So About Berry Eaters...

Ellesanna · 2019-02-18 13:04:58

It seems with the new update a lot of people are ranting about those 'useless berry eaters' again but with even more zeal than usual. As a kid, I do eat berries as theres not a lot of other things I could eat without wasting food- so I am rather curious as to what the alternative is? Some say they should go out into the wilderness and forage, which seems like a good idea at first but not so much when you realize you're a naked five year old. I just find it personally better that young kids stay in town and eat some of the berries while farming until they're older and upgrade to more advance foods. I understand the berries are needed for compost but usually there are enough berries to support both the children and the compost makers- who are sometimes the same people.
Of course, when the berry shortage inevitably happens I too know to go out into the wilderness and forage as everyone else, but seriously what else are the kids who are too old to nurse and too young to not waste more advance foods suppose to do? Eat dirt?

CatX · 2019-02-18 13:23:01

I think kids are meant to eat berries. But some continue eating berries into adulthood.
In the last towns I were in though, the mothers/wet nurses had moved to the kitchen by the fire or similar rooms with pies and stew.

I've been thinking though that if we want adults to eat other things than berries, we should make children eat other things than berries too. Get the habit in early.
Perhaps put out bowls with green beans and popcorn for them.
The problem is that it uses so many bowls needed for farming, and the bowls occupy so much space (needed for compost, soil and buckets) compared to just eating the berries.

I think it would be an improvement if kids could be able to eat pie and stew but spend less than grown ups. Perhaps a pie could last twice as long if shared by kids only.

Last edited by CatX (2019-02-18 13:25:46)

pein · 2019-02-18 13:32:02

pick all the berries in bowls, this helps the compost and the sheep feeding, also if the bushes go brown, you will refresh them and you got one step ahead, just needs a lot of bowls. but if you don't have bowls, why do you need more bushes?
eat one with holding bowl, one with right click taking out
that's 1 yum already
carrot-two yums and straw hats for everyone, then bread cause straw hats are not part of compost cycle
then we should do popcorn more often

3 bushes per person if you fix the bush right away each 8 minutes
that's on 100% berry consumption
do you really see bushes picked off, soiled and watered that often?
one compost which is 70 soil is enough for 35 bushes twice
i don't see any reason to put all bushes same space as its not for consumption if you got any other option so the main placement rule is to make it easier to pick down
which means a free space next to it which means checkboard or groups of 2, maybe 3x3
any time you see huge fields, it means the people intend to consume it for food

now with the huge floor usage, berry fields will be harder to manage, i think diagonal fast roads would be okay for it but that needs badlands, desert is kinda out of calc
planting pine tree for firewood and butt logs

you are supposed to work and make more than you consume at any age

Peremptive · 2019-02-18 13:36:31

the only way to be able to eat stuff other than berries, is for stuff other than berries to exist already or be realistically craftable. That is no longer the case after the update. You don't have the time to complete tasks in any good time, you have to eat so often you work much less. By the time you find (usually forage) food, which is much more difficult to get, and come back, the materials you gathered are gone. People are making omelets because it is pretty much the only thing simple and fast enough to make. I have seen pies but much, much fewer are made at a time compared to before and they are all gone in seconds.

Villages are pretty much unlivable at this point. You see 30 or 40 generation places with 5-6 people alive, because everyone who doesn't sense / observe through the mod impending starvation and rush to the wilds, starves every ten minutes. As others have mentioned, foraging is now the way to survive regardless of a town having buildings, fires, clothes, pumps, etc

Last edited by Peremptive (2019-02-18 13:39:33)

CatX · 2019-02-18 14:16:01

How about lots of bread?

- Uses iron / hoe for wheat, but this is needed anyway for compost
- Also possible to find wheat in rabbit biome
- Quicker to make than pies, when you often end up waiting for the fillings

Maybe bread could save a town from starving and feed all the precious younglings.

