Comments on food production

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Snowpig, Nov 17, 2015.

  1. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    To my knowledge colonists will always look for produced food first, and will ignore raw food unless their hunger meets a certain threshold, and then will only consider certain raw food if their hunger is below a even lower threshold (depending on their traits).

    I'd hazard a guess that part of the problem is more that whilst kitchen workers are carrying produced food to the stockpile it's not included as a viable food option as it's not immediately available... all a colonist can do is consider what is immediately there for consumption. So if you have 30 units of raw food sat around, and 10 units of produced food being carried out of your kitchens, your colonists looking for food to eat will go "There's only the raw food to eat, and I'm hungry enough so I'll eat that".

    Because raw food sates a colonists hunger less than produced food it establishes a kind of inefficient hunger cycle, where as eating produced food acts as a more efficient 'hunger reset' of sorts. This isn't really helped by the fact that it seems pretty clear that part of the core behaviour sees your entire colony get artificially prompted to seek food all at the same exact time of the day rather than colonists having their own personal triggers on when to seek food based on their activities/energy expenditure and other traits that may normally factor in to have colonists want food at different times. Instead eating outside of that artificial prompt occurs only when a colonist was unable to initially sate their hunger needs when the last artificial prompt occurred.

    Throw in colonists being unable to know that a kitchen will soon be producing xxx amount of food in advance, so being unable to have any kind of behaviour introduced to have the capacity to go "Ok so there's no produced food now but I know there will be soon so I'll queue the food check and perform it again later in hopes it's not already claimed", and you have something that can only act on snapshots of how things are at that exact moment with no awareness of anything outside of that snapshot.

    But barring major rewrites to a whole load of things, I don't think there's really much that can be done about that.


    One of many theoretical ideas to mitigate that little part of the problem could be to have colonists work off of the colony commodity listings as their snapshot when checking. As produced food being hauled is already accounted for there, it would at least expand a colonists perspective to a wider scope, though they still wouldn't be aware of food that is in the process of being cooked.... Though one idea for that may be to introduce the tracking of pending orders as a kind of attachment. So if you have 30 pumpkin stews in your colony and 5 more being cooked, it would be tracked as 30(+5)... this would also be quite a handy player tool now that I think about it.

    A colonist could do what they do now and just look for any free prepared food. If none found check the commodity lists, know there should be produced food available and then act under the assumption that it's all just 'busy' and queue up checking for free food again in the near future... this repeating n number of times before finally just eating raw food.

    But to really make that work to any degree of effectiveness, you'd probably need to have colonists claiming food for consumption immediately remove that unit from the list of colony reserves and that then introduces all sorts of possible complications if something happens to that colonists before they actually eat that food, and would also likely require changing how colony stock tracking is handled to quite a degree from being the current straight forward list of "What's claimed by the colony" to a more flexible list that can handle filtering fringe cases where something is 'claimed by the colony' but actually 'claimed for removal/consumption by a individual'.

    But the viability of any ideas like that really depend on how things are coded and the constraints on what information is actually available and when.
     
    Last edited: Nov 21, 2015
  2. ShadowTani

    ShadowTani Member

    I'm aware of the food saturation, but not the meal trigger (I do wonder if the trigger is ignored if there's a lack of prepared food, since they seem to be always holding out until they are starved when it's only raw).

    However, when you have the choice between using a full crew to prepare food or to produce more raw food you will in my experience actually have a better food coverage by going for the raw food, hence why I always go for an additional farm instead of a kitchen. That so many of you seem to be spending more than 40% of your workforce on food production also tells me the kitchen is not making a good enough impact on the food supply. At a population of 50 I got 20% working on food, and 20% working on booze, where the food reserves appear to be stable, if not increasing.
     
  3. Kamisma

    Kamisma Member

    Can you share a save ?
     
  4. Kamisma

    Kamisma Member

    It's a tad better but farmers tend to leave the crops on the farm instead of bringing them back to the stock pile now
     
  5. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    Here's my Alpha 45 colony:

    2 full kitchens and 5 full farms comfortably feed my colony with ample leisure time. That's 35% of my population. In the growing phase, I made them work long shifts in order to increase their output, but at 100 pop, I have an abundance of people with nothing better to do, so everyone can afford to have time off.

    The farms and kitchens and stockpiles are arranged in a configuration that cuts down on travel time the most for kitchen staff, whether the raw food is waiting in the fields, or waiting in the stockpile.

    Beds are also located close to the farms, so that the farmers can get to the fields quickly in the morning and get to work.

    All kitchens are equipped with 7 steam ovens. The redundancy is in place so that broken equipment doesn't decrease my efficiency while it's getting repaired.
     

    Attached Files:

  6. ShadowTani

    ShadowTani Member

    I finally paid enough attention to observe the food triggers; it's apparently in the evenings, I can't believe I overlooked something so obvious, lol!

    Sure; though I just restarted (should start archiving my old colonies I guess, lol), but I'm working on a colony now that will show my concept a bit better than the previous one, just give me a day or two. I'll set up one without the booze industry to avoid having those who eat the grain from the wheat production (yes, very uncultured, it is supposed to go toward beer and moonshine you whippersnapperz!) complicate the numbers of the food industry.

