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[IT 000]

As we all know two or three planters can keep a fortress of 200 fed and portly. Currently dwarves eat about two times a month. Obviously if a dwarf sat down six times a month to eat they would barely get out of the dining room. I propose that dwarves have 'snacks' as well as the sit down meals that they already have.

Essentially the dwarf will pick up a single unit of food and continue working while eating the food. Increasing food consumption and slowing the fortress down by a minimal amount. Dwarves will not have a happy or negative thought by eating snacks. To decide whether the dwarf has a snack or meal dwarves would just go through a cycle, a simple Meal Snack Snack Meal Snack Snack would do. Meaning they eat six times a month.

Additionally this opens up a new kind of furniture. A 'Dispenser' (Name is subject to change) when built you can query it and control how much food is stored inside. Min 1 Max 10. When a dwarf needs a snack they will path to the nearest food pile or dispenser and they grab a unit of food from it. If the machine runs out a dwarf with a food hauling task on will refill it.This way you don't need to have to devote large spaces for food storage in the remote parts of your fortress. Likewise it saves time so dwarves don't have to path all the way back to the dining room for a bite to eat.

Thoughts?

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, not what I was expecting with the title...

The general type of suggestion that was thrown around in Improved Farming was that dwarves simply eat more.  Having dwarves eat four times as much would make a single cow last a dwarf about a year, which is generally the correct balance. 

The problem that was raised is that it requires dwarves carry multiple units of food at once, which means collecting extra stacks of food if there is only one or two in a stack. 

That's Stacking and Hauling problems.

I'm assuming you want dwarves to somehow "equip" food to a point floating somewhere on their body without using up their hands, and eat them eventually?  You get the effect of eating three different meals by putting two units of food into hammerspace before they are invisibly consumed?

Of course, even if we do this, what's the difference between having this, and having dwarves just eat 3 or 4 or 5 units of food all at once? 

Isn't it the same thing, functionally, to have a dwarf just down 3 plump helmets all at once, rather than eat one plump helmet, and stash two in hammerspace to be eaten invisibly without slowing down, later?

[IT 000]

I'm assuming you want dwarves to somehow "equip" food to a point floating somewhere on their body without using up their hands, and eat them eventually?  You get the effect of eating three different meals by putting two units of food into hammerspace before they are invisibly consumed?

Well I was thinking that every time a dwarf would get hungry he would grab one unit of food. But I suppose this idea would work, it's just a minor detail. Either way would be fine by me.

Of course, even if we do this, what's the difference between having this, and having dwarves just eat 3 or 4 or 5 units of food all at once? 

Your food stocks would fluctuate to quickly. Giving the player little time to react. Let's assume that a dwarf consumes 6 units of food a month. Say one meal keeps a dwarf satiated for a month, then he gets hungry. Then, let's assume that a dwarf can survive an additional month without any food before succumbing to starvation.

Now let's assume that we have a fort with one dwarf and six units of food left.

If the dwarf eats all the food in the beginning of the month, he survives the first month. He his hungry at the end of the month, and dies of starvation at the end of the second month.

But if the dwarf eats three plump helmets at the beginning of the month, and three plump helmets at the end of the month, he doesn't get hungry until a little bit before the end of the second month, and dies of starvation about have way through of the third month.

It stretches out a little bit more and gives the player more time to find food.

[NW_Kohaku]

Your food stocks would fluctuate to quickly. Giving the player little time to react. Let's assume that a dwarf consumes 6 units of food a month. Say one meal keeps a dwarf satiated for a month, then he gets hungry. Then, let's assume that a dwarf can survive an additional month without any food before succumbing to starvation.

Now let's assume that we have a fort with one dwarf and six units of food left.

If the dwarf eats all the food in the beginning of the month, he survives the first month. He his hungry at the end of the month, and dies of starvation at the end of the second month.

But if the dwarf eats three plump helmets at the beginning of the month, and three plump helmets at the end of the month, he doesn't get hungry until a little bit before the end of the second month, and dies of starvation about have way through of the third month.

