Cooking Ingredients: Fixed or no?

[rat]

Last time I played, making prepared meals out of more than one ingredient required a very unnecessary amount of micromanagement. (I.E. you have to connect separate 1x1 stockpiles which cannot use barrels to the kitchen otherwise you get stuff like quarry bush biscuits with shredded quarry bush leaf and quarry bush sauce or duck liver dumplings with duck liver and duck liver etc.)

Has this been fixed or no?

For anyone just now entering the thread looking for the answer; it seems to be no.

[Fel]

They take the closest valid ingredient (full stack each time when it comes to cooking) so no, it wasn't "fixed" as it is working as intended as far as the game goes.

Making sure meals have varied ingredients doesn't really bring anything to the table outside of very specific role-play reasons.
Dwarves definitely don't care as long as they have some variety (not eating and drinking the same thing over and over).

EDIT: Maybe one day we will see DFHack's "task details" for cooking and brewing come back, this will allow you to have more control over such things (for example forcing the first ingredient to be meat, the second to be a vegetable and so on).

[Phreman]

My theories could use some verification, but surrounding a kitchen in a *edit hallow* diamond shaped stockpile is my best attempt to resolve the situation (on paper). That way every stockpile tile is of equal distance from the center of the kitchen, so the cook has an equal chance of going to any tile? Unless he just always goes to the top left. I haven't actually tested this idea out yet in game.

And as I understand it, barrels have some bugs for kitchen and seed purposes. But large pots don't have these issues. So liquids have a chance to be cooked with if these are used.

[rat]

Originally posted by Fel:

They take the closest valid ingredient (full stack each time when it comes to cooking) so no, it wasn't "fixed" as it is working as intended as far as the game goes.

Making sure meals have varied ingredients doesn't really bring anything to the table outside of very specific role-play reasons.
Dwarves definitely don't care as long as they have some variety (not eating and drinking the same thing over and over)

Uhh yeah we'll say it's "intended behavior" in that it's intended that they get ingredients for a meal with the same kind of algorithm that they use to pick up wood for making a chair.

Let's get real though: it's insanely stupid to imply that it's "intended behavior" that a "legendary" dwarf chef can't be bothered to mix ingredients together to make a meal more interesting unless the manager straps him to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kitchen and hands him him ingredients one by one. I mean, what's the point of having a chef in the first place if you're just going to use all three of the same ingredient. No "knowledge" of what flavors go with what? Literally just chopping up the first thing you see and calling it a meal?! Any frigging dwarf can do that.

Is there some kind of lore I'm missing out on that dwarves literally have no taste buds?

I mean really, it doesn't even sound right. A "masterwork" prepared meal that's actually just alpaca tripe cutlets with alpaca tripe and alpaca tripe sounds like you just had someone with a stroke try to explain to you what they found in a garbage can. Like are you serious? Intended behavior lmfao.

[rat]

Originally posted by Phreman:

My theories could use some verification, but surrounding a kitchen in a diamond shaped stockpile is my best attempt to resolve the situation (on paper). That way every stockpile tile is of equal distance from the center of the kitchen, so the cook has an equal chance of going to any tile? Unless he just always goes to the top left. I haven't actually tested this idea out yet in game.

And as I understand it, barrels have some bugs for kitchen and seed purposes. But large pots don't have these issues. So liquids have a chance to be cooked with if these are used.

Realistically I already know the "solution" to this problem, and it's forbidding barrels in a massive food stockpile and linking that stockpile to give to various 1x1 stockpiles that surround and are linked to give to the kitchen, but that's stupid. It shouldn't be like that. What else is a dwarven cook to do to improve their meals but to blend flavors together and make interesting combinations? Are you telling me all they do is cut little shapes into the food or something, and that's the only determinant as to what makes a food "masterwork" or not?

Let me tell you, if my dinner every night was spinach cooked into a hardtack ball, served with some minced spinach, you would stop hearing from me very soon, if you catch my drift. And yet, this is easily something that your dwarf cook will make a million of if all that's close to him is quarry bush leaves, even if two steps further is some goat meat or something.

The only explanation for the behavior as it is now is that fixing it would be a massive code rewrite for an issue that is (to be completely fair) 100% flavor-related in nature.

[Phreman]

Your arguments are valid if the game was considered to be in a polished state.

Practically everyone, creators included, acknowledge it isn't anywhere near that. There is a lot of work needed to be done before every aspect maintains logical sense.

[rat]

Originally posted by Phreman:

Your arguments are valid if the game was considered to be in a polished state.

Practically everyone, creators included, acknowledge it isn't anywhere near that. There is a lot of work needed to be done before every aspect maintains logical sense.

Whatever man. It's not even a big deal. I was just asking if it was fixed or not and I've got some silly billy trying to say it's "intentional". I'm just not going to let that slide. I enjoy the game as is, I was literally just trying to figure out if I was going to have to go through the whole kitchen stockpile rigamarole again. And I got my answer. So there we go.

[Phreman]

The creators said after they recover from releasing adventure mode they plan to slowly work through the many outstanding bugs, prioritizing severity/impact. Very little has been done towards the game in this regard in bringing it to Steam.

So if you find their existing work arounds to be an immersion breaking chore instead of some kind of esoteric achievement, I can't recommend playing the game in the next year or longer. You may get kitchens to your satisfaction, but there's something else right around the corner that doesn't line up as expected.

[Mechanos]

Hmm. For some reason my experience with cooking has been a bit different than the others in this thread. I always got the impression that ingredients chosen were random, as I could just throw all my ingredients in a stockpile, and sometimes they'd make use of different things, and sometimes they'd just use whatever I have most of. But maybe the stockpile was getting shifted around or something, causing what was "closest" to change from time to time? I didn't know I could control this more, by having single tile stockpiles, to make sure there's only 1 stack of each ingredient nearby. I'll have to try this.