Yes, basically as long as a meal includes an ingredient (either favoured food *or* drink), then it will meet the criteria as "decent meal". If the meal increases in quality, then the qualifier on the thought will change. The highest is "legendary meal" I think -- I've probably had them all, but I can't remember what they all are (though "sublime" is in there somewhere). I don't know what difference this qualifier has on stress levels, etc (if anything).
I've been able to satisfy most of my fortress for food preferences (somewhere around 80 percent, anyway). The trick is to make sure to get drink into your meals because most drinks are easy to produce or acquire. If you are in an acceptable biome, you can grow a lot of them and there are a lot less of them than the meat.
My general rule is: don't have any food in the fortress that a dwarf doesn't like. Use the manager to make meals and make 1 every day if you have the ingredients (no more than that). Put a stockpile of drink of 2 tiles right next to the kitchen and "take" from the main booze stockpile. Don't have it too far away from the main stockpile. This will ensure that there is exactly 1 barrel of booze next to the kitchen virtually at all times (and the timing of the making of the meals leaves time to haul a new barrel there).
When making meals dwarfs will semi-randomly select ingredients. In reality, they will take the closest ingredient from where they are when they need the ingredient. There is a *very* important rule. If an ingredient came from a container (any container -- barrel, bag, pot), the dwarf will preferentially choose the next ingredient from the *same* container. So the rule is: never store ingredients for the kitchen in a container (unfortunately some ingredients like seeds have no choice :-( -- avoid using them if possible).
Make a stockpile for the other ingredients a few tiles farther than the booze stockpile next to the kitchen, but closer than the main booze stockpile. This means that when a dwarf selects an ingredient, they will pick something randomly (based on how close it is). The second ingredient they choose will always be the booze because it is next to the kitchen (you can also put other liquids like milk next to the kitchen for the same effect). After that because the booze is already gone, they will continue to select dry ingredients based on how close they are from the kitchen.
This will ensure that *every single meal* will contain booze (assuming that you don't make a mistake somewhere). Booze is made from plants and for every plant in the stack you get 5 booze. That means that usually you have 10-15 booze in your ingredient. This lets you extend your monkey brains -- if you have 5 monkey brains and 15 rice wine, then you will have 20 monkey brains and rice wine biscuits. I've been making only simple meals because I *think* it's more efficient -- because each meal will get a different booze extender, but I'm not really sure (I need to think of all of the corner cases).
Dwarfs eat anywhere from 6-10 times a year and will seek out meals that contain ingredients that they like. In the example above, our monkey brains biscuits will satisfy dwarfs who like monkey brains *and* rice wine. Assuming you only grew rice because one or more dwarfs like rice wine, then you can satisfy at least 2 dwarfs with these 20 meals. If you keep enough variety in your fortress, then your 2 (or more) more dwarfs will have plenty of opportunity during the year to partake of those meals. Even if they eat it only once, they will *still* get good thoughts from remembering eating a legendary meal.
One of the keys is to stagger the production throughout the year. Cooking a maximum of 1 meal a day helps (which is why I suggest using the manager). Also you should stagger your growing schedule. There are 4 seasons. You should stagger growing so that you grow a quarter of your booze producing veggies/fruit each season -- that way you ensure more variety when you are making meals. Also, don't over grow! You probably only need between 1-3 (and likely only 1 or 2) tiles per plant type. You don't want to get in a situation where you have lots of stacks of a single plant and you end up making the same booze over and over again. Similarly, when you buy ingredients, only buy as much as you need. Probably 5 is enough, even if someone eats one or two before you have a chance to cook with it -- because each meal is being extended by the booze. If you decide to buy a lot, then consider forbidding most of it so that you don't end up with 1000 monkey brains biscuits and only one dwarf that likes monkey brains.
I could go on, but hopefully that inspires people to experiment. It really isn't so hard, but it requires some knowledge about how dwarfs work with stockpiles. Also it *requires* that you don't put food for your kitchen in containers! That bit is the most important, so don' forget :-)
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Topic: What is a "decent meal"? (Read 17124 times)