I love food. That's why the current DF implementation always irked me. The idea that cooks would prepare finished meals which you then store in barrels feels so... wrong and illogical. I wouldn't store my roasted chicken with delicious potatoes in a barrel and eat it half a year later, no sir! Besides, being able to sell this chicken to a caravan wouldn't work well with the upcoming caravan arc. I don't want dwarves storing finished stews in a barrel, I want them storing onions, potatoes and salted meat, and preparing the stew only minutes before eating it. No more cooking steaks, stews, etc., and storing them in stockpiles for years... nor selling them to caravans!
In short: dwarves shouldn't cook and store huge piles of finished meals, they should store raw ingredients and cook only just before eating.While the change is mostly just cosmetic, it would have many consequences in how stockpiles and workshops are handled. The actual implementation is more complicated and open to discussion (this is the opportunity for you!). Obviously, foods could be eaten raw and some raw ingredients could be
preserved indefinitely even without cooking (smoked meat, salted fish...). Also, when it finally gets to cooking, the ways could vary. Individual cooking at home, taverns, food stalls, servant cooks... The options are many. I've tried to come up with a system that is both fun and easy to manage. As little micromanagement as possible, hopefully even less than in current DF. Feel free to come up with your own refinements, ideas, counter suggestions, etc.
This is not a thread about food variety! (We had enough of those) It's about storing, preparation, and eating.
I do realise there's about bazillion of food threads here, and I did read them. I'm stealing ideas all around, most notably from
Preparation, Preservation, and Hungry Hungry Hominids. I could have posted this in that thread, I guess, but seeing as it is two years old and that this post is quite long, I decided to create a new thread.
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Why change it?Why change the system "take any food ingredients>cook them>store the prepared meal in a barrel" to something more complex?
- It feels weird and out of place in a game that simulates yield strength of different metals, individual body tissues or personalities.
- The old system is bland. Imagine instead of people eating mangled stuff from barrels, they would visit taverns or food stalls, or cook at home, or have servant cooks. New interesting locations or professions!
- Food could potentialy become an easy way to create differences between a dwarf fortress, human town, goblin tower or elf retreat. I can imagine goblins eating all together from a huge pot, elves eating only raw foods, humans buying food on marketplaces and cooking it home (men could work, women could shop and cook). All of these are viable rooms or workshops for the different game modes.
- A better system would add flavour to the game and perhaps even make people enthusiastic about food. Take for example how the "realistic" geology made many people interested in stones. Apply it to food (it's healthy and educational
). - It completely breaks any economy and I guess it's prerequisite for the caravan arc. You can't just trade prepared steaks and stews without breaking the economy (or at least the immersion).
- Food has a great gameplay potential in trading or even diplomacy. If storing food becomes more difficult, suddenly some kinds of food become rare and valuable! Caravans of food would suddenly be interesting and important. Trading for exotic foods, grain tributes, etc...
1. Obtaining and storing foodSo the food could only be stored
before cooking, and cooking a meal would be the end of its career. There are many threads about obtaining food or having different food types so I won't talk about it here. See
farming improvements or many others.
To keep it simple, I'd divide foods into things that spoil (vegetables, meat, bread...) and things that never spoil (like alcohol, grain, salted meat, etc.). Things that spoil would all spoil after the same time (say... two seasons in dwarf mode), things that won't will stay forever. It's very simplified, but easy to remember and manage. (Though I can imagine a third group of things that spoil really quickly - like meat - in a month or so). In adventure mode, times could be more varied and realistic, but in dwarf mode, having things spoil only after two seasons or so gives you enough time to process them without much hassle and micromanagement. You would have to
eat them or
preserve them eventually. Preserved food would never spoil.
A quick sketch of food types, just an example:
- Meat and fish: spoil, can be preserved by drying, salting or smoking
- Prepared organs: spoil, cannot be preserved
- Fruit, mushrooms and vegetables: spoil, cannot be preserved (optionally, depending of how many subsystems we want to implement, can be preserved by canning and pickling... with difficulties and in small amounts)
- Grain: can't be eaten but doesn't ever spoil
- Bread: spoils, can't be preserved
- Milk: spoils (alternatively, "spoils very quickly" if we have 3 groups) can't be preserved but can be made to cheese (or perhaps have all milk in dwarf mode immediately made into cheese).
