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Now, for the neat theorycrafting stuff!

For foods where only a few of the ingredients can be replanted, the efficiency plots use the best choice between replanting or 1XT / 2XT for each crop. In practice, that basically assumes you'll replant any crop that can be (since it's always better).

This approach to modeling Compost uses the real-world math for manufacturing productivity, so you can basically describe it as a comparison between the production effort vs. useful results we receive from each complete cycle through the soil economy. Since that number is below 100%, it means that a Basket of Soil taken from a Compost Pile actually represents less food than an identical Basket of Soil taken from a Fertile Soil Pit when planting the same crops. In each case, this difference should be exactly 1/7th of the useful soil that was lost in creating that Compost Pile.

However, figuring out that 'exact' lost amount could actually be a really long and messy calculation:

• If we assume a rounded 20% of the soil in each Compost Pile is lost on creating the next one, then whenever a player collects a Basket of Soil from it we effectively lose 0.6 Fertile Soil in food potential

• But... when that 0.6 Fertile Soil was taken from some Compost Pile, we lost another 0.12 Fertile Soil in food potential

• And when we took that from some Compost Pile, we lost another 0.024 Fertile Soil in food potential

• And when we took it again, another 0.0048 Fertile Soil in food potential

• And again, another 0.00096 Fertile Soil in food potential

• And again...

So exactly how much Fertile Soil did we lose on the way to that 1 Basket of Soil? You could keep counting up to an infinite number of ever-smaller soil piles if you had enough patience! Luckily, the math for doing that is actually sillypants easy:

That's where the soil cost multiplier comes from, since it's using this as a shortcut calculation for "How much Fertile Soil was lost if all the soil came from Compost?" Basically an extended version of what you suggested.

The iterations for the Compost Cycle spreadsheet follow essentially the same math, but breaking it into stages: "How much is lost if it all came from 1st generation Compost Piles?" "What about 2nd generation?" "...3rd generation?" "...4th generation?" "...1,000th generation?" What we find is that within a few generations, the answers level out to effectively the same soil efficiency no matter how far out you go.

Here's how that process looks, from a new tab I added to the efficiency plotter (called Compost Progress):

Where all this becomes important is the productivity penalty that it places on every subsequent stage of farming and food-making. When you carry 100 Baskets of Soil from the Compost Pile over to growing areas, 20 - 30 of them will produce no food for the settlement. Each minute spent tilling and farming that soil produces no food. Each person busy with processing it produces no food. Each Hoe you craft for it produces no food. (I'm over-simplifying a little bit here for rhetorical effect)

If we convert all that into an efficiency cost for food production, we get the Compost strategies shown on the plotter along with what (should be) the real food productivity that players experience when relying entirely on the Compost cycle.

From an efficiency perspective, the Mutton Pie and Wool/Sheepskin production is actually the same everywhere. That's why it's left out in the calculations. As long as you use 100% of the surplus soil from each Compost cycle, anything you grow (even non-food) will give an extra 240 Food and 1 Wool/Sheepskin.

The one exception is Mutton Pie itself, since it can't be produced without (technically) starting a new Compost cycle. The efficiency calculations for it basically assume that you've thrown out all the soil from its cycle, generally by allowing Sheep Dung to pile up near the sheep pen that never gets used in your generation.

If the cycle gets completed eventually, that Mutton Pie becomes part of the "soil economy" and doesn't affect the ~17.2 surplus soil we're trying to optimize for food production anymore. The same exclusion also probably applies for any of the 'free' outputs you might decide to make:

• Mutton Pie (+240 Food)

• Cooked Mutton / Baked Bread (+112 Food)

• Cooked Mutton / Rabbit Pie (+272 Food)

• Cooked Mutton / Wild Bean Burrito (+162 Food)

But this might even be worth its own discussion if we're breaking open the possibility for alternative Compost cycles.

