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[Arphahat]

I was looking through the list of voting suggestions and didn't see this item, so I decided to create a thread for it.

A well known tactic in DF is to brew everything you have.  As you need food, you can simply cook alcohol and "mince" it with other alcohol.  While it makes sense to be able to use alcohol as one ingredient, you shouldn't be able to mix for different alcohols in a bottle and call it "dinner." (If you do, you might need some help. )

My proposal is that only one alcohol and one of each other type of ingredient (no mixing turtle with turtle with a side of turtley-turtle).  Similar rules should be in place about cooking syrup as well.

[Dwaref]

Yeah, this is pretty important and widely discussed.
Someone suggested a system of condiments. So sugar, syrup, alcohol etc would count as a condiment and would only be able to be added once to something already cooking.

I think we could have food classes. Stuff like 'meat', 'carbs', 'sauce' etc etc. Only one type can be added per dish. Turtle with plump helmets with a wine sauce(wine and flour) would count as a real meal.

Turtle and plump helmets can be eaten individually as-is, and wine could be drunk. Left-over flour could be baked with. We got some stuff like syrup that i don't know what one could do something with. Mix with alcohol? Make hard candy? Introduce cavities.

[Derakon]

I'll note for the record that you get the same returns from alcohol that you do from dwarven syrup and quarry bush leaves. The only difference is that the intermediate product is still useful as non-food (and making it trains brewing). So I don't see this as so much of an exploit as just an oversight in the cooking system. Yes, cooking needs to be fixed, but that involves more than just this (and Toady has an item on his roadmap for cooking).

[Mel_Vixen]

This "exploit" wouldnt be abused if cooking would:

(1) leave Seeds and
(2) wouldnt count to the the cooking skill if alcohol is the main ingredient.

As it is now the most players would rely on the Fruit/fungus-> Still ->Kitchen chain cause you can have cooked food and Seeds so its an good option short after embark. I do that too as long i have not enought seeds, after that anyway i use kitchens directly to prevent an messy Seed plosion.

The good way (i think) to prevent that exploit would be if an fruit/Vegitable/fungus would spawn 2 seeds on harvest as well as the cook/stillable parts.In addition to this another nice thing would be if an Farmer would carry an seedbag with him.

edit: an option on the kitchen screen should allow you to use seeds as long enought seeds are left - This number would be defined by the player.

[Derakon]

Y'know, you could farm something other than Plump Helmets and still get seeds and food, without cooking booze.

[Spey]

yeah I agree that something more realistic needs to be done with the cooking system, perhaps replacing the more vague 'easy', 'fine', and 'lavish' meals with real recipes

perhaps have a few generic choices such as "bread", "pies" "biscuits" etc which would have similiar but variable sets of ingredients.

eg. "bread" would require one type of wheat flour, and one type of beer or ale (like any dwarf makes bread with water!) but the specific end product would vary slightly on ingredients eg dwarven wheat flour and dwarven ale/beer makes cave bread, wheras whip vine flour and longland beer would make vine loaves. this would in essence be a bit like ordering "rock crafts" and then getting crowns, scepters, idols etc. as a result

Dwarven likes or dislikes could change to reflect this, perhaps changing from liking raw foods (ie, "likes plump helmets") to liking something more specific (ie "likes helmet pie") or just having the dwarf like any recipe that includes his favourite ingredient(s)

Nobles should also definately make mandates or demands for their favourite foods, demands for more platinum statues after youve just finished making their 284th seems a little silly, but "moar roast dragon wings with a side order of fire imp jelly" is something I can envisage the countess asking for.

also perhaps have some more specific and specialised recipes in addition to more generic ones, these could require rare or exotic ingredients and would be the favourites of nobles. eg 'Dwarven Rock loaf' would need dwarven wheat flour, dwarven ale, and lime (milled from chalk or limestone)

[Dwaref]

It'd be nice if critters also grew in one's fortress, depending on what you cooked.
Cats can't say 'kill all mealworms'. But instead if you only bake food, you should build up a population of corresponding pests.
Food could go xLoaf of Breadx, up to xxxLoaf of Breadxxx before becoming 'pile of mealworms', with hordes of full-grown mealworm beetles swarming around and copulating up the fortress.

