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A 20 artist, isn't going to get too far without someone growing food,  making meals, cutting stone blocks and fending off pirates for him.

That is a description of the effects of colony size. In a colony of one, the individual must perform every task, and can't afford to specialize. As the colony size increases it becomes possible to have someone dedicate more skill points to a given profession, such as hunting/combat or cooking/growing.

When the colony reaches a size where each person can be assigned to only one skill task, reaching level-20 in their profession, that would be the maximum size colony supported by the level of detail in the game.

Well, a good baseline for estimation then is actually to start with the "Keep Everyone Alive" professions jobs like planting/harvesting and cooking.

A colony must at a minimum be able to provide 2 meals a day per colonist, and a new set of clothing every 2(?) years.  That gives you the "Upkeep Cost" of a colonist, and everything they can produce beyond that is profit.

Nice, upkeep cost as a city-wide pool of need. If you have five colonists then the colony needs to produce 10 meals/day. Extra production as a liquid asset that can be shifted around until all the minimum needs are full, and poured into the most profitable work beyond sustenance.

[Life on the Farm]

Life on the Farm
This game is rich in detail, and so there are a lot of complications between theory and practice, something I rather like about it. This is an update on how my chicken farm colony is going so far.

Spring
The first week was dedicated to setting up camp for the colonists, so planting hay began on the 7th. I started with three hens and one rooster to feed five colonists, and so figuring it takes about 10/3 haygrass/chicken I planted a dozen haygrass to start.

Soon the eggs started rolling in, and I planted six haygrass for each in preparation for the coming chicks. In hindsight that may have been overkill, probably should just stick to the 10 haygrass per 3 chickens. Then CropEater pests descended on the field, and they consumed about 1/4 of the haygrass before we killed them off. So overkill turned out to be a good thing.

Towards the end of Spring I wound up with half a dozen fertile Cassawary eggs. Someone probably found them breeding in the wild and brought the eggs back. So I incorporated them in the egg count and built another block of haygrass for them. I found out they take longer to hatch, and the young Cassawaries are born wild. So I slaughtered them and waited for the chicken egg count to catch up before increasing the field. Another bit of extra hay.

Tamed a couple healthy Minions for trade, as they have a good price and I was ahead in the hay department.

At the end of Spring, the haygrass began to mature, and so I created a pen for the chickens to keep them out of the firing line and away from hungry wolves. Their diet switched from free-range grass to the supply of hay coming out of the field.

Summer
I made two mistakes:

• I didn't set my Colony Manager table priority high enough, so hunting and gathering wasn't taking place like it should
• I didn't have any recipes queued up that required only meat, and without gathering there were no veggies available yet

The result was an empty food cupboard, and so a colonist came along and ate the half dozen fertile eggs in the hatchery.

Tamed a wolf just before a bulk goods trader came by and bought my minions and wolf, an easy grand in Silver.

Mid-Summer the chicks began maturing, and off to the dining table they went. At this point I had about 300 haygrass growing in the fields.

It's now late-Summer, and my colonist population has recently grown to seven peeps, so I added an extra hen to cover the two new colonists. Also, the rate of egg laying wasn't as high as numbers would suggest, which may be due to breeding opportunities, so I added a second rooster to...Keep em lively

And, um... you *can* get dirt by digging up soil....

I've noticed that I lack the knowledge to play with this mod.
So I won't be able to play with this mod.

I have updated the game and Im trying the latest version on gihtub. Can some one confirm that the possibility to define the cleaning area has gone?

If you put a revision number in the name of the release zip file then it becomes apparent; it's also handy for users to determine if they have the latest version.

It can be as simple as the date of release, just to sort out versions.

[Suggestion: Built-in Profiler]

Suggestion: Built-in Profiler
In the central time slice distributor/visitor track the portion of time spent in each mod and make that a visible pie chart in-game, when in developer mode.

The purpose is to apply some sense of competition for best use of the limited CPU cycles through easily understood comparative performance. It would help catch those "just for now" hacks that create lag.

Dungeon Keeper had some interesting machines in their torture chambers...

Each task that produces an item which could be sold has the potential of being worth that much to the colony, so it's possible to rate production tasks in Silver/Hour of labor.

There is some flexibility at the scale of an hour. It will take different amounts of travel time to cut down a tree, and the faster and more skilled workers will accomplish the task in less time.

One way to approach this might be to examine production for each skill level over a longer period of time, such as a year, and then average it down to hourly rates.

