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[sockless]

Have a single meat fraction counter per shop, when it reaches 1 make a Mystery Meat stack.

Call it "Dwarven Sausage" and you get my vote   But yeah, that's better, I think, than having to keep track of all 8,000,000,000 meat types.

You are a disgrace to the name Urist

Why?

Now for my 2 cents.
A way to solve the problem is to make the base unit of meat a lot smaller and then make it so that dwarves will eat like 5 meat at a time or something like that.
One of the good points about that is that they could mix and match foods. So they could have 2 elephant meat, 1 whip vine flour biscuit and 2 bloated tubers. It would be even better with the improved meals and kitchens suggested in the relevant megathread,

[Max White]

Why?

One can only assume it is because it is dwarfish to want 8,000,000 types of meat. However, it is also dwarfish to want high FPS, leading to a conflict in the code of ethics. These things happen when you don't have a philosopher to ponder stuff like that and find a solution before we even knew there was a problem.

[Granite26]

Nah, high FPS is a merely human concern.  I'm not sure how I feel about the necessity to track all kinds of meat, but years of playing this game ensure that I know that it IS necessary.

erm...

yeah...

[NW_Kohaku]

Now for my 2 cents.
A way to solve the problem is to make the base unit of meat a lot smaller and then make it so that dwarves will eat like 5 meat at a time or something like that.
One of the good points about that is that they could mix and match foods. So they could have 2 elephant meat, 1 whip vine flour biscuit and 2 bloated tubers. It would be even better with the improved meals and kitchens suggested in the relevant megathread,

Well, that just gets back to the Volume and Mass argument again.

In that, I was arguing that dwarves should be eating a mass of food proportionate to their own mass (and possibly adjusted by their metabolic rates, which could be derived from several of their statisitics). 

The average human weighs 70 kilograms, and eats about 800 kilograms of food per year.  In Dwarf Fortress's fortress mode, dwarves eat an average of 10 times a year, so we can basically boil this down to making humanoid creatures eat about 1.12 times their mass in food per meal to get a roughly accurate amount of food down the gullet of a dwarf.  (Remember, they wash this down with about their mass in alcohol, as well, and drink twice as often as they eat.)

However, like I mentioned earlier, I'm basically playing both ends of the spectrum of this line of suggestions - the random chance of meat is the leanest, fastest way to accomplish this goal that Toady could put into the game, while Volume and Mass and having a serious look at how much mass of food and drink that a dwarf needs is the long-term ideal solution.

[Uristocrat]

The average human weighs 70 kilograms, and eats about 800 kilograms of food in a day.

 

No wonder there's such a problem with obesity....

(Seriously, I'm debating whether a more realistic value is 800 grams per day, or 800 kg per year.)

[Max White]

I made my male humans 85, with the females at 70.

[NW_Kohaku]

The average human weighs 70 kilograms, and eats about 800 kilograms of food in a day.

 

No wonder there's such a problem with obesity....

(Seriously, I'm debating whether a more realistic value is 800 grams per day, or 800 kg per year.)

... per year.  Sorry for the mistake.

(2.2 kg per day - about 5 lbs per day)

I made my male humans 85, with the females at 70.

Actually, it should be more like 75 kg for men and 65 kg for women.  That will tend to make men stronger and tougher than women, thanks to the way that DF handles things related to size, however, and as such, the sort of absolute gender equality this game currently enforces will dissipate if you do that.

[sockless]

Well, that just gets back to the Volume and Mass argument again.

Yes, but my idea is just a fill in for until volume and mass is implemented. So you split the base food amount to a smaller one, then make dwarves require multiple pieces of food. It's sort of a bastardised version of volume and mass.

[blizzerd]

what if we implement "meat scraps" as an object created when small meat parts come together to be large enough for a unit of meat

all animal meat gets chopped up in solid chunks of a certain weight, any remaining values (for example lets say a chicken is 1.5 meat unit, 0.5 is remaining value) is added to a meat scrap pool on the specific butcher shop

if meat scraps fall over or on 1.0 meat unit, they become 1 "meat scrap" (treated as a cheap meat block) would also be nice if we could see what types of meat are inside of it

[Maklak]

I like the %chance of meat as a quick fix. An acceptable longer-term solution would be multiplying production and consumption of food by some number, like 10, 100, 256 or whatever. That way you always get small amounts of food from slaughtering anything, but it will take multiple bunnies to make one meal for one dwarf. Of course this increase would go towards plants, booze, leather, and so on, but it would probably require better stacking.