Dwarves would get an unhappy thought from eating bugs. The worms can be used for food in themselves, but should cause unhappy thoughts if eaten non-processed and alive. Also, their waste by-products could taint the food they inhabit.

Thus it'd be foolish to put all one's eggs in the same basket, and strive to make more varied foods.

Other vermin could be different kinds of mold, ants, etc etc, and they would together place a greater demand at food storage. Raw meat lying in the open among the flies should quickly become filled with fly larvae as well.
Vermin like lizards and rats should still consume all the food they can get at.

[Niyazov]

Another cooking exploit is that plump helmet spawn generate twice the number of meals as plump helmet if you cook them, since there are two spawn per helmet. I've never seen a mushroom that produced more edible spores than it did meat.

[LegacyCWAL]

Y'know, you could farm something other than Plump Helmets and still get seeds and food, without cooking booze.

You can, yes, and many players do farm things other than Plump Helmets.  But the only reason to plant something other than Plump Helmet is to make things harder on yourself.  Other ways to "self-nerf" your food production at least have some legitimate (if contrived) reason (e.g. choosing Dwarven Sugar over Syrup at least lets you save barrels).

[Dwaref]

Agree, i'm here to let the game play me, not me play the game.
I mean that sincerely, if you are able to pick and choose your game, we are bound as humans to take the path of least resistance.
Either that, or we play a sandbox type game, where you are forced to make up your own goals, and doesn't really need DF to start with.

I reason that you need a balance between them.
To be able to both choose how to play the game, as well as the game itself having parameters that are narrow enough to allow modes of play, where a defective strategy results in a loss.

Dying of starvation in 2-d DF was fun, so was getting mauled by critters.
Being able to play the game stupidly and still survive is not fun.

[Mirefrost00]

I don't know, guys, I'm kinda interested in trying dwarven rum biscuits some day.... 

[Tenebrais]

I liked the idea of recipes. It could be especially good in weaning you from plump helmets: a lot of things (biscuits, bread, etc) are made with flour, so having cave wheat or whip vine would be more useful than just a little variety. You could go one further and say that unprocessed plants have no function in cooking; they can only be eaten raw or possibly as a part of a larger meal like a roast.

[tigrex]

The nice thing about the food system in DF is that, while incomplete, it offers 'farmer' players a choice in foodstuffs to grow, brew, cook, process and mill.  This is a viable path both in terms of happy dwarves and profit from trading cooked goods.  On the other hand, players who don't care about food and have other goals, such as military, building or mining, can simply set a few plots to plump helmets and forget about them.

The one thing I hate about the current system is the fact that cooking plants does not return seeds.  It sounds trivial, but it isn't.  It means that if I let my legendary cook go for a couple of minutes he'll turn all my plump helmets into roasts (which is good) but leave me absolutely no seeds.  None.  At.  All.  He'll also get rid of any booze in the fort, which just makes problems later when my dwarves are forced to view the world without the benefit of alcohol.  So the only thing I let the idiot cook is meat.  And only once its dead.     The only solution to this is switch the cooking job off and on every few minutes and manually monitor the seed/farm plot levels, which gets tres annoying.

[Derakon]

Cooking for seeds isn't a problem for non-Plump Helmets, but I agree it's annoying. And I always turn off booze cooking, to better preserve my drinks supplies.

[LegacyCWAL]

I turn off cooking booze and anything with seeds, bones, or shells as well.

On the other hand, players who don't care about food and have other goals, such as military, building or mining, can simply set a few plots to plump helmets and forget about them.

The problem with is that it only takes a couple more minutes to set up a more varied diet.  Set your plots to different crops, queue up a few dozen "process plants (bag/barrel)" and "mill plant" jobs in the job manager, and you don't have to pay any more attention to it than if you farm nothing but plump helmets.