So we know that dwarfs eat but a few times a year (an average of
, and we know that farming is pretty easy. I realized that if dwarfs eat more units of food per meal, then you could have dwarfs eating enough to make farming a bit more challenging. Now if you start out having dwarfs eat a whole lot, then things will be pretty tough at embark, and easier later on. So my suggestion is have a dwarf eat a number of units equal to the number of skill levels he has above dabbling (with a minimum of one unit of food per meal).
A legendary+5 farmer who has no social skills above dabbling requires 20 units of food per meal, which is 160 units per year, or less than a simple meal (30) of dwarven wine (25) and plump helmets (5). Which means that he would require 1 1/3 farm squares to eat, without fertilizer.
A legendary+5 farmer who has all social skills at legendary+5 requires 220 units of food per meal, which is 1760 units per year, or less than 59 simple meals (30*59=1770) of dwarven wine (25*59=1475) and plump helmets (5*59=295). Which means that he would require 19 2/3 farm squares to eat, without fertilizer (13 1/9 squares with fertilizer).
A proficient farmer (max skill on embark) who has no social skills above dabbling requires 5 units of food per meal, which is 40 units per year. Which means that he would require 5/6 farm squares to survive on raw plump helmets (assuming 2 average per harvest), without fertilizer.
Easily doable at embark, and definitely harder once you have dwarfs with multiple legendary skills. The only problem i see is lots of meals that have too few units to be eaten by dwarfs, but once restacking comes into play this no longer becomes a problem.
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currently it takes 17 tasks to eat 10 plump helmets (a legendary+0 farmer), 2 for planting, 2 for harvesting, 2 for hauling to table, 1 for eating, and 10 for hauling of seeds. this is the root of the problem i was talking about, once stacking gets implemented it would take 7 tasks, 2 for planting, 2 for harvesting, 1 for hauling to table, 1 to eat, 1 to haul seeds. currently it takes 5 tasks, 1 for planting, 1 for harvesting, 1 for hauling to table, 1 for eating, 1 for hauling seeds. so it would take 3 2/5 longer without stacking to feed a legendary+0 dwarf, and 1 2/5 times as long once stacking is implemented. conversely there is always the option to cook food, which is how one stacks right now (10 tasks for 10 plump helmet biscuits, 2 for planting, 2 for harvesting, 2 for hauling to kitchen, 1 to cook, 1 to haul to stockpile, 1 to haul to table, 1 to eat.) which would be double what it is currently.
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originally suggested by Sidhien:However I don't get why no one has brought up the possibility of simply having adjustable rationing for your dwarfs. At one end, giving large meals (allowing them to take up to X units in a stack, or the entire stack if it contains less the X units) would give a large happiness bonus, while at the other you could strictly ration dwarfs to the bare minimum to survive, which could cause unhappiness, slow working and even attempts to steal food which would have to be punished.
addendum by Impaler[WrG]:What I would like to see is an Oregon Trail style of 'Rations' ware you can conserve food by ordering 1/4, 1/2, full or double rations. Naturally a reduction in health occurs at low rations which ingresses chance of disease and injury, but it was often critically important to ration food because starvation kills very very fast if food reserves hit zero.
point brought up by GrendusI like that idea, actually, though you don't need to set a new system to deal with the health issues. Dwarves at half rations would spend half their time suffering from a hungry status, which causes unhappy thoughts and causes them to work slower.
originally suggested by Warlord255:One minor integration with health issues; injured dwarves require slightly more food? The immediate threat is that injuries will clutter your fort's already massive workload, but it is one way of raising the ceiling of required food.
originally suggested by Warlord255:Another obvious one would be feeding animals, but that's a hard system to balance.
originally suggested by Grendus:It might be a good idea for Toady to just put food quantity into the raws, so if you want your dwarves to only eat one Plump Helmet a season you can set that, or if you want them to eat all 90 of the meals a human would have eaten in that relative time you can set that too.
point brought up by Fieari... just make sure hauling is updated so they'll get all their food in one go.
originally suggested by tsen:Have "eat" send them to the dining room but not directly to the food cache. Let the dining room staff and cooks take care of that. I'd much rather see some sort of system where hungry dwarves came into the dining room, sat down and ate, turned in their mugs and plates and maybe took a snack for later and left. The only issue I see is figuring out how to let people have their favorite things.
Post-economy this would be less of a problem, as restaurants could do this. Some sort of cafeteria area-room with furniture/zones/settings designating an amount of food and amount of drink to be kept ready would be nice. (And cooked meals lasting forever, while good for now, would be a good thing to get rid of if we want to make food more challenging) Ideally, since we spend so much time having dwarves walk, the actual act of cooking would take virtually no time, so a dwarf could get hungry and be added to the dining queue as soon as he/she takes on the "Go Eat/Drink" job. So the dining room/kitchen staff prepare a table for that dwarf with food and drink so when he gets there he can sit down and have a meal and then go back to business, or possibly socialize a bit in the mess hall before going back to work. Dwarves would, of course, help themselves if not forbidden if a dining hall doesn't exist or isn't staffed properly or what have you... triggering all the normal issues of "Ack, don't eat THAT!" and "damnit, seeds all over the table!"
So dining halls would be functional and cool and a bit harder to get all those happy thoughts from. "Sure it's made of solid gold but what do I have to do to get a beer?!"
Also, if stacking is implemented and we can assign "position" values to room/furniture/zones we could have a continuous order for the haulers to keep at least <X> empty bags in the bag stockroom, and the cooks could then stuff all the seeds into bags into a barrel that would get carted off when it was full, and the staff could clean tables+collect dirty silverware/mugs/plates and clean them. Naturally it would take one dwarf a very short amount of time to clean it all and put it back into a stack.
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Topic: increased portions (Read 5246 times)