Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lozzymandias]

So I've been chewing over how to deal with the "distracted over lack of decent meals" issue. Its never been particularly pressing but if stress is more of an issue then I suppose I need every string in my bow.

The problems with Decent Meals are:
1) quality of cooked meals means nothing, dwarves will consider a meal decent if it contains one of its preferred ingredients, many of which are inaccessible.

2) If meals are cooked, the dwarf will only seek out a meal that has its favourite food as the primary ingredient. l do not know if a dwarf will be satisfied with a meal if it chose a meal with the wrong primary ingredient but the right secondaries, I might conduct some science on that, but the odds of that happening seem slim

To this end, i see no benefit to cooking meals, except to sell. They do not make dwarves happier and they obscure dwarves access to their favourite foods. The best tactic is to only cook the foods that cannot be eaten raw (egg and quarry leaf etc) and grow and keep as wide a variety of foodstuffs as you can. What has been the rest of you guys conclusions on how to tackle the problem?

(As a coda I'm still unclear as to if a dwarf likes dog meat, dog intestine will satisfy him, or whether the only thing considered meat is "meat". I have only ever seen craving for simply meat, and not brain or liver so I assumed that was an all purpose descriptor for butchered animal comestibles, I don't know if that's right)

[anewaname]

This thread from last week includes discussion on cooked meals and a link regarding monkey brains vs monkey meat. It should answer your dog meat question at least.

[PatrikLundell]

You should definitely look at that thread. It seems the primary ingredient requirement was a false lead caused by DF obscuring actual detailed preferences under general descriptions, so cooking should be useful, and you should definitely read mikekchar's post, and the use of booze cooking to satisfy food needs should be rather useful.

[Bumber]

I thought the primary ingredient thing was that they only sought out meals based on that ingredient.

[PatrikLundell]

As far as I understand the primary ingredient hypothesis was based on the assumption that the DF displayed preferences were correct, i.e. that monkey meant any part of the monkey, not just the brain. The research should probably be repeated with checks for the full requirements. It may be that the primary ingredient hypothesis still holds, but I hope it falls.

[Lozzymandias]

I return from business travel in the weekend. I will conduct some !!SCIENCE!! with a custom built fort with some easily satisfied dwarves and I will try force feeding them roasts with secondary preferencez

[fortunawhisk]

Here's a link to the preference/path testing post, hopefully the scripts there can help you out.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=171322.0

For point 1: Why bother with decent meals?
Eating any preferred ingredient satisfies the 'decent meals' need and generates a good thought. The better the meal, the stronger the good thought.  To mikekchar's point, there are lot fewer types of booze than random animal parts. So getting stacks of meals that lots of dwarves will like is just easier if you plan on using booze from the start.

For point 2: If meals are cooked, the dwarf will only seek out a meal that has its favourite food as the primary ingredient.
From the testing, it didn't appear to matter what order the ingredients were prepared in. If the meal contained a preferred ingredient, the dwarf went for it. This is most easily tested (I think) with meals made from booze, as boozy meals have a consistent kitchen preparation order. Things get a little blurrier when the the preferred ingredient can be eaten raw. If both the preferred ingredient and the meal (with the preferred ingredient) are available and basically right next to each other, the dwarf will choose each about half the time.