Meat rebalance

[teal sedge]

There is a massive problem with the fluctuation of meat demand on White Tiger, because Meat goes through 3 to 7 processing steps from Carcass to finished food compared to crops with 1 to 3, so Meat prices and demand fluctuate massively. This is something that needs addressing at a base game level, but I would propose some bandaids for White Tiger so we don't lose 80% of the hunter/butcher end of week 1 to mid of week 2 every single round.

First, let us understand the market fluctuation: On day 1 to 3 demand for carcasses is very high because most of the time plants will be gone in less than 24 hours and resupply will be slow. After that supply will get to a point of market saturation until cooking/baking are released.
There will be a spike in demand that will be consistently decreasing until suddenly we get all the AUs (a problem that is being adressed in another topic around here, but won't change things massively) at once. This is the point the bottom drops out of the market, as demand for meat suddenly drops to between 1/4 to 1/2 of the previous levels. In addition we still get the massive amounts of Scrap Meat that were before this already more than the market asked for, now Butchers are sitting on thousands of Scrap Meat that nobody wants. This continues until after Advanced Food and the first 50 subtotal food job is released.
Now demand for meat increases by a factor of 10 or more. Butchers can use more carcasses in a day than in the entire week before. This continues until the end.

Now what can we do about this?
Rebalance all of meat to go through less upgrades and adjust the income to the output. Ha, good one

What can we REALISTICALLY do on White Tiger?
Move some (or most) of the Scrap Meat side product from Prepared Meat and Bacon to Prime Cuts.
Make the preparation stage cooking recipes not benefit from Upgrades. (e.g. Stock (and for the love of god make it faster now that we need to repair ovens))

Make the extremely cheap recipes of cooking/baking (slightly) more expensive, Fruit Salad, Basic Salad, Crispy Bacon, Simmered Meat and Autumn Stew, Baked Roast and Fruit Muffin are way to cheap for how good they are. (List may be incomplete)
Make Crispy Bacon only produce 1 extra Tallow. We got enough additional sources for Tallow now that its destabilizing that market too much.
Make Prime Cut 20-30% cheaper to make in addition to giving it some Scrap Meat. This should balance out Meat and Veggie option in Advanced food better.
Would still love some endgame uses for Leather and Wool, but that is out of scope for this.
I'm not sure if Prepared meat and Bacon need an adjustment for their materials, as the side product is is currently lowering the effective price by ~1/3, so moving much of the Scrap Meat to Prime Cut could be enough.

Need for discussion: Rebalance medium, small and tiny animals and bring their weight in line. The small and tiny animals are very inconsistent in terms of weight for what ressources you get out of them. And because we need so much meat everybody only hunts big game. So Small and Tiny animals that are needed for Fur go underhunted because Fur would need to be ridiculously expensive to be worth the time compared to Bison and Deer.
Ideas to make them more attractive to hunt. Each is to be seen on their own, not in combination:
Reduce the weight of Tiny and Small Carcasses to make them more attractive targets of opportunity.
Increase the meat amount of tiny, small and medium animals by 1 each.
Increase the fur amount of fur animals by 1 each

If someone has suggestions or information to add feel free to do so! I have not seen the perspective from the farming or campfire cooking side, so if you feel like there are some areas that farming affects this problem feel welcome to add to the topic!

[spring crane]

not been an early game hunter/butcher yet but as a cook you do notice the supply suffer in both directions as said.
some cooking recipies don't make much sense and stock sure fits in that list. recipies that require sea food other than general fish also fit that bill. but mostly due to the hunter gameplay not making much sense in general when it comes to sea food farming like urchin and clams.

i'm not sure what can be done to the drop off of hunter players since their game is pretty simplistic where half of their trade is not possible in game (farming seaweed, clams and urchin). fishing itself is an afterthought in their gameplan since everyone can do it equally good and only hunting remains with the pew pew.

another reason for the drop off and not enough supplies of one type of resource is not knowing what can be sold or is required by other professions.
mid game does seem to be the absolute bottom of the hunter/butcher gameplay wise where they either branch away to something different or just say goodbye till the next run.

perhaps increasing the meat and fish requirements for midgame cooking might be something. not sure.

