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[Bumber]

The real problem, IMO, is that not getting to eat your favorite food on a regular basis is considered "a lack of decent meals."

There's got to be food that you can consider "tasty enough", which will keep you in a fair mood (other circumstances permitting.)

[Azerty]

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?

Among the elements of a culture, nothing is more accessible than its gastronomy; knowing a community based around fishing makes more dishes including fish and seafood is a good way to immerge the player, and having dishes more complex than merely the present forms of biscuit, minced and roast. Moreover, knowing a given fishing community has an abundance of wood and coal and consequently eats its fish roasted and has a cuisine different from another fishing community eating marinated seafood because it lacks means to cook its food.

[GoblinCookie]

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.

The main issue is that we basically need to have exotic demands or else there is really no solid basis for much of an economy to actually exist beyond the level of a single fortress.  The fortress can find food and drink in it's local area enough to meet all it's dwarves needs and it only needs sand/clay/metals but it can just send dwarves off to collect those things because they world is so small, in effect there is no one ever needs to trade with other sites for anything ever. 

There is however the flip side to this is that if dwarves needs are too idiosyncratic then collective provision *of* those needs falls apart, the fortress ceases to make sense when one dwarf is in the sea fishing for lobsters, another dwarf is picking berries in the forest, another dwarf is hunting camels in the desert and none of them have any interest in what the other produces. 

As for military fortresses and the like, the solution is to make it so we are just given food by the central government.

The real problem, IMO, is that not getting to eat your favorite food on a regular basis is considered "a lack of decent meals."

There's got to be food that you can consider "tasty enough", which will keep you in a fair mood (other circumstances permitting.)

That solution is solved by initially coming up with a list of available foodstuffs, generating recipes based on those foodstuffs AND then giving dwarves both random demands for recipes and for specific ingredients.  If it is a long time since they have eaten a preferred recipe, they can develop new preferences for recipes which contain a preferred ingredient.  Also if they have no eaten an ingredient for a long time, they can develop a new demand for a similar ingredient defined biologically by classes.

[voliol]

The real problem, IMO, is that not getting to eat your favorite food on a regular basis is considered "a lack of decent meals."

There's got to be food that you can consider "tasty enough", which will keep you in a fair mood (other circumstances permitting.)

That solution is solved by initially coming up with a list of available foodstuffs, generating recipes based on those foodstuffs AND then giving dwarves both random demands for recipes and for specific ingredients.  If it is a long time since they have eaten a preferred recipe, they can develop new preferences for recipes which contain a preferred ingredient.  Also if they have no eaten an ingredient for a long time, they can develop a new demand for a similar ingredient defined biologically by classes.

+1 an absolutely gorgeous summary of this thread.
May I add that this should spread to entity levels as well, so that a baby born in an entity banished to the deserts doesn't need to develop its preference for dried camel meat, but instead has it inherited culturally from birth*. If there are currently systems for common individual value changes (caused by experiences or literature) influencing those of the entity the individual belongs to, I imagine they could be re-used for this.

^{*or up-bringing, but that requires a level of social interaction dwarves in-between that we're still far from having.}

[GoblinCookie]

+1 an absolutely gorgeous summary of this thread.
May I add that this should spread to entity levels as well, so that a baby born in an entity banished to the deserts doesn't need to develop its preference for dried camel meat, but instead has it inherited culturally from birth*. If there are currently systems for common individual value changes (caused by experiences or literature) influencing those of the entity the individual belongs to, I imagine they could be re-used for this.

^{*or up-bringing, but that requires a level of social interaction dwarves in-between that we're still far from having.}

This is all working at an entity level.  The entity (not the individual) has a set of ingredients that it thinks of as food and a set of recipes that use those ingredients also.  The individual randomly selects from the cultural selection of ingredients AND their selection of recipes separately (there is no need for them to like the ingredients just because they like the recipe). 

The thing is that the entity's recipes shift over time if they are unable to acquire a sufficient quantity of an ingredient needed to make a recipe.  They substitute the most similar ingredient determined by the creature class of the source of the ingredient.  In your example, they would readily switch to using camels if the original recipe was alpaca but might switch to ostrich instead were the original recipe involved emu.  If the recipe involved duck, they would switch to ostrich while if it involved honey badger they would switch to camel (because both are mammals). 

