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Author Topic: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time  (Read 15087 times)

catten

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Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« on: October 20, 2014, 03:55:59 pm »

Currently, one dorf eats 8 units of food and drinks 16 units of booze per year. This reduces food production---which was the single biggest concern in ancient times, even more so than warfare---to laughably non-issue status. A fortress only needs 2-3 food production dwarfs for each 100 population, which is about as efficient as Western Europe's food economy is today. Food economies of ancient times tied up 50-80% of the population, according to Wikipedia, and some parts of Africa still do even today.

In my forts, 2-3 farmers can easily keep up with the needs of 100 dwarfs, including cooking and brewing, and they're nowhere near legendary skills. There's no point in even toying with a real egg or meat industry, let alone dairy or herbalism or hunting. There's just too much food. Sieges mean basically nothing: food production only needs about 50 tiles, all underground, no pastures necessary. Add in all the caravan food (up to 3x per year) and it just becomes ridiculous. The only thing food is good for is making expensive barrels to sell to the caravans...

Examples:
  • A pair of 1x7 fertilized farm plots, managed by a medium-skill planter, feeds roughly 30 dwarfs.
    Spoiler (click to show/hide)
  • That same pair of 1x7 fertilized plots produces enough booze for 70-140 dwarves.
    Spoiler (click to show/hide)
  • 3 nest boxes claimed by blue peahens (plus one caged peacock) produce enough eggs+meat for 30-50 dwarfs.
    Spoiler (click to show/hide)
  • 10 pig sows (plus one caged boar) produce enough milk and meat for 35-40 dwarfs.
    Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The forums are full of ideas to cut down farm yields, make farming more complicated, change butchery returns, implement nutrition, etc... but the real problem seems to be simple: dwarfs just don't eat enough. The frequency of meal/booze breaks seems about right---just often enough to be annoying---so eating more often wouldn't work well. Instead, they should eat about 10x more food/booze at each sitting. No need to implement multi-hauling: eating a small stack would just leave the dorf hungry and looking for another helping. Prepared meals would be a Good Thing, because dorfs could take their whole meal from a stack of *plump helmet roast*[35] (leaving behind 25), rather than making 2+ trips for smaller stacks.

This one change would elevate food security to a much more realistic state, without invasive modifications to existing food production mechanisms (all of which seem reasonable, when examined in isolation). 25-30 farmers for each 100 dorfs would be enough to make food a really serious matter, while still leaving most of the population free for military, crafting, and (mega)projects. Plus, it seems nice and dorfy: Urist McMiner *should* stump in after a long job of digging marble, and ransack the larder before draining half a barrel of booze. Right now he's satisfied with a single strawberry and a sip of ale.

Worthwhile knock-on effects include:
  • Goblin sieges that scare off caravans, kill your pastured animals, chase farmers out of their fields, and prevent herbalists from gathering fruit would be a Really Big Problem (you know, an actual "siege").
  • A massive wave of spring immigrants would pose an existential threat to food security that requires care and advance
    planning to manage (where right now immigrants just mean more haulers now and more bedrooms to dig out later).
  • Farming and fertilizing (and protecting) fields would require a lot more thought and planning if you needed 300-600 arable tiles to
    feed a mature fort (instead of 30), while not being outrageously large (a 25x25 area would be plenty).
  • If seed limits stayed the same, players would be forced to diversify crops just to be able to plant enough. Those caravan seed bags with 100 seeds inside would actually make sense.
  • Other food industries (herbalists, beekeeping, fishing, etc.) would matter, because they would provide more/different food and every little bit helps. Right now I couldn't care less if the next release lets my dorfs pick fruit from stepladder, but I would care terribly if hazel nuts and persimmons actually made the difference between going hungry and having well-fed dorfs.
  • Hunting would become a really useful skill beyond just training marksdwarves (which is a pain given outstanding military bugs) and producing leather (which you can always raise yourself or buy on the cheap from caravans anyway).
  • Quarry bushes would be valuable in real terms, not just dwarfbucks, and would be worth the hassle.
  • Food from caravans would be a necessity to sustain many forts, not merely a source of variety, and you might have to think twice about trading away that prepared food barrel.
  • Losing your legendary planter would be a real disaster rather than a non-event, due to the loss of yield and slower planting his replacement could likely muster.
  • Leather and meat production would be much more balanced, with leather becoming a useful by-product of the food industry,
    rather than the primary reason to hunt or raise animals while throwing away the meat (assuming you don't just pay the caravan $70/bin instead).
  • Military dwarves would actually need/benefit from a mess hall when training and some supply chain logistics when out on patrol
    (ideally that would apply to siegers as well: you could outlast them and force them to retreat in search of food, and you could plunder their stores if you defeat them before they can retreat... but that's a matter for a different thread).

