Makes orchards viable, balances food satiety and rot, and improves artificial light protection against animal and drifter spawns.

All individual parts of the mod can be disabled and some aspects adjusted using Config lib.

Changes

Fruit trees

Goal was to bring orchards more in line with farmland and make them more rewarding than berry bushes.

• Greatly increased harvests
• Buffed tree fruit satiety
  • Cherries and similar: 80 sat. (small/berry type)
  • Apples and similar: 100 sat. (normal type)
  • Breadfruit: 300 sat. (large/cabbage type)
• Nerfed olives to 80 sat., but fixed their cooked satiety (making them fill the "berry" niche for vegetables)
• Adjusted apple tree varieties to ripen in different seasons: early summer, late summer, and fall.

Other food

Cheesemaking loses a lot of satiety. This mod improves the situation slightly and adds viability to blue cheese through better satiety. Yes, cheddar is more calorie-dense, but the same amount of milk can produce more blue cheese, resulting in higher total satiety.

• Buffed cheese slice satiety
  
  • Cheddar: 300 sat.
  • Blue cheese: 340 sat.
• Nerfs pickled olive satiety to 60, matching their new raw satiety
• Doubled yield of pumpkin slices from pumpkins to 8
  • Changed pumpkin seed craft to use pumpkin slices instead of whole pumpkins
• Bamboo shoots are considered vegetable instead of typeless
• Fish meat brought up to standard

Rot

Rot values have been rebalanced to bring more coherence across food categories, making spoilage scale more naturally with item size and type. This should remove odd outliers, such as whole pumpkins or pineapples which would produce more rot if cut into pieces, and flour where simply adding water previously quadrupled rot yield. Overall you should see little change in how much rot you produce.

• Fruit produces 0.3/0.4/1 rot based on size
• Vegetables produce 0.35/0.45/1 rot based on size
• Pickled vegetables are same as raw
• Grains, flours, doughs and bread produce 0.5 rot

Spawns

There is a lot of inconsistency in spawn behavior, this mod curbs that a little and makes artificial light provide much better protection.

• Artificial light now blocks all natural spawns, be it drifters or animals, both passive and hostile, at any light level
• This greatly increases the protection radius allowing easier spawn-proofing of open areas
• Natural light no longer affects spawn behaviour

Configuration

You can disable all parts of the mod using toggles and adjust a variety of values in this mod if you have Config lib.
The things that can be changed are currently:

Days per month: Use this to change fruit tree schedules to match your chosen month length. Fruit tree growth cycles were never updated to adapt to month length changes, so this setting corrects them.
Do note that this setting only applies to trees that grew after this was set, old trees will ignore the setting and follow the schedule they grew up with.
It is recommended to set this before starting new world, you can do that by creating a temporary world, change the setting and then setting up and starting your main world.

Why?

Fruit

Fruit satiety in early game is something everyone keeps high, but I found out that once I got animals and a farm going, fruit satiety started lagging behind other types, despite having an orchard and bunch of berry bushes. I've always liked the idea of having an orchard in the game, but never felt rewarded by it. I don't see a problem with how the game handles tree growth, but the results always felt a bit lacking.

Fruit generally lacks high satiety options, which makes meals made with it feel lackluster, with the improved satiety the meals should feel on par with vegetables, but vegetables keep their versatility in meals. This should make it easier to keep fruit satiety up in later game.

Vanilla fruit trees feel... lacking. After looking into the details they genuinely feel like an afterthought that was hastily slapped into the game. They are inconsistent, unintuitive and outclassed by everything. Did you know, that pink apples are the superior apple type and red are the worst? That olives offer higher satiety, but get no bonus from being cooked? Trees are still unaffected by the amount of days in a month? Berry bushes completely outclass fruit trees due to the 16ish day regrowth with comparable yield (4 berries on average, trees drop 4-6).

With this mod a branch should yield comparable amount to a patch of vegetables, so every tree with normal fruit (100 sat.) yields 16 fruit with slight chance for more (up to 24, but the chance is very low, so the average is still close to 16), trees with small type or 'berry' type (80 sat.) (cherry, olive and lychee) yield 21 (up to 31, again average is still close to 21) and breadfruit (300 sat.), like cabbage, yields 3 (up to 5).

Eventually I would like to give all trees a little bit of their own identity, currently only pears (very long ripe period, but only 15 per branch), olives (treated as vegetables), breadfruit (300 sat.) and lychee (60 sat. like cranberries, but longer fresness than other small types) feel different. If you have suggestions I would like to hear them, but keep in mind that I do not want to deviate too much from reality.

Cheese

1 liter of milk gives 150 satiety, 1 liter of cottage cheese gives 140, and a quarter wheel of cheese gives 240 satiety. Or, more digestibly:
25 liters of milk (3750 sat.) → 25 liters of cottage cheese (3500 sat.) → 1 wheel of cheddar (960 sat.)

Some loss of nutrition during processing is expected, but this drop feels excessive, especially taking into account how watered down the milk is (realistically it should be much more nutritious), hence the increase. Also with this there is now an incentive to try to make blue cheese. It still spoils faster and can't be waxed, but it gives a bit more nutrition, rewarding the extra effort.

Rot

The rot changes might not be as impactful as the other changes in this mod. The most notable part will likely be the increase in berry yield from 0.25 to 0.3, but I have found myself at times trying to game the system, to squeeze out just a little bit more rot even if the means did not make sense, like cutting, or adding water. Now you might still engage in doing these things, but only to speed up the spoilage.

I aimed to make rot more logically consistent, rather than changing how much rot you will see in the game. The amount of rot you now get is mostly based on assumed size of the food item, the difference between some categories like fruits and vegetables is due to water content, as you may have guessed water does play important role in composting, but does not change the actual amount of compost produced.

Spawns

This started with a pack of wolves spawning in year 3 in my chicken enclosure. Thankfully, despite the loss of gen. 10 chickens, it was not too bad as I had been giving reject chickens to a friend when breeding. This got me thinking of spawn proofing larger areas and especially those where grass is wanted.

Digging in the files, I again found spawning to be inconsistent. Wolves cannot spawn in areas where artificial light is above level 7, but hyenas ignore artificial light and so forth. So I have decided to make the spawning more predictable by making all natural spawns susceptible to artificial light. For now, I haven’t touched some denizens of the depths though, so deep underground you may still get a surprise visitor.

Compatibility

This mod is designed to be simple content mod and should therefore be compatible with all other mods, unless another mod directly overrides the same parameters.

• If another mod changes the same values (e.g., fruit yields, satiety, spawn behavior), the result will simply reflect whichever mod loads last. No crashes or errors should occur.
• This mod does not affect content added by other mods, except those listed below. For example, custom trees, animals, or enemies introduced by other mods will retain their original behavior and values unless explicitly patched.

No known compatibility issues at this time.

Mod Integration

Adjusts some values from these mods to be logically consistent with Food and Spawn Tweaks:

• Butchery
• Primitive Survival

Areas under consideration

• Expanded Foods integration: vital mod, consistency matters if used together.
• Juice system: rife with inconsistencies, but complex; may explore if I find a workable solution.
• Other systems: seem consistent for now, though closer inspection may reveal hidden issues.
  If you notice something that feels off, or a mod you’d like better compatibility with, I’m open to suggestions.