While playing atm I saw all that rotten food in my stockpile and thought, what a useless junk … but wait … IDEA.
There are at least four minor factions now that I can tell appart:
Monsters, Undead, Wildlife and Goblins.
Since the goblins are the only one who you can interact “peacefully” with why not expand the interaction possibilities.
TRADING WITH MINOR FACTIONS (Goblins):
As long as the Goblins are peaceful you will be able to trade with them BUT they will not buy everything you want to sell and they will only offer you what the think is useless to them.
And Goblins are the only ones that will buy rotten food from you. Why? We do not know but they like it.
With every trade interaction you will delay the next gift request but since they do not buy everything and not always, there will be a lot randomness which will alter each and every game.
Sometimes they buy almost everything from you and sometimes they do not want to trade with you at all or everything in between.
Edit:
Oh the trades are not always to your benefit.
Since you are trading with Goblins, they won’t give you the same as other traders.
Rotten food:
why not a composting bin to create fertelizer in combination with animal poop? Could be used to buff the amount of farmed goods or they could raise the difficulty, so we have to use fertilizer to grow more advanced crops.
Trading with minor factions:
They should offer goods we can’t produce, so we have a reason to trade with them. Additinaly we could hire them as merceneries, with additional food as payment.
I was just about to make a Suggestion thread regarding Rotten Food when I saw this one.
I agree on the need to better incorporate spoiled food, as it’s little more than a nuisance right now. Make a bit too much food, some of it goes bad, and eventually it disappears. It pretty much encourages making as much food as possible without any consequences or planning regarding your current population or storage capacity. If rotten food was persistent and your settlers actually had to destroy it or move it to prevent more food from going bad, it would create a more interesting and dynamic storage system.
Plus, if rotten food persisted instead of just disappearing, it would be much easier to use/save it for recipes, composting, etc.
how about consequences of mass of food?
food attract rats or other nasty animals --> diseases spread —> pet fox to hunt rats and herbalist have to deal with sick hearthlings (origin of zombies?)
Maybe insteading rotten food with goblins, you can offer them as tribute? Give then enough of that and they may give random stuff in return someday… or dislike your offering