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[Explodo]

I think it would be fun if basic crops and meat were perishable even while held in stockpiles, and would require a job like salting, drying, or pickling to make them permanent.

You could set up a fortress on subsistence farming at first, and slowly build up an economy where excess food is preserved for hard times or stockpiling. This would also have the added benefit that foods could be given different rates of decay and difficulties involved in preserving them. So plump helmets could be easy to grow, but would decay quickly unless you slowly dried them out into a cooking ingredient, whereas meat could be quickly salted and still stay ready to eat.

Figuring out a good decay mechanism might be complicated. Stacks could have a birth date, I guess. Or could just shrink as the seasons change. There would probably be a lot of refuse hauling involved, especially if someone grew much more food than thew could process.

That would work well with the vermin attacking food stockpiles bloat though. A stockpile that has too much refuse in it could start to attract bugs.

Oh, and if food stacks ended up with birth dates you could make it so that some things improve with age. Like whiskey, for example. Then you could vault up a couple of barrels to commemorate an event, and twenty years down the line crack them out for an extra morale boost.

[Mechanoid]

Decay of food is a bloat, or req... Or something. In any case, it's already been thought of.

Still, it will be necessary eventually, in order to keep the player on his toes.
"A plump helmet [100] has rotted!"

[Explodo]

Sorry, I went through all the bloats looking for it...

Anyway, I was more interested in talking about salt pork and dried mushrooms than about rotting food. The agricultural economy used to be all about how you process your foods to last through the winter, and it would be fun to have to divide your labor based on the pros and cons of your chosen crops.

[BurnedToast]

I think this is a good idea - making meat easy to preserve would give it a big advantage and making hunting alot better (assuming they fix the return kill problems and hunter AI issues). Picking a map with animals to eat would be an advantage, not a disadvantage how it is now.

You could also make say, flour and sugar last a long time (or never rot) which gives you a reason to make those, mill up a ton of flour and sugar then cook prepared meals (which will rot eventually, just slowly) as needed.

[Explodo]

I'm going to flesh out this suggestion a bit, to see if that makes it more interesting for discussion.

Advantages for Current Crops:
Cave Wheat - Doesn't rot. You have to mill it and cook it, but the excess crops can be piled into storage.
Sweet Pods - Rots until processed into sugar or syrup.
Plump Helmets - Rots quickly. Can be dried at a farmers workshop. Drying takes a fairly long time so preserving a big crop would require a lot of work. Dried mushrooms would have to be cooked into meals.
Quarry Bushes - Rots. Could be processed at a workshop into either raw leaves (also rot) or dried leaves, which have to be cooked into meals. The advantage over plump helmets is still the stack sizing, but since these have to be processed anyway using up a little more time to dry them wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Meat:
Livestock - Salting or Drying at the butchers. This would be a fast job, giving meat the advantage of being preserved easily. Salt could be a mined and traded commodity, since it's being added anyway. Preserved meat could be eaten plain.
Fish & Turtles - Fish processing could have two options, into raw and into salted/dried. Preserved fish would have to be cooked.

Cooked Goods:
Regular - Rots. Cooking food before it spoils would just extend its lifespan.
Preserved - Cooking food using dwarven sugar and something else would make a meal that doesn't rot, giving sugar production a use.

Vinegar:
The alchemists lab could turn alcohol into vinegar, which could be used at a kitchen to pickle plump helmets, quarry leaves, meat and fish. Pickled foods can be eaten as is and wouldn't require salt, but would require an extensive production tree.

What do people think, too complicated?

[ September 16, 2007: Message edited by: Explodo ]

[Tamren]

not at all.

Weat doesnt rot much afaik, its tough. But you have to be careful of ergot poisoning.

[Seryntas]

This would make it twice as difficult to survive your first winter, you realize.  Eventually the learning curve for this game is going to be complete impassable XD

Also: What about icehouses, if your fortress is located where you can get ice in the winter?

[Matias]

Why bother doing vinegar in alchemist lab. Leave a barrel of vine open for a month and there you go! Well, this might be a problem when dwarves are present... So, jailing some vine barrles?

-Matias

[Name Lips]

Yes, temperature has to be brought into consideration. Having food outside in a Hot Swamp should make it rot almost instantly, but having it underground in a cool, dry celler should make it last weeks (or maybe months in DF). I don't really think barrels/bags should help preserve food - they should instead help keep vermin out. Hot dry maps should be good for drying food. Maps with abundant wood should be ideal for smoking meat.

Dwarfs are quite intelligent, and should be able to figure out that food stored properly in glass jars can last almost indefinately. We already have a glassworks, why not make glass jars? You can process food into them at the Farmer's Workshop. Each jar will last indefinately, but based on the skill level of the worker has a very slim chance of making a dwarf who eats from it violently ill (botulism).

[Solara]

quote:Originally posted by Explodo:
<STRONG>
Preserved - Cooking food using dwarven sugar and something else would make a meal that doesn't rot, giving sugar production a use.
</STRONG>

Right, the food wouldn't rot, just the teeth of the dwarves that eat it. (Just kidding, but I think this would have to be restricted to plant products - I doubt anyone wants to eat meat cooked in sugar...also, salting meat should be quick, while drying it would take a long time but make it last near indefinitely.)

But seriously, I think these are all good ideas, though like Name Lips said temperature should be taken into account. On a freezing map you likely wouldn't have to do much processing at all.

And before anything like this was implemented, for balance reasons it should be impossible to make a meal entirely out of alcohol (though it should be okay as at least one ingredient), and the same goes for syrup and sugar. Those are all kind of exploity even now, but if other foods rotted they would give such a ridiculous advantage there would be no reason to produce anything else.

Anyway, as cool as I think all this stuff would be for the dwarves, I think it could be even more interesting for adventure mode, once it gets made more realistic as far as eating/drinking/etc. goes.

Instead of just killing an animal and then using its corpse to bludgeon another animal with, imagine being able to butcher it, cook a little of the meat, salt the rest to either trade or eat while you travel, and while you're at it tan the hide to make some nice leather clothes, maybe even carve some trinkets from its bones. (everything except the bone carving part can actually be done in a game called Unreal World that's been getting some discussion in the 'other games' forum...I've been playing it a lot lately and it's got me all excited for some of the things that could be possible in adventure mode once Toady has time to flesh it out.)