Peremptive · 2019-02-18 15:18:50

bread costs four times the water as one pie, and if compost is being made (which it is much more rarely now) then you have tons of mutton, not to mention tons of rabbits. If compost isn't being made you don't have the wheat thing. But none of this matters, because people will light a fire to cook two pies and a bit of meat so as not to die.

Last edited by Peremptive (2019-02-18 18:15:19)

CrazyEddie · 2019-02-18 15:30:17

We need tons of bowls now, so you can pick berries into a bowl and take it with you to your workspace, so you can get something done without starving and without running back and forth to the berry farm all the time.

Pies are better for this, of course, but with the general productivity fall-off due to the desert being nerfed, pies aren't as common as they used to be.

fragilityh14 · 2019-02-18 15:34:22

I've spawned in all sorts of villages that have stew, pies, bread, etc since the update. It hasn't changed all that much. Making food is perfectly easy. I spent a life making stew and sauerkraut and it as fine.

As far as berry eating: tending the fields is the ideal job for children. it frustrates me when i have to do it as an adult cause no one else is. It should be easy for kids to stay alive and be productive in the berry fields. If they are fully maintained make compost or feed sheep or whatever, or help in the bakery, bread is also a good kids food.

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 16:20:09

The way I see it making bread from scratch is effective failing to make mutton pies. Its not bad, but it also could be better if you bothered to make pies. Making bread from scratch is only useful if someone is making baskets, cause there will be lots of extra threshed wheat for bread, so i's totally worth to keep in mind that. In fact, quite often you can find wheat dumped randomly around town and it's perfectly ok to use it for bread (but also rabbit pies).

Berries aren't as awful since they cost little iron in the form of tillings, but it ends up being inefficient since soil and water also have costs in iron and producing these continually takes a lot of work and demands quite some time. There's no harm in eating some berries to start yum, proceeding to pies and bread, stew and milk. In fact, pies and milk are so good that it barely matters if people make inferior foods as long as theres enough people on composting and pie making. Berries would be good if not extremely labour intensive to produce. Mutton pies take berries so they are also labour intensive (even cost more iron with all these tillings), but they are a subproduct of compostng (which you have to do anyway) so they're in this sense free food.

When we compost we spend food, water and iron to get more soil which we then have to decide what to do with. As long as we keep making more soil then spending, we can use the rest for stew, berries, milk, wheat for rabbitpies or bread. Personally I'd use it for milk whenever had the option because it's much better than anything else as food. But I mean, we still need soil for milkweed and for baskets so there's more to have in mind than just food. Also, the economy of the game just changed enormously and stuff like kindling, rabbits and sheep have gotten yet more valueble than before, which I think force us into heavier needs for composting (mostly to supply thread and skins, and and later plant trees). This is turn may cause us to naturally lean closer to pies, which is the only consequence of this update which I dont like much.

My conclusions from all this is that people should be composting for their lives because all that soil will find it's use and we already get food from doing so. Also milk is good.

antking:]# · 2019-02-18 16:39:43

instead of berries people should, use green beans, milk, skimmed milk, popcorn, and corn those are three easy meals that most people don't think of harvesting (green beans) or just lay it on the ground an forget about it... with this food you could easily get a descent yum. I think that those options should, exist for kids, as regular food and for adults as yum increasers!

fragilityh14 · 2019-02-18 16:51:27

The mutton pies being a byproduct of composting is, IMO, a major balance issue, since you're right, they're effectively free.

One solution to this is to make it so sheep poop when they go from unshorn to shorn, especially since everyone is so concerned about clothing.

And while berries are labor intensive, there are not a ton of safe ways to be productive from ages 4-7 or so. If the kids are actually working, the labor of the berry bushes isn't much of an issue. This is the whole point of child labor

Spoonwood · 2019-02-18 17:15:00

Booklat1 wrote:

Berries would be good if not extremely labour intensive to produce. Mutton pies take berries so they are also labour intensive (even cost more iron with all these tillings)

Also, shovel uses, though to a lesser extent.

antking:]# wrote:

instead of berries people should, use green beans, milk, skimmed milk, popcorn, and corn those are three easy meals that most people don't think of harvesting (green beans) or just lay it on the ground an forget about it... with this food you could easily get a descent yum. I think that those options should, exist for kids, as regular food and for adults as yum increasers!

