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[tigger89]

What is the difference between the meal types?  I make everything on the middle setting because I'm not sure which one is best, but I'm sure there's a difference.  The wiki doesn't explain it too well, I checked.

[Derakon]

The difference is in how many ingredients are used. More ingredients means that more meals will be created, which can be used to consolidate your food supply (e.g. if you had no barrels, then you could turn four squares' worth of Plump Helmet [3] into one square of Plump Helmet Roast [12]). It can also be used to create dense wealth which is easily traded away. However, you get the same experience for making biscuits as you do roasts, so if you're training up a cook, make biscuits.

[Bogdanov]

Also, i'm pretty sure dwarves are happier if they eat more elaborate (spelling?!) meals.

You can see feelings such as "has a truely decadent meal lately" or such...

[Solara]

quote:Originally posted by Bogdanov:
<STRONG>Also, i'm pretty sure dwarves are happier if they eat more elaborate (spelling?!) meals.

You can see feelings such as "has a truely decadent meal lately" or such...</STRONG>

Or it might just be that more ingredients in each meal means a better chance of a dwarf getting one of their preferences, I've never been clear on this though.

[Metalax]

This is how I believe it works from my experiences.

The high good thoughts are based on the meal value/quality. If one or more of the ingredients happens to be favoured by the consuming dwarf then they will judge the value of that part of the meal higher, possibly pushing the thought over into the next higher category of good thought.

[tigger89]

But the same amount of food will end up created, right?  Like putting 8 units into biscuits will yield the same number of biscuits as roasts?

[corc]

food quantity is conserved if that is what you are asking. although, sometimes you can make food out of nonfood... like tallow.

it's very useful for freeing up barrels for booze production.

I always buy all the plants I can and brew them and then have the cooks cook the seeds with tallow and whatever else I have to make lavish meals that take up less space.

[RickiusMaximus]

When your dwarven economy gets started up poor people can only afford easy meals (don't worry, they wont starve if you don't have any) but they will end up spending the lions share of their money on food.

Its best to keep a good mix of all three meal types as food production shouldn't really be an issue after your first year.

[Brent Not Broken]

quote:Originally posted by tigger89:
<STRONG>But the same amount of food will end up created, right?  Like putting 8 units into biscuits will yield the same number of biscuits as roasts?</STRONG>

Cooking always adds quantities. The type of meal cooked only affects the number of "stacks" of food combined. The quantities of all the cooked stacks are added, and the sum is the quantity of the stack of prepared meals.

If you're cooking up a bunch of stacks of Horse Meat[5], for example, an easy meal combines two stacks of five into a single stack of ten meals, and a lavish meal combines four stacks of five into a single stack of twenty meals. You still have the same number of food-units, but you've consolidated them into smaller groups.

So cooking easy meals is the most efficient way to train your cooks (since they have more cooking jobs to process the same amount of ingredients), and cooking lavish meals is the most efficient way to manage your food stockpile space (since you have fewer stacks of prepared meals in the end, and large stacks of meals are often too big to be stashed in barrels with each other.)

Note that cooking doesn't produce any extra item-quantity-units, but it can produce more edible food if you are cooking ingredients that aren't edible raw, like syrup, flour, and quarry bush leaves. When I got inattentive with one fort and let food supplies run out (oops!), my dwarves were saved from catastrophe by cooking biscuits out of spare seeds.