A Numerical Gastronomy EDIT: These numbers are outdated, see A v48 Gastronomy below for latest (v48A) Let's take a look at numbers. Actually I mean recipes. Suppose we have the following: Chilli/Cabbage => 1 farmer produces 4/day Maize/Pumpkin => 1 farmer produces 5/day Wheat/Sugarcane => 1 farmer produces 6/day (long average) To feed 60 colonists will take: 10 farmers on wheat/sugarcane. Suppose now we are trying to feed 40 lower-class and 20 middle-class colonists. ================================ Making Farmers' Stew needs 2 units of the following: Cabbage, Chilli, Pumpkin. Ability to farm these differs, so in the name of efficiency we will use... Antipodea 40 Wheat, 40 Pumpkin per day ie: 6.67 wheat farmers, 8 pumpkin farmers = 14.67 total Sogwood 40 Wheat, 40 Chilli per day ie: 6.67 sugarcane farmers, 10 chilli farmers = 16.67 total These go down as you get overseer skill, but anyway. Add another 5 for cooking. And you're looking at about 20-22 people of your 60-colonist force used in cooking. Not too bad, you can cut it closer with improved skill. ================================ Now a potential input control problem. Antipodea will use the bread recipe to convert wheat into bread, and the farmer's stew to convert pumpkin into farmers' stew. No problem there. Sogwood only cooks sugarcane via the Basic Food recipe. This will also take up your chilli which causes you some problems, as you would prefer to keep these relative expensive inputs for the farmers' stew. ================================ By the way, Maize Chowder is tagged as quality food (the entry for it in the food.edb has the tag "quality_food" and not "basic_food" which say Stew has). This means in 46B, overseers will be happy eating this food. Probably just a bug. ================================ Also, while the icon on recipe suggests you can use maize, you can't.
In real life, maize is grain. Not vegetable. So it you can't use wheat for farmer stew, no being able to use maize makes sense kinda.
The icon shows a maize though. It doesn't show a sack of wheat. A UI issue. Well anyway solves that mystery. By the way, Cut Sugarcane is turned into Stew, but not Farmers' Stew because.Maize also make Maize Chower which looks like a yellow-colored version of stew. Heh. But anyway... the issue is just this icon: Of the four items shown there, only the cabbage, chilli and pumpkin work. Amusingly the icon for those 4 is identified as raw_vegetables_category, though it doesn't matter what it's called internally of course. Alternatively, make it so 1 Maize + "Cook Basic Food" => Stew 2 Maize + "Cook Farmers' Stew" => Farmers' Stew Though, Maize is better than Pumpkin for farming, both are more efficient than Chilli/Cabbage though. Oh well.
That's a good point, that should also be taken care of, I'm not sure why it wasn't rolled in while everything else in the basic 1:1 category was (and then there's Maize Chowder heh) However, having your top efficiency plant use a specific recipe is actually quite useful for input control, I wish the Sugarcane had a separate cooking recipe too. As mentioned above having to use Cook Basic Food is a potential input control problem. It's also nice as workers from a bread kitchen won't run out to grab random steak in the forest, the sugarcane stew factory people do. Yes I want you guys to convert all my sugarcane, but then go haul and don't walk across the map to grab a steak and try to cook it. ===================================== There would be an issue with converting fungus etc into Stew when you might want to use for trade food. But nah, just make Standing Desks and Glass Panes to trade, it'll do.
Cook basic food worked well when you didnt care what food you were cooking, so it improved the flow since neither you nor the colonist AI cared about what food went into the oven. Now though, as we have more complicated recipes with actual effects on gameplay, the cook basic food action becomes an hindrance as, as you say we can't control inputs. Without taking into account the "quality chowder" bug. The only way right now is to only feed bread to your colonists and use everything else for higher quality recipe or exports etc.
I realized you can probably work around the input issue by careful placement of your farms (for farmed ingredients anyway), stockpiles and kitchens. The output control on the other hand is probably harder. Unlike the case of lower-class people sleeping in all your middle-class beds (which you can build your way out of), this one is quite troublesome. In my 60-colonist set up, making 40 basic food and 20 quality food might not work as well as you think because the lower-class people might eat all the quality food*** anyway.And unlike the beds you can't just move to producing 60 quality food now, that's rediculous. I haven't checked, but someone let me know if your colonists will eat the various types of trade goods like Pickled Chilli etc. If so that's quite a headache as well... *** It seems the lower class people will go for the Basic Food first, I have been told. Haven't tested it myself but if so that's great news.
version 48-A A v48 Gastronomy Let me begin by just stating the following ratios, which roughly hold for Inept overseers @ 5 shifts a day. 1 Farmer produces 4 units of Maize or Pumpkin per day 1 Cook can cook 8 times a day, meaning: Converting 8 Maize to 16 Maize Chowder (Basic Food) Converting 16 Pumpkins to 16 Farmers' Stew (Quality Food) OR a linear combination of the above. Now, since the food changes which we are experiencing in v48(A), it is possible to quickly produce the Quality food. 1. A Maize farm with 5 people should be able to produce 20+ Maize a day, meaning 40+ Maize Chowder. 2. We feed a number N of overseers. Say 16 out of a 35+ colony. 3. We need to produce 16 pumpkins a day for this, which is about 4 farmers. So set up a full pumpkin farm... 4. Now, this will produce Maize to make 40 Maize Chowder and Pumpkins to make 20 Farmers' Stew. 5. Wait about 4 days for pumpkins to begin to roll in. Now the magic occurs. 6. Say we have a kitchen of 5, this allows us to make the full 40 chowder and 20 Farmers' Stew (and actually they will use up all the raw food). As we have both a) a sufficient amount of raw food (more than enough for each category) and b) a sufficient amount of cooking capacity (more than enough total), we can set up the kitchen as follows: First: Minimum Farmers' Stew 32, 64 etc etc Second: Minimum Basic Food (whatever, as the game will use up everything possible). This solves the input problem, as pumpkins will only be diverted into making Stew (basic food) when there's a full amount of Farmers' Stew. Furthermore, because pumpkin production is not perfectly smooth, setting the minimum at 2 to 4 (or more) days worth will help. One more thing, after the switch, we have 35 colonists, of which 16 are eating Farmers' Stew. This leaves us 19 who will be eating maize chowder. But we're producing 40 chowder. So if you wait about, oh 6 days, then you should have 6 days of buffer of raw maize/chowder, and you can flip over your maize to wheat. Or, just add more colonists until you're near 20 overseers and 40 lower-class (which would be near the limit of what your 2 farms could feed). ========================= You can scale to 100 colonists (24 overseers, 76 lower-class) but this probably needs you to have 2 pumpkin farms, 2 maize farms and 2 kitchens (well probably, you might get away with 1 but it would be close). In the case of 2 kitchens, have both follow the order above. Even if you switch to wheat, you can't get away from needing 2 wheat farms, but you might be able to use 8 instead of 10 (or given skills & science, 6-7). The gains were probably bigger when you needed more farmers...
