Food strategy.

[Senf]

So, how do you feed a full school? (Currently back to 19, but I need gnosis shards).

I have 3 Fire Mages staffed. One more waiting to finish his apprenticeship and replace the OG fire mage. I have the OG on night shift, hunting spectral croa and then cook, to keep my kitchen intact and to satisfy her victory need. Two more with level 1 wands on cooking duty full time.

I barely keep up and had my non-cooks start on an emergency supply of bitter gruel just in case.

Whats the best strategy here? Do better wands cook faster? If so, how to you compensate for the victory need? I have an 8 rat pasture plus the croas at night that keep the apprentice and the OG busy without micromangement, but more would be a hassle, especially since the mages don't exactly voluntarly share the gain if you set hunting before cooking. First come, first serve.

Thinking about cross-training to take at least the slop of the fire mages' hands. Best class for that? Also, anything involving apprentices takes to much time, grinding the underworld is the only good source of fire XP I can find.

And what do I cook? I have 2 woks on honeyed stir fry, normal stir fry if no honey is availabe and 1 wok for cabbage stuff. But that all takes so long, especially the cabbage. Go back to gruel? I don't have enough honey for 20 mages, though. And I am currently building my third greenhouse, in addition to my huge rice garden. (Rice is fine, 600 stocked, probably downsize that one).

Also, what's up with the dragon? The egg plant just died on me, citing the lack of "other plants" that are not documented anywhere - are they?

[Manxome]

Each cooking recipe requires a certain number of fire points to cook. Higher fire skill means you apply more fire points per cast, so yes, you finish cooking faster. Cooking speed is also increased in higher-tier kitchen rooms and by certain relics.

More advanced recipes generally require more fire points and therefore take longer to cook. Bitter gruel in a gruel pot only takes 8 fire points, which means a mage with 4 fire skill in a mid-tier kitchen can make it in a single cast. Contrariwise, the bitterrice recipe made in the dragon wok gives more conviction and uses the same ingredients, but takes 36 fire points to cook (over 4 times as long!). The recipe says how many fire points it needs.

Pay attention to how far your mages need to go to fetch the ingredients they're going to cook with. If the needed ingredients are all stored on the far side of the school, your mage can end up running back and forth for every batch. To avoid this, make sure there's a container in or near your kitchen that is set to only store cooking ingredients, and only store a certain amount of each (so that it can't be completely filled with 1 ingredient and leave no space for the others), and set to a higher priority than most of your storage containers so that it will be filled first. (And make sure you have enough quilted or students to move stuff around for you.)

Also, double-check that you are farming a few gutberries and that your vivified are allowed to eat them. Vivified have no taste buds, so they get no penalties for eating bad food, and will automatically eat the worst available food. So make sure you have cheap bad food for them, instead of forcing them to eat expensive good food.



If you want, you can also greatly reduce your food requirements by having all your mages eat only once per day, instead of twice. Eating fully refills your hunger need bar, so this is sustainable. However, it does mean the mage will be "Very Hungry" for 6 hours out of the day, which is -10 conviction, and means the mage will interrupt mid or low priority tasks in order to eat even if it's not scheduled (so if you want to ensure your mages are only eating once per day, make sure the 6 hours before their meal are sleeping, recreating, or high-priority tasks).



I currently have two second-tier fire wands on my staff and they seem to be able to keep up on their victory needs fine just from me telling them to hunt wild spawns. (I do need to periodically look around the countryside, select all the rats and croa, and set hunt tasks for them.)

But I admit that fire has the most annoying need. If this is a problem for you, or if you just don't want to deal with it, then your best bet is probably to get mages with a non-fire wand but with high fire skill, and ideally with a relic to boost cooking speed and/or max fire skill. If you start with a nature or air wand and then apprentice* in fire, you get a fire-affinity relic slot, so those are probably your best options for non-fire cooks.

