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[sketchesofpayne]

Food production systems and options need to be more robust or the food preferences need to be less specific.

I've been reading about solutions to the "decent meals" need.  The granularity and absurdity of food preferences seems ludicrous.  Sorry if this reads like a rant.  I've just had a lot of different thoughts about this issue bubbling away on my brain-pan.

In dwarf fortress someone's favorite food is something like 'river otter intestines' served as a biscuit, stew, or roast.  I'm not even sure how you get a "river otter intestine biscuit" whose sole ingredient is two pieces of river otter intestines.  The method of preparation and composition of the food is often more important than what animal part or what exact species of plant is involved.  Fried, baked, boiled, roasted, smoked, fermented.

And for that matter, why in the world do dwarves not make some kind of sausage?  Or porridge?  Pickled vegetables?  Salted meat?  Vinegar?

You know what a really Dwarf Fortress-y solution would be?  Random generated cuisine types.  Where each cuisine would come from a civilization.  It would have one to three meats associated with it, one or two grains, two to four spices or vegetables, and a preparation type.  In the kitchen you would have "make basic meal" or "make [cuisine] meal."  This way, as long as you can access several of the associated ingredients you could satisfy all the dwarves in you fortress whose preference is that cuisine.  There could be 10-30 cuisines in a given world, instead of the myriad of body parts and plants we have now.

Instead of Urist McPickyEater preferring 'cheetah liver' he should have a preference like 'burrito' which would require [meat] [flour] [leaf vegetable] [bean] [cheese].  So you could make it from musk ox liver, millet flour, lettuce, red bean, goat cheese.  Or you could make it from chicken heart, wheat flour, cabbage, broad bean, cow cheese.

Stew [meat] [tuber] [stem].  Elk bird lung, potato, celery.  Cave fish, long yam, rhubarb.  Lion sweetbread, purple yam, leek.

Fruit Pastry [flour] [egg] [fruit].  Finger millet flour, turkey egg, blueberry.  Single-grain wheat flour, chicken egg, custard-apple.


I know this is probably not easy to implement.  In the meantime can we at least limit preferences to an animal rather than animal part?  Ideally dwarves should prefer food they may have actually come in contact with at some point.  Besides, in adventure mode pretty much no one has prepared meals at all!

[Dorsidwarf]

There've been a series of really detailed and interesting threads on the matter, but they've mostly touched on the weird preferences dwarves have for the ingredients, so I quite like the idea of more types of food to widen up the dwarven diet from a monotony of minced slurry pressed into biscuits or served in stew.

[GoblinCookie]

Problem with this idea is what happens when the civilisation can't get the ingredients for it's cultural meals?  Also when it can't initially get items for all the various basic food types (or being elves they aren't allowed to eat meat).

[voliol]

Problem with this idea is what happens when the civilisation can't get the ingredients for it's cultural meals?  Also when it can't initially get items for all the various basic food types (or being elves they aren't allowed to eat meat).

Looking at real life, they should initially replace the missing ingredients for other available ones, but with some dismay. Later generations brought up with this new version would then consider it the more proper version of the meal, even if it becomes more boring over time*. If the ingredients become scarcer instead of disappearing altogether, the original version could split off from the meal archetype, becoming a "luxury variant". The opposite could be true for cases where foodstuffs become seasonally scarce; the winter version could be considered a less preferable "poor man's variant".

I imagine they wouldn't spawn with cultural meals with unfulfillable requirements. 

*though I imagine some counter-mechanic being in play to avoid everything from becoming the cheapest possible gruel.

[SixOfSpades]

Food items should be organized into categories, as you said [meat, fish, flour, egg, leaf vegetable, berry, spice, etc.], but also taste groups: [sweet, salty, bitter, bland, sharp, smooth, etc.] For instance, potatoes and horseradish are both tuber vegetables, but no one would ever use horseradish as the staple basis for a meal. When food substitutions occur, the Cook should consider the replacement's category and taste with respect to the original ingredient. For example, most pies are made with category [fruit]--to make them with category [vegetable] doesn't make sense--except for pumpkins & sweet potatoes, because those specific vegetables have the taste [sweet] quality in common with most fruits.

[Dorsidwarf]

Food items should be organized into categories, as you said [meat, fish, flour, egg, leaf vegetable, berry, spice, etc.], but also taste groups: [sweet, salty, bitter, bland, sharp, smooth, etc.] For instance, potatoes and horseradish are both tuber vegetables, but no one would ever use horseradish as the staple basis for a meal. When food substitutions occur, the Cook should consider the replacement's category and taste with respect to the original ingredient. For example, most pies are made with category [fruit]--to make them with category [vegetable] doesn't make sense--except for pumpkins & sweet potatoes, because those specific vegetables have the taste [sweet] quality in common with most fruits.

Not the best example because I can absolutely imagine people making vegetable pies if they are lacking other ingredients. Pies are a very, very wide category of food after all. People will put anything in a pie.

But the idea is a good one

[Shonai_Dweller]

Must express additional confusion over the concept that vegetable pies "don't make sense". 

