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[Maximum Spin]

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!

If you approach the question from the opposite assumption — that each unit of food is however much food dwarves need for the period over which they eat it, not 1.6kg, and therefore that crop yields are extremely excessive, then food units are actually severely undervalued!

[Saiko Kila]

Yes, if dwarves were eating only a little bit more realistically, then they would starve in most scenarios, and the food would be more valuable than gold. 50000 ticks is 2.5 months! Even eating once every week would make survival very hard. And when you think about it, paying 800 dwarfbucks every season or so for sustenance is very cheap, comparing to other things and items.

If anything is overpriced it's clothing, especially since they use much more of it than food (even when counted in dwarfbucks per day, if you have good quality).

[Maximum Spin]

If anything is overpriced it's clothing, especially since they use much more of it than food (even when counted in dwarfbucks per day, if you have good quality).

Oh god yes. I still, to this day, run all my forts' trade almost exclusively on what falls off dwarves after using "cleanowned x" in dfhack.

[Fleeting Frames]

There are various mods that change grow durations and make food rot faster, but they don't do anything to butchery. It would be ~near trivial to make all  fort citizens hungry every week, though (or increase their hunger by 6000 per day), however.

If old clothing is overpriced, near everything is overpriced. Thread-weaving is just minimum-wage 10 U job, dyeing is bit better at 20 for most dyes, and even skipping that for maximing value per job with leather maximum value coverage (robe 33, trousers 23, shoes 8) results in average of 21,3 per set item, lower than what statues or mechanisms will fetch and just beating crafts if they're unworn. Unless importing leather from caravan (with maxes out as equivalent to bronze), best option is GCS silk farm, requiring much more setup compared to fire clay craft production for barely better results - assuming no ash in fort (glazing is very quick, beats dyeing and only uses 1/150th a bar, last I checked).

Of course, everything may be overpriced indeed. Can modify cloth values (at cost of protection, I think), but can't modify most of those things.

@mikekchar: Np.

Personally, I think the issue is that every single piece of roast stack gets value from every ingredient, regardless of the ingredient's amount. I.e. [10] sugar, [1] alcohol biscuit is as valuable as [1] sugar, [10] alcohol one. Cooking yields could be theoretically changed with a plugin, but it couldn't change that (only the resulting amount).

Roasts are only worth as much as chairs or single goblets per piece if one mods to remove material value from all ingredients, so that's one solution (4*10 dog meat still results in equivalent of 40 chairs, though there's 14 hauling jobs per dog - even including those, though, it still beats wooden spiked balls when butchering giant elephant calves).

However, second is kind of waste of time when one can just not trade roasts, and first is barely more useful.

Also, you overestimate farming yields. A legendary+5 farmer tolling on a potashed field will get an average of 4.94 plants per harvest, halfway decent one without potash gets 2.5 (analysis), and only the shortest growdur crops can be grown in a month.

[PatrikLundell]

Changing eating frequency without changing movement rate to match will cause a heavy dent in production, and possibly starvation if sites are far away (I think I've had a very deep fortress where it took about a week just to walk to the work sites by the magma sea I was draining).

Dorfs currently move at a 1:72 ratio, so eating rate should match that, not the nominal calendar time. If movement and eating rate changed to 1:1 compared to adventure mode, you'd definitely have to adjust how much you farm, but also how long it takes dorfs to plant and harvest (as well as weeding, when farming is overhauled), and you'd have to do something about stockpiling to handle the mounds of food required, etc, etc. It also would make a generational fortress a very slow project (or dorfs just effectively teleporting around, if time passes at the current 100 FPS rate, but movement rate is adjusted).

[Fleeting Frames]

Yeah, if a dwarf goes to bed peckish they'll starve before they wake up. I suppose there is fastdwarf and forcefeeding, though since starting 7 goes to sleep for first at ~once, even that might be unviable. Could be interesting challenge once past that.

Additional labour needs....Assuming one doesn't adjust drink needs or cook, it's 21 plump helmets per dwarf per season, which means 1 accomplished farmer per 9 dwarfs, roughly. Cooking and/or potash could of course increase that number, lower skill lower. If you start with no farmers and want to use farming without boosts to provide sustance, I think most dwarves have to farm (not sure how many exactly), assuming you have enough seeds to plant next crop when previous is harvested.

[Miuramir]

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.

Warning: gets a bit divergent and philosophical. 

I think you're going about it a bit backward; the "meals" implied in DF are an abstraction needed by the sim so that they aren't constantly going back and forth.  So, if you think of it as a month's (or whatever) worth of food, it's a bit more sensible. 

In the real world, I think most people are exposed to somewhat over two orders of magnitude of meal cost, with outliers that stretch it to three.  For instance, in the US to someone of a typical class, a poverty diet that manages to cover all the nutrition requirements for a day might run $1, whereas a really nice special occasion dinner out might cost approaching $100.  In a cheaper economy or with efficient bulk logistics the poverty diet cost would drop down, and there are certainly restaurants that charge well more than that, so $0.5 to $500 as a less common spread isn't unreasonable; three orders of magnitude.  So, in a world that doesn't have magic, or fantasy animals, etc. having an expensive meal cost 1000x what a cheap meal costs is reasonable; and when you add elaborate exotics it could logically go up even further. 

The difference is, for most people who are not *very* rich, they don't eat the most expensive meals for a whole month; imagine what the astronomical cost would be if you ate only at Michelin-starred restaurants for your entire food requirements for a month.  Whereas due to the way DF abstracts things, an expensive meal is an expensive entire month. 

This isn't to say that the DF food system isn't out of whack; it certainly has issues.  However, it's not as bad as it looks at first.  Most of the problem is on the other end, crop production.  And this gets into what is fun vs. what is realistic.  Historically, the vast majority of humans have been engaged in the business of producing and processing food for humans.  Growing the Land has some interesting info; while based on the US which due to various reasons biases the number of "farmers" upward...
1790: farmers are 90% of the work force
1840: farmers are 69% of the work force
1890: farmers are 43% of the work force
1940: farmers are 18% of the work force
1990: farmers are <3% of the work force

The nominal default cap for a DF fort is 200; and many people have issues of running forts that populated.  It's pretty clear that even semi-realistic late medieval (pre-1400ish) ratios would not be fun for most; perhaps having in a full fort of 200 something like 50 young kids, 75 farmers, 25 ranchers, 20 food processing (brewers, threshers, millers, cooks, etc.), 20 fabric processing (spinners, weavers, dyers, clothesmakers, etc.), and only 10 people to cover the "overhead" which is the cool stuff: sheriff, baron, cleric, scholar, blacksmith, carpenter, maybe a man-at-arms or two, etc.  Now, as a resource-extraction town, you could do better; mining towns didn't have enough farmers to feed everyone, but depended on selling their products (metal, stone, etc.) for the surplus of other, more agricultural towns. 

So, it's clear that 90% of the population to provide and deal with food isn't fun.  And that modern-ish 5% to 10% is stretching disbelief a bit too much.  But where in between that is the best?  It's a genuinely hard problem. 

My personal opinion is that I I usually prefer forts that are at least mostly self-sufficient on necessities (ie, not selling giant corkscrews for food from the caravans, or whatever); and that I want no more than half the fort to feel like "overhead", yet less than say 20% - 25% feels cheaty.  So, I'd want to adjust things so that one farmer raises food to feed 5 to 15 dwarves, perhaps, plus an egg industry and some meat.  Say, 25% of the fort producing or processing food and drink, another 25% producing clothes, weapons, armor, doors, beds, and so on, giving 50% to cover miners, military, and so on.