The Everything About Food thread is basically my answer to this question! When putting together the efficiency plotter spreadsheet for the second section, I found that essentially all of the differences come from which farming strategy we applied in each set of math. The goal with this was to put the math for every strategy in one place so we could compare the different assumptions.

Looking at the efficiency plots, I've started to have some doubts about the 2 Soil x 1 Tilling for Steel Hoes that became popular after Iron spawn rates were nerfed. That farming strategy actually seems like the worst of all worlds: soil efficiency plummets for most foods, your iron efficiency doesn't improve much, and you end up using more water and Shovels running Compost cycles to keep up with food demand. What are your thoughts on the appeal of sticking with that vs. optimizing around a different strategy?

The farming strategies for Stone Hoe assume that you grow the 4 Milkweed domestically so you won't eventually deplete all availability for it. With that approach, planting with 1 Soil x 2 Tilling turns out to be the cheapest per Tilling use. Domestic Saplings are left out since they produce the Weak Skewer variant that breaks instantly if you try to Till with it (no net Tilling uses).

Foraging is basically free from an efficiency perspective, so any Skewers or Milkweed you gather from the wild will match Steel Hoes for Food per Soil and Water per Soil, but have ~30% better Food per Iron than (domestic) Stone Hoes in the same situation:

While villages don't grow Milkweed often now, if we're keen on maximizing Iron efficiency perhaps we should consider it as a large-scale practice? It would certainly transform the Rope availability for other tech if we did! (Bows, Buckets, Hand Carts, ...)

I don't think you've given the food economy complete enough consideration here. Corn is a long replacement-time crop (over 8 minutes) that's providing the foundation for your entire Stew and Milk food supply. If well-meaning newbies poach all of your Shucked Corn while it's drying or your Dried Corn to make snacks, there's a nearly 8 minute delay before you can produce any further food -- so that almost immediately rules it out for this village.

Your initial suggestion of Carrots as a short-term food source was more on the mark, I think, and supports a better economic progression to Bread / Carrot Pie as the secondary food chain. Importantly, Rabbit Pie production can never match farming capacity long-term (due to 1 hour respawn times), so there's always going to be room to fit more Wheat-based cooking if you want to keep your Bakery busy. Both of these foods also beat Popcorn by +40% food per Soil/Water and +600 food per Iron, so there isn't an efficiency argument that favors Popcorn either.

Lastly, and the same as any production process, bottlenecks are what drive the overall performance of the system. While I get that Corn alone probably appeals to you as an 'elegantly simple' approach, it's nowhere near as trustworthy as a mixed food economy across Corn / Carrot / Wheat. Even in a case where we're relying on Gooseberry production as well, poaching of Corn supplies is a major nuisance for Stew and Milk producers because you lose nearly 1/6th of a working life if there's a shortage. We should be practical here and go by the numbers here, even if the result seems less than neat and tidy.

For children, there's actually several early-tech foods that beat out Gooseberries by a significant margin:

• Cooked Carrot Pie (7 pips x 4 meals)
  No waste if Age 4+
  80% more food per Soil/Water
  6 min. to start production

• Popcorn (3 pips x 4 meals)
  Never wastes pips
  20% more food per Soil/Water
  8 min. to start production

• Raw Carrots (7 pips x 1 meal)
  No waste if Age 4+
  Equal food per Soil/Water
  4 min. to start production

So from a food supply perspective, there's definitely no reason you must fail without Gooseberries. In fact, you'd probably be better off getting food up and running 4 - 6 minutes earlier!

However, Gooseberries are quite helpful if you want to task your newbies with Farming upkeep (since there's no tilling, seeding, etc.) while the experienced players focus on advancing tech eras. You should also plan to make several Hoes early on if going for other crops, since tool usage is significantly heavier for anything except Cows.

A main feature of Fire Pit cooking is that the workspaces can be packed up and moved easily, so I don't think it's especially helpful to think about it as a fixed structure like the Bakery. Rather than trying to find a "perfect" site for it, you can produce these kinds of foods the fastest by splitting them up into stages:

• Gather Limestone and stack it near the Smithy

• Construct a simple Limestone Station when you're ready to process it:
  
  (Often the Smith or Builder will even start processing it for you, no questions asked!)

