Thanks to input from forum members Twisted, Miskas, and Fug, all food values have been re-examined and rebalanced based on how hard they are to make and what input resources are required. We might see a perfectly balanced food system as being flat and boring, because all foods would be equal in terms of efficiency, so this update does not aim for that kind perfect balance.
The YUM system is meant to make the less-efficient foods still worth eating from time to time, and YUM has been changed so that your chain never breaks. Your bonus grows every time you eat a new food, and you get that bonus each time you eat a new food, but eating a MEH food simply skips applying the current bonus, instead of setting your bonus back to zero. This means you can no longer cycle a small set of foods to farm a small bonus over and over, but it also means that during tense times, you won't destroy your YUM progress when you have to eat a MEH food out of desperation. This will make growing a large YUM bonus quite a bit easier, and we'll have to see if it swamps the rest of the food system. If so, there's a cap setting (limiting the bonus from growing to high) that I can apply as needed.
But up until now, YUM hasn't been needed for survival anyway. I'm in the process of changing that.
Last week, I cut all food values in half as an experiment, based on observations of massive food surpluses in most late-stage villages. People had also been depending almost exclusively on low-efficiency foods for survival, since massive surpluses made efficiency unnecessary. By the end of this week, food behavior in the game has indeed changed a bit in reaction to these reduced food values, with players making more high-efficiency foods---there was quite a bit of panic and starvation earlier in the week, of course.
The most interesting thing about scaling food values was how it reduced the value of low-tier foods. The problem with a uniform scale factor is that it effects high-tier foods too (a berry went from 3 to 1.5, and a feast plate went from 40 to 20). This made the game universally harder, regardless of which foods were eaten, which wasn't exactly the goal. The goal was to make the high-tier foods more necessary for late-stage villages.
This week, a new gradual scaling system is in place: as the generations wear on for a given family, a growing value is subtracted from all food values. This value reaches a maximum of 5 after about 30 generations, and if subtracting the value would make a food 0 or negative, the food is pegged at 1. So a berry would eventually be worth 1, while a feast plate would eventually be worth 35. A cooked rabbit would drop from 10 down to 5. You can see how this kind of adjustment affects low-value foods much more than high-value foods, in relative terms. It is a bit like the opposite of the eating bonus, which buffs low-value foods much more than high-value foods, relatively speaking.
Beyond food changes, there are a bunch of new stacks, and an arrow pointing toward visitors that knock at your gate. You also get better labels above the heads of the people that you are navigating toward, helping you find them in a crowd.
A few exploits have also been fixed.
If you're die-cycling to find your friends (living less than 20 minutes in your last life), you don't count toward the posse size of a posse that you join. This limitation already applied to twins, but the goal is to prevent a group of friends from ganging up on people.
Abandoned outposts (non-primary homelands) untap springs and iron deposits when they expire, allowing new Eves to settle there later, and preventing one player from making loads of spurious outpost homelands to block iron and water opportunities in a large area.