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[snow dwarf]

I have a slight feeling that dwarves value food a tiny bit too much.

[Fleeting Frames]

Gratz, you made a salad.

Generally, how it works: Cook may, instead of picking a single ingredient from the barrel, pick up and uses the entire barrel ingredient list as single entry for a cooking job.

However, for prepared meal calculation purposes, each of the ingredients is minced separately, and thus their material values are included separately.

It's easy to cause it by embarking with 300 milk, proficient cook and a sugar bag. But I'm not exactly the clear on the circumstances for doing this with sugar and plants themselves (other than my QSPs, containing no barrels, will not make it happen).

[RWARO_GNARL]

...How does one make a stack of 385 serving?

[snow dwarf]

...How does one make a stack of 385 serving?

It's fairly easy. As fleeting frames said. They take a whole barrel of rice beer instead of a single unit.

[Fleeting Frames]

The rice beer was framed!

Though I suppose it did count for about 25 of that 385.

[anewaname]

There could also be a high value meat stack in there.

[mikekchar]

Easiest way to get huge stacks like that is mega-beast meat or fat (forgotten beast will do it too, I think).  Because the roast has 4 ingredients, but only shows the first one in the title, it's hard to see.

If you get something like that, it's a good idea to try to engineer a roast with a few ingredients that many dwarfs like.  400 roasts with a popular ingredient is going to satisfy a few dwarfs for a *long* time.

Edit: just to clarify: Imagine that you had 4 dwarfs that like cranberry wine, 2 that like pond turtle and 2 that like lettuce.  You have a stack of 350 forgotten beast tallow.  You forbid everything except the cranberry wine (say stack of 30), pond turtle (stack of 1), lettuce (stack of 5) and forgotten beast tallow (350).  You make a roast and end up with a stack of 386 "cranberry wine roast".  That 386 stack of cranberry wine roast will satisfy food needs for 8 of your dwarfs for years and years.  Of course some of them will be eaten by other dwarfs, but as long as the "cranberry wine roasts" are in the food search radius for those 8 dwarfs, they will seek it out.  You basically never need to worry about those dwarf's food.  You can prioritise buying weird ingredients for your other dwarfs.

[Fleeting Frames]

Huge stacks, yes. Like that, no. Highest material value boost is provided by whip vine flour at 25, and that gives you meals around 6,7 (Legendary+5 average quality bonus) *(10 (base prep meal)+1 (fb meat)+25*3 (whip vine) )*385 (stack size above) = 221837. Not bad and worth doing, sure. (Though dwarves generally like something of bit lower value, so it's probably be something like 4 instead of 25 there if going for that.)

Kinda falls short of above, though, but could still reach it with luck. But not possible to reach the 12 mil Urist ones with this.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Is what you're saying that the value of an individual roast (one meal's worth) increases with the number of distinct ingredients (or more precisely, stacks of ingredients) used in its creation?

[mikekchar]

The price you are highlighting is for all 385 roasts.  Yes, it's misleading.  So the actual price per roast is 852.   Calculation description is here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Item_value

Basically you have a multiplier of 5 for the overall quality.  Each ingredient has modifier for the mincing quality (from 1 to 12).  Each ingredient also has a base value (rice beer is 2, and forgotten beast meat is probably 1... we don't know what the other ingredients are).  So you take (10 + (the value of each ingredient multiplied by its mincing quality)) * 5 -- which is how you get up to 852.

[snow dwarf]

The price you are highlighting is for all 385 roasts.  Yes, it's misleading.  So the actual price per roast is 852.   Calculation description is here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Item_value

Basically you have a multiplier of 5 for the overall quality.  Each ingredient has modifier for the mincing quality (from 1 to 12).  Each ingredient also has a base value (rice beer is 2, and forgotten beast meat is probably 1... we don't know what the other ingredients are).  So you take (10 + (the value of each ingredient multiplied by its mincing quality)) * 5 -- which is how you get up to 852.

I know, but I feel like a single proficient cook shouldn't be able to create a roast worth more than an artifact. And there was no forgotten beast meat for sure. My fort was living off of only gathered fruit (maybe one or two giant skinks)

[anewaname]

Some of the giant versions of animals drop at x5 butchering returns. Giant elephants are at the high end of the range, dropping 700-1100 meat at x5. Check your skull collection at the butcher's shop and you may see that your hunters hauled in something large.

[Saiko Kila]

I think it would be enough to just check composition of that particular roast stack... All ingredients are listed, it's usually quite easy to identify the one which gave such big volume boost, there's only a couple of them. It's still volume boost only, single roast cost is pretty standard in this case.

I always sell such stacks, preferring to sell less items but of higher value.

Also, role-playing a bit, most artefacts are darn useless for dwarves. Food - they can find use for, so they value it more.

[Fleeting Frames]

@Dozebôm Lolumzalìs: Yep. 100 milk on embark comes in 20 stacks of 5, so it totals as valuable as regular sugar.

@mikechar: Nope.

The overall quality multiplies only the prepared meal's base value of 10, not the rest of the ingredients.

If it worked like that, Legendary+5 cook 100-stack syrup/bush meals would be worth on average 328k, not 54k.

@anewaname: Only perhaps pair of syrup-cooked dragons with everything but the meal itself masterful could provide this much value in 385 without salads. (12*(20+20+15+15)+5*10)*385 = 342650

[mikekchar]

Thanks Fleeting Frames.  I was wondering why I couldn't get the numbers to work out.

I don't think anyone disagrees that roasts are *waaay* overvalued.  Stack size aside, a single roast should not work out to 800+ (especially since it wasn't even a masterpiece).  Food needs an overhaul in a bad way.  I think cooking yield needs to go down a lot.

I was just checking the wiki.  Dwarfs eat between every 40-50,000 ticks assuming food is available and they aren't busy.  They can go up to 65,000 ticks if they have a long term task.  A year is 403,200 ticks, so at most a dwarf eats 10 times a year.  A single ingredient counts as a single food.  A single tile farm with a half way capable farmer will give you at least a stack of 5 plants per month.  A tile is 4 square meters (43 square feet).  Just roughly, cereal crop yield in the world now is about 4000 kg per hectare, which works out to 400 *grams* per square meter -- or 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs) per DF tile.  Never mind that it's a whole season worth of growth, not just a single month.

So a dwarf can subsist for at least half a year (and realistically a *lot* more) on 1.6 kg of wheat -- or about 3-4 loaves of bread.  Or in other words, a single meal (that lasts for at least a month) is composed of 1.5 loaves of bread (or about 7-800 calories) -- realistically a large dinner.  A slightly nice wooden wheelbarrow costs 200 units (just sold one recently).  If we think that corresponds to about $100, then we are saying that the very nice prepared meal is in the $400 range.  That's quite expensive for an 800 calorie meal.

I live in Japan and at New Years people buy osechi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osechi) bento boxes.  Really crazy ones can get up to $100, but most *very high quality* boxes are between $25 and $50.  So I'm thinking the price for an exceptional meal is probably about 4-6 times over priced.  However the real problem is not the price, it's how little dwarfs eat in fortress mode.  Half a day's calories for an entire month!