Simplified food mod

[BeerBeer]

I would like to explore the possibility of doing away with all the various food items and replacing them with a single generic food item called ‘food ration’. As for drinks, there would only be dirty water, clean water and ‘preserved drink’. ‘Preserved drink’ would replace all soda and beer cans, lemonade bottles etc. but not ALL alcohol.

ISSUES:

1. The cooking skill. It would become far less meaningful, but it would still affect the chemistry side.
2. Food ingredients in other recipes. There is a handful of crafting recipes that require certain food items, such as salt, sugar, and lard.
3. Deciding the nutrient content of a single ‘food ration’.
4. The harvest from animal carcasses. Should we have ‘uncooked food ingredient’ to represent all raw meat and fat, and then have a single cooking recipe for ‘food ration’ that uses ‘uncooked food ingredient’ as the single component?
5. Alcohol. Weak and strong alcohols are needed in many recipes. Perhaps alcohols should be turned into generic ‘weak alcohol’ and ‘strong alcohol’ items?
6. How to deal with the mod and the graphics? It might be easiest to just have the ‘food ration’ have a single graphic, even if it makes the game look a bit bland at places (grocery stores, farm fields).
7. Compatibility with the simplified nutrition mod.
8. Various cookbooks would become largely void of recipes although they might still increase the skill. But I… guess that could be OK?
9. Spoilage. I was thinking that all food should become non-perishable, even if it would render minifridge largely obsolete. Although it would still be needed to preserve ‘uncooked food ingredient’…? Food being universally non-perishable would also mean it would always stack neatly.
   Edit: One more:
10. Food allergy traits. They would either have to be disabled or their cost reduced to 0 or something.

The main reasons I’ve often thought about this mod are the cluttered crafting menus and inventories, and just the general micromanagement hassle with food and eating while reading, while trying to keep anything from spoiling - all of which I find a bit of a nuisance, together compounding into a greater nuisance.

[Coolthulhu]

1. Mods can alter balance, it’s not a big deal
2. 50, 25 or 20 nutrition, 1 or 0.5 volume per unit would be good
3. Cooking meat is just a formality (cooking into “cooked meat” that is, jerky is more expensive). If the fire is enough to turn pieces of a corpse into permafood, you may as well skip that step.
4. Only strong alcohol is used. Weak could be “preserved drink”.
5. Generic food mod should have simplified nutrition as dependency, because it most certainly won’t include vitamins. Mod dependency is supported already.

[DG123]

I’d suggest making it slightly more complex. Have several qualities of meal, much like Dwarf Fortress does.

Disgusting meal, OK meal, nice meal, super amazing meal etc.

Then you can have them affect your mood more when it’s nice food rather than being able to eat dogfood.

[pisskop]

problem with DF level meals is that while the system is essentially barebones, its other mechanics make it so complex that theres even more variety than cdda.

Rainbow trout biscuits
Dwarven syrup pot roast made with finely minced dwarven syrup, exceptionally minced dwarven syrup, and plump helmets
And, my favorite, None, made with finely minced none.

[Coolthulhu]

problem with DF level meals is that while the system is essentially barebones, its other mechanics make it so complex that theres even more variety than cdda.

Not true.
Unless a lot has changed in this regard since I last checked, DF meals boil down to general quality (affects morale) and individual dwarf preferences. With a special case that all-liquid meals are liquid (which only resulted in a bug back then).
For example, “cooking” 3 full barrels of strawberry wine with a single strawberry seed would produce a huge stack of solid, edible meals, each of which would decrease the hunger counter as much as an actual meal made of bread, meat, fat and plump helmets. And without an effect on thirst.

DDA has much higher variety because there are perishables and permafood (DF allows indefinite storage of all prepared meals), cooking job length actually matters (DF has hauling take more time than cooking, unless the dwarf is seriously impaired), you can’t produce a roast from 4 stacks of flour making different components matter, and different components have different nutrition densities.
By the mid-game this variety disappears because bread/biscuits and clean water are enough to thrive on. This is why, I assume, this mod was proposed - if this variety disappears, tracking it is just a chore.