This is also another way of looking at the merits of various technologies and support infrastructure, to see how they add value to the hourly production rates.

Just had an event take place on the 7th of the month, the two leaders stopped being leaders. My guess is it was probably the result of reaching the end of their 1-year term of service, but no new election took place that day, leaving them leaderless for a week.

So far I've used security forces to arrest colonists when they become unresponsive and a threat to either themselves or the other colonists. They might be starving and unable to feed themselves, or they might have collapsed and be suffering an addiction with the cure in a hospital they can't get to.

I've also used security to ostracize incurable cases that create problems in the colony by arresting them when the pirate traders show up, and selling them into slavery. It's a tough call as most colonists don't take kindly to that action, so the decision is one of weighing morale loss and making some value judgements on merits of keeping them.

Thanks for the detail on the egg stack bug, looks like they might form a bell curve around some average, unless the numbers bump up against a ceiling or floor.

On thinking about the hay to haygrass relationship, I agree that representing it in terms of haygrass/hay is both unintuitive and somewhat bizarre; I only did it that way as an in-between step to perform the mechanics of getting to how much haygrass it takes in a cycle. There's probably other ways to travel from hay to haygrass in math that might be more intuitive.

Since my current test involves a rather large 21x21 plot of haygrass, I've been planting it in stages; every day that goes by I get around three eggs and plant a block of about 20 tiles in support of the chicks that will come of it.

I haven't yet got any numbers on blight/Cropeaters or other disasters. I like the Pests mod because it changes the non-interactive blight disaster into something a player can work with. Probability/frequency of occurrance and how much they'll eat before being slain is a lot of chance variables, but it might be possible to make a generalization with a really wide spread.

Ok I'll double-check that next.

I think I'm following, except I get lost trying to figure out how you calculated that a chick needs 8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay to reach adulthood and then reduce it to 6 hay to grow to adulthood.

It's a lot of variables, sorry if it got confusing. The conversion is from how much hay they need to how much haygrass it takes to produce that hay. If each haygrass produces 24 hay/haygrass, then by flipping the fraction we can also say that's 1/24 haygrass/hay.

Doing that gives us a 'hay' on top of a fraction and a 'hay' on the bottom of a fraction so that they cancel out:
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 144/24 haygrass = 6 haygrass

Also: Can you tell me more about this egg stack bug?

[Test Cycle]

A chick grows to maturity in 3/10 of a year; 3/10 x 60 days = 18 days. If chicks eat the same as chickens, then they'll need 18 days of food to develop into an adult.
8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay.
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 6 haygrass for each chick to grow to adulthood.

With an egg laying interval of 1 egg per 9/10 day they produce 10/9 eggs/day. So in a span of 18 days a breeding hen should produce 18 days x 10/9 eggs/day = 20 eggs. Once the whole production line is filled up, there should be 20 chicks maturing during every 18-day cycle for each breeding hen.

How much meat is that, and is it enough to feed a colonist?
20/18 chickens/day = 10/9 chickens/day.
23 meat/chicken x 10/9 chicken/day = 230/9 meat/day = 25 1/9 meat/day

If we made simple meals out of that:
230/9 meat/day x 1/10 simpleMeal/meat = 23/9 simpleMeals/day
each simpleMeal restores 85 saturation of hunger
85 saturation/simpleMeal x 23/9 simpleMeals/day = 1955/9 saturation/day = 217 2/9 saturation/day

So a rooster plus one breeding hen should be enough to feed two colonists on simple meals.
The haygrass support system for that is to place enough haygrass to feed
1 rooster + h/2 hens/colonist + 20h chicks
haygrass for roosters and hens is 10/3 haygrass/chicken, and haygrass for chicks is 6 haygrass/chick, so we can substitute those into the formula:
(10/3)1 + (10/3)1/2 + 6(20) haygrass/hen
10/3 haygrass+ 10/6 haygrass/colonist + 90 haygrass/colonist
10/3 haygrass + 91 2/3 haygrass/colonist

Test Cycle
A team of five colonists should require:
1 rooster and 3 hens.
10/3 + 5 x 91 2/3 = 461 2/3 haygrass, an area of about 21 x21 tiles.

Gonna go give it a try!

I'd like to replace chunks at a time, with multiple surgeries.
Each chunk replacement could be filled with a skill or trait.

Brain harvesting to build instalable modules
"I'm gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge"
Later tech to non-destructively record memories

Might fit in well with building an army of clones

Take a look at Smart Speed, it offers some adjustments to the game speed.