In these cases all the individuals switch en-masse because they are all referencing the same data-entry.  Individuals may pick up preferences for recipes and raw foodstuffs from other cultures they are exposed too, but in that case they reference the extra recipes from the foreign cultures separately and don't automatically add them to their original entity. 

[Nidor]

Hello, hopefully this isn't too much of a necro after just a couple of weeks inactivity.

As a big fan of cooking irl and in games, I am curious as to the limitations of DF when it comes to kitchen reactions. I am wondering if it is possible to have an intermediary step. For instance how the ingredients were prepared, itself being a preference. Simple 1 ingredient 'meals', one step higher than raw foods, but could be upgraded by using as ingredients for higher category meals. Say a dwarf prefers grilled and dolphin meat, they would be ecstatic to get a grilled dolphin meat roast, but will avoid 'no decent meals' mood debuffs if they are provided something like a grilled plump helmet, due to the prep preference.

That way you could mitigate demands without scrambling for exotic or impossible materials, while still providing a benefit for managing to get said materials. This could also seemingly work in a manner similar to create ___ crafts making assorted goods. (make # crowns mandate style) by having a "prepare ingredient" reaction that produces random prefix (grilled/fried/baked/boiled/smoked etc) foods.

[GoblinCookie]

Hello, hopefully this isn't too much of a necro after just a couple of weeks inactivity.

As a big fan of cooking irl and in games, I am curious as to the limitations of DF when it comes to kitchen reactions. I am wondering if it is possible to have an intermediary step. For instance how the ingredients were prepared, itself being a preference. Simple 1 ingredient 'meals', one step higher than raw foods, but could be upgraded by using as ingredients for higher category meals. Say a dwarf prefers grilled and dolphin meat, they would be ecstatic to get a grilled dolphin meat roast, but will avoid 'no decent meals' mood debuffs if they are provided something like a grilled plump helmet, due to the prep preference.

That way you could mitigate demands without scrambling for exotic or impossible materials, while still providing a benefit for managing to get said materials. This could also seemingly work in a manner similar to create ___ crafts making assorted goods. (make # crowns mandate style) by having a "prepare ingredient" reaction that produces random prefix (grilled/fried/baked/boiled/smoked etc) foods.

Pretty much that is covered by having a preference for generated recipes as well as their ingredients.  How they are 'prepared' is covered by the preference for the generated recipe, without having to go into the exact details. 

[arkhnchul]

as wide mentioned, one of the problems is what food preferences is too narrow. Some suggestion for widenig it somehow.

It's already suggested many times, we can introduce overall somewhat abstract characteritics of meal: salty/fresh, spiced/tasteless, sweet/bitter, soft/chewy and so on. But mainly they all related to prepared dishes instead of main ingredients, as it often suggested here - there are ton of examples IRL. Seriously, there are hell of a methods to prepare, say, rice. Or to combine bread with meat.

Well, let dorfs have their dreams of dragon intestines, roc eggs or giant sperm whale eyes. Let it be a big morale boost if it even happen to be fulfilled some day.

Among with that, let they prefer to consume somewhat like "salty chewy meat" (okay, along with preference with beer) or "fresh tasteless soft cheese" (and generic wine, bearded sommeliers). Let prepared food characteristics reflect cook preferences with some deviations. Say, cook with "fresh spiced bitter" prefs prepare "salty spiced bitter", "fresh tasteless bitter", "fresh cpiced sweet" and so. If dorf consumes something, which mainly (>0.66) overlaps with his preferences, it fulfills the need; full overlap generates happy thougnt with boost based on quality.

as i see it, this way we can somehow fix current situation with some vantages:
- changes affect only prepared food, not each and every of possible ingredients
- there is no need to dive into sea of world-generated civ food traditions
- it isn't introduce deep micromanagement with recipes like "prepare 10 stacks of (cat meat)+(cave wheat flour)+(strawberry) for that unhappy peasant"
- it still need some management with assigning labors to suitable citizens and not trivial overall

well, there are still bigger problem with dorfs doing nothing to fulfill their needs (i.e. not consuming preferred food if there are sweet old raw plump helmets available), but its slightly out of topic.