On the implementation side, it should be easy enough to tweak the current hunger counter system to use thresholds: Urist gets the munchies at 40,000 ticks and becomes officially "hungry" at 50,000 ticks (as now), and each unit of food eaten reduces that number by 5000 or so; once the "munchies" threshold has been crossed, the Urist McHungry will keep eating until his counter drops below 10,000 units or some such. As a bonus, Urist McStarving would need a much bigger meal (15+ units) while Urist McMunchies could get away with less (6-8).
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The-Moon

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #1 on: October 20, 2014, 10:27:47 pm »

I agree with ya dude, way too easy to get food. I doubt many people have a problem with food. Would be nice if it was a challange to keep dorfs fed.

:)
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Arcvasti

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #2 on: October 20, 2014, 10:29:59 pm »

Its a gameplay/realism kind of thing. We DO need a farming rework, but I would personally prefer that it stay on this side of the line between "Negligible difficulty" and "Ungodly hard". Its more fun making crafts, digging out forts and killing goblins then it is farming.
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Adrian

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2014, 07:33:54 am »

Any rework of farming should emphasize labor- and resource management, much like the rest of the game.
As it is right now farming is just too simplistic. You set up the plots once and you never have to revisit them ever again. Water is unnecessary and fertilizer is optional.

Simply giving plants water as a requirement of growth would make farming much more challenging. Overwatering would drown and kill the plant, and too little water would result in smaller harvests.
Then the player would need to choose between relying on slow, manual labor and give farmers watering cans, or install flood irrigation with a complex system of levers, reservoirs and floodgates and risk drowning the plants.

Also hoes, weeds, insects, droughts, monsoons, water in barrels for local storage and farming zones with assigned tools.

And farming doesn't need to be ungodly hard, it just needs to be Dwarf Fortress hard.
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StagnantSoul

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #4 on: October 21, 2014, 07:50:44 am »

Well, if water was a nescessity, you'd only be able to farm on about half the world.
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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #5 on: October 21, 2014, 07:53:13 am »

On the implementation side, it should be easy enough to tweak the current hunger counter system to use thresholds: Urist gets the munchies at 40,000 ticks and becomes officially "hungry" at 50,000 ticks (as now), and each unit of food eaten reduces that number by 5000 or so; once the "munchies" threshold has been crossed, the Urist McHungry will keep eating until his counter drops below 10,000 units or some such. As a bonus, Urist McStarving would need a much bigger meal (15+ units) while Urist McMunchies could get away with less (6-8).
This sounds pretty simple, I would be interested in trying this out on my next game.
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catten

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #6 on: October 21, 2014, 09:46:07 am »

Any rework of farming should emphasize labor- and resource management, much like the rest of the game.
As it is right now farming is just too simplistic. You set up the plots once and you never have to revisit them ever again. Water is unnecessary and fertilizer is optional.

My suggestion in no way replaces the need for a farming rework (that's a whole separate issue). I just don't think a farming rework will fix the glaring problem that food is just plain unbalanced right now. As I mentioned, the current yields and such all seem reasonable if you look at seeds vs. labor vs. yield per tile... or butchery yield per animal of given size. The problem comes when you look at how much a dorf eats (= very little). Right now, you could remove all but one food industry from the game and most forts wouldn't face any real hardship. Even the most complicated and interesting farming system won't be very meaningful if most fortresses only need a pair of 1x7 plots... a one-dorf bucket brigade could keep it watered just fine unless you're trying out surface farming in a scorching climate. Besides, if the farm system became too complex, people would just buy brewable plants from caravans and focus food production on some easier industry like meat/egg/dairy. Or just buy everything from caravans, for that matter.

The idea here is to make most food industries necessary for most forts. Then a farming rework, ability to harvest trees with stepladders, hunting and hunting dogs, etc. all become interesting and meaningful. It might even become worth Toady's time to fix the fishing/extinction bugs at that point, so fisherdwarves become an asset rather than something to groan about at each immigration wave. Right now none of this is worth the effort and risk to pursue.

@Arcvasti:

The idea is definitely *not* to make things super hard. It should just require a little planning and work to keep hundreds of dorfs fed when they live in a hole in the ground, in the middle of nowhere, with a caravan or two per year bringing food supplies and goblins laying siege at regular intervals. A realistic model for dwarven tech levels would suck 70-90% of the population into full-time food production, where my tweak would only pull in about 30% (probably closer to 20% if you keep high-skill dorfs going full time). Right now, with 2-3% of the population producing food on a part-time basis, it takes work *not* to have a 2-year supply of food and booze laying around.
Case in point:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Since this change would actually be pretty invasive, in spite of its simplicity, I imagine Toady would add a knob that controls it (currently, food reduces hunger by 50,000, I propose to make that 5,000, but you could set anything you wanted).