You can summon a bunch of mages and look for ones that randomly get fire as one of their extra skill boosts; if you're patient enough, you can wait for someone who gets fire as a random boost on both their tier 1 wand AND their tier 2 wand, in which case it will only be 1 point lower than if they had it as their wand element.


*You mentioned you're having trouble training apprentices. You might be confused about how to teach them. Apprentices can raise their skills by going to class, just like initiates, but they can't do it at the learning stone--they need to use the same element-specific buildings that create apprentices. You can put a bunch of learning stations in a single classroom so that you don't need to duplicate the chalkboard and bookshelves, but you need a separate teacher for each station.

If an apprentice specializes in a different element than their wand element, they will need to train both skills, which means they will need to use both of the elemental learning stations (but only one at a time).

Alternately, you might just be thinking that it takes a long time to raise an apprentice to max skill. AFAICT that's just because each level in the same skill requires more xp than the previous one, so raising someone to 4 fire skill shouldn't take longer for an apprentice who has that as their second element compared to an initiate who has it as their main element. Raising someone to 8 skill takes a lot more than twice as long as 4 skill, though.

[Senf]

The quilted take care of all the logistics. The cooks can literally stand there and zap everything they need out of the pantry. That was the first thing I fixed.

Thanks for explaining the fire points, I guessed so but it did not find it being said explicitly in the game.

What I mean with the apprentice: I need a new cook to replace the scarred ones I have, soon. I already have promoted a level 3 initiate straight to staff to deal with the shortage, but of course his skill is now low. An apprentice cannot level his skill by cooking. He needs a high level and then cook. I have a classroom for each element, could stack the fire one to fit the "advanced classroom" maybe, but training an apprentice takes an ingame month or so, it feels. Also the dude is trained by the founder because the staff is either doing emergency cooking or JUST SUCKS AT FIRE MAGIC, which is what the apprentice is there to fix. I am aware that higher levels take longer to pratice. It's just frustrating that non-staff mages are pratically useless for chores and the the fire tasks cannot be done by quilted. I don't care to wait for my nature apprentice because I have an army of harvesters and fertilizers and the old dude can handle the occasional runewood chopping or wand carving, neither of which would kill my base if postponed. Also my non-apprenticed dark mage can easily maintain 30 quilted with his moon-lit atelier. But fire - just sucks.

What also gives me trouble is, if I set teaching to high, unfit teachers (not just the founder) with better things to do train the apprentices. Not the actual specialists.

[Manxome]

If you're in an emergency and need a new person right away, I think it makes sense to grab a non-apprentice. (Maybe also hire another one, and have them start training an apprentice?)

If you want to make sure the class isn't taught by someone with low skill, you can try changing the access permissions on the learning station so that only your preferred teachers are allowed to use it. But watch out that if no allowed teacher is available, the apprentice may just stand around waiting.

If you're facing an overall manpower shortage, you may want to take note that the maximum number of staff you are allowed to have at one time increases based on the level of your ritual room.

[Jaggid Edje]

My approach to food is just to never feed anyone higher tier food than bitterrice stir fry if they don't need it.

It can serve as your main staple food all the way through the end of the game. I just set up group meal rules so that anyone whose conviction is dipping gets better (as well as anyone with one of the 'eater' trials).

[Senf]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

My approach to food is just to never feed anyone higher tier food than bitterrice stir fry if they don't need it.

It can serve as your main staple food all the way through the end of the game. I just set up group meal rules so that anyone whose conviction is dipping gets better (as well as anyone with one of the 'eater' trials).

That is a good idea. How do you program your "needy" group, though? Just "Possible Break Risk"? Sometimes things escalate rather quickly.

I also think about feeding fire mages meat and veggies so I can flip the finger to their hunting addiction. Upped the rec room. Dorm will have to stay medicore. No time to research the advanced stuff for staff recreation.

@Manxome I'll try that. I am on max ritual room already, I need good candidates and ones that don't get immidiately scarred because they ate raw gutberries.

