easy food?

[Stabbity]

I played this game a ton but I can't decide which food is easiest to manage long term. Please help de-stress my winter!

edit:
Thanks everyone!

1. wine
2. beef stew
3. bread
and free foods!

[spared_life]

None is easiest, I don't feed them. I never worry about the food.

[Stabbity]

:O they dont die?

[spared_life]

Yes but just rest them before that happens. I rest them mostly before raids on horde night, guardians, and dragons. They will plop down and rest themselves when health gets too low. I lose a couple now and then too :)

[Dherian]

Easiest to manage is everything related to Crops, once youcan make your own coal, grow wheat underground and you never run out of food.

Early on its the pinecones, I still leave them on at least one table all the time, as they are abundant and the dwarves still like them, when better food is available. Just don´t feed them only cones.

[stylez]

Anything that drops naturally like pinecones, berries, lard, coconuts, put that stuff out on the table to give the dwarves variety (to skip the annoying "I can't eat this any more" messages). Then craft whatever recipes have feeding and healing, i.e. apple pie and mixed greens salad.

Keep a dedicated chicken (or whatever world-specific equivalent) farm for egg collection.

Apples are cheap in the shop, 1g for 8, and 1 Apple makes 10 pies; 80 pies for 1 gold + the other nearly-infinitely-renewable resources (water, egg, coal, flour) is a great conversion rate even for the levels where you can't get apples naturally.

[Stabbity]

wow, thanks everyone! I feel a lot more confident in my food planning!!!

[Psysop]

Fishing is also a good option for variety, but only with a well designed artificial pool. It can also double as a rain collector if exposed to the sky (on a map with rain).

[Tamren]

The best food in the game is Wine. You can get wine by building barrels and crafting them into wine barrels. You can then place the barrels anywhere on the floor or wall and they will regularly spit out a bottle of wine. Eventually a barrel will be depleted and you can deconstruct it to get an empty barrel back. Wine is a superfood because it feeds for 2 and heals for 33%. It also energizes dwarves the same way tea and beer does. However it does require a lot of research and you can only make them in the late game.

Other than that just make about 10 of each food item as you research them, tha should give you plenty of food to last the level. Like they mentioned above you can also put "junk" food items like cones and coconuts out on the tables, these will help give the dwarves variety and stretch out your good food supply. Most junk food items have no secondary use anyway.

To get meat just kill every animal you see or farm chickens. To get grain you can harvest some wild or find seeds while digging and plant more. Fishing and grinding wheat into flour are the most time consuming ways of making food, but fish and flour turn into the most food per-item because of the higher tech recipes.

[stylez]

Originally posted by GWJ Tamren:

The best food in the game is Wine. You can get wine by building barrels and crafting them into wine barrels.

IIRC this is available in the Sisters DLC.

[susannag]

Yes, wine is not a base game feature.

[xenxander]

If you're on a snow map, the yetis during the raids will eventually feed you.
They drop lard. If you are also cutting down trees, you will get cones. Lard + cones = free food forever, without needing coal.
you can also get apples on that map, so if you want to make apple pie later, go ahead.
However, Cones + Mixed Green Salad on the snow maps works too (apples and leaves drop naturally, as do cones)

It may not be the best feeding, but it's free. And again, the yetis will drop a huge supply of lard if you are good enough to kill large raids.
On 'underground' mushroom maps, dried mushrooms and mushroom salad, both take zero coal and can feed you indefinitely if you keep chopping trees (mushrooms) down.

If you want the best 'coal' food (that is, food requiring coal to make), then Beef stew is the best. One coal = 10 stews. 1 stew = 3 feeding. That's an amazing 30 feeding per coal. The next best thing down is bread, at 1 coal for 6 bread. Each bread is 3, therefore, one coal = 18 feeding.

It used to be identical, bread and stew, but the update dropped bread's feeding down a bit.

Never make grilled fish. Sure it takes only one coal, but you also need one oil. If you work through the tech tree to find out how much coal you need for the glass, then coal for the bottles, and then oil from the bottles, and THEN how much fish you can make for the oil you can produce, then you realize that 1 coal = 15 feeding with grilled fish. That's the same as 'fish stew' needing 2 coal, making 10 fish stew, at 3 freeding per. That's 1 coal per 15 feeding.

For this reason, I stay away from fish and just go with bread and beef stew. You can make both on any map.