ALPHA 44B NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

whispers intensely: wheeeelllbaaaarrrooooowwwsss

 

lol.

I still stand by the core idea behind this post.

Now that things like the pub have shown offices are maturing to act as a means to consolidate groups of a certain object type and make them available to colonists, something along those lines would seem to be a much more practical approach for Kitchens now rather than the existing kitchens which were fine back in the initial builds but are now showing signs of needing a new implementation entirely as the demands from them and the requirements of the related systems that tie into to them have changed.

Having Kitchens shift to a more office-like mentality serving as the focal point to not only prepare meals but also store (and in doing so, restrict access) to raw foods to be immediately obtained and cooked on-site, and then have those prepared foods stored back in the kitchen to be served at colonist request rather than clinging on to the current old workshop mentality just seems to make so much more sense.

Plus as going on some of the details in a previous devblog, offices are much more open to serve as a player front to specific behaviour scripts and additional commands to perform much finer actions, it would open the door for more flexibility in options for kitchens than the more static workshop framework seems to support.

If/when the concept of colonist ownership and property matures more, it would even make a whole lot more sense for colonists to go to the kitchen on a daily/weekly basis and buy/trade/receive an allotment of food from the kitchen. Then the colonist takes that food home to eat or store, rather than think that later on we'll still have giant stockpiles sat on the floor of "Help yourself" meals which sit around for days at a time and people just wander up, grab whatever they fancy and take it back home.



@MOOMANiBE great to hear that some head way is being made in that area. Kind of hoping the work for it gets bumped up the chain maybe for revision 46 or so as at the moment I'm finding almost all of my time with the game is spent managing food production once I get to around the 40 population milestone mark with little attention able to spent on any other part of the game.

Food should certainly be important, but at the moment having it pretty much be 'The game' in terms of the amount of attention it requires to try and fight against everything to retain some sense of a proper flow going in your colony without just resorting to letting everyone constantly eat nothing but raw food detracts from being able to put attention toward all the other changes added to the game the last couple of months.


@Nicholas Haven't had the chance to properly go through all of your post yet, but will be reading it properly in a bit. Thanks for the write up explaining the rationale behind the current changes and the additional things being taken into account. Another awesome post as always.

 

A TEAM OF AUROCHS DRAWING A HAY WAIN! .if you please.
As shouted in unison until deaf,daft ,und hoarse ("pardon the allusion to the forbidden equine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hay_Wain#/media/File:John_Constable_The_Hay_Wain.jpg

 

Hello Tikigod,
I feel like i already met you a long time ago on some other game's beta forums (though i probably had another handle).
Either way i really like your posts

I like the idea of the food being handled in a way similar as alcohol through a "distributor" office whose job is only to get food stored up and distributing to the colony (it doesn't have to be the kitchen itself since i doubt the game's code and design will like having an office/workshop hybrid thingy)

The publican, like the chapel, is great because it makes the colony feels actually alive as you see people gathering at night in the pub for a drink, rather than making a beeline to the stockpiles. Well in theory anyway since in alpha 44A (didn't test yet on B) it often get broken.

But we can't just copy paste the publican design for food. For starters as you pointed out, colonists should pick up the food themselves rather than having it served by another colonist (unless there is some kind of restaurant/canteen at some point), and they should do it in batch food so that they don't need to do extra long trips every day.

But yeah, we need more system like ownership, and private storage to get a complete feeding system.


On a related note, right now i feel like it's a waste of balancing and articulating game mechanics on systems that look really incomplete (unless i'm mistaken and from the beginning the game was designed around colonists eating at the stockpile rather than at home or in a canteen)
Parts of the game or rather mechanics feel duct taped together (which must be meant as temporary but little by little becomes permanent-ish until it's overhauled and duct taped again when something else breaks)

The fact the food to colonist flow isn't too balanced right now is probably not a big deal since the complete feeding cycle is not implemented yet. I mean the way farms work right now is satisfying and as Moomanibe said earlier the issue mostly has moved to the kitchen. But if new mechanics related to food are planned, it's probably a waste of time to balance the kitchen right now.

