Oven types: is there presently a difference? Can any food actually be made with just a workbench? Is it better to have multiple small kitchens, or one large one that three or four people can slave away in at once? Likewise with crop fields: one giant cabbage patch, one moderate sized field of each crop? What ratio of farm to population seems best to keep cannibalism at bay?
Workbenches do at least caviar tins. My personal preference is one big kitchen with a full work crew and enough ovens for them to run in parallel. Multiple small ones will each take up a separate Overseer (I believe) which is one not supervising other tasks. Higher population load may make further kitchens necessary. I likewise find cannibalism odds greatly increase if fishpeople can reach your farms, both for crop destruction straight up and making colonists flee away from harvest/tending jobs.
Good point on overseers. I suppose it applies to farms as well, which would argues for a single massive plantation as opposed to multiple gardens. Can multiple work crews work the same shop/field? If not, you'd have to sort out what the maximum size field one full crew could successfully farm would be. Anything larger than that would be counterproductive. The one thing a small kitchen or other workshop would have in its favor is startup time. You can get one stone oven up and stewing faster than four steam ovens.
i think anyone can pickup farming at any point when not doing anything else, like any non-workshop duty so having separate fields shouldn't be a problem.
The very first thing I do when I'm starting a new colony is to create two cabbage patches at maximum size; by the time I've hit between thirty and forty colonists, I might have a third farm. Their produce, plus the occasional foraging trip, and hunting every aurochs or dodo that wander into down, provides me with more than enough food to sustain a colony. Tin of Exotic Caviar is presently the only food that requires the workbench. I don't believe the stove is used in its manufacture (nonetheless, trying to subsist entirely on caviar so you can avoid building stoves is a terrible idea). As for Overseers and kitchen duty, a Kitchen may only be claimed by one Overseer at a time. A stove can only cook one item at a time, and can only be manned by one colonist at a time. It follows, then, that for maximum throughput, you should have one oven per crew member, and vice versa. Any mismatch and you have an idle worker, or an idle stove (since Renovations don't work at present, I build my kitchens with four stoves during blueprinting). Based on those assumptions, I'm guessing one kitchen that can make maximum use of one Work Crew is more efficient than multiple, smaller Kitchens that will occupy multiple Overseers, but leave many of their workers idle. I would assume the optional Kitchen tools, like the increasingly fancy stoves, will eventually do something, but I have no idea what. There seems little point building them at present, since you need stoves early in the game, and you have all the materials for Small Stoves in your starting stockpile. Big kitchens aren't necessary slower to start than small kitchens, either. You can start queuing up food orders as soon as one of the stoves is complete. I believe farms are treated like workshops - exactly one crew devotes all their manpower to one field. A handy tip: stew will accept literally any raw ingredient, and has the same nutritional value as every other cooked food. There is currently no advantage between queuing up 10 Cabbage Stew, 5 Steak, and 5 Pickled Fungus, and just queuing up 20 Stew, In fact, it's probably more efficient to make nothing but stew - you won't need to micromanage a wide variety of potential recipes; everyone eats the same brown sludge. As soon as the kitchen is ready, I queue up, like, 50 stew, and let the crew make it as raw ingredients trickle in. In the last big patch, crop growth was changed to happen in stages; when a plant completes one stage, it creates a Tend Crops job in the queue, and waits for someone to tend it so it can progress to the next stage; no farmer needs to be present when a plant is busy growing into the next stage.
Presumably in the future the different foodstuffs will have a function, even if only to break up the monotony. Until then infinite stew seems to be the order of the day. Here's a scenario: your kitchen has three ovens and a workbench. You have a crew of four workers. Can three work on stew while the fourth cans caviar? Or does the second product demand a second shop?
Currently it looks to me that all crew will try to finish one work order at a time (please correct me if wrong!). So if you queue up 20 cabbage, 10 bread and 20 stew, all crew members will try to finish the cabbage order first before moving on to the next. Where I have seen them jumping to the next item in the list is when I ran out of raw cabbages and the order could not progress.
That's been my experience as well. Crews are unable to multi-task. So if you queue up 10 stew, 5 steaks, and 3 preserves, they will grab food out of storage indiscriminantly, and you may not have enough ingredients for raw steak or fungus, even though there were enough other raw foods to make all that stew without them. Corollary: if you need to save that wheat in your stores for beer, don't queue up stew, because the Crew may consume the wheat. You're better off ordering specific recipes, in that situation.
