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[sketchesofpayne]

I imagine any system made would share a lot in common with the music system.

Music Style = Cuisine
Song = Recipe
Instruments = Food Item Groups

The cook would then 'perform' each food item.  And recipes would be 'composed' and shared.

[Strik3r]

This game does absoulutely not need an overcomplicated food and cooking system, especially not as a solution to an minor bug in the game(Dwarfs(occasionally) having ridiculous food preferences)

While i agree that the bug should be fixed in some manner, probably by making sure that when food prefs are generated, that the civ actually has access to the food in question... kinda hard to aquire a taste for something when not even a single civ anywhere has that kind of food. Also, no vermin, except for certain creatures who will eat vermin even if not starving(Another bug; In adventure mode, [VERMIN_HUNTER] adventurers can't eat vermin)

However, i do not agree with making dwarves have food prefs for entire animals instead of specific parts. If a dwarf likes deer liver then he likes deer liver and not deer balls. The dwarf in question should however make an effort to eat food that contains his favourite ingridients, whatever they may be.
Im also totally okay with food being made out of completely randomly picked foodstuffs, because i like the game generating awesome things like ☼Tallow roast☼s consisting of nothing but several pieces of finely minced tallow. even if it is completely nonsensical. It's a game for crying out loud, not everything needs to be realistic or make sense.

I like the idea of civs occasionally having specific dishes or foods they make, but if they can't make it, they cant make it. No pointlessly complicated systems for substitution or categories for food beyond simple and overarching categories. Also categorizing things by taste... really?

And dont bother giving me the "Dwarf Fortress is complicated" argument; yes it is, but its complicated where it needs to be. Food production does not.
Also, having the player micromanage food production down to individual ingridient is not the solution either.

[therahedwig]

Is this going to go down into another recipe thread, remember there's been some really good ones regarding that already.

All of them, you'll notice, mention using taste-based preferences. Some of them even handle micromanaging by suggesting a communal cooking mechanism.

The big problem with generating recipes(we should have had them already during the tavern release), is that different food supplies have different chemical compositions and thus different effects on the resulting food. Here's a website that explains how different types of flour have an effect on the texture of the products you can make with them. You're just going to have vastly different kinds of bread with any of the flour types in DF, let alone all of the other stuff. I am pretty sure that's why we don't have improved cooking yet.

Mind you, the real problem that this thread is trying to solve is not the food preference itself, it is that dwarves just go insane over time from not eating their favourite food which is ridiculous by itself.

[Strik3r]

Is this going to go down into another recipe thread, remember there's been some really good ones regarding that already.

All of them, you'll notice, mention using taste-based preferences. Some of them even handle micromanaging by suggesting a communal cooking mechanism.

The big problem with generating recipes(we should have had them already during the tavern release), is that different food supplies have different chemical compositions and thus different effects on the resulting food. Here's a website that explains how different types of flour have an effect on the texture of the products you can make with them. You're just going to have vastly different kinds of bread with any of the flour types in DF, let alone all of the other stuff. I am pretty sure that's why we don't have improved cooking yet.

Mind you, the real problem that this thread is trying to solve is not the food preference itself, it is that dwarves just go insane over time from not eating their favourite food which is ridiculous by itself.

The dwarf in question should however make an effort to eat food that contains his favourite ingridients, whatever they may be.

Provided of course, that food with the dwarf's preferred stuff is actually available in the fortress. If not, its not the game's fault that the player hasn't aquired a variety of foodstuff.

[voliol]

Is this going to go down into another recipe thread, remember there's been some really good ones regarding that already.

[...]

Mind you, the real problem that this thread is trying to solve is not the food preference itself, it is that dwarves just go insane over time from not eating their favourite food which is ridiculous by itself.

It’s been that from the very start. Some of us (including me) might have gotten a bit excited talking about the possibilities of random recipes, for the sake of random recipes instead of them being a handy solution to an existing problem/bug though. Then again, considering the current music system having a somewhat random recipe system does not seem too far-fetched.

