Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: 1 [2] 3

Author Topic: Advanced food and booze  (Read 11226 times)

Broseph Stalin

  • Bay Watcher
  • Dabbling Surgeon, Proficient Butcher.
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2011, 10:11:19 am »

my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.

I guess I'm going to have to test that again, this time more thoroughly.


I only ever cook Lavish.  Keeps everyone real happy.

If you imply that meal value results in happy thoughts directly then that is a common misconception. It used to work this way, or at least appeared to, but currently they only get thoughts about food and drink they have a preference for. I'm repeating myself now, since I said the same in this very thread.

Of course I don't expect you to take my word for it, especially after being possibly wrong about that other thing, but this is easy to test. Look for "had a fine/wonderful/legendary/whatever meal/drink" thoughts in your dwarves' profiles and compare their preferences vs what you provide. If my recent forts have been any indication, you should notice no such thoughts unless they're accompanied by a preference for something produced locally.
I can actually vouch for that, my food is all stockpiled in one place so that might have something to do with it but they actually cooked all of our booze before they touched the syrup.

Lemunde

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #16 on: November 29, 2011, 10:44:13 am »

my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.

I guess I'm going to have to test that again, this time more thoroughly.


I only ever cook Lavish.  Keeps everyone real happy.

If you imply that meal value results in happy thoughts directly then that is a common misconception. It used to work this way, or at least appeared to, but currently they only get thoughts about food and drink they have a preference for. I'm repeating myself now, since I said the same in this very thread.

Of course I don't expect you to take my word for it, especially after being possibly wrong about that other thing, but this is easy to test. Look for "had a fine/wonderful/legendary/whatever meal/drink" thoughts in your dwarves' profiles and compare their preferences vs what you provide. If my recent forts have been any indication, you should notice no such thoughts unless they're accompanied by a preference for something produced locally.

By my understanding dwarves get a happy thought if they eat a meal that has an ingredient they like in it. Since lavish meals use more ingredients it's more likely that it will have an ingredient they like. However if you focus production on food items that many dwarves like it may be more efficient to make biscuits or just leave your food raw.
Logged

proxn_punkd

  • Bay Watcher
  • Still a better dove story than Twilight
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #17 on: November 29, 2011, 12:45:32 pm »

About five turkey hens and a gobbler pastured in a coop next to your kitchen with some nest boxes is an easy way to make more prepared meals.

When they start to get old, lock the door to the coop until a clutch is hatched and butcher any extra gobblers, starting with the oldest one.

Voila! you have a poultry industry. Where minced eggs are not pointless, but a delicacy!

The best part is, poultry feeds by filtering nutrients out of the air (ergo, they don't graze). And after a while you'll have enough eggs that you don't have to be worried about brewing all the crops.

I think I will start with this idea as this seems a good compliment to my puppy kebab special I serve to my dwarfs.
Are there any non grazing animals that gives leather?

Any animal whose size is 2000 or higher in the raws gives leather, meat, and bones in addition to a skull. Any animal whose size is smaller than 2000 typically only gives a skull when slaughtered. As a baseline, anything cat-sized or larger IRL probably gives meat, leather, and bones in DF (including cats).

Of the poultry options, ducks and guineafowl only give skulls, and all others give meat and leather. Turkeys give relatively large amounts of eggs while living and meat, bones, and leather when slaughtered, and are generally the preferred poultry.

Among grazers, sheep are usually prized; they have relatively low grazing requirements, but give milk and wool while living, and meat, leather, and bones when slaughtered. General protocol is to slaughter unwanted stray grazers as soon as they arrive or as soon as it's reasonably feasible, and pasture grazer pets until they can be disposed of without pissing off the owner too badly.

I usually stash baby non-grazer animals in a cage in the meeting areas so dwarves who like those kinds of animals can get happy thoughts: "saw a wonderful creature in a cage recently". When they mature, they are pastured or chained, examined thoroughly, and culled so the biggest/fattest/most muscular live on and breed while the smaller/skinnier/weaker ones line my dwarves' larder.
Logged

Sphalerite

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Drew's Robots and stuff
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #18 on: November 29, 2011, 01:16:38 pm »

Here's what you can get from each of the domestic animals:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

From this we can see that of the non-grazing common domestic animals, the dog has the highest yield of meat and other butchering products.  Turkeys are the best of the egg-layers.  Ducks and guineafowl are never large enough to get anything but a skull, but they go give eggs.  Rabbits and cavies are completely useless.

Water buffalo are the highest meat common domestic animal, but they're nearly impossible to keep fed.  Sheep, alpaca, and llamas are all good choices for grazing livestock, you can not only butcher them for meat but get milk, cheese, and wool from the living animals.

ETA:  On closer inspection, either geese or blue peafowl are actually superior to turkeys as sources of meat.  Turkeys take two years to reach full size, geese and peafowls only take one year, and the amount of meat you get from them appears to be the same.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2011, 01:58:51 pm by Sphalerite »
Logged
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Psilobe

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #19 on: November 29, 2011, 01:34:59 pm »

About five turkey hens and a gobbler pastured in a coop next to your kitchen with some nest boxes is an easy way to make more prepared meals.