General question: Do Vivified get POSTIVE bonuses from food?

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Senf:

That is a good idea. How do you program your "needy" group, though? Just "Possible Break Risk"? Sometimes things escalate rather quickly.

I use multiple groups.

The first checks for anyone with conviction below a threshold that I define (using the group rule that can check if conviction is less than x". Those people I have set to be allowed to eat the +20 conviction foods. The second group checks for anyone that is a "potential" break risk (as well as an actual break risk), those people I allow to eat the +25 foods.

As you rightly brought up, vivified do not benefit from better foods, so I exclude people who are faction = vivified. They get only gutberries, ever, for meals.

You also need to watch for people who have a "hates yyy meals". Doesn't do any good to put someone on the higher meal types if they have a quirk that makes them hate their racial food ingredient type. Same with bitterrice. If someone has "hates bitterrice meals", they need to be on a different meal plan.

I include checking for those quirks in my meal group definitions as well, once I actually see someone who has the quirk, but I don't generally bother to add those rules until I have someone that it applies to. So far in my current game, as of day 181, I've only had to make the group rule for "hates bitterrice", not any of the others.

Edit: I realized I didn't indicate what I use for the threshold I mentioned in the first paragraph. Usually I use 70 or 75 for students and 75 or 80 for staff. I imagine lower even than those values would work fine, I'm just cautious.

[n3mes1s]

Dont overcomplicate things. Unless you are playing in very hard difficulty, you can just use a single food for all your students (in my case i always use either honeydrop gruel or honeye stirfry) and only a couple of specific food + bitterstirfry for your staff.

In fact, i make sure my students only eat one specific generic food so i can store it in the house commons and they go directly to eat it. Because for my staff i use different food.

If you are having problems with conviction because of the food, you can mitigate it in other ways like recreation or better sleeping quarters, etc.

[Senf]

No, I have problems with people dying from not having food to eat. But thanks to the advice in this thread, no longer.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

You also need to watch for people who have a "hates yyy meals". Doesn't do any good to put someone on the higher meal types if they have a quirk that makes them hate their racial food ingredient type.

If you set up the rules so that the person is allowed to eat multiple food types, do they take their own quirks into account when deciding which one to actually eat, or do they eat the one that is best on paper while ignoring their own quirks?

[Vitalicio]

I use wolfkin to cook. As they eat rat or croa they have to kill them, this helps a bit in his needed. Overall when are iniciate, that they cant hunt, and u can make them eat 3 or 4 times a day,

[MadDjinn]

Originally posted by Manxome:

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

You also need to watch for people who have a "hates yyy meals". Doesn't do any good to put someone on the higher meal types if they have a quirk that makes them hate their racial food ingredient type.

If you set up the rules so that the person is allowed to eat multiple food types, do they take their own quirks into account when deciding which one to actually eat, or do they eat the one that is best on paper while ignoring their own quirks?

Some internal rules get followed without needing to tell them. I had an initiate eat the berry soup they needed for a trial, despite bitter gruel being also available to them (forgot to turn it off).

[Soul4hdwn]

also wasn't answered but vivified don't get benefits from food equally as don't get penalties, so they strictly should eat gutberries. and they already prefer that so only way for them to eat higher (last checked, i can be wrong) is to force them via the food menu or manual orders.

[RawCode]

use fried bitter rice for everyone and instantly fire anyone who developed scar that prevents using this food type.

[MadDjinn]

Originally posted by RawCode:

use fried bitter rice for everyone and instantly fire anyone who developed scar that prevents using this food type.

I just demote them to eating soup, or if wolf, eat what you catch. You're only down 10 for the soup and there's less complaints.

[ExMachina14]

Originally posted by Senf:

So, how do you feed a full school?

Restrict oneself to fewer people. Restrict the vivified to only eating raw gutberries and the wolfkin to only eating raw rats and croa. Have one fire mage cook for only a handful of people that require cooked food.