Print

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

[Blue_Dwarf]

I've been thinking about ways to make more varied recipes than 4x Quarry Bush roasts.

One trick would be to make chess-board-shaped food stockpiles (make stockpile, then p->x to remove some tiles, make another stockpile on top of the first).

Another is to utilize restricted areas to guide the cook's pathing.

Well as a first crude attempt, this very simple restriction actually works pretty good, the cook grabs a decent variety of ingredients:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The kitchen is on top, with cheese - meat - fish stockpiles around it.

[wierd]

Oh wow! It's NOT a spam thread for british kitchen designs!

One of the approaches to getting more varied roasts, is to put 4 stockpiles in a + sign configuration around the kitchen, each with restrictions to allow only a certain kind of foodstuff, and with barrels forbidden, then tie those stockpiles to the big food storage pile, and the kitchen to the small piles.

This way the closest ingredients to the kitchen will be 1x each stack of different kinds of foods. Say, one holds booze, (only one with barrels allowed), one holds eggs, one holds tallow, one holds raw veg, etc.

This will make sure that the resulting "meals" aren't 100% comprised of tallow with a few specks of plump hemet peeking out.

[MagmaMcFry]

Oh wow! It's NOT a spam thread for british kitchen designs!

Unless Blue_Dwarf is a sleeper spambot.

[wierd]

Shhh! You will give the spamlords ideas on how to dupe us into thinking a post isn't spam!

Say for a moment, the spamlords make a user named "Magma_McFry" with the underscore. Not the same as you, but for people not paying pedantic amounts of attention, it could cause some nasty misunderstandings.

I prefer to not pay attention to initial poster IDs, and judge spaminess as it happens. Hence the elated shock.

[Blue_Dwarf]

One of the approaches to getting more varied roasts, is to put 4 stockpiles in a + sign configuration around the kitchen, each with restrictions to allow only a certain kind of foodstuff, and with barrels forbidden, then tie those stockpiles to the big food storage pile, and the kitchen to the small piles.

Well, that's the classic approach, and unfortunately not very efficient. That's why I'm trying to come up with something better.

So far overlapping chess or striped stockpiles (same principle) appear to be working better in theory, and can be shaped much better to suit your room layout.

[MagmaMcFry]

Wo, what up! I TELL YOU UP we kitchens good I liek dem!
Good Kitchens! dwarf cat magma is delicious! Link! Horses!

Fix'd.

[SixOfSpades]

Of course, a far better "solution" than bending over backwards to micromanage awkward stockpiles would be for Toady to simply move the existing kitchen reactions into the RAWs, so the players could quickly cobble together a more realistic set of recipies. No more (fish + whiskey) = (biscuits), now it's (flour + flour + egg + milk) = (biscuits). You want your cook to use up some of your excess honey? Just queue up some cakes, or pastries, or Lavish (glazed) pig meat roasts.

And just how the hell does anyone mince a seed, anyway?

[Merendel]

And just how the hell does anyone mince a seed, anyway?

depends on the size of the seed.  Mincing is just chopping the food up very finely.  While I agree most small seeds would at best be a powder after mincing them there are other seeds out there that are large enough to dice up with a knife if you really wanted to.  I could chop up a pumpkin seed into quite a few pieces if I wanted too.  Not sure it would accomplish anything useful but it could be done.

[Blue_Dwarf]

There are seeds that you can chop with an axe, nevermind mincing.

Coconuts, for instance.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Turns out that traffic doesn't actually help the dwarf in choosing the ingredients, only the routes he takes to get to them 

But, here is a chessboard stockpile. Three of them actually, a meat pile that fills the entire room, and two halves for cheese and fish that also take leaves and flour:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Larix]

Couldn't you just interlace the stockpiles:
- paint a large-ish stockpile, say 9x9.
- delete two out of each three tiles.
- paint a new stockpile over the same area (fills in the open squares)
- delete every other tile of the new stockpile
- paint a third stockpile over the area.

If you did it right, you'd have a pattern like this:

Code: [Select]

ABCABCABC
BCABCABCA
CABCABCAB
...
where each "A" tile would belong to stockpile A etc.

It would be even more of a chore to set up, but it'd be space efficient and should frequently result in the use of items from different stockpiles for each meal.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Yeah, that should be even better. A couple of macros could make that easier to place.

Although with the minor drawback of not being able to balance ingredients based on their availability. If you have tons of quarry bushes, it makes more sense to dedicate a bigger stockpile to it, instead of giving equal space to more rare items.

[Hans Lemurson]

The most effective method I've managed to get a kitchen to make what I desire is to use 2-4 one tile stockpiles that Take from your main food stocks and then Give to your kitchen.  Change what each tile allows in them to control which ingredients are available.  This is what I had to do one time when I decided to feed my fortress exclusively on Rock Nut Oil/Press cake biscuits.

Downside: Cancel-spam when haulers aren't fast enough to refill all ingredient stockpiles.

[McCautious]

Hi guys,

necroing this topic because my dwarves crave better meals.
I am currently playing the 40.15 version and am trying to get (ideally) 4 ingredients per roast.

I wanted to start testing a 4-lane or checkerboard-design but I pretty much fail at the very first instant, which is:
Having my larger stockpiles (meat, fish, quarry leaves etc.) feed into 4 smaller stockpiles, which are then set to "give to -> Kitchen". The larger stockpiles have barrels allowed, the small feeder ones don't.
The problem is that the dwarves won't carry any items to the smaller stockpiles. Could this be a problem of "un-barreling" the food from the larger stockpile? Are they unable to just take a fish out of a barrel and bring it to the small stockpile?
And what about bagged food? Is there a difference between e.g. flour and fish concerning barrels allowed/not allowed?


(I ran into issues with seperating items and item types on other occasions and can't really put my finger on the underlying principles here. E.g. my dwarves were able to seperate high boots and gauntlets out of the same bin and then sort it all into two seperate stockpiles, one for boots, one for gauntlets. They even got extra bins to get it done. On the other hand, leather bins I purchased from merchants apparently cannot be split up into different leather types. They didn't even look at the bins until I gave in and made a generic "all leather types"-pile. Granted, here they would have had to sort the stuff into three different piles, not only two as in the armor example. Either way, both situations do require them to take stuff out of a bin and put it into another one ... )

[MagmaMcFry]

Oh good, it's a person. I was just thinking the kitchenbots had returned.