You can enable this policy to allow settlers to eat grain as porridge. When you don’t have a mill or your bread makers can’t keep up. Good old grain porridge…
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I wholeheartedly agree!
Though I would even go so far as to suggest, that the default should be that people could eat grains as porridge, and the policy should then be to restrict people from eating grain directly. Though, of course, for this to work, there should be some advantage to having people eat bread over porridge.
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Without milling, you are eating the whole wheat berry, or else having a very rough hand-ground meal. That makes it harder to digest, lower nutrition. Porridge would have a significantly lower impact on nutrition and hunger rates for people.
Now, you use whole wheat grain to achieve filling without calories and higher dietary fiber since calories and balanced diets are easier. Back then, calories and nutritional balance were the problems.
Solution, IMO, would be to have 1 grain produce more than 1 bread through the milling / baking process. This would strongly incentivise making bread as a way of multiplying food usage, while permitting “raw” grain to be eaten at a lower efficiency. Policies to enable / disable this sounds like a smart idea to me!
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Indeed! That seems like the most elegant solution to the problem; It gives the player a meaningful choice as to how he goes about feeding his citizens. It doesn’t require too much re-tooling. And finally, it adds a touch of realism.
Now, if only the preservatist would be able to make saurkraut out of cabbage 
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Balance might be a little complicated because beer also consumes grain, but my thought is something along the lines of some number of greens plus 1 beer (as vinegar) plus one glass jar to put it in. (On the other hand, sacrificing some food now for more food later could be pretty worthwhile, given that greens only keep as long as fruit.)
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I think it would be a pretty worthwhile trade-off - It’s one we actually already do whenever we build a preservist or a smokehouse; every worker who smokes meat or fish is a potential fisherman or hunter if you think about it.
Also, it seems to me that we just desperately need a way to store greens (or for people to eat what is about to go bad). Otherwise cabbage as a food source seems pretty much pointless.
Not really. Fish and meat are limited by the nodes at the moment. That quickly becomes the practical limiting factor (or, at least, those nodes a reasonable distance from town), not work force.
But the defining feature of Greens is that they have huge yields but short lifespans. If you make them pickleable, they’ll be way better than roots - I was able to grow 3500+ leeks in a single season in a 10x10 farm, I’d be doing well to get 1/4 of that at turnips.
Maybe it could work if you abstract vinegar as a fruit and make 20 green + 10 fruit + 1 glass = 20 pickles. And make it relatively slow to make? I think the balance would be on a knife’s edge between useless and overpowered though, and very hard to get right.
IMO, it’s more interesting and brings more diversity to gameplay if we go the other way and have villagers prioritise food that’s about to go bad. Which, to toot my own horn, is what Balanced Diet does okay-ish.
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Point taken on both accounts.
And I’d certainly love it for my citizens to eat more seasonably - Where would a wise man go look for your mods by the way?
Though your second point did make me wonder if it actually would be a good idea if greens and vegetables ‘changed places’ so to speak, so greens would be used at the preservist building and vegetables wouldn’t. That would leave us a trade-off between low-yield crops that are naturally keep for a longish time and high-yield crops that go bad soon, but with the option of preserving them with the appropriate allocation of resources.
You could of course make the case that kinda is the way it is presently - except there’s nothing to do about the short shelf-life of greens.
For what it is worth, I presently find that I very rarely grow greens of any kind and generally stick with either vegetables, grain and beans. I suppose I would be happy with anything, really, that makes growing cabbage and leeks worthwhile.
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Steam workshop, generally speaking. Although my very recent bread one I’ve only posted in this forum for the time being.
That makes an awful lot of sense. Because, I entirely agree that, as it stands, Greens are almost always the wrong choice for what to grow.
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The way things are currently, it shifts significantly for me depending on phase of game. Leeks have the interesting detail that they are actually the most productive crop per land area, beating out even grains, which take about the same amount of time to grow, by a significant margin.
Early on, I want just a little farming, so I set up with three small (often just 5x5) farms with a simple rotation, but I need the food to be something that will definitely last the winter. Later, I want a bunch more farming, so I have some other, bigger fields (which I will likely expand a bunch) somewhere. At that point, food consumption is significant enough that a 5x5 field’s worth of cabbage or even leeks is very likely to be able to be consumed within a couple months. (Because of other foods’ availability, it often isn’t, but everything that is surplus to current consumption needs will eventually spoil if you’re producing more than you consume. It just might not spoil this year.) At that point, it’s worth switching the little farms over to vegetable patches for the spike in food. Also, by harvesting cabbage as early as possible and leeks as late as possible, it smooths the grain income out a bit longer, which might, potentially, matter.
But really, what I use greens for is mostly to intentionally put some slack in the system because something will need to spoil. If we don’t need it, that’s great, because it increases the immigration rate while it’s there, anyway. If we do need it, well, then it’s there to be eaten.
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I guess that the most efficient thing to do would be to grow exactly as many Greens as the villagers want to eat vegetables (or a little bit more for safety), because that’s the most efficient use of farm land and requires 0 post processing.
Then, with left over farms, grow roots and pickle them. And then make sure the villagers do not eat the pickles or the roots. They’re just there to give you a high food stockpile. That’s the most efficient way of having a stock pile because while every uneaten Green counts towards your stockpile for ~9 months, each uneaten pickle counts towards it for ~15 years (assuming storing in a brick cellar with barrels), so they’re worth 20x more more as food stockpile.
I haven’t tested it, but if you turn off pickles and roots in the market and have them only be stored in cellars a long way from where your villagers eat, they should barely touch them. Ideally you’d want the pickles to be eaten just before they expire, but that’s probably beyond our ability to manipulate what villagers eat.
Theoretically, this ought to give something like 24 months of food stockpiles just by growing and preserving ~15% more food than is eaten.
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