Bay 12 Games Forum

So I was playing this 2x2 on a glacier for a couple of years before I realized a pretty significant problem:

The underground didn't have any connected sources of water.  My water source was just an isolated underground lake.  I was going to eventually run dry.  Then: no more farming.  No more healthcare.  No well, no obsidian trap, no ice trap.  I'd have to rely on trading for all my booze.

And just when I was digging into the blue stuff, my last legendary went fey, wanting shells.  I'd amassed a collection of FBs, but the miner wasn't satisfied with the steam monster's shell, and there clearly weren't any lobsters or mussels around.  Oh well.  Time to train up another miner.  So I went digging into the loam that was just under the ice.

And lo and behold, there was an untouched aquifer!  Hallelujah!  Guess I'll be training that miner up on a plumbing system....

I made a really nice post and then accidentally hit back on my browser

1) I would stop cooking by not making kitchens.  Just like I don't make dyer's workshops.  The cost to eating raw food is a small unhappy thought.  The benefit to eating raw food is decreased preparation time, increased fortress space from no kitchen (or pot), and overall simplicity of the fortress.

And I want to emphasize this, because I feel like I've been going around in circles: happiness, as it stands, is insufficient reason to cook food for many of us.

2) Changing the space requirements of raw food does nothing to change the relative value of cooking to not cooking.  If my raw plump helmet stockpiles take up half the space they used to, there is still no benefit to stockpile space from cooking.

3) I was mistaken regarding skill quality and communal cooking.  I generally make a dedicated cook and turn off all other labors on him until things are cooked.  That wouldn't be possible, or rather, would leave him idle frequently, under your proposed changes.  So skill progresses slower, time-wise.  But the quality of the 1000th prepared meal is the same either way.  (It would be kind of a hassle to find make-work for my cook, but I could live with it.)

4) I have had a hard time understanding parts of your proposals.  I'm going to describe how I currently describe it.  I am going to be very specific, more specific than my understanding warrants, because it sounds like you want to know how to make things more clear.

When a dwarf gets hungry, he will check for the presence of prepared food.  If there is no prepared food, he will try to cook food.  If he can't cook food, maybe because of no pathable kitchen, he will eat raw food.  He will do this regardless of whether cooking is enabled on his labors.  Only after cooking (if possible) will he eat.

There will be a new kind of building which we'll call a pot.  When a built pot is empty, it will generate a cooking job at a kitchen.  This job will only be accepted by a dwarf with cooking enabled.  Once cooked, the food will be moved into a pot.

There will be no option to manually (through the manager or through the workshop) create cooking tasks.  If you want a cooking task, place an empty pot someplace.

Prepared food will disappear from stockpile settings.  Prepared food that is not in a kitchen or pot will rot.  Prepared food will not be able to be brought to a depot, or else it will rot quickly enough that there's no point to doing so.

How accurate is that?  (I translated a lot of things like "Dwarfs should do this" into exactly how they will behave-- I think that sort of thing is necessary to really evaluate proposals like this, because the devil is in the details-- or rather, it's easy to miss exactly how things play out unless you spell out the details.  For instance, after writing this, I wonder: well, why not just make a stockpile of pots to store tons of prepared meals?)

Now, like I said, my problem with this is that I don't see a point to bothering with prepared meals under your system.  To be useful, cooking needs to solve a problem.  Here are some potential problems:

1) Gives dwarfs significant bad thoughts for eating raw foods.
    As has been said, if you do this, you need to make other changes to happiness as well.  You don't want to screw up beginning fortresses.
2) Require diversity in diet for health, which is easiest to provide through prepared foods.
    You've said you don't like this idea.

There's something else I see on review, which may be what you originally intended:

Kitchens are necessary in order to preserve food.  Once you have a kitchen, dwarfs will insist on using it to cook their food, whether you like it or not.  So the problem solved by cooking is rot, but prepared meals (and the labor they require) are an unavoidable cost of kitchens, rather than a function served by kitchens.

I know I've been wordy, especially considering losing my earlier essay   That's because I think that you and I probably play very differently.  I think it's important to see how a wide diversity of players would see these changes.  I represent a faction that would, for instance, see food preparation, in the absence of all current functions of cooking except happiness, as a net loss to my fortress.  It feels like you don't believe me when I say that.  Do you see how I could feel that cooking wasn't worth the benefit?

I think the problem is that there are too many "I win" buttons right now.  Bridged ramps, bridged moats, obsidian traps, ice traps.

To me, the obsidian trap entrance is the ultimate defense, and I think it's kind of lame that once you have one set up, you're on easy street.  The problem is that there's nothing short of digging that's going to bypass a well designed trap entrance.

I wouldn't put sappers in until constructed walls could be engraved somehow, though.  Engravings are too important to people.  And I wouldn't make sappers a common siege component.  Maybe starting at year ten, and not with every siege.  A player SHOULD feel proud of making a well designed obsidian trap, and should get some use out of it.  It's just that they shouldn't be able to rely on it to the exclusion of everything else.

The tiles in the default, non-graphics version are always a little stretched....  I'm assuming you mean that they're really stretched.

I wonder if maybe you messed with some stretch setting, before you realized that it's only the menu that doesn't resize?  Maybe you should restore your init to the default, launch the game, and see what happens, if you haven't already.

Maybe you should also try not running full-screen, but just windowed, and resizing the window to be big enough for your tastes.  I suppose there's the potential for fullscreen on an unusual aspect ratio to behave wonky.

I can't imagine it being too difficult to have a scalable nutrition system.

Creatures get something like, "NUTRITION_TICK:PROTEIN:100" and the meat default gets "NUTRITION_SOURCE:PROTEIN:120000".  If somebody wants to get into more detail, they just add "NUTRITION_TICK:B12:50" to their dwarfs and makes a few foods supply B12.

With the way DF works right now, though, I can't imagine much room for a lot of complexity.  There just aren't enough different food sources to get much beyond basic food groups.

Then, we'll need to figure out a way to make polar bear liver poisonous

I like nutrition as a problem for cooking to solve.

As in real life, specific nutritional deficits could take years to develop, which is perfectly appropriate-- it gives you time to get on your feet.  All of this could be done within the frameworks that already exist in the game, maybe as part of a syndrome expansion, or as part of the development of stat improvement.  I'm afraid I don't quite understand Kohaku's suggested implementation   I can't imagine how quality would increase the number of food groups involved, other than through more easily making lavish meals.

It would, however, hurt some of the more extreme forts out there.  Farming isn't always possible, and neither is trade.

I'm not as fond of the idea of requiring multiple units of food based on size.  It ends up making smaller races more productive, just because they spend less time hauling.  This doesn't seem right to me.  On the other hand, it doesn't really seem right to me either that larger races could store more food in a single square than a small race could.  I think there's room for some abstraction in the game.

You don't have to make a new world.  Just copy over the df/data/save folder.

I was going to ask you how, but I just figured it out-- lol, I never knew   That's cool.