Thank you all for responding, my objective was to get a perspective on what high-level play is like for the food industry and I got that.
I think I want to give some perspective on what eating is like as a mid-level player. We've started making our own bots but it's slow going. To give you some context for that, I'm around 500 base stats right now, had some setbacks this world, was just under 2000 by the end of last world.
Finding good recipes is actually easy for us, thanks to a third party site I will link below. The real issue is all the best recipes use pepper, truffles, driftkelp, and fucking troll parts. The difficulty is finding food that is easy to mass-produce. We often supplement with easily made, shit-tier food, mostly eaten to fill out almost-complete fep bars.
https://hnhfood.vatsul.com/Late world, your pepper guy usually quits of boredom and you're not making it at all. Yeah, I know, that's really bad, but it gets worse. Truffles are annoying to get, as you have to drag along a pig. Usually only people capable of fighting animals do it, which trust me, is WAY LESS of the active population than you'd hope. Most people that go outside end up dying and quitting anyway. Dedicated cooks quit early too, we've been through about 3.5 dedicated cooks this world. Cooks are under a lot of pressure to do a very, very tedious task that requires much teamwork.
On the bright side, drinks usually come quicker, as they're easy to make en masse or take from dead plots. Buuut I've seen literally no one with every drink in the game. I usually drank till 20... whatever the number that comes up in Drink and Be Merry is. Salt is common too, as late game we don't have enough food to get our hunger bars full, so we usually try to sell it. Early game, salt is harder to get, and usually only the miners care.
How curious that hemp hasn't been mentioned so far. It's fairly easy to get, often I forget about it during our many times of famine due to the difficulty of feeding a big village. I use it religiously early world though.
Also, a lot of people just don't use hemp and drinks because they're a fucking boring mechanic. Especially the whole receptacle thing. Like you have to wait and watch your character do shit before you can get to the dopamine-inducing jingles of your character leveling up. Fuck Hookahs.
SnuggleSnail wrote:I think it says a lot of negative things about the current system that people who've been playing for multiple years don't know how to use it @jorb
Big this. W3 player btw.
Some info not available in game: results of variable material on food (without experimentation and third party records), what foods count as what ingredients, amount of satiations gained from eating an item, how much to drink, what receptacle to use for some drinks, how much hemp to smoke. Eating truly "efficiently" seems an art form, even at high level of automation it seems no one's making 1 of every food item in the game.
Tbh I miss the w11 system where ever food had a few satiation groups. At least I could just pick a favorite food in eat category and eat less. However, I understand that was not a popular system and I was not cooking at that time.