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Variety Matters Improved

Pawns now have a variety need. Pawns satisfy the need by eating different varieties of foods.

Updates for Ideology
Improved search method for pawns when eating variety.
Fix to accommodate new colonists joining high-wealth colonies.
Variety changes are slightly faster.

Open a pawn's need tab and hover over variety. The tooltip will display Varieties Expected and Recent Varieties. Every time your pawn eats, these numbers change and you gain/lose variety.

Recent > Expected = Gain variety
Recent < Expected = Lose variety
Recent = Expected = Move toward 50%


To count as a variety, a food must provide nutrition. Thus, for example, ambrosia is a variety while other drugs are not. Second, a food must either provide joy or be at least raw tasty. Thus, beer, chocolate, berries, and cooked meat are varieties, raw meat is not. Unless your pawn happens to be a cannibal, in which case they will treat raw humanlike flesh (and corpses!) as a variety. Finally, rotten foods do not provide variety.

A food's variety is based on its display name (label), not its defName, so "apples" added by two different mods will only provide a single "apples" variety.

The above rules always apply. However, there are three options for how to handle meals (foods that display ingredients):

Option 1: Ingredients Only

By default, ingredients are varieties, not the meals themselves. Grow different crops and hunt different animals and you'll have happy pawns. Feed your pawns nothing but rice, corn, and raiders, and you'll have unhappy pawns. There is NO benefit to providing a mix of pemmican/survival/nutrient paste/simple/fine/lavish meals. However, lavish meals provide an extra "lavishly-prepared" variety as well as the basic variety. Therefore, an all-lavish meal diet will provide twice the variety of a diet without lavish meals.

Meals that can have ingredients but don't (e.g. bought from traders, Replimat meals) are assigned a random "mystery-ingredient" variety when eaten. Fine and lavish meals also provide a mystery meat, and lavish meals provide a mystery lavish ingredient. The number of available mystery varieties depend on current expectations. It is balanced so a diet of all-fine mystery meals should approach a neutral (50%) variety need, while a diet of all-lavish mystery meals will slowly increase variety, but there is RNG involved.

Option 2: Ignore Ingredients

If you choose to enable the option to ignore ingredients then varieties will be based solely on the final product consumed, ignoring ingredients. Your pawns will want a mix of simple, fine, and lavish meals, pemmican and nutrient paste, but won't care if they are made entirely from corn and chicken.

This option is recommended only if you use mods with lots of new meals such as the Vanilla Cooking Expanded series or VGP Gourment Garden.

Option 3: Track Ingredients and Meals

This option causes pawns to track both the name of the meal and its ingredients. With this option you will need to both provide a variety of ingredients and a variety of meals. If, for example, you feed your pawns simple chicken meal and fine chicken/corn meal, you will have 4 varieties (rat, corn, simple meal, fine meal) compared to two varieties (rat/corn) with option 1 or two varieties (simple/fine meal) with option 2.


The base variety expectation depends on a pawn's current thought expectation and is adjustable in settings.

The expectation is then modified based on a pawn's current variety level. The closer a pawn is to 100% variety, the harder it is to stay there. The variety expectation will also change based on the number of mod-added varieties available at load-time and slightly decrease when the weather isn't suitable for growing crops.


Pawns remember the foods they've eaten up to 2x their current variety expectation. That means half of a pawn's diet needs to be new varieties in order to meet their expectation. The other half can be anything. For example, a pawn with an expectation of 10 that eats 10 fine rice bowls, each with a unique type of meat, will have 11 varieties (rice + 10 meats).

Once a pawn's memory is full, it will randomly forget a prior food to make room for the new meal. In the above example, if the pawn eats a simple, meatless rice bowl, there is a 50% chance it will replace one of the earlier rice meals and a 50% chance it will replace a meat memory, reducing variety to 10.


Yes! The goal of this mod is to require you to make different foods available to pawns, not to micromanage them eating. Pawns have a strong preference for new varieties, and will even choose fine meals over lavish meals if that is the only choice with a new variety.


Yes! When "cooks use different ingredients" is enabled, cooks will remember what ingredients have been recently used on the map. Better cooks have a longer memory and do a better job of using a variety of ingredients. (Option) to have cooks consider spoiling foods as well.

Note: Vanilla code searches for ingredients by region. In other words, cooks will first look for ingredients up to about 15 spaces from the stove in cardinal directions. They will only check diagonal and more distant ingredients if they can't find what they need nearby. So if your cooks refuse to grab that stack of <new variety> that is just one space farther than <common variety>, you need to move your stockpile.

This feature is unnecessary when using Option #2 (ignore ingredients).


There is a (recommended) option to prevent meals with different ingredients from stacking, which increases the variety of foods available. The downside is the need for extra storage space. Alternatively, you can increase the number of ingredients the game tracks when stacking meals. That option was added by request and how it affects variety has not been tested. Both of these features are unnecessary and disabled if using Option 2.

By default, sick pawns will temporarily stop caring about varieties (toggable for certain non-human race mods with beneifical hediffs that are treated as being sick).



Best Mix is compatible, but will disable the feature to cook with a variety of ingredients. A future patch is likely.

[ko-fi.com]