• Bring your Slaked Lime somewhere near the Bakery

• Set up an ideal Fire Pit layout for the task (less movement is better):
  

• Finally, hop into the Bakery to prepare your Carnitas and/or Beans then combine to finish

Pork Tacos and Bean Tacos are still very step-intensive crafts, though, so it's difficult to get food production rates that are competitive with other Fire Pit recipes unless you have a lot of support from other professions. That's another reason why Tacos and Burritos are pretty underpowered right now.

Burritos are a resounding No No NO, as they're one of the rare cases where putting in tons of time to making it results in... less food that you started with. That puts them so low on the Yum totem pole, that it's often worth intervening to stop someone if you see them trying to make it under the (mistaken) assumption that they're helping the village food supply.

Pork Tacos are a Good If... recipe, primarily depending on whether: (1) You want to clean up Wild Pork that's cluttering village spaces and (2) You go and collect the limestone yourself. With ~80 clicks per plate of food it's pretty exhausting to make Tacos, but if you're up to it the food gain per batch is comparable to Mutton Pie and it uses Soil well (~7x better than Gooseberries). Builders also tend to be overjoyed if you end up hauling back enough Limestone (Plaster) for them to start on village upgrades.

Bean Tacos have a nearly-identical recipe but provide less food, so you're usually better off making Pork Tacos if you decide to go ahead with this type of cooking. However, all of these tend to be among the least interesting foods you can make in the Fire Pit workspace:

Here's a few suggestions to consider based on what we know about historical clothing styles (before modern industry) and real-world thermodynamics!

1. Historically, insulative cloth has had two, totally different purposes: while it's commonly used for retaining body-generated heat in cold environments, it's also almost ubiquitous for warding off solar heat in hot environments.

For real societies, that means insulative clothes have been very common both in the coldest extremes like the Artic and hottest extremes like the Sahara desert. Typically, the only fundamental difference between these styles is how readily you can adjust airflow within the garments (to encourage or discourage heat loss through sweating).

In the current simulation, player heat and tile heat are added together and then amplified by the insulation in clothing. That seems to generate rather counter-intuitive heat behavior in hot biomes or near heat sources, where insulative clothing causes you to roast instead of preventing the heat from affecting you quickly.

As a thought experiment, if you're toasting your hands by a campfire in winter: do you typically keep your mittens on or take them off to get more heat? Intuitively, taking off insulation should make you absorb the warmth faster.

2. Both historical and modern building insulation are very effective at normalizing towards a single, consistent temperature. This is primarily due to how quickly natural (or forced) airflow equalizes temperature inside.

In the current simulation, heat sources and sinks don't travel very far at all compared to real-world conditions. That's probably the main reason that building walls, functionally, isn't all that worthwhile right now despite their high insulation rating. In player usage, interior spaces larger than 3x3 tiles tend to quickly regress to the same temperatures you'd get with flooring alone since heat travel is much weaker than tile-based heat over most distances.

An interesting, alternative solution for this might be to intentionally simplify the heat calculations within buildings, effectively treating completed walls as a single temperature zone with averaged conditions across all tiles. That would allow players to treat temperature control as a new game mechanic, carefully selecting the balance of biomes underneath buildings and adding campfires (+heat) or snowmen (-heat) for fine tuning the temperature ranges indoors in a way that outdoor camps simply can't match.

3. Historical clothing styles were always designed around what was safe / effective for daily use.

With Yellow Fever currently posing a lethal threat (without assistance) if players have more than 40% insulation, it's very difficult to imagine small adjustments which could convince players to wear more than 1-2 clothing pieces. That interaction should be adjusted somehow, perhaps by allowing players to take off clothing once sick or having clothes not affect Yellow Fever penalties. It's not really safe to just avoid Jungle biomes, since Mosquito Swarms can spawn into any biome that's adjacent to a Jungle somewhere.