I wholeheartedly agree with this. It's also one reason why I would often not play with a group, because they hadn't provided any foods like those when they probably could have done so early.

I also think that people cooking more than rabbit and mutton pies can have value. Making all of the pie types, many of which rely on rabbits (carrot rabbit, berry rabbit, and berry carrot rabbit), I also think a good idea.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-02-18 17:19:48)

DestinyCall · 2019-02-18 17:21:39

antking:]# wrote:

instead of berries people should, use green beans, milk, skimmed milk, popcorn, and corn those are three easy meals that most people don't think of harvesting (green beans) or just lay it on the ground an forget about it... with this food you could easily get a descent yum. I think that those options should, exist for kids, as regular food and for adults as yum increasers!

Please don't make green beans as a staple food and definitely don't encourage people to eat fresh corn. It is a very inefficient use of soil/water/labor. Green beans aren't even a good yum-food unless you are chaining fairly high and fresh corn is even worse. These foods CAN be made/eaten in times of great need. Like you are starving and notice that the pies are gone, there's no stew, and all the bushes are bare. But they should be avoided if you have any other option. Feeding kids on green beans would be worse than feeding them berries, in terms of the time and effort needed to produce the same amount of food. And expecting the average player to be able to sustain a yum chain long enough to cover the cost of eating inefficient foods is very optimistic.

Ideally, you should be aiming for foods that are easy to mass produce in large quantity and with high efficiency (low cost in labor/resources). This means focusing on a few staple foods that do the job well and leave the labor-intensive foods to people who value a high yum bonus enough to make more options themselves.

Of the listed options, whole milk is the most efficient. Even if this food is eaten by a child and some of the total value is lost due to the child's small hunger bar, it is better choice than eating a berry or carrot and it is a much better choice than green beans or fresh corn. Skim milk is not as good as whole milk, but it is easy to make (and tends to happen by accident while producing milk) and still much better than alternative uses for corn, so producing skim milk and buttered bread adds more options for children/adults.

Ideally, most villages should try to keep the following foods readily available: whole milk, meat pies, skim milk, three sisters stew, bread, buttered bread, turkey slices, turkey broth, and gooseberries. As long as you have meat, you should be making meat pies, rather than bread or roasted mutton. When the pie supply is overflowing (which is rare now), you can diversify to bread/mutton for variety/yum bonus. Otherwise stick to the meat pies best use of wheat. Avoid making any pies with berry. This does not gain you much net benefit, uses up wheat that could be used for meat pies or bread and uses up berries that should be used on compost or eaten raw for essentially the same total value. You can make pies with carrot, but plain carrot pie tastes bad and rabbit/carrot pie is only marginally superior to plain rabbit pie. Save the carrots for the sheep.

I would like to see a lot more villages with cow pens. Don't put the cow in with the sheep. It is super annoying and gets in the way of your shepherd's job. Also, don't put the buffalo in the pen. Instead, make a small cow pen (really small, you only need to fit one cow in there with room for a baby or two. Make as many buckets as you can so you are ready for milking. After hunting the buffalo, feed the baby buffalo away from town (preferably in a small biome so it won't wander too far). Then you just need to bring back one of its babies. Don't bring the buffalo back to town - it will just clutter your pen with too many dead babies and not give you any milk.

