Palate

A spiritual successor to Variety Matters, meant to encourage having a diversity of food, but being a bit easier on performance and a little more focused. Basically, this gives you a reason to plant things beyond corn, rice, and potatoes.

Pawns get tired of eating the same thing. Every meal nudges a palate need up or down. It rises when the meal brings an ingredient the pawn has not had in their last few meals, and falls when everything in it is familiar. The bar settles at the average novelty of recent meals, so it drifts as a diet changes rather than jumping about.

Variety is measured per ingredient. A fine meal of beef and rice reads as new to someone who has been living on beef and corn, and the needs tooltip names each ingredient, says whether it was new, and lists the last three meals so you can see exactly why the bar moved.

What a pawn has actually eaten is what counts. The bar responds the moment someone finishes a meal, which keeps the mod cheap as well as honest: it does its work a few times per pawn per day, never on a tick and never by scanning the map, so this is less performance impacting than some similar mods.

Whether a food is pleasant is asked of the game, per pawn. A cannibal enjoys human meat, a tunneler ideoligion enjoys fungus, someone with robust digestion is happy eating raw -- each gets the right answer, and modded food is judged by the same question.

Expectations follow colony standing, on the same wealth tiers vanilla already uses for joy and comfort. A tribal camp is content with little, a wealthy colony wants more, and a titled noble expects more still.

Unpleasant food registers as a meal and earns no variety, so a colony living on nutrient paste reads as thoroughly monotonous. Fruit and milk count toward variety; raw crops and eggs are just surviving. Ascetics, prisoners, and slaves have no need for variety.

Pawns seek out food they have not had lately, folded into vanilla's own food scoring as a preference for something new.

Settings: how demanding pawns are, how far each meal moves the bar, penalty severity, whether raw food counts, and whether pawns seek variety out.

Requires Harmony.

This is a decently complicated mod, so there's probably a few edge cases I missed, please let me know if you find any.