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[Sarmatian123]

One issue with royal jelly is how to make chefs in kitchen to actually use it.
Even once, we patched with special stockpiles issue of food stored in bags and jugs inside barrels (flour and sugar bags) and bins (jelly jugs),
which makes their contents invisible for cooking. Given everyone has "no mix" in orders menu turned on. (By default it is not. Nice trap Toady!)
It seems cooking has iron priorities in what is getting cooked first and only first.
One priority has to be worked entirely away, before another priority is even considered for cooking.
There is no randomness. It seems most dishes almost always contain only one food.
So forget about cooking lavish meal with 1 dog meat, 1 garden grass with 1 dwarven wheat flour and 1 spice of sorts (there's no spices in DF yet? ).
Combining ingredients coming in small "1" batches with "8" home-grown plants for example, so their satisfaction bonus lasts longer,
seems almost impossible without tedious managing of 4 1x1 food stockpiles (next challenge for automation to have beside 20 auto-stills also 200 auto-kitchens?).

1. Seeds (At the beginning of embark unlucky priority for all those, who forget to forbid cooking all seeds from start. Nice trap Toady!)
2. Meats-> Fishes-> Plants and Fruits (Basically basic fresh food for all cooking and eating purposes.)
3. Processed food like flour, sugar and (if jelly's tool-stockpile is closer kitchen then stockpile for flour, and sugar!) _royal_jelly_.

So, basically all foods except flour and sugar have to be disabled for kitchen.
The only way to efficiently empty royal jelly jugs without adding besides "empty water bucket" another process for screw press.
Imho, this information should be mentioned on wiki both with royal jelly information and in kitchen with cooking.
Kitchen is a cumbersome business, as farming and bee-keeping.

You can not expect a new player of Dwarf Fortress to enjoy automating mead brewing and automating royal jelly cooking without this vital information about these priority linkages.

Also, if it wasn't about this guaranteed depression issue in Dwarves none would bother with cumbersome kitchen mechanics. Same meal of dog meat and plump helmets for everyone year around! Though as fulfilling needs fixes only focus, the question is why highly focused Dwarves spiral down in depression less, then unfocused ones? Depression is not caused by (= focus) needs, right? At least !Science! so far claimed. So, why this correlation? Is focus the issue causing depression to spiral down, besides main moods' alterations from rain and dead bodies and such?

[TubaDragoness]

By default, all seeds except for tree seeds (almonds, pecans, etc) are are set to no-cook. Also, prepared meals do not satisfy desires/needs for good meals at the moment. They must contain one of the specific foods a dwarf prefers for them to find it pleasurable, and they don't seek prepared food out with this in mind.

The result is that I rarely make actual meals. I disable cooking on any plant or fruit that can be brewed, all boozes, and meats and fish that are edible raw. Dwarves are better about seeking out their favorite foods when it's still a raw ingredient.

This is not forever. The game is still very much in Alpha at the moment, and there are plenty of bugs and kinks to work out. And once food is working properly again, I will resume cooking fabulous meals for my dwarves.

Is it newbie-friendly? Also no. Most of the game is not. They learn the same way any of us did: asking questions on the forums, reading the wiki, or just trying things and learning from their failures and successes.

[coalboat]

Dwarves are better about seeking out their favorite foods when it's still a raw ingredient.

Do they do this?

[PatrikLundell]

Dwarves are better about seeking out their favorite foods when it's still a raw ingredient.

Do they do this?

Initial research indicated dorfs failed to target meals containing their favorite ingredients (and I was one of those who claimed that was the case), but that turned out to be wrong, because DF hides what the *actual* favorite ingredient is, saying e.g. "bobcat" when it's actually giant bobcat liver, so them not seeking out bobcat meals was caused by the bobcat part wasn't the desired one, or the bobcat wasn't the giant variety. Further research taking this into consideration found that they did actually seek out such meals. And yes, they do seek out raw ingredients as well.

Thus, cooking can actually be useful in multiplying the number of meals containing the very few favorite ingredients you can get hold of by adding "don't care" ingredients. A Lavish Meal has a rough multiplier of 4. I've also seen it claimed that meal quality does matter, but only when a favorite ingredient is included, i.e. greater satisfaction from a higher quality/more valuable meal (possibly not hitting a favorite ingredient causes a base multiplier of 0?).

[coalboat]

Very useful information!

[Sarmatian123]

I see, so first ingredient matter for naming sake and Dwarves ability to search for it.
The other 3 ingredients are just matter of filling in the blanks.
This could be solved with one 1x1 stockpile accepting from links and filler materials in general stockpile. Placing stockpiles would be crucial here. Thanks for sharing this info. This may yet be helpful for something.

The thing is, Dwarves will not pick flour, sugar or royal jelly, unless all seeds and all fresh foods are gone from fortress. Linking is crucial.

I solved my issue with cooking royal jelly by setting automated cooking order for lavish meal with following settings:
cookable(trait) honey bee royal jelly(material)(fluid item type)
available is at least 3
With setting "at least 1" I was cooking frequently also honey and receiving spam of canceled jobs from mead brewer.

However I have a question. Maybe someone knows. Does refuse stockpile delete animal fat and wax cake from game? They seem to last there for ever and ever.