If you do NOT have a cow, three sisters stew is the best use for corn and beans. Do not eat raw corn or green beans. It wastes a lot of potential pips. Instead, gather wild squash and raise all three foods for stew production. Excess corn can be made into popcorn, but stew is better than popcorn and milk is better than stew. Most important thing ... DO NOT LOSE THE SQUASH SEEDS. When you break open a squash, you only get a single seed. If this seed is not planted or placed into a bowl immediately, it will decay away like a picked wheat seed. It only takes a moment to lose the squash seed and then you will permanently lose the ability to make stew until you gather more wild squash. Since wild squash does not regrow, squash plants are the major limiting factor on how many crocks of stew your village can have running at the same time. Now that more people are making stew, it is becoming more common to see an older village with lots of empty crockpots and not a single squash plant or wild squash left in nearby prairies. This happens when someone who is unfamiliar with stew production tries to help make stew and loses the squash seeds repeatedly.

Lastly, turkey is a limited natural resource, but it should not be overlooked. A single turkey produces a great deal of foods for the village and two different sources of yum. Just be careful to return the leg bones to the plate after eating them. You need a "complete" carcass in order to make turkey broth, so if the drumsticks are taken away and lost, the broth can't be made. Also, please wait until all the pies are cooked before roasting the turkey. You cannot remove the turkey from the oven until it cools down. In early villages (pre-sheep), be sure to check that you have a knife available to cut the turkey before making this food. Same thing with bread - do not make bread in an eve camp with no iron tools or in an early village without a knife.

Now that we need rabbits for clothing, we should always have meat for pies. This food should be the backbone of your village unless you have a great milkmaid producing ample whole milk. Meat pies are portable, pip-rich, and very soil/water/labor efficient. Eat more pies and less berries. The village will live longer and be less hungry.

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 17:25:38

antking:]# wrote:

instead of berries people should, use green beans, milk, skimmed milk, popcorn, and corn those are three easy meals that most people don't think of harvesting (green beans) or just lay it on the ground an forget about it... with this food you could easily get a descent yum. I think that those options should, exist for kids, as regular food and for adults as yum increasers!

NOOOO, absolutely no. This is wrong.

all of these except milk are wasteful in a way or many ways and I can prove. Green beams are among the worse foods of the game at 30 pips for 1 till, 1 soil and 1 water (and you need to let a row for seeds each 6). Corn eaten raw is even worse at 20 pips. Both cost the same as carrots with 35 pips (and also a need for reseed, in this case 1 row out of 7). Carrots are only ever worth as a food source if you are yumming and in fact, only if there's 5 people yumming at 17 yum (to justify it's costs according to math by betame and comparing to mutton pies). Berries yield thesame as carrots while not costing a till.

Popcorns are made from a corn each, so a corn plant generates 4 x 4 bites of 3 food so, 48 food. Already twice as good as raw corn, so why eat that? But still, with each corn you can also make milk. Assume you are a slow milker and makes a single bucket each cow you feed. That's 140 per corn and 560 per corn plant. How do you even say green beams are good in the same phrase as talking about milk?
If you're making carrots, corn or green beams to eat raw you're waaaay better off just making more berries (which we all know is kids work, so why bother?)

There is no universe in which people should eat corn and green beams intead of berries. Popcorn and carrots may be used occasionaly as food in the early game too as they produce food faster than berries for same costs (except tillings which is still very relevant long term). I would appreciate if people stopped sayig things are good or bad without doing at least basic research.

Last edited by Booklat1 (2019-02-18 17:40:48)

DestinyCall · 2019-02-18 17:59:31

Spoonwood wrote:

I also think that people cooking more than rabbit and mutton pies can have value. Making all of the pie types, many of which rely on rabbits (carrot rabbit, berry rabbit, and berry carrot rabbit), I also think a good idea.

No. It is a bad idea. It is not the MEAT in the meat pies that makes them so much better than berry pies. It is the LACK of berries.

Meat pies (rabbit or mutton) are the best choice. If you add a full bowl of berries to a rabbit pie, you have just wasted a full bowl of berries. There is a very steep opportunity cost associate with eating berries in general. In the same way that you should not eat carrots because we need them for compost. You should avoid eating berries (if there is a better option available), because they are also needed for compost. If you DO need to eat berries to survive, eating the raw berries or berry-in-bowl gives you almost the same value as eating berries in pie form.