    So far I can say that a full 5-colonist team on a 9x12 Maize farm definitively can feed up to 25 colonists without a kitchen, though 24 might be a safer number if you account for possible disturbances in the work schedule, like a raid etc. I'll be experimenting some more, and get back to you guys with that save. :3
     
  7. ShadowTani

    ShadowTani Member

    Ok, finally finished experimenting with this colony. It's a fully working 50 population 20% colony, no operational kitchen (only a nonoperational brewery that can be upgraded with kitchen ovens if needed for experimental reasons).
    • It's food supply is mainly covered by two 9x12 farms.
    • The farms are each worked by full 5-colonist teams that both have off-time during the early and late night hours.
    • Ideal colony size would be 48, but you can with easy adjustments still stick to these two farms at a population of 50.
    Unmanaged there's a slight decline in the maize food stocks over time, but there's many ways to boost the output of food.
    • Making the farmers work night shifts being the most obvious. This will often be all you need to do!
    • There's also three voracious colonists that may be weeded out and replaced. Though not sure if they actually do eat more.
    • Foraging, hunting and fishman genocide will provide quick alternative food sources.
    • There's a bamboo farm that can be switched over to pumpkin production from time to time. I've never needed to do so myself though.
    If particularly lazy you can use food drops, though only accept such a drop in the dusk for best effect and never two days in a row (see the kitchen research section as for why). The decline is small enough that it will take more than 5 days to use up this boost (meaning the prestige will be recovered by the next time you need it). However, it shouldn't be necessary, I just do it sometimes because I rarely use my prestige for anything else, lol.

    Finally, you can upgrade the colony with a booze industry where the wheat production will have some leakage, whether you like it or not, over into the food industry. The buildings for this, a brewery and a public house, is pre-built in the colony for this convenience. The colony also have some opium already going on. However, a colony can manage as fine without booze as it can without a kitchen; I just have a booze industry going in most of my other colonies due to Dwarf Fortress nostalgia.

    Also, the colony should be mostly bug free, aside from the unavoidable floating items after fishmen along the map edges.

    Kitchen Research Report (important details and findings)
    I did some experimenting with a kitchen and various food behaviors in addition too, and I must say I'm even less impressed with the kitchen than I was before. It's all based on logic and observations so if I'm wrong about any of this it's appreciated if the devs correct me. Anyway, first findings is in regards to the food trigger:
    1. There is no actual saturation system, just hunger levels. This means, aside of raw and prepared, food is equal.
    2. The food trigger every dusk is NOT a food trigger, but a hunger trigger, all hunger levels get increased then.
    This actually means the food trigger is an illusion, all characters will actually eat any available prepared food at any time as long as their hunger is less than "not hungry" (i.e. "somewhat hungry") and any raw food as long as their hunger is less than "somewhat hungry" (i.e. "really hungry"). The reason they flock to eat each dusk is probably more because their hunger is increased then rather than because they are explicitly told to eat then.

    And the thing with food being equal is for example a bread and a pie will have the exact same effect. So if you make pies you are actually REDUCING your food coverage, as you are essentially making two units of food into one unit of food. i.e. Both a bread and Pie will make a character become "not hungry" and in both cases the character will go from "not hungry" to "somewhat hungry" the next dusk.

    Also, the main difference between raw food and prepared food, aside of the mood effects, is that from dusk to dusk raw food will cycle between "somewhat hungry" and "really hungry", while prepared food will cycle between "not hungry" and "somewhat hungry". Meaning that in practice there's no practical difference.

    So the conclusion is overwhelmingly, if my observations are right, that a kitchen is completely useless in regards to helping with food coverage.
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Nov 27, 2015
  8. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    If your colonists are starving they will eat multiple raw food items to get satiated, but only need to eat one cooked item. That's how it helps food coverage.
     
  9. ShadowTani

    ShadowTani Member

    But you shouldn't normally get into that situation; from day to day, if the food supply is consistently sufficient, there will be no practical difference. You will have colonists go up one level in hunger, and then consume food to satiate one level of hunger.

    Look at the food stores of my colony, you think I ever had a starvation issue? By the time I hit a population of 25 and started setting up a second maize field my first maize field would have given me a huge food reserve; and they never touched any of the meat, which have built up in the hundreds as well.

    In my raw food colony example each citizen do not consume more than one unit of food from day to day, the exact same situation as if you had a kitchen running - with the difference that you would spend more time and require more people producing the food if you do use a kitchen, and if you go for pies you will even consume twice the amount of food. The only difference between a kitchen colony and a raw food colony is that my colonists will bounce between "somewhat hungry" and "really hungry", while a kitchen colony will bounce between "not hungry" and "somewhat hungry". Sure, my colonists are a bit less happy, but I still haven't had any cult problems; it just make a booze industry, another currently questionable useful industry, more meaningful for me than it would for you guys with kitchens.

    I think it's a major issue with this. I want kitchens working, but right now they are only a road bump that I can't find a logical reason to use. I spent a week observing and stalking my colonists, so it's based on pretty solid observations.
     
    Last edited: Nov 27, 2015
  10. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    Depending upon how you run your colony, it can make some difference or very little, yes. Mainly, as you said, it is a happiness booster.