Summary:
The categories of food items still seem random for now. All are correctly in the major category of “Food & Drink”, but the subcategories seem to be useless for now.
Steps to reproduce:
Level up enough farmers and cooks to be able to grow and cook everything in proper amounts.
Place 3 distinct storage options (in my case urns), set them to exclusively hold one of the 3 food sub-categories each.
Harvest and cook different food items and wait for them to be stored.
Expected Results:
Freshly harvested items should go in the first subcategory (item apple), cooked foods in the second (icon bread) and raw meat products (as from the trapper and shepherd) should go to the third category (icon ham).
Actual Results:
Honestly I can’t even identify a pattern… Apparently some items even have multiple categories assigned to them, see the Omelette, bread and stews in the screenshots below.
Yup, I agree. There needs to be a clear category for cooked foods and a clear category for animal products (meats, MAYBE eggs) and a clear category for plants and raw harvested stuff.
Gotta agree here. These days I have two types of food-related containers: one set on all three of the Food & Drinks categories, and one that just uses the Plants category in the Resources section.
Those two seem to cover the family of food-related items pretty well.
I would really love to just set the items my self per container/ stockpile. What is now forces you to place certain things together. like the herbalist next to a weaver both need plant materials. Cook close to the farms trapper and the pastures.
Or sort them out on a job category.
things for a cook / things from a cook.
things for a shepherd / form a shepherd
etc.
That last part does sound interesting. I wouldn’t want to categorize per item, as that will easily get our of hand, but additionally to the current categories, the usage sounds helpful.
How about a way to define for yourself what’s included in filters? Give the player like… 12 filters with like 24 or 32 item slots per filter and a management UI to config them. Then Team Stonehearth could get out of the business of making filter decisions (or the lack thereof) entirely, any time a new item is introduced to the game.
It also lets the player decide what’s important to them and ignore the rest.
This problem bugged me when I tried to separate my food stocks between a Kitchen (which need raw food) and a Dinning Hall (which need prepared food). So i put chests set to “Food Container” and “Cooking Ingredients” in the Kitchen and others set to “Prepared Food” in the Dinning Hall. And like for @Raffo, everything ended mixed up : Veggie Stews in the Kitchen, Baskets of Veggies in the Hall, made me crazy!
So I decided to look into the game code and try to understand how food is sorted. The fact is, some prepared food share the same sorting tags with some raw food ! The Veggie Stew for example is a “Prepared Food”, but also a “Food Container”, like the Baskets of Veggies, so the Hearthlings can stock the stew in the two categories.
By default (in A16), the “Food and Drink” category is divided in 3 subcategories with these tags:
I made a little mod that gives a better food sorting. My subcategories are now like this :
Raw Food: raw_food
Prepared Food: prepared_food
Cooking Ingredients: stockpile_cooking_ingredient
Animal Feed: animal_feed
Now the Veggie Stew can only be stored in “Prepared Food” stockpiles, and the Carrot Basket in “Raw Food” ones!
Also, I modified the three Animal Feed to remove the “prepared_food” tag, so they are now stored in the “Animal Feed” stockpiles (near my pastures).
It’s a good start, I think it can be improved. I can share my mod if some people are interested.
I agree that providing per item filters is too much. I really appreciate that this game focuses on gameplay over detailed customisation so that it’s easier to pick up (even for an existing player after a long break). If the game provides the option for individual item filters and setting up such a filter would make your town more efficient, there is a strong incentive to do it, even if you’d rather not be micro managing.
I think a per item filter is better suited to a mod. That way casual players are not encouraged to micromanage, but those who really want to can.
When it comes to designing filters, I think the most important thing to consider is how the items are used. So I like lios’ suggestion of filters based on who produces and uses each item. The list could even be dynamically calculated by looking at the existing recipes, to support all items without the need to tag them.
To take the idea a step further, introducing blacklisting would result in a very powerful system. Filters could be summarised as
Food but not Items used by the Shepherd, or
Items used by the Carpenter but not Items used by the Blacksmith
The combination of the usage based categories, the broad thematic categories that already exist, and the ability to blacklist categories provides a system that is powerful and scales to any number of items with any amount of overlapping uses. The question remains, “is it too complex?” It might be the case that I like the idea only because I’m a programmer and I’m used to thinking that way.
@Shinsaka, that sounds like a great mod to tide us over until the existing categories are cleaned up officially.
The thing is that more common goods are used all over the place… like wood should go to the carpenter. But the blacksmith needs a steady supply to make ingots. In more moderation the potter/mason wants to have some for tools from. Most of the other classes wand it for there crafting stations.
The weaver has those in-between products that are used by the blacksmith, carpenter. So idk if that would be user friendly having class oriented sorting. because of the exceptions that are used in crafting. (copper ore for the mason per example) It should be in for this system but it will dominate all the masons containers because you end up having a ton of it and using almost nothing of it with the mason. <= that is the reason why we are looking for a better sorting system not?
Maybe we just need some more sorting in the current system.
Food should have:
1,Cooked food (anything that comes from the cook meant to be eaten by hearthlings)
2, Animal food (just food for animals.)
3, Fruit and vegetables. (coming ether from the wild plants or from the farms.)
4, Meat (from the pastures or the trapper)
*Plants need to be split in to:
1, Fibbers (materials for the weaver like the silkweed pickings maybe also feathers wool )
2 Flowers (ether collected flowers and their plant variant also oak saplings)
A16 just got updated to release 2924, with new Food filters !
They are now like this:
Fruit and vegetable baskets: raw_food food_container
Cooked food: prepared_food
Raw ingredients and animal feed: stockpile_cooking_ingredient
And tags on some food have been modified. It’s now a lot better, and my little fix is no more needed, but I still think of a mod to add more filters for food and plants.
8Bit, you are correct, this issue has been around for a bit. Maybe not specifically for food but I wrote a bug on clay/earth objects having multiple classifications, resulting in the same behavior as explained above.
