ALPHA 47D NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Hooray!
*checks Steam*
It appears not to have gone live yet (though Steam has informed me of 47D in a pop-up announcement).

 

That's... a lot. Well, should at least stop some of the Steam forum folks from going on about food for awhile...

 

Vampires in CWE confirmed.

 

After a brief trial run several versions back (I was always on the 1 raw -> 1 cooked) and now with the 47C workshifts... never had a problem getting enough cooked food for everyone.

So my general bet is it is (c) or (d) A few things come to mind (and this is from seeing posts and screenshots people posted):

Cooking-specific:

• Not leaving enough "free" colonists to haul raw food to stockpile. This means cooks are doing more walking -> may not be able to cook enough.
• Alternatively, the stockpile is built too far from kitchen, or other optimization issues (kitchen door or oven placement)

Farming-specific:

• Not estimating correctly how many farmers you need (47C: 1 farmer for 4 people, before that it was 5)
• Not adding farmers when the population increases
• Farms are too small, so the farmers are not fully effective.
• Previously, people may also have been using cabbage/chilli too much, and these are less efficient. (but they aren't available at start anymore)
• Also, some people switch to wheat incorrectly, which means the colony starts starving before the wheat begins to kick in.
• It probably isn't animals eating crops, I haven't observed issues even without tricks like walls.

Now I tried to address these in the Crop Post thread, but eh, people on Steam who are complaining probably never read it.

I do, however, believe that it isn't a balancing act (unless you really want to cut it close), if you've seen/read a brief guide you should be able to pretty much 100% oversupply your colonists with cooked Basic Food and your kitchens with Raw Food to cook.

How to commmunicate that in-game is harder, I can write essays but condensing it is... eh well I don't know.

>> Do the tutorials give a "1 farmer: 4 colonists" and "1 cook: 8 colonists" ratio? Or maybe an example image of a farm-kitchen setup

(well now it is 1 farmer:8 colonists provided you have 1 cook:16 colonists...

 

Appreciate the insight on this. Personally, I liked the system how it was, because it forced me to actually think about how to ramp up production to keep up with population growth. Plus, failure can be amusing to me--starvation spirals and cannibalism make me smile.

I get the other side though... I'm sure a balance will be found through either science or MAGIC SPARKLES.

 

It seems to be 100% though?

Like, (provided you cook it) your farmers and cooks go twice as far as they did before.

Instead of 4 farmers and 2 cook for 16 colonists, now you use 2 farmers and 1 cook, so your colonists have doubled their effectiveness.

 

First crash - just started a new colony, crashed when I tried to save a game. It seems to have created a save game file but the save does not show up when I click "load game" in start menu

 

As for the kitchen output change, on first reading it very much caused a ".... wait... what? Again?" reaction mainly because for some time now the amount the kitchens produced per order has never really a problem, that is providing everything carried on ticking over as it should without interruption then kitchens could churn out food great.

The problem in my eyes is that (simulated) life happens, which means things don't always keep ticking over as they should in a standard day.

Perhaps a wandering fishperson just prowling around suddenly freaks out and starts lobbing bombs about the place and cause colonists to scatter causing kitchen workers to drop what they're doing and leg it for the hills losing 1 or 2 chunks of the day of work whilst your military put the fishperson in their place (underground). But just because that disruption occurred with your kitchens, it doesn't disrupt the pre-scheduled scripted food behaviour in the evenings where colonists all switch to "Eat food now" mode and brutally assault your stockpiles with the closest tool they can find that resembles a kitchen utensil.

Or perhaps 'Goldsmith Smegbroke' doesn't have much work to do during the day and sees their good friend 'Bob VitalKitchenWorker' walking away from the stockpile carrying a cabbage and figures it's a nice day for a little gossip about the latest technological advances in hat manufacturing. Bob being the civilised person that they are is too polite to tell his friend he's working at the moment and really can't stop to talk but perhaps once his shift is over they can meet up and they can be caught up on the latest over a nice stew this evening, so instead stops to socialise still holding his cabbage which is most certainly HIS cabbage and certainly not for anyone else to take and put to productive uses in the meantime.