I don't want to drowned you in numbers, but the math is very bad on all types of berry pie, because the value of the berry bowl is so much higher than other pie fillings. A raw carrot is only 7 pips. Cooked rabbit is 10 pips. Cooked mutton is 12 pips. A bowl of gooesberries is 30 pips! But berry pies are not three times as good as rabbit pies, in fact, they are worse (12 pips for berry pie vs 14 pips for rabbit pie). Rabbit berry pies are not significantly better than rabbit pies. You only get an additional four pips from each bite of pie, while you are losing 30 pips by adding the berries (14 pips for rabbit pie vs 18 pips for berry rabbit) . So you are losing 30 pips and gaining 16 pips for a net loss of 14 pips per berry rabbit pie. Rabbit berry carrot pies are even more wasteful. For one thing, they are effectively identical to rabbit berry pies, but you are losing a carrot too. Rabbit berry carrot pies give 20 pips, but unless you wait until after you are dead to eat the pie you can only get up to 19 pips by waiting until the last moment to eat one. Most people are probably getting less than 19 pips from the pie because they don't wait that long. So rabbit berry carrot and rabbit berry pies give you essentially the same amount of food and waste the majority of the non-meat ingredients. You basically lose food by making these pies.

So why would you EVER make berry pies? It is a terrible idea, unless your village has such an abundance of mutton/rabbit pies and fresh compost that you just feel like wasting some berries or if you are playing solo and want to be able to switch between pie types when you are away from camp.

Please leave the carrots and berries alone. If you are interested in yum, stick to making bread, roasted mutton, and cooked rabbits when the pie supply is looking good. Or learn how to make burritos/tacos. These alternatives are not as efficient as meat pies, but they are easy for people to find if they are interested in yum and don't waste too much if a non-yummer eats them by mistake. Whole/skim milk, buttered bread, turkey slices/broth and stew are other great ways to add labor-efficient yum options to a village. Variety fruit/veggie pies will just get lost in the sea of meat pies.

BladeWoods · 2019-02-18 18:13:09

Yum bonus makes almost all foods worth it (no tacos no potatoes still). If you know how to build a yum bonus green beans are way worth it as well as all the kinds of pies.

CatX · 2019-02-18 18:16:44

OK, thanks, this has been enlightening.

So what I get from all of the above is:
Feed children milk.

It takes time to get a pen going, though.

It's a little sad that some of the foods produced by farmers are so wasteful compared to berries. Feels like with all the effort it should be more rewarding.

I also wish this dish could make its way into the game: Buns.
Made from dough like bread.
Cut with sharp stone or flint stone.
Cooked on flat rocks like omelettes.

Peremptive · 2019-02-18 18:21:18

blade that is what he is saying, that people in a village don't really yum most of the time. Maybe if you are yumming at +14 and planting stew crops you could eat some green beans but you shouldn't encourage people to eat them at +2.

DestinyCall · 2019-02-18 18:34:51

CatX wrote:

OK, thanks, this has been enlightening.
So what I get from all of the above is:
Feed children milk.
It takes time to get a pen going, though.
It's a little sad that some of the foods produced by farmers are so wasteful compared to berries. Feels like with all the effort it should be more rewarding.
I also wish this dish could make its way into the game: Buns.
Made from dough like bread.
Cut with sharp stone or flint stone.
Cooked on flat rocks like omelettes.

Technically, the MOST efficient food to feed young children is human milk. As long as you can still pick them up, this is the most efficient food, since it only costs one pip from the mother's hunger bar. Later on, switching to cow's milk for all ages would be great. Unfortunately, feeding entire villages off milk is a bit impractical, since it would require a ton of buckets and a skilled cow milker, both of which tend to be in short supply.