Besides, this tweak would mostly impact mid- and late-stage forts, because a large population means you need lots of food infrastructure and workers to keep it going. At embark, you'd almost certainly be able to get away with one food production dorf, just like now. Especially if you embark with a decent supply of food. There'd be a distinct difficulty bump when that first spring immigrant wave sweeps in and starts plundering your food stores (esp. if there was a bad siege that winter and your food production suffered), and food production would increase steadily from there. Other changes (not proposed here) could even force players to diversify their food production as population ramps up. Perhaps nobles demanding lavish meals containing all four food groups, or food preferences with teeth (dorfs get depressed if they never eat their favorite foods).

Well, if water was a nescessity, you'd only be able to farm on about half the world.
Actually, that would be about right, if you Google "arable land."
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Sirbug

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #7 on: October 21, 2014, 11:29:46 am »

Perhaps we should focus on cooking more instead? Right now stacks are insanely big. What if nothing is to be eaten raw and one cooking operation would create only one food item?

This way food would be more sensibly scarce while lavish food would indeed be a luxury only for prosperous forts.
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Skullsploder

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #8 on: October 21, 2014, 11:40:54 am »

I wholly agree with this. Two plump helmets per tile per season is a reasonable amount, but not when one plump helmet will satisfy a dwarf for a very long time. The setting for amount of hunger reduction should be in the init file (and set lower than it is now by default), that way people can easily make food security trivial for science forts or very challenging if they want to realistically represent feudal era food production.
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Authority2

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #9 on: October 21, 2014, 11:46:45 am »

I like this idea.
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Mushroo

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #10 on: October 21, 2014, 01:47:42 pm »

I totally support this! :)
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Dirst

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #11 on: October 21, 2014, 02:22:55 pm »

I wholly agree with this. Two plump helmets per tile per season is a reasonable amount, but not when one plump helmet will satisfy a dwarf for a very long time. The setting for amount of hunger reduction should be in the init file (and set lower than it is now by default), that way people can easily make food security trivial for science forts or very challenging if they want to realistically represent feudal era food production.
So basically you want an init setting for just how plump these helmets are.  That seems fairly simple for Toady to code... and it might even be possible to patch in now with DFHack.
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Escapism

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #12 on: October 21, 2014, 03:57:00 pm »

A good idea, certainly, in terms of game balance (dwarven labour should be an asset, which it certainly isn't right now). I think it might even be a good idea to have it at 15x-20x instead. Same principle holds true with economy or craft production, really. You should nearly always be in a position where having more of a given resource is a Good Thing. Then again, I've always been more of a power gamer, so that might not be a viewpoint shared by everyone.

However, it is, as you say, not a replacement for a sorely needed farming (or, rather, food. Or, rather, balance) overhaul. Tying up 10x as many dwarves in food production won't solve how food/energy is essentially generated from nothing in it's current state. It won't solve sieges being effectively useless as long as you just wall yourself in (the only difference here being 25 farm tiles vs 250). You'd need to import some basic laws of nature into the game for that to work, e.g plants requiring some kind of energy to produce food.

Some suggestions on the top of my head to make food production more meaningful:
- plants requiring either sunlight or manure
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
- nutrients
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
- droughts/disease etc.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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catten

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #13 on: October 21, 2014, 04:51:13 pm »

Perhaps we should focus on cooking more instead? Right now stacks are insanely big. What if nothing is to be eaten raw and one cooking operation would create only one food item?

This way food would be more sensibly scarce while lavish food would indeed be a luxury only for prosperous forts.
Eating raw food is a good feature. Means you don't need a cook/kitchen right at embark (we expect those dorfs to sleep in the rain at first, but they need cooked food to survive?). Plus, the threat of eating raw food makes prepared food that much more luxurious.

Cooking 2-4 units of raw ingredients down to one unit of prepared food is interesting and reasonable (I thought that was how it actually worked when I first started playing), but a side issue---prepared food is a luxury, not a necessity. Plus, it wouldn't fix the booze side of the problem.
Spoiler: more cooking thoughts (click to show/hide)

A good idea, certainly, in terms of game balance [...] I think it might even be a good idea to have it at 15x-20x instead.
That would be technically the most realistic, but 10x seemed a reasonable match with the rest of the game mechanics. It should probably be tunable, though, as others suggested.