[Azerty]

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've created the thread Taxonomic trees and biological families about the creation of taxonomical families, which could provide a way to implemant your suggestion.

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.

Good idea too, especially combined with taxonomical trees.

[IndigoFenix]

I think the idea of a creature being born with a preference for a favorite food (or anything else) which they then keep throughout their life is pretty silly to begin with.  It has a gameplay function but it defies logic.  A preference for certain taste types might be instinctive, but even these can be acquired through experience.

I think it might make sense for creatures to have a preference for foods they are accustomed to or grew up with, and to have preferences operate on a sliding scale rather than being an either/or thing.  That would put a bit of strategy into play when making a fortress, you can import from the Mountainhome to keep your dwarves happy or force them to eat weird foreign cuisine until they get used to it, making it easier to grow food later but also making things harder for new migrants.  But you'd never be stuck in a situation where you have no access to the food your dwarves like, and you wouldn't have to carefully micromanage every individual dwarf.

[Splint]

I think the idea of a creature being born with a preference for a favorite food (or anything else) which they then keep throughout their life is pretty silly to begin with.  It has a gameplay function but it defies logic.  A preference for certain taste types might be instinctive, but even these can be acquired through experience.

I think it might make sense for creatures to have a preference for foods they are accustomed to or grew up with, and to have preferences operate on a sliding scale rather than being an either/or thing.  That would put a bit of strategy into play when making a fortress, you can import from the Mountainhome to keep your dwarves happy or force them to eat weird foreign cuisine until they get used to it, making it easier to grow food later but also making things harder for new migrants.  But you'd never be stuck in a situation where you have no access to the food your dwarves like, and you wouldn't have to carefully micromanage every individual dwarf.

Definitely in favor of this, cause it's very hard to help problem dwarves via food or drink when you literally cannot acquire what they like and no way to have them get a taste for what you can provide.

[Iduno]

This game does absoulutely not need an overcomplicated food and cooking system, especially not as a solution to an minor bug in the game(Dwarfs(occasionally) having ridiculous food preferences)

You seem to be in the wrong place. This is a forum for Dwarf Fortress, a game-like program that thrives on over-complicatedness.

Actual serious thoughts:

Although the suggestion someone made to have dwarves actually eat food they like instead of food they don't (like you do when you have a preference) makes sense.

The suggestion to have preferences arise out of experiencing new foods sounds good, but is also game-able: if I only feed you plump helmets and dwarven wine, you won't ever develop interesting wants. You would have to have a (small?) chance of a dwarf or dwarves picking up preferred foods when merchants visit the map (otherwise avoiding building a trade depot allows the plump helmet only diet).

The obvious best solution is to fix dwarves, and also make meals more complicated (perhaps making cooking require multiple skills like combat does). Maybe throw in requirements like "x ingredients with no repeats" and "x ingredients with no repeats or similar items". That way dwarves are more likely to find a meal that contains one ingredient they like (although they'd be more likely to have a ingredient they dislike as well).

[Splint]

It's more that they often have preferences that either can never be provided for or make no sense - like a baby born in a fortress that wants to eat giant thrips and drink bannana beer in a fort in the middle of a frozen trundra that has never imported such things because nobody they trade with has access to things like that, or a migrant to a fort from a civ that probably doesn't even know what seahorses are preferring to eat them and drink gutter cruor, a type of drink only goblins - that dwraves never trade with mind - would probably produce in any great quantity produce.

Personally I'd just be happy if excellent or masterful meals at least gave the bare minimum just because they're that well made and delicious. It'd be better than simply not being able to deal with that thought at all because neither you nor your neighbors can provide any of what two thirds of your dwarves apparently want.

[sketchesofpayne]

It's more that they often have preferences that either can never be provided for or make no sense

That is the crux of the issue.  I would someday like to see food production expanded.  But a more elegant solution right now might be to make dwarf food preferences more generalized.  Their food preferences should be more generalized things like: seafood, poultry, red meat, leafy vegetables, tubers, grains, fruit.  You can usually source something from each of those categories.