As a general rule, processed foods are more pip-dense than unprocessed foods, but the labor and resource costs vary quite a bit between different options. So taking something like corn ... eating it as a fresh ear of corn only gives 5 pips, but letting it dry and cooking it over a fire gives you a bowl of popcorn worth 12 pips total. Using that same ear of corn to make a crock of stew will give you eight bowls of stew with two servings per bowl. Each serving is worth 14 pips ... so that's 224 pips from your ear of corn (plus squash, beans, and water). Even factoring in the additional labor and resource costs to product the other crops, that is a huge gain. Milk is even better, with a single bucket of whole milk containing 10 servings of 14 pips each and the ability to gain multiple buckets of milk from the cow after a single feeding.

Also, berries are really NOT a very good food. To replenish one berry bush costs the same amount as growing corn or wheat, but only gains 35 pips for your effort. Growing wheat for pies or corn for milk is a much better use of resources and produces much more food. This is why veteran players get so frustrated with adults who sit around in the berry patch emptying bush after bush, rather than going to the bakery for a bite of pie.

Meat pies and milk are pretty amazing. Much better than the closest alternative. But there are decent alternatives beyond the obvious staple foods. It's just important to realize that when you eat "bad" foods, it costs your village more time and effort to replace the food you eat. Try to make up for that by working hard and being a net benefit.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-18 18:49:32)

DestinyCall · 2019-02-18 18:46:51

BladeWoods wrote:

Yum bonus makes almost all foods worth it (no tacos no potatoes still). If you know how to build a yum bonus green beans are way worth it as well as all the kinds of pies.

Here's a question ... do you know how high your yum bonus needs to be before green beans are "worth it"?

Because if you are not reaching very high yum bonuses, it is better to let the chain break early rather than intentionally eating fresh ears of corn or green beans to sustain it. In some villages, there is simply not enough food variety to justify eating these foods, even with yum. In theory, a high enough yum bonus would make any new food great (eventually), but in practice, you should be avoiding very low efficiency foods even while yum-chaining. At the very least, you should be postponing until the very end of the chain, since those foods are so much worse than more efficient foods options. If the chain breaks early, yum bonus will not be sufficient to make up for poor food choices.

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 18:54:54

BladeWoods wrote:

Yum bonus makes almost all foods worth it (no tacos no potatoes still). If you know how to build a yum bonus green beans are way worth it as well as all the kinds of pies.

it takes more than 17 yum for these to be as efficient as mutton pies, so NO, it's not worth it, this is a lie. You have to eat bad food to get your yum this high, which means, wsting food. Carrots and corn are also as bad as green beams as food and popcorn needs 16 people at 4 yum eating it for it be good.

Please people, stop talking about things you don't know. If you have never bothered to calculate the value of yum related to costs you have no right of saying something is good or bad.

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 19:02:41

Green beams get you 30 food.

Using a corn plant for the same costs you get 20 from raw corn or 560 from milk.

And people wanna insist yum makes up for this.

antking:]# · 2019-02-18 19:14:05

Booklat1 wrote:

Green beams get you 30 food.

silly we are not talking about green beams but green beans... I never knew that you could eat beams of green light, the more you know the more you don't know

Booklat1 · 2019-02-18 19:19:26

antking:]# wrote:

Booklat1 wrote:
Green beams get you 30 food.
silly we are not talking about green beams but green beans... I never knew that you could eat beams of green light, the more you know the more you don't know

i was actually kinda pissed from this whole conversation but you bothering to nitpick makes me slightly less because i know your arguments ceased

antking:]# · 2019-02-18 19:20:48

Booklat1 wrote:

antking:]# wrote:
Booklat1 wrote:
Green beams get you 30 food.
silly we are not talking about green beams but green beans... I never knew that you could eat beams of green light, the more you know the more you don't know
i was actually kinda pissed from this whole conversation but you bothering to nitpick makes me slightly less because i know your arguments ceased

oh no I gave up the argument at the beginning, I just thought that was funny. green beams who would have known?

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