- Cheese: doesn't spoil (? - I'm thinking hard cheese as the standard), can't be otherwise preserved
- More details and suggestions in this thread.
Spoiling after two seasons sounds about right... this would mean that eg. humans would be able to live off autumn harvest od vegetables through the winter but come spring they'd be reduced to eat bread only. Unless they had stocks of salted fish or smoked meat, of course. This sounds reasonably historical and prevents you from hoarding huge amounts of food (or at least makes it harder) which is good for game balance I think.
Some kind of AI that would make dwarves eat spoilables first would be nice. Personal preferences would come into play, of course.
NOTE: please don't confuse preserved food which refers to processed raw ingredients (dried meat, salted fish, dried mushrooms...) with prepared meals which refers to cooked meals (biscuits, stews and roasts in the current version).2. Eating and cookingFood could be eaten raw (no change here) or cooked. Cooking would happen right before eating, not weeks or months! The player would no longer order food to be cooked - dwarves would cook automatically, by themselves, as needed or as they get hungry. The player would only have to build some kind of a kitchen, then forget about cooking entirely. If the player wouldn't build a kitchen, dwarves would resort to eating raw food. Eating raw food only would probably cause bad mood.
The "prepared meal" items as we have them now would no longer exist. Technically, there would probably still be some "cooked meal" items... existing for a couple of seconds after dwarves take them out of a kitchen, and before they eat them. They would have no gameplay relevance, nor could they be stored. If for some reason a dwarf wouldn't finish his meal, it would count as refuse.
There's many possibilities how to handle "kitchens". Just throwing some ideas (thinking in dwarf mode terms):
- Individual cooking: a person would grab ingredients and just cook them for themselves. Either in their room (optionally might require a "stove" furniture) or in a communal kitchen that can be used by anyone (implemented the same way as current kitchens, or perhaps as hospital-like rooms where you'd place stoves and food stockpiles). The food turns into prepared meal. Eat it quickly!
- Family cooking: in non-egalitarian societies (humans?), women wouldn't work (you wouldn't be able to assign any jobs to them). Instead they would obtain/buy food and cook it at home for the whole family. I imagine it implemented via some kind of pot that holds many servings at once. The woman would periodically replenish it so there's food for the family at any time (much easier to implement that to have all the family members eat at once). For the sake of simplicity, the food in the pot wouldn't rot... it's bound be eaten very soon anyway.
- Communal cooking: very much like family cooking, just for the whole fortress at once. A huge pot or several pots served by full-time cooks. Anyone gets hungry, they come to the mess hall and take a serving of stew from the common pot.
- Taverns could again use the periodically replenished pot (to have food available at all times). The "pot" system might be expanded to include other meals than stews in other kinds of containers. Like a barbeque "pot" holding a roasted pig, for example.
- Servant cooks could be implemented the same way as family cooks, so they'd simply keep a continual supply of prepared meals (perhaps better quality) in the lord's manor. Cooking by order would be the hardest to implement since you'd somehow have to synchronise several dwarves to one "job" (the servant cooking and the lord waiting).
Only some ways would be available to a dwarf player, but other races would use different cooking habits. As I've said, imagine dwarves using individual cooking + taverns, humans using family cooking, goblins using large communal pots, etc.
To elaborate on the "pot" idea: I think food in "pots" shouldn't rot or degrade for the sake of simplicity. You can't take it out anyway (so it's almost like it didn't exist), and spoiling would just add too much micromanagement. If fort mode dwarves eat about 8 times a year, then some kind of rotting simplification is necessary. While a pot could still hold prepared meals indefinitely, it would be only small amounts (4 to 10?) - nothing like the thousands of roasts and stews we have in barrells now. The thousands of items would need to be stored in raw/preserved state. Once cooked, food could only be eaten or thrown away, never sold to caravans.
