Animals and the Kitchen

Comrades, the field feeds the herd, and the herd and the field together feed the Commonwealth. This lecture treats the keeping of animals, the kitchen, and which foods keep a worker going longest.

Keeping animals

Lead animals home by holding the food they like, or with a lead, and keep them behind fences with a gate. An animal pen beside the fields is best: the crops feed the herd, and manure of a kind (bone meal from the composter) goes back to the fields.

Breeding. Feed two adults of the same kind the food they love and they produce a young one. The parents can breed again after about five minutes; the young grow up in about twenty, sooner if you feed them.

• Cows, sheep and goats: wheat.
• Pigs: carrots, potatoes or beetroot.
• Chickens: seeds (wheat, melon, pumpkin or beetroot seeds).
• Rabbits: carrots, golden carrots or dandelions.
• Horses and donkeys: golden carrots or golden apples.
• Llamas: hay bales.

What they give. Cows give milk (with a bucket), leather and beef. Sheep give wool when sheared, and grow it back by eating grass. Chickens lay eggs every few minutes, and give feathers for arrows and quills. Pigs give pork. Keep the herd larger than you slaughter, so it always grows back; a collective herd is a trust held for the comrades who come after.

The kitchen

Raw meat feeds poorly; cooked meat is among the best food there is.

• A furnace cooks anything, slowly, with fuel. One piece of coal or charcoal cooks eight items.
• A smoker cooks only food, but twice as fast.
• A campfire cooks four pieces at a time without any fuel. It is slow, but it costs nothing.
• With Create, an encased fan blowing through a campfire's smoke cooks food in bulk as it passes on a belt.

Bread is baked from three wheat on the crafting table. Soups and stews (mushroom stew, beetroot soup, rabbit stew) come in bowls. Pumpkin pie and cake need sugar and eggs; a cake is placed on a table and eaten a slice at a time, and can be shared.

What feeds best

Every food fills the food bar by some points (20 fill it), and gives a hidden reserve called saturation. While saturation lasts, your food bar does not fall. So a food rich in saturation keeps you working longest. The best of common foods, as food points / saturation:

• Golden carrot: 6 / 14.4. The worker's best friend, if you can spare the gold.
• Steak or cooked porkchop: 8 / 12.8.
• Cooked mutton or cooked salmon: 6 / 9.6.
• Rabbit stew: 10 / 12, but it takes some making.
• Cooked chicken: 6 / 7.2. Mushroom stew and beetroot soup: 6 / 7.2.
• Bread, baked potato, cooked cod and cooked rabbit: 5 / 6.
• Pumpkin pie: 8 / 4.8. Filling, but little reserve.
• Apple: 4 / 2.4. Carrot: 3 / 3.6. Melon slice: 2 / 1.2. Sweet berries and cookies: 2 / 0.4. Dried kelp: 1 / 0.6.

Take cooked meat or golden carrots for a long day in the mine, and bread or baked potatoes for the fields.

Food to avoid

• Rotten flesh fills a little but very likely gives you Hunger, which drains the food bar.
• Raw chicken may give Hunger too. Cook it.
• Spider eyes, pufferfish and poisonous potatoes poison you.
• Suspicious stew gives an effect that depends on the flower in it, good or bad.

A bucket of milk clears every effect, good and bad, and honey cures poison.

Food for the Commonwealth

A worker who eats well works well. Feed the colony's cooks and the common stores before your own chests: the plan may ask for bread, meat or potatoes, and every delivery (/cw deliver) counts towards it.

The Physician of the Health Service lectures on hunger, healing and the dangers of the world (/cw lecture medicine 1). Questions to me: /cw ask professor-agronomy <question>.