You might be confusing the math a bit. If you're looking at Yum chains specifically, it should always be one bite per player to find how much bonus it can provide, ie. 6 meals provided means 6 players using it in different Yum chains.

Newbies usually don't know how to recognize enough foods to build >4x Yum chain, so it's best to funnel them toward the staple efficient foods: Whole Milk, Three Sisters Stew, Carved Turkey, Mutton Pie, and Rabbit Pie.

It's wrong to think one staple food is enough, though! That's easily the quickest way to create a famine since there's a single point of failure on the whole village's food supply. It's much better to have 3-4 staple foods available, minimum, so that you can reduce overcrowding in workspaces and avoid reliance on Gooseberry Bushes (which newbies wipe out completely in times of famine).

In particular, Mutton Pies are not a good sole food in any village since the Compost -> Gooseberry -> Sheep cycle takes up to 15 minutes to restore if it gets interrupted. Most other staples benefit from having raw ingredients that newbies don't know how to eat, and also won't miscook nearly as often (like the dreaded baskets of Cooked Mutton just as you go to make pie). Not to mention Mutton Pies are only the 5th-most efficient food.

This is a good warning to share. Between all the available foods now, only 4 turn out to be "food loss" recipes for a village: Rabbit Berry Pie (-56 pips), Rabbit Berry Carrot Pie (-52 pips), Buttered Bread with Skim Milk (-28 pips), and Bean Burritos (-9 pips).

While many players approach Yum bonus with a bit of mysticism, it's actually super simple to look at the math for whether Yum will outweigh food loss on these recipes:

Minimum Yum Chain * Meals Provided - Comparative Food Loss >= 0

Generally, foods which provide multiple Yum counts (like Turkey or Potatoes) or a large number of meals make the best candidates for increasing the variety of diets in your village. But if the Yum chain requirement is especially high for any recipe (>4x), you shouldn't leave it out where newbies might consume it by accident.

So where do those 4 foods break-even with Yum?
RB Pie & RBC Pie each provide 4 meals and 1 Yum count per player, across a set of 4 pies per batch. For them to be a net food gain for the village, every person who eats one needs at least 4x Yum Chain after having already consumed a Gooseberry, a Carrot, and a Slice of Bread. That's practical for experienced players, but it can have a negative impact on your village's Compost cycle if too many are made at once.

Buttered Bread together with Skim Milk provides 2 Yum counts for 8 meals and 1 Yum count for 2 meals. For this to be a good variety addition over just Bread and Whole Milk, each person who starts eating them needs at least 1x Yum Chain beforehand. Well, that's super easy even for newbies! It also helps with teaching them to milk Cows, which is one of the best food sources in the entire game (up to ~1,600 food per Soil).

And finally, Bean Burritos provide 1 Yum count for 6 meals. For them to be a net food gain for the village over Bean Tacos, every person who eats one needs at least 10x Yum Chain after having already consumed a Bowl of Green Beans. That's going to be quite rare and puts Bean Burritos at nearly the very last in line for sources of diet variety.

Thanks for this! I was searching through the different Radio components for which one would be simplest to craft for this purpose, and Spark Gap Transmitters certainly seem like the simplest with only a Newcomen Roller involved and no drain on your Iron supplies.

I very strongly recommend against ever making Bean Burritos. They're a net food loss (-9 pips) compared to using the same ingredients for Bread and Bowl of Green Beans, so you get nothing back for the time and effort they take to produce.

While Bean Tacos (+48 pips) and Pork Tacos (+76 pips) are modestly productive, they're pretty poor for water efficiency before Kerosene / Diesel make water wildly abundant. Better alternatives for your Green Beans and Dried Corn can be either Three Sisters Stew (+195 pips) or drawing Whole Milk from a Cow (+128 to +408 pips depending on your speed). The payback for your time with these is simply astronomical in comparison.