[novel pilot]

I would like to touch on this again, as @teal sedge mentioned it in-game tonight. I agree with Krisocka's points. I played Hunter > Butcher this round. The first few days was spent getting Bison and Medium Animals and turning them into Charred Meat + Tallow. I kept gathering smaller game during this time and hoarding them for Butcher. About the time I got Butcher was the time for Blacksmithing, Smelting, and Fertilizer. I kept a small amount of Fur Pelts in stock, but 75% of those went into Leather Hide + Tallow. I turned my Tallow into Lubricant to supply the engineers. At this time, 90% of my business was Lubricant, with multiple types of meat stacking up in my icebox barely moving. If I decided not to butcher more animals, then Leather Hides and Lubricant would had dried up and stalled other professions. This lasted up until Cooking / Baking released, at which time Prepared Meat and Raw Bacon kept getting bought out by 1-2 Cooks. However, Raw Bacon and Prepared Meat generate an excessive amount of Scrap Meat and there isnt a whole lot of use for Scrap Meat at that time. I ended up doing work parties just to turn scrap meat into Tallow for fat tags to supply myself with lubricant.

When I hunt, I dont typically aim for specific animals or sizes, so even if I accumulate lots of smaller animals, I can always turn the pelts into Leather Hides. The tallow generated from that helps with Lubricant immensely.

For Hunting and Butcher, I see 2 primary pain points:

1. lack of leather hide generation compared to demand. Typically there is little Leather Hide needed in the first couple days, but by day 3 the Tailors, Smelters, and Blacksmiths are going full force so its hard to keep up with demand. That is closely followed by Mechanics within the next day or 2, causing even more demand.

Proposed Change: Increase the amount of leather hides a medium animals gives to 3 for Bison, 2 for Medium, and 1 for the rest. Could also adjust the weight of the animals. A rabbit weighs 1 kg and a bison weighs 5.5 kg, which doesnt make sense. You could tune the hit points of the bigger animals to take more to fell, and have them provide more as compensation. By the time you get your end-game bow + level 7 hunting you can nearly 1-shot most animals anyway.

2. Excessive scrap meat. Once Butchers start making Raw Bacon and Prepared Meat, it generates excessive amounts of scrap meat, but demand for scrap meat also plummets due to not needing as many charred sausage. This is also the same time that Milling is going, so Oil is in full production as well, so not as much demand for Tallow as a fat tag. Its might not be worth it from a Campfire Cook / Baker perspective to turn scrap meat into Tallow.

Proposed Change: remove or reduce scrap meat generation from Raw Bacon and Prepared Meat. Could also add more needed for each craft to some other recipes such as fertilizer, charred sausage, ect.

[spring crane]

as a butcher i didn't convert pelt. i did make charred meat from bison for tallow, selling the meat and making lube from the tallow.
i've seen only 2 days where i didn't buy corpses. those days were right between getting BU4 and baking. hides sell out the fastest, pelts a bit slower but they sell out as well.
i am noticing a lack of corpses the last days. quantity needed grew beyond early game levels with cooking/baking. a lot less supply from hunters, even the active ones because they're also doing other skills now. converted to bison i need about 75-100 a day.
adv cooking/baking coming out will require even more corpses.

i have been looking at the tallow/lube market because i'm seeing interesting things where some people can't be making anything from tallow or lube compared to butcher/bakers. there are many ways to create tallow but most are not worthwhile. i'm keeping to around market value with tallow/lube but non butcher/bakers keep the market price "high". haven't checked for 2-3 days but i can drop a bit more again i think.

it's a weird market that's spread over multiple skills that make it not efficient on this server.

[novel pilot]

I agree. With my latest WP converting tallow cost $0.65 each in just labor requirements past day 8, not including the scrap meat itself. Since I have quite a bit of scrap meat, I was fine going that route. I imagine if Cooks / Bakers are converting it themselves, it would be much much lower.... probly even close to current Oil costs (0.5 each). But then they would have to pay approximately the same cost in scrap meat.

And yea, whenever I see bulk animals, usually I pick them up. But honestly only 1-2 people are selling them anymore. Most likely like you said.... people moving on to other skills which are more engaging. But at this point, its really easy for me to burn through 200 animals just to restock my shop.

That does not include the demand we will be getting for Prime Cut either.

[spring crane]

today with butcher BU5 and baking AU5 i have tallow at 0,5

[teal sedge]

Hey, its me again! Just wanted to say that Fish Oil and Fish Stock made the whole Scrap Meat situation so much worse! Fish Oil replaces Tallow for everything because Fish is just generated out of thin air, so the Bakers that would use large amounts of the stuff can now just go with Oil for everything.
Could Fish Stock at least be brought to 8 Raw Fish so we have Parity between the recipes and Scrap Meat doesnt need to be half the price of Raw Fish? Which, again, can be literally generated from nothing, automatically.
Not to mention Hunter/Butcher literally work against their own interest if they sell Fish because it destroys their customer base for Scrap Meat.