PS. Do not expect fixes for old unfinished systems soon. Toady does new features. Those give more hype to the game. Fixing bugs, balancing and finishing old features are not priority for understandable reasons. All test-embarks of Toady seem to be short time business lasting just months to test some features. Not wonder the bug with construction and digging, which appears on largest embarks has totally past attention of Toady. Steam version may bring Toady some stress about fixing game critical bugs. From 2015 (release year of Witcher 3) there is an expectancy from gamers that games "just work". Patience for betas and alphas sold at full price of regular games is gone.

[PatrikLundell]

No. The first ingredient matters for naming, and it also has to be a solid. The other three satisfy corresponding needs when present and can be liquid as well.

Nobody likes fixing bugs, as it's tedious, boring, and gives little sense of progress. However, the statement that there is no tolerance for bugs in today's market doesn't match well with most "releases" being alpha bug fests (called "open access" and the like), and quite a few being "fully released" while only half the contents (let alone balancing) has been done.

[Sarmatian123]

Thanks for info. Solid eh. I have folks like to consume milk. I was hoping to cook that.
Is milk drinkable in DF? Will Dwarves drink their favorit milk instead of alcohol?

I have 18 alcohols plus mead. I have all sorts of caravan food plus (18+) special stores with plants and fruits.
Alcohol makes Dwarves only content. I removed shrine zone from drinking area for no gain. Still killing 1 psycho per season.

About bug fixing and betas, this is true. However people pay for betas and alphas and get every 3 months regular content updates and bug fixes. Toady is all alone in it. Nobody helps him. This can cause issues for him on steam, when entire crowd of paying customers this time will come down on him complaining about bugs, unfinished features and releases with bug fixes coming far between. I hope it will end well. To keep it up, he will need somehow get to this boring, tedious and giving little sense of progress activity to get some bug fixes out from time to time, between big features' releases.

[coalboat]

Dwarf cannot drink milk, but milk can be the non-first ingredient of a prepared meal. I often see dwarf feeling "blissful" after drinking, so maybe it depends on individual dwarf's personality...

[PatrikLundell]

Dwarves can have non alcoholic beverages as favorites (and I've seen water!). However, I haven't positively confirmed that they drink it, but I don't see why they wouldn't be able to (a test might be to have no alcohol or water, but only milk, and see if they resort to milk when out of booze and they don't have water).

When it comes to the commercial DF launch, I am worried for it due to the backlash potential as well as the risk of it losing income rather than gaining if many people switch from regular donations to a single time purchase. However, the course is set, and I hope it ends up well. It can also be noted that Toady is changing the process from a single code base to one where the latest release is supported in parallel with production of the next one. This ought to mean regular updates/patches fixing bugs and adding/modifying minor features to show that there is actually work going on even during the Big Wait.

[Salmeuk]

Dwarves are better about seeking out their favorite foods when it's still a raw ingredient.

Do they do this?

. . .because DF hides what the *actual* favorite ingredient is, saying e.g. "bobcat" when it's actually giant bobcat liver. . .

Wow, I had no idea that was thing. I feel as though not everyone should possess so specific a taste. Perhaps personalities should run more on scales of apathetic vs. obsessive regarding preferences or favorites. Or the amount of favorites should vary between dwarves, so you could potentially have a dwarf with 30 prefs, while another might only have 3.

[Sarmatian123]

About naming dishes. I just found "honey bee royal jelly roast[5]" in my fortress. Quite few of them. The first ingredient is always some solid flour of sorts, but the other 3 are royal jellies. I think I got it, because I set the job to wait for 3 jellies available first. Maybe naming depends also on the most frequent ingredient used and not just the first one? So, I could make "milk roast [?]" as well?

Toady could use integration and testing server like Jenkins for example. Hell to write plugins for it, but it is one of the oldest and still most used in programming. It would run all compilations and tests, when he sleeps. Just a thought. Maybe worth for suggestion thread?

[PatrikLundell]

I may misremember the naming rule for cooked meal, so that might actually be the last ingredient that determines the name. I believe you could make meals with milk as an ingredient, but for some reason mead isn't cookable, so you can't make mead roast.

@Salmeuk: Yes, the hiding of actual preferences took a fair while to be detected. It was seen a lot earlier, but thought to just be a representation quirk. The list of issues is a fair bit longer though, such as preferences for parts that can never be gained through butchery because the animal isn't large enough (e.g. cavy eyes), parts of vermin (mosquito brain), and parts of animals that were never generated anywhere in that world. I've probably missed a few. https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10954 was an attempt to sum up the bugs as well as reporting a few new ones.

[Garfunkel]

So cooking as usual or better to leave it all as raw ingredients and hope for the best?

[PatrikLundell]

I'd say cooking is better, as you have some chance of getting a higher satisfaction for the few dorfs that happen to like something you can provide. If you go out of the way to buy desired things from the caravans you can also achieve some meal multiplication through it (but of course, all 4 of the very rare ingredients will happen to end up in the same batch of lavish meals...).
Booze cooking is especially powerful given that there's a much more limited kinds of booze than there's kinds of solid food, but it's a lot of work to manage it, I think (unless you use a script, in which case it's a lot of work to try to balance the script).

The losses from cooking are basically:
- Additional labor spent that could have been tasked elsewhere (probably only applicable to low pop fortresses, as large ones seem to get more workers than there's work for).
- Loss of meals due to rotting in the kitchen. Again, low pop fortresses are more vulnerable to the morons hauling old refuse rather than saving fresh food (until it spoils, at which time they'll haul it).
- More player management.
- Some checks (probably yearly) to see that you keep enough seeds of each cultivated shrub.
- An additional actor fighting over multi use resources (like Pig Tail's use for booze, food, and thread).