When they start to get old, lock the door to the coop until a clutch is hatched and butcher any extra gobblers, starting with the oldest one.

Voila! you have a poultry industry. Where minced eggs are not pointless, but a delicacy!

The best part is, poultry feeds by filtering nutrients out of the air (ergo, they don't graze). And after a while you'll have enough eggs that you don't have to be worried about brewing all the crops.

I think I will start with this idea as this seems a good compliment to my puppy kebab special I serve to my dwarfs.
Are there any non grazing animals that gives leather?

Any animal whose size is 2000 or higher in the raws gives leather, meat, and bones in addition to a skull. Any animal whose size is smaller than 2000 typically only gives a skull when slaughtered. As a baseline, anything cat-sized or larger IRL probably gives meat, leather, and bones in DF (including cats).

Of the poultry options, ducks and guineafowl only give skulls, and all others give meat and leather. Turkeys give relatively large amounts of eggs while living and meat, bones, and leather when slaughtered, and are generally the preferred poultry.

Among grazers, sheep are usually prized; they have relatively low grazing requirements, but give milk and wool while living, and meat, leather, and bones when slaughtered. General protocol is to slaughter unwanted stray grazers as soon as they arrive or as soon as it's reasonably feasible, and pasture grazer pets until they can be disposed of without pissing off the owner too badly.

I usually stash baby non-grazer animals in a cage in the meeting areas so dwarves who like those kinds of animals can get happy thoughts: "saw a wonderful creature in a cage recently". When they mature, they are pastured or chained, examined thoroughly, and culled so the biggest/fattest/most muscular live on and breed while the smaller/skinnier/weaker ones line my dwarves' larder.

Does traits like big and fat actually affect offspring? Other attributes like appearance/strength? Would it be possible to selectively breed super animals?
Logged

Broseph Stalin

  • Bay Watcher
  • Dabbling Surgeon, Proficient Butcher.
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #20 on: November 29, 2011, 02:16:00 pm »

Does traits like big and fat actually affect offspring? Other attributes like appearance/strength? Would it be possible to selectively breed super animals?

Yup, selective breeding has been proven to work.

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #21 on: November 29, 2011, 08:24:04 pm »

Since lavish meals use more ingredients it's more likely that it will have an ingredient they like.

No argument there, but since I'm getting the hint that many people believe that high meal value without a corresponding preference is enough for good thoughts, I feel it's sensible to point out that it doesn't work that way.
Logged

Sphalerite

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Drew's Robots and stuff
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #22 on: November 29, 2011, 09:16:14 pm »

my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.

I guess I'm going to have to test that again, this time more thoroughly.

Admittedly not a thorough test, but in the fortress I have running at this moment, I have a kitchen right next to a large stockpile of dwarven syrup barrels.  I butchered a yak, resulting in the usual pieces of meat and organs being generated.  When I set the 'prepare lavish meal' job to be performed, a cook grabbed a single Prepared Yak Kidney, then went and got three barrels of Dwarven Syrup to fill out the meal, despite there being many more pieces of perfectly usable yak meat and organs in the butcher stockpile.

Here's the kitchen with ingredients listed:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And here's the nearby meat stockpile:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Admittedly this is a heavily modified world, but none of the mods should affect cooking of liquid ingredients.

There may be some as yet undetermined strange priority scheme for determining which ingredients get cooked in what order that will need further science to work out.  The claim that dwarves won't touch liquid ingredients until there aren't any solid left isn't the case - at least under the conditions I was testing dwarves are willing to use nearby syrup even if there is meat usable further away.
Logged
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Urist Da Vinci

  • Bay Watcher
  • [NATURAL_SKILL: ENGINEER:4]
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #23 on: November 29, 2011, 09:24:32 pm »

...
I think I will start with this idea as this seems a good compliment to my puppy kebab special I serve to my dwarfs.
Are there any non grazing animals that gives leather?
...
Seems like some nice organisation ideas here that I will have to try out. Any recomendations as to what crops I should start growing for something other than dwarven wine?

Cat and dog leather is easy to obtain via. domestic breeding. You already have puppies, so breed more of those and let some get older before butchering them. You need a tanner to turn the skin into leather.

Try growing ALL of the underground plants to start with. Play around with what you can do with them. Personally, I like rum, so I tend to use a lot of sweet pods in the fort.

khearn

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #24 on: November 29, 2011, 09:32:22 pm »

I suspect (but haven't tested) that using liquid ingredients in food has to do with distance. It looks like in Sphalerite's example, the syrup was closer to the kitchen that the meat. Since one solid ingredient is required, the cook found the closest solid ingredient, then for the remaining ingredients he just grabbed whatever was closest, which happened to be the syrup. It'd be easy enough to test. Set up a kitchen, then a stockpile that takes only syrup, then a stockpile farther away that takes meat. If I'm right, that should result in meals that contain one meat and three syrup. Then try reversing the stockpiles and you'd probably get all meat meals.
Logged
Have them killed. Nothing solves a problem quite as effectively as simply having it killed.