As said, life happens and disruptions occur. And because of the inherent 'On demand' way Kitchens work in that raw produce just sits in the open and is only allocated toward kitchens as and when a individual colonist starts a single cook activity and goes "Right I'll have that one", disruptions cause problems and increasingly significant problems at that the larger the scope (E.G. Population or range of potential disruptions) becomes.

If there was a means to:

1) Have kitchens proactively claim and store raw produce for later processing, rather than only claim 1 unit at a time per colonist on a purely 'on job demand' basis.

2) A way to throw a spanner in the works in regards to the colonists scripted prompt to always seek food at a pre-established time every day in complete disregard to what had happened throughout the day and having a pretty open willingness to chow down on a entire bag of flour, a raw cabbage or whatever else as a substitute.... but one that will see them do the exact same thing again in a few hours.

And instead have a way where colonists will only consider anything non-cooked when on almost literally on the verge of dropping dead right that instant and emotional downfall in the meantime be damned.

3) Have colonists access a means to take raw food and figure out their own much cruder prepared food equivalent that will see them through like any standard prepared food would for next 24 hours, just with more negative memory consequences.


Then I don't think there would really be much of a issue.

But #1 I don't think is compatible with the inherent restrictions being a workshop imposes?

#2 Could potentially be done just by removing the scripted "It's 8pm so it means you have to eat immediately minions" prompt, and instead have colonists seek food to see them through the next day purely based on when they're hungry instead whilst at the same time varying the degree a colonist will become hungry from one to the next (Different metabolisms? Greed?).

#3 Would require a whole load of work and again from what I'm understanding isn't compatible with how workshops/modules work for colonists to just make use of a free kitchen oven to make their own grub. And housing with functional owned modules seems a concept from another time.

 

It also crashes on autosave attempt. Bummmmmmmer

 

P.S. Your secret is safe with me whoever you are.

 

Hooray for proud engineers!



And yay for happiness threshold buffs on memories!

 

You should be able so scale your way out of this, if you kept up properly.

Imagine if on day 3 you nuked 20 food. I might not even have that.

If you nuked 50 food on day 30, let alone day 40 I wouldn't care much due to having 10 to 20 days of pure cooked food buffer.

Now the problem is is someone (ie: bandits) somehow took off with the one stack of 600 Bread. Which shouldn't be happening.


There is one particular set of things which is troublesome (much less so now though with the food change) - if your highly skilled farming/cooking overseer gets shot in the head. Ideally one prevents this by having military who will throw themselves in between these two (or I guess a wall so enemies can only approach from one angle, ie: the one farmers are not at..)

 

I experienced a crash about 10 seconds into playing a loaded save (A47D). I've posted the report in the Bug thread here.

If you load the save I've attached to that file, you'll see one of my completed Stone Ceramics Kilns is in good repair but has turned invisible.

 

Which is kind of the point.

It works if you know how to make it work, either through lots of experimentation with trial and error, or from "Just Googling it" and finding the efforts of someone else who did that initial process and has worked out the single means you have to do to make it work.

Which isn't a sign of a system that actually works. At least not for something that is fundamental anyway.

And ultimately "Everything is about wheat, wheat, wheat" which if we're to be honest is the #1 way to stay ahead of the problem with everything else having all sorts of risks and higher chances of falling on its arse at a disruption is just emphasising that something isn't right.

 

I dunno, I'm kinda liking Tiki's idea. A freezer/cold storage type module that holds x amount of things, that can be placed in the kitchen, and colonists will take raw food to it if it still has space available?

 

It does, at least supposedly you lose out if your wheat does not survive to harvest. Which you do except well...

However in 47C, they can't spoil. And the animals (even large ravenous herds) are not as destructive as I had imagined.... so yeah.


Besides, you have two options as far as your farming goes. Maize. Or Wheat.

Actually now it seems an Inept 5-worker Maize farm would cover 40 people, so if you want actually you probably would be fine with 2 Maize farms with some science and a little overseer skill (say Middling) to 100 people. So maize chowder.