New Food Buffs

[sbhink805]

I'm having an issue where my clanfolks eat their meals mainly in the late afternoon/early evening, still work time but close to time off.

So the vast majority of the buff is wasted to time off and sleep. Am I doing something wrong? Some do eat in the morning but not many.

Your thoughts?

[Philtre]

I guess you could force them to go to bed hungry by disallowing all food late in the day, then reenable it all right after they wake up in the morning. I'm not sure there's any less-invasive way to control when they go eat....

[sbhink805]

Perhaps pause the timer for buffs while asleep or make them longer

[dissent]

The timing of the buffs is the most minor of the problems with recipe food imo. The recipes are way too convoluted and require far too much micro, resources and storage space. Pottage is OK but I've given the rest a hard pass.

[sbhink805]

I'm still making most of them, I especially want the veggie stew for the increased speed during planting and harvesting time, but I find they sleep through most of that buff.

[dissent]

Veg soup takes 16 of each veg to make four meals. That's 4 different veg x 16 = 64 veg. Each of the veg types yields 6 per crop tile. So that's 64/6 = nearly 11 tiles of cropland with all the work that entails over the four day growing period - planting, watering, fertilizing, harvesting, hauling - to make four meals. I'm not seeing any value in that at all.

I made Haggis and Neeps earlier, just to see what it required versus what it delivers. It's a nice bonus - Work, Mood, Satisfaction, Warmth for a whole day (1800 seconds) - but dear lord, the micro and resources and storage space required. For starters, it's two cooking processes, the first to make the Haggis, the second to add the Neeps. Then it takes a ton of resources - Pluck, Onions, Oats, Neeps, Butter, Milk, Charcoal.

That it requires both Milk and Butter is, in itself, problematic. If you have a Cow or Goat providing the Milk, you can't turn all the output into Butter, you have to set half aside as Milk. The only way to store Milk is on a Milking Bucket pallet in a cold room. The only way to store Butter is in a bowl in a cold room, with each bowl taking up a Pantry storage slot. So your storage needs skyrocket with your Pantry slots being taken up by single Bowls.

Then the Cow/Goat doesn't stop producing Milk, and you won't have enough Pluck or Onions/Neeps or Bowls or Oats to turn your daily Milk output (even from just one Goat) into Haggis and Neeps. So either you let most of your Milk rot, or you turn it into Butter which nobody wants to eat. Or you sell it and lose the Bowl and have to keep making more Bowls. It delivers 10k nutrition which nobody is going to use, a worker would have to be literally starving to get 10k. Most of my people eat when they lose the Well Fed buff, i.e. when they go below 5k on the Food bar. So they're only getting just over 5k nutrition from a 10k dish, the rest is going to waste.

I can get 15k nutrition from five Cooked Fish. That takes me less than two minutes to gather at Sunrise, and another twenty seconds to pop it into any cooking station. When it's done, it stores in stacks of 20 in the Pantry, doesn't require Bowls and doesn't need Charcoal to cook, just a few Branches. And no washing up afterwards. Compare that to the mountain of work to produce Haggis and Neeps. There is no upside at all to the recipe dishes. Hard pass for me.

[Philtre]

Originally posted by dissent:

Then the Cow/Goat doesn't stop producing Milk, and you won't have enough Pluck or Onions/Neeps or Bowls or Oats to turn your daily Milk output (even from just one Goat) into Haggis and Neeps. So either you let most of your Milk rot, or you turn it into Butter which nobody wants to eat.

You can make surplus milk into cheese, which people will happily eat and which you can sell. My problem with this is that they tend to prioritize cheese production over all other uses, regardless of the priority settings on the cheese maker. meaning you have to keep an eye on your milk stocks to turn cheese production off and on.

I don't find either the labor costs or the storage space to be an issue with the new foods; freezers are cheap to make, and after the first year your peeps don't currently have much to do anyway. They might as well be farming as standing around idle.

[dissent]

My problem with Cheese is that it requires Linen which I never touch. I buy/harvest enough Flax/Flax Seed to get the Haystack and Grain Pallet and then I don't touch it again. I can't remember when I last made Flax Retting but it was an awful long time ago. I could level up the Plains trader and buy Linen Cloth/Hanks from them but then they sell less of the sheafs and seeds I want from them.

I never make dairy products either. For the amount of work that goes into it, one pat of Butter giving the same nutrition as one Berry is just ludicrous, and Cheese isn't much better. It does sell for a decent price at least. But then Coin isn't much of a problem in the game.

[Philtre]

Originally posted by dissent:

My problem with Cheese is that it requires Linen which I never touch.

Well, I love the textiles processing in this game, so not having linen-making would be a handicap for me. :D And I never let them eat plain butter, it's only for cooking (in fact, until the new foods I only ever made one bowl of butter per save, to unlock it in the storage list).

[dissent]

Just to clarify, I'm very happy about the new foods and veggies as it adds more variety and options to the game. That they're not for me doesn't mean others won't enjoy making them. That's the way any management game should be, offering options to tackle the game in different ways.

If I was into role-playing primarily, I'd relish the new foods. But I'm all about min-maxing, in this and any other game. So I either do things to excess or not at all. In Clanfolk, that means no Toilets, no Flax/Linen, no livestock other than Boars, no pets, no travellers, no lighting (Rushlights, Torches, etc), no Bread and no recipes that require Bowls.

That said, I'm digging Pottage and Haggis. They're both easy to make, offer good value, store easily and fit into my min-max approach.

[Chai]

Just to add my bit ...
I love the new veggies. Haven't found neeps yet, but it will happen.
I love the idea of the cooking pot for my inn. No more 'scramble to get something nice cooked for guests'
BUT the cooking pot is too charcoal intense to use as an everyday food source for me.
Lots of veg needed? No Prob. Lots of raw protein needed? No prob.
Needing as much charcoal as firing 6 jugs in the kiln? Problem
Have to prioritize cooking pot vs making anything in the smithy or kiln. For now, crafting wins.
No pottage for you my clan unless there are guests, sorry. Here's some Haggis, enjoy!

[dissent]

Yeah, the charcoal is a big and often overlooked factor. It's a very Branch-intensive way of cooking, and firewood is a game-long issue. Still, I like the Cooking Pot because there's no storage or washing up or Bowls required, it's 6 ready meals on the go for busy workers. I disallow everything except Eels and Mushrooms in the Cooking Pot. I used to have Cooked Eels, Meat and Fish as staples. Of those, Eels provide the least nutrition, 2k versus 3k for the Meat and Fish. So I was willing to forego the Eels as staple and use them in the Cooking Pot instead. The Mushrooms are great too, I do one big harvest in late Fall and that keeps the Cooking Pot supplied for the entire year. People generally don't like eating Mushrooms anyway so this uses them up.

Then my Boars produce Pluck. I could make Pluck on a Stick with it, it's functionally exactly the same as Cooked Meat, 5 Pluck/Meat + 5 Branches = 5x3k nutrition. But I make Haggis instead. It stacks, doesn't need Bowls and gives a good bonus, and growing a few Onions and some Oats now and then isn't a biggie. So Cooked Meat and Cooked Fish as staples, Haggis and Pottage as supplementary meals, all augmented by a large Berry harvest every Summer. Sorted.