I don't know, my 2cts.

 

I love the journals. I find myself compelled to read them whenever there's some downtime. I just hope they don't get overlooked too much, since you have to scroll down quite a bit in the character panel to see them.

 

In regards to last nights dev blog and the

Foot note.

Fired up a new colony late Tuesday/Early Wednesday to test some food related stuff and unless the kitchen lovin' involves boosting their output to run off of less raw food, manpower involved in maintaining farms to feed the kitchens also needs some love relative to immigration of overseer rates (or shifting immigration rates themselves to have more crews, as sheer crew count regardless to workers are probably the most precious resource in the game).

20 workcrews across a population of 59 colonist (achieved by setting carpentry and ceramics to maintain 200 units of constructed materials in the colony) with 6 of those crews dedicated to farms (soon to be 7 as 6 farms doesn't cut it. And even 7 will be hard pushed) plus 2 for the kitchens leaves little manpower for other jobs... so that's 9 of those 18 focused toward food production, and Kitchen workcrews scheduled to never sleep.... ever.

And of those other 9 free crews, another 4 or so go keeping your colony sourced in produced construction materials.

So... that leaves 7 free workcrews for military (2 military squads minimum feels the minimum needed), hauling, raw resource harvesting, barbers, church, science, mines etc...

It's a bit of a stretch for a colony that still is struggling on the fringes of "Nothing but raw food to eat when it's produced". Though I could extend those pumpkin farms to achieve better output.




Got wood?


Edit: Technically it's 5 farms at present set to handle food production, with the 6th handling flax for cloth. The small cabbage field with workers still gets spoilage even that small, and the small pumpkin across from it is quick injection 'training farm' to quickly churn out something to meet shortfalls whilst I flatten out land for larger plots and move the overseer to a 7x8 or 7x10 plot.

 

Does anyone else have a problem later in the game, maybe 40 or 50 colonists, with everyone starting to move very slowly? Instead of just walking my colonists will take one step, pause, then another, then pause and so on.

It ends up taking them forever to get anywhere. I play on my laptop so this may very well be a hardware issue but I'm curious...

 

Main Kitchen is fully staffed, secondary kitchen is half staffed. Both overseer's middling skilled.

Kitchen tries to keep up with preparing the food but often colonists stuff raw food down their face immediately after harvest, a fair bit of idle time with the kitchens with this test layout and distribution whilst waiting for farm yields.

Now sized two of the pumpkin fields to 7x10 and built a 3rd 7x10 pumpkin, which has helped try provide more sheer volume, still noticing farm crews on those fields have downtime with nothing to do mid-field growth so may look into pushing the size up one notch, but after harvesting the replanting time is a MAJOR time sink, so farm sizes are a juggling act between trying to be large enough so farm crews aren't sat on their arse most of the day after planting, and avoiding having replanting after the plot is all harvested dragging on too long.

Only had one rotation with the larger fields so far so it's too early to tell how it will eventually settle but first yields were largely scoffed raw before the kitchen had time to snag it as all workers were occupied so unable claim ownership/dibs before the hungry colonists went "Oh, free food and no prepared food available, time to eat raw pumpkin!". Even though there were 5 workers carrying prepared food from both kitchens to stockpiles if they'd just waited 5 seconds.

 

If anyone wants to fire up the colony to poke around with it, try other things to try keep kitchens working with less 'nothing to do' time or otherwise just watch it play out and give thoughts on what they think is the roadblock areas feel free. I'm doing pretty much nothing with this colony except focusing on farms, food production and sustaining enough raw resource input to keep workshops producing to draw more overseers to throw them into more farming (and soon a 3rd kitchen) at this point.

Other than responding to random events and constantly pushing carpentry and ceramic workshop production orders up as they meet their quotas, things should be pretty much auto-pilot to just tweak farm distributions. Military seem able to deal with anything thrown at them so far, the two cults are being relatively quiet etc.

Just keep in mind it's a 44B save.

Edit: If anyone does fire up the colony, first thing you'll want to do is just drop that cabbage field. Cabbage is broken. No other word for it when a 3 worker crew can't maintain 2 rows of 6 plants without 3-4 crop spoiling first thing in the morning before anyone can even wake up and walk to the field.