Optional: I believe this cooking system would be later easily expandable by adding nutritional effects or food diseases/sterilisation by cooking. But that's over the scope of this suggestion. I'd like to keep it as basic as possible.EconomyFood is the base level for the whole economy. Unless you have food economy functioning properly, you have no economy
It's very important to get it right for the caravan arc if Toady wants to have "realistic" worlds. The target we want is: basic foods like grain selling for
very low prices in
very high quantities (think grain caravans), and moving from villages to towns. Villages keep towns alive, a towns can't survive without food from the countryside. In more concrete terms:
- Grain, vegetables and fruit are cheap and available in huge supplies. They are only traded in the raw form.
- Since fruit and vegetables are spoilables, they should have limited caravan "range". Caravans would take them only short distances. Grain doesn't spoil and can be shipped all over the world.
- Addendum: I think the problem with fruit/vegetables transport wasn't just time, but perhaps more importantly the hazards of medieval travel - insects, bumping and other nasty things that would destroy the fruit after quite a short distance
- Raw meat and raw fish are average priced and can be traded only locally since they spoil too fast. Prepared organs fall into this category as well, so you wouldn't be able to buy sausages from caravans for example.
- Meat instead gets traded in livestock form If you want sausages, you have to butcher the pig yourself! Livestock is expensive and can be traded short distances (I guess?).
- Preserved (smoked, salted...) meats and fish are expensive but can be traded all over the world.
- Milk is extremely short distances only.
For dwarf mode players it would mean they could buy quite a limited range of foods, depending on the exact game location. If they are in an isolated area, caravans would only bring things like salted meat, but the player might arrange grain caravans as well. No fruit or vegetables though. If, on the other hand, the fortress was built in an inhabited area, it would get large variety of spoilable foods from the outlying farms.
It's debatable whether to have the same "towns need villages" apply not only to the world, but also to player fortresses. I'd say YES since having to care about food caravans sounds like Fun. But fortunately fortress mode can cheat and use different rules then the rest of the world.
Optional:If we want fortresses dependent on the outside world, we have to do something about the limited food consumption. As it is now, dwarves eat too little. Butchering one cow yields about 15 meat and 10 organs, which is 25 food units, which means single cow can feed 4 dwarves for a year. Obviously, this totally breaks the whole economy. Unless this is changed, having enough food in fortress mode would stay extremely easy.
Ideally, a dwarf should consume the same amount of food per year in the fortress mode as in the adventurer mode. In adventurer mode, dwarves eat (or will eat) each day. In fortress mode, they eat about 8 times a year. Which means one fortress-mode meal ought to represent 1/8th of 336 = 42 adventurer-mode meals. The question is how to handle this in a way that still is user-friendly. In any case, it would probably require many changes in Numbers(TM)
We have no answer yet, and I would like to ask you to discuss the issue. My original, now outdated proposal is in the spoiler.
If we want fortresses dependent on the outside world, we have to do something about the limited food consumption. As it is now, dwarves eat too little. Butchering one cow yields about 15 meat and 10 organs, which is 25 food units, which means single cow can feed 4 dwarves for a year. Obviously, this totally breaks the whole economy. So what to do about it? I thing the number of food obtained from a cow is all right, I think (for adventure mode). The ideal solution would IMHO be rapidly increase the number of food items a dwarf-mode dwarf consumes in a single meal... to 10 units, perhaps? Then, for the sake of simplicity, divide all displayed food numbers in dwarf mode by 10 (in a similar fashion how metal bars or cloth works now). So butchering a cow in dwarf mode would yield 1 to 2 meat and 1 "organs". Internally, there would still be the proper amounts - just hidden -, and if you visited the fortress in adventure mode you would indeed see 10 to 20 meat and 10 different organs in a heap.
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Well... and that's about it. I've outlined how I imagine food could be working after the caravan arc. I also recommend reading the
thread I mentioned many times for inspiration. Any comments welcome.
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Topic: More reasonable food system (aka Down with prepared meals!) (Read 32789 times)