Favorite Foods!

[Agent]

I've found that unless you manually order your people to eat their favorite foods they tend to eat random meals instead. But if you disallow all the other meals except their favorite won't they get mad about the lack of variety? It's obviously easy enough to disallow others from eating the food you want reserved for someone's favorite but oftentimes it'll just sit around until it rots.

Am I making too many varieties of foods maybe? How many types is ideal to get the variety bonus? I wish peeps would preferentially go for their favorites if I'm making it and not allowing anybody else to eat it.

[Docsprock]

Jack gets some grain and starts cooking grain porridge, his favorite meal. He finishes and places the cooked meals on the shelf. Then grabs a pumpkin and eats it and complains about having to eat raw food.

[Flin Fredstone]

If you want to go into detailed food consumption you can have their favorite food only set for them plus at least one of the other categories.
Also get them off raw food asap apart from Syrup imo.
Keeping the prepared food in a freezer or +/- minus 6 degrees cooled room will preserve the food.
If you have a good cook you can disallow some food from consumption and stock up on it inbetween the other cooking. And then use it when you need all your people for some adventure/task and free up the cooks.

[The Former]

As the tutorial notes, they like variety. Even if that variety means "Screw it, I feel like raw melon today. -> Ugh that was a mistake..."

For me, I try to keep three or four varieties. For five colonists, I keep 3 veggie soups, 3 veggie stews, and 5 hay sausages and that seems to be plenty. I don't do a lot of hunting/ranching and I use my insect meat for fat, so meat dishes are rare but I occasionally add them when we have a surplus (we usually slaughter one head of cattle per year). That much variety seems to keep them more than sated.

[Agent]

I don't have much of a problem giving them a ton of variety I just wish they'd then preferentially go for their favorite food more often. "I reserved this freaking VegePizza just for you, why are you always eating a damn piece of plain bread while it rots away."

[Bjørn]

You might be aware of this, but some characters have a trait that makes all meals they make get the +18 'Exquisite meal' happiness boost. This way you can just make easy and quick meals while still getting max happiness for them.

I don't remember which of the default characters now, but several of the modded characters in the workshop also have this. Veronica is one of them.

I think only 2 different cooked foods are enough for variety, but not sure?

[The Former]

Originally posted by Bjørn:

You might be aware of this, but some characters have a trait that makes all meals they make get the +18 'Exquisite meal' happiness boost. This way you can just make easy and quick meals while still getting max happiness for them.

I don't remember which of the default characters now, but several of the modded characters in the workshop also have this. Veronica is one of them.

I think only 2 different cooked foods are enough for variety, but not sure?

In theory, as long as you have enough of each that everyone gets their pick each day, it should be enough I think.