I've never made pies work

[van the man]

100 hours, up to p18, I simply have never gotten baked good production going

Food is a problem that I always prioritize solving in the early game, I always go for quick effective solutions like porridge, and by the time I've got the 3 or 4 building combo needed to make pies and biscuits, there's 400 food in the warehouse and the rep bar is climbing from wealth effect.

The only 3 blueprint method of making baked goods that I can see browsing the encyclopedia is greenhouse or herb garden > building that makes flour > building that makes baked goods. If I try to do it with a small farm though. I'll get plenty of flour but only as much pie as I can gather ingredients for. Try to do it with plantation, oops all berries, I've gotta source my flour ingredients elsewhere. Also staffing all of the buildings needed to get baked goods going requires getting to mid game at least, which again, means I've already solved food. Also, if I get herbs early, I'm stuffing them in provisions packs because I can't stick the actual food in them.

Whenever I take a flour production building, I just end up selling flour.

I feel like it's the tightest combo in the game. Tool production is literally a win condition and it's simpler being only two blueprints. (or just one if the trees have dew)

[el Darkness]

I do not remember if I managed to efficiently pull pie production, but I always stryluggle with pickled goods, I cant make them work at all, just too many requirements...

I feel your pain.

[AlienGeek]

Me too. I struggle with the flour requirement, so i never make pies or biscuits.

[Ragnaman]

Usually you either go pies/biscuits for farmer game or meatstuffs for gatherer game. Lizards/harpies nice for meat. Humans/Beavers nice for pies/biscuits. But yeah, if you get porridge +1 per each 50 drizzle water, just crank it up and forget about other food and trade or stack other things to victory.

Also, it kinda sucks that all food is pretty much manufactured by Lizards, so if you dont have lizards, then not going porridge is just ruining the game round.

If you get the scaling increase for grain harvest or roots/herbs, you can just break the game with biscuits tho.

[8-bit Cavalry]

I usually angle for porridge or jerky, but biscuits and pies still end up as a food solution in 20-25% of my games if I had to guess. The biscuit/pie production line has the advantage of a processed step being sellable to most any merchant, if they won't buy the pies, they'll buy the flower. I'm not an expert at this game so having easy liquidity to buy my way out of problems is always in the back of my mind.

And as always "there's a cornerstone for that" ... in this case the "bake 10 pies: get 10 jerky" cornerstone which can stuff your warehouse full of food before you know it. Of course there's a cornerstone for everything, so that's not saying much.

[van the man]

Originally posted by el Darkness:

I do not remember if I managed to efficiently pull pie production, but I always stryluggle with pickled goods, I cant make them work at all, just too many requirements...

I feel your pain.

I usually manage pickled goods by having the food things and then getting containers through cornerstones or caches. I get pickled goods quite often, maybe 40% of games or so, but I almost never actually produce the containers. If you produce containers pickled goods are potentially a bigger blueprint combo. Make container material > Make Container > Make Food > Combine Container and Food. If you're doing waterskins making the container material might be two buildings, getting feed for the ranch and then making leather.

But I'm actually able to get enough free containers almost every single game. If I go for Pickled Goods it's usually a mid game choice aimed at getting resolve, not at feeding people.

The thing about containers > if there's clay on the map for pottery, there isn't any stone, and you almost definitely need the clay for bricks. If you can fuel a ranch, you usually want it to make meat and eggs, not leather. If you have metal, there's higher value things than barrels you can do with it, like tea, training gear, pipes and tools.

[koboldlord]

I usually just let the game offer me a solution, and then I grab it. It's hard to get everything you need to make pies, but if you grab a flour recipe that comes with a plank or provision recipe it'll be there when you find a pie, biscuit, or trade goods recipe. If you grab a pottery recipe you might not have a use for it now, but it'll be a solved problem when you find a glade event that requires containers or you later get offered a pickled goods recipe.

You can also fill it a lot of gaps by planning ahead when the trader comes. A stack of barrels off a trader doesn't cost very much and turns into a lot of pickled berries. Likewise, flour is pretty cheap. You don't need 100% coverage to stretch your food supply.

[Bukkfrig]

Complex food is initially about making food efficiently so people don't go hungry, but having multiple complex foods online provides enough reputation that it becomes a win condition. The way I see it, they have intentionally made some foods easier and some harder foods for this reason.

[Alexander]

Hmm. Biscuits production is one of my primary goals in most runs. It is the best way to feed people with the small farm. Biscuits + jerky cover complex food needs for most of the races.

I rarely make pies though.

[DG]

Before porridge, there were no problems with pies. The flour production chain is balanced. Pies have a wider variety of ingredients than biscuits and seem more efficient/convenient. The cornerstone that gives skewers/jerky for pies is great. Pies give quite a lot of resolve.

If porridge seems easy then it might be too easy and it's the porridge that's out of balance. If some players prefer biscuits to pies then they might just prefer the races that like biscuits rather than the races that like pies.

[Alexander]

Originally posted by DG:

If some players prefer biscuits to pies then they might just prefer the races that like biscuits rather than the races that like pies.

What do you mean by "prefer races"? Players have little control over the set of races in the settlement.

Biscuits kind of make the difference where it matters. They are pretty much interchangeable with pies, except for Beavers and Lizards, and who cares about Lizards' resolve? Moreover, the other alternative to feed Beavers is pickled goods which are much harder to produce.

[Corbeau]

Yeah, over 200 hours in and I've yet to make pies. They overlap too much with biscuits in ingredients and biscuits are better at generating rep.

[van the man]

It's just that 'not food > not food > food' is an awkward flow when having no food means lose.

jerky for example is 'not food > food > more food'.

Early-mid game solving food is a necessity. So I'm not going to try to get an exodia combo together.

Then in mid-late I shift focus to stuff that wins. From the posts here I'm getting the impression that this becomes a bit player specific. I tend to try and go for luxury production, but I usually just trade myself to victory by year 9 or 10. I just buy stuff from the bottom bar with the perks/blueprints/cornerstones from the traders until I win somehow, and it always works. I've only lost when I played the biome wrong (not managing wood right in the coral forest, thinking I'm going to farm instead of gather in the marshes, etc.) or when I didn't consider a dangerous glade event right (oh whoops, I should've stopped producing food while I did that one...)

[bluemonkey]

(P10) Almost never get to pies myself. Biscuits are easier to get off the ground (field kitchen) and so pies get de-prioritized. Recently, Sahilda's cookbook seems repeatedly to pop up in year 1 for me when it is far inferior to anything else that is immediately useful.