 

Yeah, that happens when the game is pushing your system due to too much going on or you've got a lot of other stuff running alongside the game.

It can also happen when you're placing new buildings or modules, everyone will temporarily freeze whilst things like pathfinding etc is all recalculated I suspect.

 

Loaded your game... saw this:



I don't think that's a ghost...

Anyway, I'll have some time tomorrow to see if I can come at the food situation from a different angle, or just completely destroy everything and kill everyone trying.

 

Ok, just watched how it played out for 5-6 in-game days after switching the tiny cabbage field to a small pumpkin field, my kitchens aren't really being taxed at all they have large chunks of time where they have absolutely nothing to do with a farm layout that's mostly pumpkin with a single maize farm and 6 farms all dedicated to food.

Yet when the fields do finally provide a yield the sheer volume of the load flooded across a small space of time completely swamps the kitchens restrictions of just 5 cooks (1 overseer, 4 workers). Yet once the initial raw food zerg rush is over, the kitchen is back to having bugger all to do for huge chunks of the day.

After watching it play out, I'm not entirely convinced kitchens and hauling are the bottleneck... at least not in this layout.

The bottleneck seems to lie in how farms produce their yield in a massive single push which in-light of the changes to 1 worker = 1 cook job means a kitchen just can't handle the sudden volume of even a smallish farm, let alone the multiple larger farms you need to have in operation once you get to higher population demands.... unless the alternative option to larger farms where you instead have over half your workcrews all being dedicated to farming small farms is someone's idea of a preferable solution to their colony,... as that's certainly a option as things stand, although that means you end up playing "Clockwork Farmers" with a richly simulated agricultural sprawl.


Anyways, if farms produced a gradual yield and it was set up so that planting established a minimum interval between the neighbouring crop having a high probability of also maturing within a certain interval, I think at least part of the bottleneck could resolve itself. But initial point seems to still stand....

But now with the added addition of:


And even if kitchens got their output boosted to run off less raw food, if farms carry on sheer bulk volume flooding your kitchens in sudden spikes beyond their means to snatch jobs up when the raw food becomes available, it's going to have to be one heck of a boosted output to compensate bringing us back to the days of "One kitchen to rule them all", or it's still going to remain a "How many individual kitchens is deemed a reasonable number of kitchens to tackle the flood before anyone else gets to it? And how exactly do we keep them doing something productive whilst they sit around waiting for the next spike?".

 

Yeah, not entirely sure what happened to them but they wandered off to do a hauling job one time and came back like that and have been like it since.

Except for me the lighting changes have made certain things more 'glowy' and 'blurry' so I don't really see what presumably is a base UV map texture or some sort. Instead they just glow brightly at me. If you check out my first screenshot from my earlier post you'll notice them there carrying some beetle meat through the graveyard being all blurry.

 

Ok, now for something completely unrelated to food production (Huzzah!).

Sometimes when members of a cult enter into conversation with non-cultists they will display the cult icon in a speech bubble which normally signifies they're attempting to recruit another colonist, however I've noticed several times now that after the conversation the non-cultist will do a happy little dance but there is no message regarding any recruitment attempt, and the non-cult colonist still isn't a member of the cult.

On checking the cultists memory they have the following:



Same has happened with another cult leader who worships hugging trees. They talk to a non-cult member, cult icon pops up over the conversation, non-cultist does a dance, cult member has the "Offended" memory.

Which seems rather wrong?

 

Hey! Played to day 34. I didn't have much luck maintaining a cooked food supply, but overall you're in pretty "okay" shape.

Notable Happenings:

• I tried to get rid of your small farms and replace them with large ones, making sure all farms and kitchens were fully staffed
• Survived a raid of 30 bandits with only two casualties!
• One of your kitchen overseers got trapped in a gravestone and starved to death, so I replaced her
  
• Brand new Cult!
• Built a shiny new laboratory for you (next to a shrine, of course)... macroscope should be complete soon
• Started building a naturalist office