[NW_Kohaku]

I like the %chance of meat as a quick fix. An acceptable longer-term solution would be multiplying production and consumption of food by some number, like 10, 100, 256 or whatever. That way you always get small amounts of food from slaughtering anything, but it will take multiple bunnies to make one meal for one dwarf. Of course this increase would go towards plants, booze, leather, and so on, but it would probably require better stacking.

Yeah, we've already seen a system for the quantity of food a creature eats being dependent upon the size of the creature in the grazing feature.  Of course, grazers have literally nothing else to do with their time but eat, and even then, elephants literally can't eat fast enough to stay alive. 

I remember when we were talking about how much meat a cow should be producing around half a year ago, I managed to reverse engineer it to find that dwarves should basically eat four or five times as much as they currently do to make a cow's meat last the appropriate amount of time. 

Using some sort of volume-based accounting system, we could do something like measure it all in kilgrams.  An average human eats about 11-12 times his own body mass in food in a year (not counting drink), so a dwarf, who eats about 9-10 times in a year could just eat a little over his/her own body mass in a single sitting, and it all averages out around right.  Different stats or traits might make a difference in how much the specific dwarf eats, though.

[Bohandas]

Right now, butchering and slaughtering animals provides units of meat based upon a simple threshold value of muscle before you can get a single unit of meat.

With the addition of several animals, like rabbits, chickens, and others that are relatively small, many of these creatures are unfortunately not even large enough to produce a single unit of meat.  Likewise, meat is only available in an "integer form", how muscular an animal is only matters on larger animals like cows, since animals like goats have to cross an entire threshold value to get from 9 to 10 meat on slaughter. 

In order to fairly easily simulate a "fraction" of a meat, why not make a percentage chance for meat to be produced?  If something has 90% of the amount of muscle to produce a unit of meat, give it a 90% chance of producing a meat item, and if something has enough meat to produce 9.20 units of meat, make it give 9 units of meat with a 20% chance of an extra 1 meat.

This way, you can't get a full unit of meat from a rabbit, but butchering 20 should at least give you one or two.

this is a good idea

[Sfon]

How about having small creatures give 1 piece of meat unless they were super small like insects? Like how it works with skulls, which are produced even for small creatures. So rabbits and cavies would consistently give exactly 1 meat.

[kaenneth]

As a quick fix, to make those animals useful, the percentage chance sounds ok.

But as I dislike randomness, I would rather have one rolling counter for fractional meat (global or per shop), that whenever it rolls over produces one unit of whatever meat is being butchered. While it's potentially exploitable by having a cheap animal fill 90+% of the quota, then a valuable one for the good meat, then repeat... but doing that would be really hard to manage, while giving more consistant results.

[NW_Kohaku]

As a quick fix, to make those animals useful, the percentage chance sounds ok.

But as I dislike randomness, I would rather have one rolling counter for fractional meat (global or per shop), that whenever it rolls over produces one unit of whatever meat is being butchered. While it's potentially exploitable by having a cheap animal fill 90+% of the quota, then a valuable one for the good meat, then repeat... but doing that would be really hard to manage, while giving more consistant results.

How is that potentially exploitable? 

Do you honestly think someone is going to savescum for a single piece of meat when butchering rabbits?  If someone's that nuts for maximum efficiency that they will sit there and reload for hours to get a single extra piece of meat, then they could have much more easily "cheated" by just making a reaction that gives themselves free food.

While I'm no fan of forcing players to abide by random chance when you have the outcomes of important actions take place on a single die roll, that doesn't mean randomness cannot be used constructively.  (Procedural generation is just fancy guided randomness when you get right down to it, and procedural generation is what DF is all about.)

If a random event that occurs commonly enough for the law of averages takes over, and produces the same results as a "rolling counter", but without taking up unnecessary amounts of memory as every creature in the game times every type of food item they produce when butchered has its own counter, then what is really lost for making it random?