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #25 on: November 29, 2011, 09:37:35 pm »

The claim that dwarves won't touch liquid ingredients until there aren't any solid left isn't the case - at least under the conditions I was testing dwarves are willing to use nearby syrup even if there is meat usable further away.

In my fort I have all ingredients used for cooking stored in the same stockpile. Combined with your findings my experience would explain why I ended up with unused syrup barrels: they pick ingredients by distance. If, in my case, all my eggs turn up in one barrel I tend to get roasts composed of four stacks of eggs, if all my spices end up close to each other I'll get quadruple leave roasts, etc.

This suggests that placing a stockpile that only holds syrup right next to my kitchen should result in 1x solid, 3x syrup roasts until I run out of the latter. Thanks for testing this.

Now if only we could place stockpiles in a way that would result in greater ingredient diversity (since I figure the whole point of a "lavish" meal is using four different ingredients). Off the top of my head, a few single-tile stockpiles right next to the kitchen accepting eggs, meat, flour, syrup respectively, and - this is important - in cases other than the syrup one not accepting barrels might do that. But I don't expect haulers to be able to keep up with a legendary+5 cook and restock the mini stockpiles in time.

I'll have to test this later.
Logged

Blue_Dwarf

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #26 on: November 29, 2011, 10:13:16 pm »

They don't pick ingredients by distance in my forts, I've tried this many times already... Even tried surrounding my kitchen with syrup.
Logged
Crafting Statistics 42.06Farming Statistics

Blue Dwarf has been happy lately. He did some !!science!! recently. He admired a fine forum post lately. He was enraged by a forum troll recently. He was upset by the delayed release of the new version of Dwarf Fortress lately. He took joy in planning a noble's death recently.

proxn_punkd

  • Bay Watcher
  • Still a better dove story than Twilight
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #27 on: November 30, 2011, 01:12:32 am »

They don't pick ingredients by distance in my forts, I've tried this many times already... Even tried surrounding my kitchen with syrup.

Were the other ingredients on another Z-level? Dwarves calculate distance disregarding things like floors, so a food stockpile directly below the kitchen would be seen as closer than a food stockpile directly left of the kitchen, even if actually getting to it takes a couple dozen steps to the stairwell and another couple dozen to the food.
Logged

Blue_Dwarf

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #28 on: November 30, 2011, 04:25:56 am »

They don't pick ingredients by distance in my forts, I've tried this many times already... Even tried surrounding my kitchen with syrup.

Were the other ingredients on another Z-level? Dwarves calculate distance disregarding things like floors, so a food stockpile directly below the kitchen would be seen as closer than a food stockpile directly left of the kitchen, even if actually getting to it takes a couple dozen steps to the stairwell and another couple dozen to the food.

I tried both on the same z-level and on another. I even tried restricting traffic to the other stockpiles.

Here's an example of my test kitchen surrounded by syrup barrels, the main stockpile is on a lower z-level to the east:



Here's a save if anyone wants, just order a meal and unpause.
Logged
Crafting Statistics 42.06Farming Statistics

Blue Dwarf has been happy lately. He did some !!science!! recently. He admired a fine forum post lately. He was enraged by a forum troll recently. He was upset by the delayed release of the new version of Dwarf Fortress lately. He took joy in planning a noble's death recently.

Sphalerite

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Drew's Robots and stuff
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #29 on: November 30, 2011, 10:39:05 am »

I tested Blue_Dwarf's save and determined that with his setup the dwarves would refuse to use the nearby syrup for cooking while there were any other solid ingredients available.  It didn't seem to matter if the ingredients were plant, meat, or tallow.  This was very strange as in my own fortress my dwarves would happily make stacks of food out of one solid ingredient and three barrels of syrup even with plenty of solid ingredients available.

I noticed the main difference between my setup and Blue_Dwarf's is that I strictly segregate my food stockpiles such that barrels can only be used for liquid foods (booze and extracts) while solids are stored outside of barrels.  I wondered if this might be a factor.  So I forbade storage of meat in Blue_Dwarf's main stockpile and created a new stockpile of just meat with zero barrels permitted.  Then I seized a giant lion from the elves and butchered it.  Once the new stockpile was full of meat, I forbade the cooking of everything but syrup and giant lion meats, and set the kitchen to cooking.

The result:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It appears that whether or not an ingredient is stored in a barrel is a factor on the order in which dwarves will use ingredients.  Ingredients in barrels get used before ingredients not in barrels.  I always store non-liquids outside of barrels, which is why my fortresses never have trouble cooking liquids.  If all your foodstuffs are stored in barrels, the liquids won't get cooked until all the solids are gone.  Mystery solved.
Logged
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Pages: 1 [2] 3