It stretches out a little bit more and gives the player more time to find food.

Beyond the initial season, dwarves asynchronize their eating habits enough that they all average out, anyway.

Wait, you mean you actually want them to go hunting for food stockpiles to start picking up additional snacks every single time?  The whole fact that they stop work and have to go run to the stockpile and then the dining hall is the whole thing I thought we were trying to cut out of this loop.  The run from stockpile to dining hall is typically short, it's the run from the floodgate you desperately need linked into a lever at the furthest reaches of your magma trenches to the stockpile and then back through all your twisting tunnels that is the real killer.  If you have them running to the stockpile to grab another unit of food each time, you're not actually "saving time" with this snack idea at all.

Just having them down four units of food all at once at least gets it all over at once.

[IT 000]

Yes, I suppose that can get a tad annoying. Well then we could do as you suggested

"equip" food to a point floating somewhere on their body without using up their hands, and eat them eventually

That solves the running around constantly problem.

[Jeoshua]

You got this idea after getting a candy bar from a vending machine didn't you? 

I like everything except the Dispenser.  Using the Kitchen that's already in the game, a Dwarf could grab an [EDIBLE_RAW] food item, wash it off or cut it into slices or whatever with a "Make Snack" job, and then munch away as they walk back to work.

[Darkweave]

What problem are you hoping to solve with this? Being able to feed 200 dwarves with a 5x5 plump helmet plot or the lack of realism of dwarves only eating twice a season?

[IT 000]

You got this idea after getting a candy bar from a vending machine didn't you? 

Yeah, but it's a rather efficient way of doing it. Why reinvent the wheel?

What problem are you hoping to solve with this? Being able to feed 200 dwarves with a 5x5 plump helmet plot or the lack of realism of dwarves only eating twice a season?

I'm trying to solve the being able to feed 200 dwarves with a 5x5 plump helmet plot problem. The Improved Farming post by Kohaku was great, but that's an entire arc! My suggestion could be done much faster and make the game more Fun until a better way comes along.

[Jeoshua]

And it solves 3 problems at once:

Dwarves eating so infrequently
Small plots feeding huge populations
Dwarves cancelling work to eat

[Ahrimahn]

Oh and not to waste an awesome title can we have babies be labeled as butcherable.

[Jeoshua]

I think that may be too literary of a reference... I barely got it

[Ahrimahn]

It relates to the British satire A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, where the author said that in order to solve the famine in Ireland they should start eating the Irish children.

[Jeoshua]

Satire.  As only a Brit could possibly have written.

More commonly known as "A Modest Proposal."  That was Swift, right?

[Ahrimahn]

I like the full title more so i always refer to as that.

[NW_Kohaku]

The Improved Farming post by Kohaku was great, but that's an entire arc! My suggestion could be done much faster and make the game more Fun until a better way comes along.

I said this recently in another thread, but Toady doesn't really seem to take up any of these "simple, quick" solutions, and instead just delays things until he has time to revamp the whole system in an arc.  At a certain level, I think he's just more patient about the game than most of the players are, because he's got a much better view of how much more distance there still is to cover, and he doesn't want to spend time on short-term fixes when he's going to overhaul the whole system later.

Also, while the length of the Improved Farming thread is notable, and makes for "an entire arc", I would point out that if you look at what the Caravan Arc entails, and I were to write out every little detail about city construction, house building, the social class densities, the architecture of various classes in different cultures, furnishings, ways to procedurally generate most of that, road layouts, bridge building, castle construction, job center creation and the formation of road layout and building density, logistics, famines, price gouging and hoarding, food riots, diseases, plagues, contaminated water supplies, and then all that stuff with storm sewers and catacombs and undead.

And oh hey, that's just the city-related stuff that comes as the warm-up to the actual caravan things.

Improved Farming is a thorough thread, but it's not really that terribly complex to actually code relative to some of the monsterous tasks that Toady has taken on.  If you write out everything involved in making even something "basic" like background city building, that's a massively complex amount of mechanics going on behind the scene.