheetos and Pepsi, you give them the tools to build a balanced diet. But on the other hand, you can't expect players to know the nutritional makeup of imaginary underground plants ("I guess rope reeds are high in fiber, but do quarry bushes have more minerals?"), and even some of the real-life plants (muskmelons? 4 types of amaranth?) are largely unfamiliar, so yes, a clunky table of data would unfortunately be almost unavoidable. But, back on the first hand again, this is DF, where clunky tables of data are practically a given, no matter what you're trying to do.
Setting what you are arguing for aside for a second to focus upon the argument itself, saying, "it's Dwarf Fortress, so it's fine not to worry about making it an unintelligible mess," is a dodge that can (and all-too-often is) used to excuse nearly anything, and it absolutely isn't what players should be suggesting. We SHOULD be suggesting systems to
repair the grievous problems caused by invisibility of information, and how many of the major systems Toady spends a great deal of time upon are completely taken for granted because players simply don't bother to spend the time looking for the traces of information that would show they exist. This is, again, why I keep bringing up the eyelashes problem: you negate any benefit your suggestion might have when nobody is capable of seeing it, or if it is visible, but too complex, willing to read through it.
(This is, incidentally, why I always use Therapist, and oppose people claiming some sort of "hard core cred" for just ignoring dwarf preferences and personalities and just putting jobs in a nickname and ignoring dwarf individuality entirely... It's ignoring a major, vital piece of the game that needs to be developed more, not glibly ignored, and the interface directly opposes everything Toady is trying to accomplish.)
Beyond that, though, nutrition absolutely brings up the problems I mentioned above regarding "all omelettes all the time" fortresses. If you want to make that happen, you have to start with devising the interface by which players will be able to be able to understand what they need to accomplish, and then give clear orders to the cooks to actually accomplish those objectives, rather than just say "it'd be nice if there was a nutrition system". Because just saying that dwarves need to eat at least one citrus fruit each month to prevent scurvy is going to be a disaster if players have no way of getting dwarves to actually eat those citrus fruit, and they eat nothing but tallow roasts all day every day.
