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[MMad]

There's many interesting ideas in this thread, but few that I think would immediately make the game more fun.

[Footkerchief]

Their have been some periodic 'tending' tasks being involved in farming in combination with a lengthened growing duration but I'm hesitant to make them significant in workshop production.  The time scale of things like baking bread is so short it hard to see how meaningful work can get done in between the tending tasks.  It also might create some odd incentives ware the player locks the cook in the kitchen in order to keep the souffle from collapsing from lack of tending.  Though not opposed in principle I'd used tending sparingly in any workshop, short cooking tasks would be handled as they currently are (no wait), and longer ones like baking bread or making a stew would be prep once and wait once.

Sparingly sounds good.  Just having to take the bread out of the oven would achieve most of the effect I'm envisioning.  And yeah, the AI would have to be smart enough to not start some other gargantuan task while waiting, although I think it's worth noting that people sometimes really do dumb things like that.

Beer and wine on the other hand, are not only monitored during the "rotting" stage, but efforts are made to maintain humidity and temperature, hence the sealed underground stores. Wine bottles are also periodically turned to prevent sedimentation.

Man, everything is so complicated in real life.  Maybe "rotting" items could periodically generate jobs of their own, kind of like how truly rotten items get auto-dumped.

There's many interesting ideas in this thread, but few that I think would immediately make the game more fun.

I admit my own tendency to go for verisimilitude first and "fun" as an afterthought, but I think the idea of tending items on a stove has some immediate charm to it.  Scribbler already mentioned the things people do while baking, and I really like the mental image of a dwarf throwing some stew in a pot, heading down to the meeting area for an hour, then having an "oh shit" moment when he remembers that he left something on the stove and rushing back so that it won't boil over or whatever.  Or a cook who tries to do too much at once and ends up burning half the food to a crisp -- it's mildly mean to the player, but so are most of the things that give dwarves real personality.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Sparingly sounds good.  Just having to take the bread out of the oven would achieve most of the effect I'm envisioning.  And yeah, the AI would have to be smart enough to not start some other gargantuan task while waiting, although I think it's worth noting that people sometimes really do dumb things like that.

This actually makes me think, what if food actually burns when left in the workshop based on to much time passing, it goes from 'done' to 'over cooked' (-1 quality), 'burnt' (-2 quality) to eventually 'badly burned' (-3 quality) at reaching badly burned a miasma-equivalent 'smoke' gets generated and fills the kitchen causing unpleasant thoughts.  That certainly would make the game world feel more alive.  I'm sure burn food has been suggested before but I bet most assume it will be skill based, a time based mechanism would be far more interesting.

[Footkerchief]

This actually makes me think, what if food actually burns when left in the workshop based on to much time passing, it goes from 'done' to 'over cooked' (-1 quality), 'burnt' (-2 quality) to eventually 'badly burned' (-3 quality) at reaching badly burned a miasma-equivalent 'smoke' gets generated and fills the kitchen causing unpleasant thoughts.  That certainly would make the game world feel more alive.  I'm sure burn food has been suggested before but I bet most assume it will be skill based, a time based mechanism would be far more interesting.

Like what was suggested in the "Crafting Failures" thread, XX bread XX would probably suffice for modeling burned bread.  That's what the game already does for items that catch on fire.  Perhaps the game could even just use the existing heat damage model to cause gradual time-based degradation.  Smoke is actually in the game already, and does cause unhappy thoughts, but it's not very widely used (hopefully forges, furnaces, stoves, etc. will require ventilation at some point).

[scribbler]

I'm thinking more in the lines of tasks needing a dwarf to monitor stuff. Farms are essentially fire and forget. Your planter plants, harvests and plants again. A few farms and they never get bored, as opposed to masons where you're constantly giving new orders.
A few threads have mentioned having more options in the mechanical constructs area, realistically larger systems of axles and gears would need dwarves to oversee, grease, unjam, etc.
A full time job. I'm thinking that after crafting the beer, it gets moved to a storehouse or aging workshop of some kind where another dwarf can do periodic checks on it.
Say a 3x3  aging room can hold 10 casks of beer, based on job limits for existing workshops. A brewer would go in run a short task on each cask and it would be good for a period of time, say 2 weeks. If you brew alot you'd need several workshops (one brewer could keep an eye on a number of them) and eventually an office to keep the input/output straight.
(I think I'm building towards the idea of fewer haulers and more dwarves having meaningful jobs that require hauling. Instead of having a hauler drag it off, a brewmaster or his porter collect finished beer and take it to the cellars.)