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Author Topic: Food, its consumption and pricing  (Read 475 times)

Vyro

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Food, its consumption and pricing
« on: May 04, 2016, 10:22:06 am »

I'd be glad to see both adjusted - currently your dorfs require unrealistically tiny amounts of meal to survive (one unit consumed per month, really?) and those are borderline exploitably expensive, enough to buy out entire caravans (of raw food to make into more meals, ad nauseam).

Many sandboxy type games rely heavily on starvation as an important element of challenge, something DF utterly lacks in my opinion. Cause let's be honest here, when was the last time you've lost a fort to hunger? Outside of a Terrifying zombie Glacier? With no picks? Even as a newbie I don't remember having such problems. Invaders, clothing, hydrodynamics? Sure, we've all been there, but never starvation.

It is also downright annoying to me to just drown fort after fort in metric tonnes of lavish meals I know I can't possibly use up in any ways short of donating ludicrous amounts of value to passing caravans - I never trade food anymore, it's just filthy. Way past Wooden spiked balls filthy.

Can we fix that, please?
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Food, its consumption and pricing
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2016, 11:22:19 am »

While I agree that feeding your dwarves should be more involved, there isn't any way to do that so long as food is grown in bulk quantities simply by throwing seeds at dirt.  There is a planned update to farming to that end, and you can read the Improved Farming thread in my signature for more than you are likely to want to read on the subject of how it could be balanced.

Meal value, meanwhile, is also a known problem and will likely be fixed at some later date, as well, when trade as a whole is given an overhaul.

Dwarves eat once a month because the walk from the food stockpile to the dining room takes three hours, and they sleep for two days.  The timescale in dwarf fortress is massively warped, with walking distance taking an inordinately larger amount of time compared to everything else dwarves do.  Just a few versions ago, it was common for dwarves in well-provisioned forts to starve just because they wouldn't break off from their hauling tasks soon enough to make it to the booze stockpiles to take a drink or get something to eat.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare