Raw food and meals

[LeNUTRIE Metanolo]

I'm new to the game and I am evidently missing something because I'm trying to cook meals, disabling raw food consumption at all. It is an impressive struggle to cook meals that takes 24 ingredients each (also that's not clear to me, whatever 24 raw food ingredients are making a meal?).
For example, doing little math I calculated that meals takes to kill 38 deers every year for each townfolk. That would be a massacre, and also I have 6 deers on my small map.

If I am right, I guess I'll just uninstall.
It's horrible to only think such quantity as reasonable.

[bortas]

Basically all raw food components can be used to cook meals, not just meat. They can use fish, berries, grain, vegetables, whatever... you don't have to kill a single animal to keep your people fed, if you don't want to. Just start farming crops and wild berries and mushrooms. You can also get milk and eggs from domesticated goats, cows and chicken.

The first winter can be a bit tricky to get through without meat, but even that is possible, if you store enough grain (which never rots) to make bread. Don't use the grain in the other seasons... save it for winter.

Honey is also an excellent food to store, once you unlocked bee hives.

[Philtre]

Note that each cooking operation produces multiple meals (4 IIRC), it's not 24 ingredients for 1 meal. If you don't disallow any raw foods, they'll use whatever's closest. If they add a mix of ingredients, the resulting meal is "stew"; if it's all the same thing, it will get a more specific name and icon (although they are all nutritionally identical); for instance, all meat gives you "roasted meat", all barley yields "bread", all honey yields "honey crispels", etc.

Meat is one of the most labor-intensive foods, and it has no nutritional benefit over vegetable foods, so I would suggest not hunting unless you are desperate for food, need the leather, or want your people to skill up in ranged combat. Get your research bench built and unlock agriculture instead.

[Zeion]

you need 20 food ingredients (same or mix) and 4 "fuel" for 5 meals so the best way to reduce your walk time is making 1 little zone that have raw food in it and other little zone that have fuel (wood, sticks, coal) for faster food process w/o walking too far and waste their time for preparing them. and you can make kitchen room for more efficiency food process by making room with 1 butcher table 1 cooking station and 2 pottery stand too (you can read how to make room in game). so I think this will help you solve the problem a little bit.

ps. I prefer not to do complex thing like make some food in some season because if you plan optimally you will have plenty of food at any season.

[LeNUTRIE Metanolo]

Thanks guys for the tips, I've managed to have a kitchen with all the needs in the very room (like Zeion was saying) and I had so much food that I didn't know where to put it. Also, the workload in the fields is overwhelming so I still have to find the balance of things.

There is an evident problem in stock managing, because there is no way to keep a minimum stock of barley for the fields, and if you do not keep a constant eye over it the kitchen will completely use it all during winter.
This feels like dumb, and I think this game deserves a smarter way to do it.

[Muladas]

From a tutorial I watched, the number of meals output from 1 "meal prep" is 3 but can go up with cooking skill. It mentioned a skill of 13+ upped the output to 4 meals from 1 prep (showing a 133% cooking output in the attributes screen). Not sure if cooking indoors/decorations in the room would impact like it does crafting.

[Kaelroth]

Originally posted by LeNUTRIE Metanolo:

Thanks guys for the tips, I've managed to have a kitchen with all the needs in the very room (like Zeion was saying) and I had so much food that I didn't know where to put it. Also, the workload in the fields is overwhelming so I still have to find the balance of things.

There is an evident problem in stock managing, because there is no way to keep a minimum stock of barley for the fields, and if you do not keep a constant eye over it the kitchen will completely use it all during winter.
This feels like dumb, and I think this game deserves a smarter way to do it.

You are correct that there isn't a means of keeping a minimum stock, but just an FYI, if you want to keep barley around specifically for making spirits or growing hay, you can modify what foods your campfires/stoves are allowed to use. If you don't want your settlers cooking with barley, you can just uncheck barley from the list of usable resources.

The issue with barley is one of the reasons I don't play with seeds enabled. The settlers are hardwired to plant barley (and other crops, but barley is problematic because it doesn't have separate seeds) whenever it is warm enough and they end up planting barley fields twice a year even though there isn't enough time to grow and harvest the second crop. It all dies from the cold weather, so you waste a bunch of barley as a result.

[.O.]

Originally posted by LeNUTRIE Metanolo:

Thanks guys for the tips, I've managed to have a kitchen with all the needs in the very room (like Zeion was saying) and I had so much food that I didn't know where to put it. Also, the workload in the fields is overwhelming so I still have to find the balance of things.

There is an evident problem in stock managing, because there is no way to keep a minimum stock of barley for the fields, and if you do not keep a constant eye over it the kitchen will completely use it all during winter.
This feels like dumb, and I think this game deserves a smarter way to do it.

You can set a shelf, make it take ONLY barley and then set everything on it to be "off limits" so they never use up the emergency barley stock. I do that with most of the resources I consider important. I set up a special storage area where they are disallowed after the initial hauling.

[canuck250]

You can also choose what your cooks/producers can use. I like my berry wine early game, so as long I have enough food, I will disable berries from any food recipe. Another thing I do is disable wood/coal from most of my burning sources like braziers and camp fire. Or if I am doing a lot of fence/stick building I will use just wood for burning sources.\

Basically, look deeper into your station menus, lots of nice little settings to help maintain things. However your material balance changes so you will have to keep all these adjusted.