Since learning the initial hang of feeding a fort's dwarves, I've always thought that it was entirely too easy. Dwarves only need to eat roughly 2 food each season? Farming alone can take care of the completely. Bringing some egg-laying poultry can do it with even less work (and no Farming skill necessary). And then there's booze-cooking, plant gathering, fruit picking, butchering, and trading for food (which is almost ridiculously fruitful considering you can net thousands of Uristbucks by cooking a fraction of the food you trade for while buying it for 10 bucks per stack of 5).
In all, I wanted another area of challenge within the game beyond sieges, beasts/titans and creatures. Starvation is !FUN!.
And, I like enhanced realism, to a certain degree. There's just something about having to imitate distillation or smoking meat that makes my brain happy. So, two bams in one.
Alpha Version HereRecommended Install Instructions:
1) Do a new LNP install
2) Set graphics to ASCII
4) Unpack the zip into your main directory, overwrite everything
5) Enter " decayfood start " in DFHack after you embark
6) Good luck!
(7) Don't forget to build the new Brewery, the Still is rather useless now)
This version has all of the new alcohol implemented for everything in the plant_standard file, and gives two methods of preserving meat indefinitely (extract blood or smoke meat, you'll need fuel for the latter).
State of the ModThe first part of the mod is making food decay, no matter where you have it stored. You won't accumulate thousands of meals over time, because they will automatically take wear and evaporate from inside your barrels. (This is achieved through a modified version of
omniclasm's scripts.)
This makes food acquisition less fire-and-forget, and makes food preservation a vital part of the fort.
Implemented,
see Wishlist for expansionThe second part is making food acquisition more difficult, thus requiring significantly more effort in a single sector or branching out into multiple food sectors. The latter is easier by far, but hey, it's your fortress.
This entails making crops take longer to grow (exceptionally so for the underground crops), making egg-layers lay fewer eggs, making most plants dead in Autumn and Winter, reducing the amount of fat received from animals, eliminating booze-cooking and seed-cooking, making most ingredients require processing before they are actually edible, and a couple other small things.
Implemented,
will be tweaking growth timers and other sundry details over timeThe third part is creating the preservation industry. Preserved food will last indefinitely (for the nonce), but it requires more work to come by.
You can smoke meat and fish, confit meat and fruit, ferment meat, cure eggs, and so on. Flour and sugar are also far more useful now, rather than just adding value to meals or selling off to traders.
Working on thisThe fourth part is making alcohol-creation harder. It's necessary for every fort to flourish, and it's significantly more complicated IRL than a single-reaction product like it currently is.
I've thus added three steps to the creation process, with differentiated reactions and materials based on the kind of alcohol (cider, beer, wine, etc). To make it not so horrifically onerous, the additional steps are automated (minus the collect water task). The number of drinks created per plant, however, is significantly reduced.
Implemented,
see IssuesThe fifth part is altering food values to make selling food less profitable, and buying food more expensive.
Working on thisThe sixth part is then adding in some kindnesses to add more diversity into the available foodstuffs (as well as in adding in some extra realism and uses for stuff that's otherwise trash).
Blood can be extracted from meat and cooked, quarry bushes / nut oil can be turned into fuel and vermin remains can be turned into ash, subterranean plants grow year-round, two underground trees now produce fruit, some other underground goodies can be turned into food through gathering, and a few other small things.
Half-implemented,
working on thisCurrent IssuesThere are two hiccups that I haven't been able to resolve to satisfaction yet on my own, though.
Currently,
all preserved foods are classified as Cheese. This is solely because I couldn't get the new materials to get stockpiled otherwise, and cheese is my preferred template of the existant ones out there right now. I'd like to ideally have the materials be differentiated, but I haven't figured out how to get them into food stockpiles yet.
Water is necessary for most of the booze reactions, but seemingly
can't be automatically gathered, so there's a reaction that makes water out of nothing. I'd prefer a call for water just appear when the reaction is started, rather than needing to do that, or try and fanangle with Pond shenanigans.
Also, the
Still is utterly useless for this since it doesn't play nice with [AUTOMATIC] reactions. Without a building replacement hack or some other fix, it's going to just require new buildings for most everything.
WishlistAt some point, I'd like to make these happen:
- Decay script that works on item types or materials that aren't already covered in the item-type list (i.e. preserved foods of new materials, as nothing lasts forever~)
- Have a HUNGER SCRIPT that can increase the number of meals a Dwarf needs in a season (and possibly also alcohol, but that's already pretty fine-tuned now)
- Have some kind of script or somesuch that prevents non-preserved food items from being traded at the Depot
- I want a general reaction that turns a stack of X plants into much fewer meal-items (edible raw or cooked), but I don't know how to make a reaction like that which doesn't erase the identity of every ingredient after the first. It'd be ideal if you could make a salad out of raspberries, plump helmet, spinach and walnuts, and then see all four of those in the item, and then add that to meat to create a meal. I have a workaround, it's just not as tidy as having that automatically happen.
I'm going to be re-doing subterranean plants to a certain extent, and I may or may not create separate mods for that.
Many thanks to Meph for his advice and excellent
Masterwork mod, which made a lot of this much easier, and to Evaris and his
Orichalcum mod, which inspired me to do this in the first place (and gave a bunch of good ideas).