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[AncientEnemy]

something I've noticed in every fortress i've made is that lavish meals are worth gobs and gobs of money. i've got enough to buy out the entire stock of every trader that comes with plenty left over, just from a few stacks of Dwarven Wine Roast, which i'm making anyway. is this supposed to be the case?

[numerobis]

Yes, no, maybe so.  If you want more challenge, then don't do it.

[SheepishOne]

The only 'technical exploit' there is making food out of booze.

From the Wiki:

Since a single brewable item will produce five units of alcohol, and each unit of alcohol can be cooked directly into food, it is advisable to brew any plants you intend to cook. In this manner, you may produce five times the food you would from simply growing and then cooking your crops. Be wary though, as you need to ensure enough remains behind for drinking. Note that this is considered an exploit, and Toady plans to disallow the use of booze as a food substrate in the future.

You really make your own difficulty in DF. I prefer to have some specialty liquors available for cooking because I want my cooks to mix it with other foods. I get a hankering for beer brats and I love wine in certain sauces. No reason the dwarves shouldn't have the same variety and flair

[Bromor Neckbeard]

I personally consider it an exploit (just because it seems exploity to pay for a dozen suits of masterwork steel plate with a stack of 25 masterfully cooked cat tallow roasts), but people DO pay thousands of dollars for a meal cooked by a master chef in real life, so it's up to you.

[Overdose]

The only solution I could see to this problem is if cooking quality scaled like damage does for weaponry, where masterful is only double value.

Then you'd have fancy food, that's worth more then it was when it wasn't cooked, but the prices wouldn't get crazy, making it less exploitable, and also solving the whole "not being able to afford meals when econ starts up" thing as well, which leads to more happy thoughts from good meals being eaten.

[Hyndis]

Bolts have the same issue. The quality is applied initially to just one bolt, but because there are 25 bolts in a stack, you can get utterly absurd values for a single stack.

Try it out yourself. Craft some high quality steel bolts. Then decorate them with gems, bone, and everything else you can get your hands on. That single stack of bolts will be able to buy out an entire caravan.

[pushy]

Bolts have the same issue. The quality is applied initially to just one bolt, but because there are 25 bolts in a stack, you can get utterly absurd values for a single stack.

Try it out yourself. Craft some high quality steel bolts. Then decorate them with gems, bone, and everything else you can get your hands on. That single stack of bolts will be able to buy out an entire caravan.

That particular exploit was fixed to a certain degree months ago. Get an old version of the game (I think anything as late as 38c may even still work), start a new game and set about making some wooden or bone bolts and decorating them with some cheapy gem (just one). Even for stuff of pretty mediocre quality, the dwarven caravan will still be willing to spend anywhere from 1,000-3,000 on a single stack of bolts (and my experiences of it extend only to decorating with green glass, so more valuable gems would have made it even more excessively expensive). Repeat the process in 40d and you'll find it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the older version - after decorating, the bolts may have a value of 100 or something.

[Tormy]

something I've noticed in every fortress i've made is that lavish meals are worth gobs and gobs of money. i've got enough to buy out the entire stock of every trader that comes with plenty left over, just from a few stacks of Dwarven Wine Roast, which i'm making anyway. is this supposed to be the case?

No, it is not exploiting at all....The trading system is quite imbalanced at the moment. I guess that Toady will balance it when he will work on the Caravan Arc. 

[R1ck]

On a related note, sometimes nobles can change the price of food and prepared meals to levels where everything is 75% off. Thus even poor dwarves can afford gourmet food.

[LegoLord]

The value of food is accurate but the ease of acquiring it is not.  Once farming is more difficult, by what ever means Toady decides, it won't be so much of an exploit.

[G-Flex]

People always, for some bizarre reason, forget one key problem of cooking when they discuss this.

Cooking high-quality lavish meals creates not only absurdly high percentage profit, but also creates potentially dozens of items at once. No other industry in the entire game can do that.

And yeah, they're way overpriced, especially in comparison to their ingredients, and trading food to a caravan can be kind of sketchy anyway, depending.

[numerobis]

Given that the roasts will last for decades, it's not that sketchy to be giving them to a caravan.

[Shurikane]

On a related note, sometimes nobles can change the price of food and prepared meals to levels where everything is 75% off. Thus even poor dwarves can afford gourmet food.

On my economy fort, I had a long period where lavish meals were cheaper than easy ones.

[pushy]

Cooking high-quality lavish meals creates not only absurdly high percentage profit, but also creates potentially dozens of items at once. No other industry in the entire game can do that.

You're wrong there. Dragons let you make 100 bolts in one go from their bones, and no fewer than three animals you can bring along at embark can give you in excess of three dozen bolts in one go (horses and cows give 45, mules give 40...donkeys just miss out on joining them as they only give 35)

And before you say that bone bolts (with the exception of those made of things like dragon bones) aren't worth jackshit, remember that the bones themselves have a value of 0, so anything you get out of them is a profit...and you can decorate them to boost their value even further (which you can't do with prepared meals)

[G-Flex]

You have a point there, since bones DO come in high stacks and bolts multiply the amount from the bones they get.

I don't know how much profitability there is in getting bone bolts out of livestock (or whatever), though... I've honestly never checked. I doubt it's as severe as lavish meals, but you still make a point.

Granted, for the most part, my point still remains; kitchens offer an extremely fast production stream compared to anything else, and the value is just nuts.

I believe I've suggested before that dwarves should do something like cooking a minimum number of meals at a time; in other words, a dwarf making a meal would only take ONE of each ingredient, leading to the minimum possible number of stacks (2 for biscuits, 3 for stews, 4 for roasts). It would also make cooking take enough work that you wouldn't be swimming in prepared meals constantly, either.