However, it is, as you say, not a replacement for a sorely needed farming (or, rather, food. Or, rather, balance) overhaul. Tying up 10x as many dwarves in food production won't solve how food/energy is essentially generated from nothing in it's current state. It won't solve sieges being effectively useless as long as you just wall yourself in (the only difference here being 25 farm tiles vs 250). You'd need to import some basic laws of nature into the game for that to work, e.g plants requiring some kind of energy to produce food.
You are absolutely right, and I'm not arguing against such fixes.

That said, 25 vs 250 is definitely a meaningful difference. If you can wall in a 250-tile above-ground farm plot before the first serious siege hits, more power to you. Especially if you also manage to roof it over (since otherwise the gobbos will just climb the wall like it's not there). IMO, the resulting siege-proof farm would have been fairly earned because it surely came at the expense of something else.
Spoiler: more musings (click to show/hide)

Keep in mind, though, 250 tiles would more or less cover the booze needs of a full-sized fortress. It would take another 500 or so to actually feed everyone (unless you grew only plump helmets and quarry bushes). You could rely on massive farms, but the scale of that operation---esp. after a farming rewrite makes it more complex and labor intensive---would push people to supplement farming with other food sources like fishing, gathering, hunting, caravans, etc.---all of which expose your fort/workers to invaders and wild animals.
Spoiler: more musings (click to show/hide)

Some suggestions on the top of my head to make food production more meaningful. [...]
I think they're all good ideas. Hopefully they (and others like them) make it into the game some day. The feature I'm suggesting here can be implemented very quickly, though, and would make those other fixes and additions much more meaningful. Again, making farming more complex won't matter much if 14 tiles can feed a medium-sized fortress. Sunlight, water, fertilizer, etc. would all matter a *lot* more if you had to manage a 250-tile farm complex rather than a 14-tile farmlet. It's the difference between a 1-dorf bucket brigade and a major engineering project to pump water up from the caverns.

So basically you want an init setting for just how plump these helmets are.  That seems fairly simple for Toady to code... and it might even be possible to patch in now with DFHack.
I bet dfhack could change the "nutrition value" of eaten food easily enough (using a binary patch if nothing else), but the other two pieces would be harder:
  • Hunger/thirst threshold. Urist McHungry shouldn't start prowling for food until he passes 40-50k hunger, but he shouldn't stop eating until hunger drops below 10k (or whatever). Without a threshold, he'd eat every time hunger passed 10k (every 4-5 days), which would be really disruptive to the fort.
  • Food stacks. Urist McHungry should be able to take a strawberry[5] to his table in one trip. Right now he always takes them one by one, which would mean lots of exercise at mealtime (food stockpiles in the dining room might help, but it would still be annoying/unnecessary).
« Last Edit: October 21, 2014, 04:58:33 pm by catten »
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GavJ

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Re: Dwarves should eat/drink about 10x more at a time
« Reply #14 on: October 21, 2014, 07:30:09 pm »

This is a good idea for a bandaid fix, but as mentioned above, is in no way a replacement for fixing the countless gaping holes in the food system long term. All food needs preservation required, and every individual food industry needs to be made more difficult and realistic in concert (at which point the hunger could be reduced back down slightly to remove its bandaid-y-ness a bit).

OP, keep in mind that one problem with realistic food is that it's much harder to balance. 2-3% of the population means that if for some reason you have a temporary food issue that needs to double the labor, it's still 4-6%, and the game is playable. If you need 50-80%, and suddenly temporarily you need double the labor due to a balance issue, you now need 100-160% of the population, and half your fort dies.

So if you make it realistically half your population as farmers, then the whole system would have to be MUCH more stable than now to be playable. Namely, skill couldn't be allowed to do nearly as much to swing outputs, nor could fertilization. Nor could you allow silliness like the arbitrary season cutoffs for crops being erased like now, etc. it's a lot harder to make and maintain.

Simply making dwarves hungrier will not successfully serve as a bandaid for this balance issue -- if you make dwarves 10x hungrier, then you initially will need 50% farmers, but as soon as any get high skill, you're back down to 5% again. Or if anybody uses fertilizer. Alternatively, if you want high skill and fertilizer to require 50%, then the initial labor requirement will be like 400% of the population, and forts will never get off the ground. This cannot be solved without food reworking properly.



However, if we had hunger as a parameter, then we could make simple mods that set it 15x higher, AND make farming a static skill at level 5 that can't be learned (or surpassed in embark), AND get rid of fertilizer somehow (may also require Toady intervention, but simple intervention), and it would work as a proper bandaid.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2014, 07:33:45 pm by GavJ »
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