-----

Let me be clear, it's not that I don't like dwarves having food preferences, or even specific food preferences.  I would make each dwarf a personalized boxed lunch if the game allowed for that.  But right now they have oddly specific, unobtainable, or nonsensical preferences.  This makes me as a player powerless to meet their needs.

-----

Another note: the idea that "This game does absoulutely not need an overcomplicated food and cooking system" is silly.  Food has been one of the things that has been more important to civilized culture than anything else in history.  More time and effort has been spent growing, raising, preparing, and cooking food than war or politics or industry.  People have spent lifetimes perfecting alcohol distillation and brewing.  The greatest riches found in the Americas was not gold, it was the produce they took back to Europe.  Chocolate, corn, potatoes, peppers, vanilla, tomatoes.

Currently in the game, food is easy to produce in unmanageable quantities.  And while it has a wide array of possible ingredients, they are basically pressed and formed into nutrition cubes that are worth a stupendous amount in trade.  There is a point of balance between hardtack-and-saltpork and a twelve-course meal with dessert and wine tasting.  And I'm certain Dwarf Fortress can find it.

[voliol]

Food has been one of the things that has been more important to civilized culture than anything else in history.  More time and effort has been spent growing, raising, preparing, and cooking food than war or politics or industry.  People have spent lifetimes perfecting alcohol distillation and brewing.The greatest riches found in the Americas was not gold, it was the produce they took back to Europe.  Chocolate, corn, potatoes, peppers, vanilla, tomatoes.

Other than the obvious economy connection, this also has connections to a farming update; certain foods need to be objectively tastier and/or nutritious to be sought after, and some crops need to have a better yield than others (or you could fine-tune it with the VALUE token but I digress). There has been very thorough threads on this (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0) so I won't go into details.

Another example of this would be the spice trade, as when associated trade routed were cut off, this led to the first voyage around Africa and eventually to the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans, for better or worse.

[GoblinCookie]

You seem to be in the wrong place. This is a forum for Dwarf Fortress, a game-like program that thrives on over-complicatedness.

Well there is a difference between being complicated because you have to be and being overcomplicated for no reason.

Other than the obvious economy connection, this also has connections to a farming update; certain foods need to be objectively tastier and/or nutritious to be sought after, and some crops need to have a better yield than others (or you could fine-tune it with the VALUE token but I digress). There has been very thorough threads on this (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0) so I won't go into details.

Another example of this would be the spice trade, as when associated trade routed were cut off, this led to the first voyage around Africa and eventually to the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans, for better or worse.

The DF world is basically too small for the equivalent of the spice trade to exist in the game.  The real problem with the game is why any trade would exist at all when I can just in a few days (of fortress mode time) to send a dwarf to the other side of the world to gather whatever resources I need.  The differing time-frames of the two modes makes this situation even worse, the world is even smaller from the fortress mode perspective than it is in the adventure mode perspective.

[Rataldo]

You seem to be in the wrong place. This is a forum for Dwarf Fortress, a game-like program that thrives on over-complicatedness.

Well there is a difference between being complicated because you have to be and being overcomplicated for no reason.

I agree with GC here. For me, Dwarf Fortress is all about creating interesting stories. The complicated combat system definitely adds to stories, but I can't see a complicated food system doing the same. Maybe a legend of a great chef making great dishes... and that's about it.

Is there more story-making opportunity here than I'm seeing?

[therahedwig]

hey, uhm, guys, Iduno was making a joke. You can tell, because the next sentence starts with 'In all seriousness'.

And truthfully though, there is something to be said for playing a tavern-focused settlement and having all sorts of wacky shenenigans revolving your inability to get  something like... lobster. The tricky thing about all dwarf fortress mechanisms is to find a balance between allowing people to specialize in a given mechanic, like a temple, food, libraries, military, while still having good enough defaults to allow someone who just wants to run a military outpost to ignore food beyond ensuring there's a little variety and enough to drink, or the opposite, allow a tavern to create some militia that's good enough to deal with bandits and trouble makers but don't need to have detailed training schedules because they're not exactly going to fight off sieges.