Balanced Diets

[Misterpiece]

While I love the idea of having different biomes and how this weights on the choice for a base location, I strongly feel like there is a lot of untapped potential in it. The way I end up solving the "food-production" dilemma when I settle down somewhere is to find the right amount of farms that I need to keep all my characters fed and than forget about it. One XL farm for wheat and two cactus and I can feed a dozen individuals and never need to worry about it again. I wish there was a bigger incentive for us to raise different crops.
Even when I discover Hydroponics, even though they can be useful for other reasons, I don't really see a point to update the base and improve the food variety.

With a diet system the player would be rewarded for diversifying the diet and either buying different types of food from nearby vendors or importing the raw materials or setting up another base.

An example could be that we can't raise hunger above 150 using only one type of basic food, or 175 with advanced food. Living in an arid biome for instance, 175 would be the cap even if we decided to craft all: bread, chewsticks and dustwiches, because the ingredients are the same. This way, if we want to keep things as simple as possible on the production side by producing only food from one biome, our troops will have to deal with a stats penalty.
Ration packs could be immune from this effect and be the food of choice when going on lenghty expeditions.
Another way could be to give the character with a diverse diet some combat bonuses.

On the base managing side, to make food production easier in light of having to manufacture different types of it, I wish there was a way to queue the production so that, when the materials for making let's say Foodcubes and Dustwiches are out, the cook proceeds to use all excess greenfruit to make cooked vegetables.

This could later on have great synergy with shop counters and travelling merchants if we could set what good we want to buy, along the goods we want to sell.

[Rambler]

You can queue production by having multiple stoves set to cook different items and assigning the cook to both stoves.

[Tearlach]

problem with that is that you can't set the worker to rotate between his assignments, so he'll work on stove 1 until out of resources and then move to stove 2.

[lucidmadness]

Put in a Scurvy meter. That shit destroys your body. Eat your greens!

[swillo]

I update food types more as a matter of roll play then anything else. For me Shek love cactus. Their main foods are cactus and meat.
Where I see variety playing a roll is if there was a morale stat for characters. Then different foods or a favorite kind of food would have an effect on that. It would be nice because then you could expand the options for foods and even have a minimum cooking skill level for some special meals.
But with out a morale effect it seems more like RP to me, and I can do that without further programing.