[SixOfSpades]

Not the best example because I can absolutely imagine people making vegetable pies if they are lacking other ingredients. Pies are a very, very wide category of food after all. People will put anything in a pie.

Must express additional confusion over the concept that vegetable pies "don't make sense".

Yes, meat pies especially are a category unto themselves: pork pie, shepherd's pie, steak & kidney pie, etc. And many of these contain vegetables, like the peas & carrots in shepherd's pie. But these are all entrees, whereas fruit pies are desserts. You can make in-category substitutions, like replacing pork with fish, but I don't think you would try to cross into desserts by swapping out steak with apples, for an apple & kidney pie.

Other ingredients also might not make sense for certain kinds of dishes, for various other reasons: For instance, I've never heard of fruits like grapes or watermelon being made into pies, probably because they contain too much liquid for the rest of the dish to absorb, and/or they simply break down from the heat of baking.

Then again, I also admit that dwarves aren't humans, and they might very well have different tastes & customs, especially if a change of local ingredients forces them to try new flavor combinations. But I still think it's wise to try to keep the recipes at least halfway familiar to what modern humans know: If the resulting meal comes out as something that we at least sort-of recognize, then that literally adds flavor to the game. If the Cook just throws stuff in a blender practically at random (muskmelon, spelt flour, blue peahen egg, jaguar pancreas), we the players have practically no idea what those poor Haulers are supposed to be eating.

P.S. I forgot rhubarb as a vegetable dessert pie, rhubarb is also sweet.

[Urist McClown]

Eh, even tastes and "fitting combinations" are not so much based on our biology as our culture. E.g., the ancient Romans tended to combine seafood with fruit for their desserts.

[Ninjabread]

Apple and kidney pie might not be a thing, but steak and apple is totally a thing. I get what you're getting at, but pie probably wasn't the best example you could've given, it's too versatile, and also the British exist and we'll encase just about anything in pastry.

[GoblinCookie]

Looking at real life, they should initially replace the missing ingredients for other available ones, but with some dismay. Later generations brought up with this new version would then consider it the more proper version of the meal, even if it becomes more boring over time*. If the ingredients become scarcer instead of disappearing altogether, the original version could split off from the meal archetype, becoming a "luxury variant". The opposite could be true for cases where foodstuffs become seasonally scarce; the winter version could be considered a less preferable "poor man's variant".

I imagine they wouldn't spawn with cultural meals with unfulfillable requirements. 

*though I imagine some counter-mechanic being in play to avoid everything from becoming the cheapest possible gruel.

I think the civilizations ought to initially scan their local area for ingredients and then create a set of foodstuffs after subtracting the ones they are not ethically allowed to eat, similarly to how they generate instruments.  This needs to happen *before* the economy because the economy is going to have to work based upon the foodstuffs they demand.

Then if they become unable to obtain a sufficient quantity of the needed ingredient they should substitute it for the most similar item that they can obtain enough of to make that recipe.  However the possibility needs to exist that they actually like the new ingredient better than they liked the old one.  That means we should probably randomise whether the new meal is considered tastier than the old one or less tasty. 

Food items should be organized into categories, as you said [meat, fish, flour, egg, leaf vegetable, berry, spice, etc.], but also taste groups: [sweet, salty, bitter, bland, sharp, smooth, etc.] For instance, potatoes and horseradish are both tuber vegetables, but no one would ever use horseradish as the staple basis for a meal. When food substitutions occur, the Cook should consider the replacement's category and taste with respect to the original ingredient. For example, most pies are made with category [fruit]--to make them with category [vegetable] doesn't make sense--except for pumpkins & sweet potatoes, because those specific vegetables have the taste [sweet] quality in common with most fruits.

We don't actually need to do it in that complicated a way.  The game can simply guess what tastes similar to what based upon the equivilant of [CREATURE_CLASS] tokens and the type of thing it is.  So if we have dog meat, wolf meat and fox meat, the game will know they taste similar because they have all the same tokens.  If we have say a cow, the game will know they taste dissimilar because they have only one token in common with the dog *but* they will know they are more similar than a giant mantis which has no tokens in common. 

We can reuse these tokens for other purposes, so it is more efficient than having to manually tell the game how sweet everything tastes. 

[voliol]

Food items should be organized into categories, as you said [meat, fish, flour, egg, leaf vegetable, berry, spice, etc.], but also taste groups: [sweet, salty, bitter, bland, sharp, smooth, etc.] For instance, potatoes and horseradish are both tuber vegetables, but no one would ever use horseradish as the staple basis for a meal. When food substitutions occur, the Cook should consider the replacement's category and taste with respect to the original ingredient. For example, most pies are made with category [fruit]--to make them with category [vegetable] doesn't make sense--except for pumpkins & sweet potatoes, because those specific vegetables have the taste [sweet] quality in common with most fruits.

We don't actually need to do it in that complicated a way.  The game can simply guess what tastes similar to what based upon the equivilant of [CREATURE_CLASS] tokens and the type of thing it is.  So if we have dog meat, wolf meat and fox meat, the game will know they taste similar because they have all the same tokens.  If we have say a cow, the game will know they taste dissimilar because they have only one token in common with the dog *but* they will know they are more similar than a giant mantis which has no tokens in common. 

