Sourdough too efficient compared to other breads?

[baldamundo]

Describe the bug

Just had a long discussion on the Discord about how best to use flour, and realised that Sourdough is much more energy efficient than other types of bread, and I'm wondering if this is a mistake.

The maths can get a bit confusing, given different possible ingredients and possible confusion in the interface between total calories vs calories per portion, but I've tested the following in-game with flour made from wheat:

wheat flour = 33 kcal per portion

wastebread (chitin powder) = 3 portions x 20 kcal per portion / 1 flour = 60 kcal per flour (higher with other ingredients) flatbread = 2 portions x 234 kcal per portion / 11 flour = 42.5 kcal per flour hardtack = 1 portion x 266 kcal / 6 flour = 44.3 kcal per flour bread = 10 portions x 89 kcal per portion / 20 flour = 44.5 kcal per flour crackers (vegetable cooking oil) = 8 portions x 303 kcal per portion / 30 flour = 80.8 kcal per flour (higher with other ingredients) sourdough = 10 portions x 174 kcal per portion / 10 flour = 174 kcal per flour

Steps to reproduce

Debug spawn yourself a load of wheat and cooking tools, cook it yourself, and check my maths.

Expected behavior

I'm not a baker or a nutritionist, so perhaps I'm missing something about how effective the process of making sourdough is, but to a layman, it seems very surprising that the same ingredients (wheat flour and water) generate an extra 300% of the calories when made into sourdough compared to normal bread. It's even almost a 100% increase compared to crackers, which also add fats and sugar - both obviously high calory ingredients!

And certainly from a game balance perspective, it seems like there's almost never any reason to make bread over sourdough. Their other properties are pretty much identical, and while sourdough starters take a little while to mature, they're very easy to craft and only need more flour and water rather than a third ingredient like yeast.

Screenshots

No response

Versions and configuration

Build: 2022-07-09-1715

Additional context

This seems to have come up before:

• in March 2020, it was pointed out that sourdough seemed unrealistically calory-efficient - https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/38981
• it was then nerfed by reducing the portions output to 4 (in the latest versoins it is 10) and increasing the flour input to 10 (which it the same in the current version), which was supposed to bring it roughly into line with other breads but slightly more efficient if the starters are reused - https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/39056
• there was a change in February 2021 which increased the number of portions from 4 to 10 - I think out of concern for loot spawns not recipe balance? - but that came alongside larger increases to the portions number for bread and flatbread which should have made sourdough less efficient by comparison, not more https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/46885/files#

I think the issue might be confusion over the fact that there is a "charges" [portions] line in the files defining the items (which is used by default), as well as a "charges" line in the files defining the recipes, which if not left blank, will be used instead of the line in the item files. The sourdough recipe doesn't have its "charges" defined, so it uses the value from the item file - when the charges were increased in that file to rebalance item drops, it thus buffed the sourdough recipe without affecting the other recipes.

So my guess is that there needs to be '"charges": 3,' added to like line 8778 of recipe_food.json https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/85de01c4c2cd7cc8db808014d64e90d1138078c9/data/json/recipes/recipe_food.json#L8778

(with 3 portions per batch, sourdough would have 52.2 kcal per flour, which would make it slightly better than normal bread)

[Qrox]

Sourdough bread has the "NUTRIENT_OVERRIDE" flag which should be removed so its nutrient can be tracked by its ingredients, though it may need some extra handling because the crafting process involves item transformation. The recipe charge may still need to be adjusted to ensure conservation of mass though.

[PatrikLundell]

No expertise on the matter, but, as @Qrox said, ingredients tracking should take care of the bulk of the resulting calories. There ought to be something that took cooking (making calories and nutrients more easily available) into account (which I don't think exists currently), but otherwise the difference between using sourdough and yeast should be time to rise and the calorie input from the sourdough/yeast. I don't know if yeast provides any noticeable amounts of calories, but since sourdough consists of some amount of dough, it ought to provide a corresponding amount of calories. Calories per unit of flour is only a valid comparison if all the ingredients are equal, so additional calories from e.g. sugar and cooking oil would have to be deducted. Adding low calorie fillers (mud in the extreme case, used in famine stricken areas today, bark from history) should result in a larger volume with a lower calorie count per "unit", but with a total calorie count based in the inputs.

[Qrox]

something that took cooking (making calories and nutrients more easily available) into account

There's the RAW flag which reduces uncooked food nutrient by 25%.

[PatrikLundell]

Crude, but better than nothing.

[baldamundo]

Calories per unit of flour is only a valid comparison if all the ingredients are equal, so additional calories from e.g. sugar and cooking oil would have to be deducted.

Yeah but the point is the only relevant ingredient is flour. Water has no calories, and the sourdough starter is also made from flour and water, but you get another one back as a byproduct, so it presumably can't be providing any net calories anyway.

So the calories per flour provides a useful comparison baseline - if the thing made from only flour is getting more calories per unit of flour than the thing made from flour combined with several other high calorie ingredients, then something looks a bit odd.

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