We can reuse these tokens for other purposes, so it is more efficient than having to manually tell the game how sweet everything tastes.

I agree a substitute system needs to be in place when there are no specific taste tokens to be found, but being able to manually set taste has its upsides as well.

For instance, a lemon is sour, an orange sweet, and a grapefruit bitter, despite all being citrus fruits. It would be nice if the cultures could draw connections both from familiar relationships, so orange juice could be replaced by grapefruit juice, and raw taste, so lemon juice could be a substitute for grape vinegar.

The game also needs to respect that tomatoes and potatoes don’t taste much alike despite being from similar plants, due to one being a fruit and the other a tuber. The liver of a pig I also imagine is closer to the liver of a cow than it is to pork. This means taste has to be controlled by the kind of growth/body part in some way.
The easiest way to solve this, I believe, is to have taste be defined at the material level. That way, there’s no need to implement new ways to detect the kind of growth, and it’s also consequent with the way edibility is checked for. Creature classes and hypothetical future plant classes having internally similar taste could of course trickle down into this in some way.

[GoblinCookie]

I agree a substitute system needs to be in place when there are no specific taste tokens to be found, but being able to manually set taste has its upsides as well.

For instance, a lemon is sour, an orange sweet, and a grapefruit bitter, despite all being citrus fruits. It would be nice if the cultures could draw connections both from familiar relationships, so orange juice could be replaced by grapefruit juice, and raw taste, so lemon juice could be a substitute for grape vinegar.

The game also needs to respect that tomatoes and potatoes don’t taste much alike despite being from similar plants, due to one being a fruit and the other a tuber. The liver of a pig I also imagine is closer to the liver of a cow than it is to pork. This means taste has to be controlled by the kind of growth/body part in some way.
The easiest way to solve this, I believe, is to have taste be defined at the material level. That way, there’s no need to implement new ways to detect the kind of growth, and it’s also consequent with the way edibility is checked for. Creature classes and hypothetical future plant classes having internally similar taste could of course trickle down into this in some way.

The idea to compare items of the same type across class, not items of a different type. 

The main advantage of having taste tokens is that we can assign them to particular parts of the creature.  So the orange tastes sweet as opposed to the orange leaves tasting sweet.  However when you think about it, an orange also tastes like a lemon.  Taken together, a civilization would substitute orange for grapefruit because both are sweet but if it did not have any grapefruits they would use lemons. 

[voliol]

I agree a substitute system needs to be in place when there are no specific taste tokens to be found, but being able to manually set taste has its upsides as well.

For instance, a lemon is sour, an orange sweet, and a grapefruit bitter, despite all being citrus fruits. It would be nice if the cultures could draw connections both from familiar relationships, so orange juice could be replaced by grapefruit juice, and raw taste, so lemon juice could be a substitute for grape vinegar.

The game also needs to respect that tomatoes and potatoes don’t taste much alike despite being from similar plants, due to one being a fruit and the other a tuber. The liver of a pig I also imagine is closer to the liver of a cow than it is to pork. This means taste has to be controlled by the kind of growth/body part in some way.
The easiest way to solve this, I believe, is to have taste be defined at the material level. That way, there’s no need to implement new ways to detect the kind of growth, and it’s also consequent with the way edibility is checked for. Creature classes and hypothetical future plant classes having internally similar taste could of course trickle down into this in some way.

The idea to compare items of the same type across class, not items of a different type. 

The main advantage of having taste tokens is that we can assign them to particular parts of the creature.  So the orange tastes sweet as opposed to the orange leaves tasting sweet.  However when you think about it, an orange also tastes like a lemon.  Taken together, a civilization would substitute orange for grapefruit because both are sweet but if it did not have any grapefruits they would use lemons. 

I'm not sure what you're trying to put forth here? You might have missed writing a crucial word in that first sentence... If the taste tokens are assigned to materials that also allows there to be a difference in taste between different parts of both creatures and plants.

[Starver]

Grapefruit does not taste sweet. Neither does rhubarb. You need a lot of sugar or genuinely sweet fruit also in the mix to make it sweet. Possibly that's what other people do with grapefruit, but I just avoid those. Rhubarb grew in my mother's garden, so I had to learn to deal with it, but she never grew grapefruit so I mostly got that as part of a fruit-cocktail starter in a formal dinner, with the grapefruit segments notably bitter and contaminating the sweet-citrus juices from the more orangeesque components.


As to the topic, I mentioned my solution to practical (though not common) required ingredients, elsewhere.Somethng similar based around preparatory styles of meal could follow a procedural investment in diversifying the kitchen output (code shared/re-used from the music/instrument procgen process?) where a culinary tradition can be made in worldgen to satisfy base mealtime needs (wursts, fritters, meatballs or haggii based upon territory-normal creatures that are subject to husbansry and butcherable and plants that can be grown and processed, etc) with more exotic tastes needing satisfying for that extra level of pleasure that consists of rarer (but still accessible) components and combinatirial styles.