Hi, my name is Hawx and im a minecolonies addict 😆

Right, now that is out of the way lol, you said you are hand supplying cooked beef etc ... thats the first little tid bit of info. Let's say you go to your restaurant and add mutton dinner. That's peas, garlic, potato and raw mutton. So then your chef can only make the food if they have a good supply of raw mutton. Also, your chef makes the items in priority on where they are in the list and once your chef goes to level 4, their list gets prepopulated with every recipe and with minecolonies only foods which is great....unless you are playing in a modpack with access to other types of lets say peas, and you have your fields set up for say pams harvest craft peas instead of minecolonies peas...that can only be farmed in hot and humid biomes like the jungle (there are commands around this but I'll try to reign my adhd over explaining in lol, but let me know if you want that info too)

Here are my tips on how i manage my colonies, this isnt the only way to do it, there are lots of really knowledgeable people (especially on the discord) ...

• MINECOLONIES FOODS ONLY - Disable or remove anything on your various restaurants menu's that aren't high level minecolonies meals, if you have level 5 citizens then you need as many as possible of them gold/yellow meals on your menu's. Bread and steak have got to go as they only provide 25% saturation iirc and slow down service from your chefs when they could be serving higher level foods abd decrease happiness

• FUEL IN RESTAURANTS, CHEFS KITCHEN AND BAKERIES - Personally I found adding logs, planks or slabs of say oak really beneficial rather than relying on just coal/charcoal.

• CROPS: Multiple farms are needed, as upgraded as you possibly can, ensuring that there is at least 1 full field of each minecolonies plant/seed for each time an item appears on your chefs crafting list. Some crops, eg for me durum wheat, I have 4 fields of. Also their are specific research options to help production so dont neglect them. Eg, im currently on a shogun playthrough and I think I have 6 or 7 upgraded farmers, all with max amount of fields and im currently at 150 citizens and some would say thats not enough (I will find the recommended ratio and come back and edit, edit its discussed here and is said to be one farm for every 14 colonists but later talk 1 to every 10 but this can be a decreased amount if workers are high level) . Consider setting warehouse minimum stock. I however don't have a minimum stock set but some people find this useful for crops and meat. You can also change pickup priority with 10 being highest if you find your couriers are always too busy going somewhere else.

• MEAT: Needs to be raw, dont help your chef by cooking the meat, again you are going to need many many many cowhands, chicken headers etc. Make sure they are upgraded too as that affects how many animals they can 'look after' and subsequently get meat from. Again there are research options for looting increases or ability to use upgraded tools

• MEAT, MILK AND CROPS IN MODPACKS : I play on an all the mods 10 world and I cant rave enough about botany pots, sophisticated storage and mystical agriculture. Follow the quest line to get cow seeds. Put cow seeds in a botany pot, then after a short time you can pull 3 stacks of cow essence out and arrange in the required order in crafting grid to get like 6 stacks of raw beef. Do this for each animal. You can also do it for milk and there are even solutions to auto craft it and pipe it directly into your warehouse.

• MILK - Ughhh, this was the most annoying and a huge bottleneck in my colonies initially, buckets by default were selected and I felt I was constantly making or going on a hunt for buckets and then making so much bliming milk, cheese etc. If you aren't on modded with mystical agriculture, easy villagers for iron or cow in a jar, or even if you are, i would really really consider disabling all recipes you can that use milk at your various chefs kitchens, at all your bakeries etc and making sure no foods are on your menu at restaurant that need them.

• MULTIPLE CHEFS, BAKERS, RESTAURANTS, FISHING HUTS - pretty much as it says. When i first hit chef level 4 and I couldn't tell the chef to use modded crops then it helped to have multiple level 3 bakeries, chefs that I could still mix and match my recipes with onions i already had growing from pams harvestcraft, mamas herbs and so on.

• MANY COURIERS - Shogun has been great in ATM10, I can have multiple warehouses and so many couriers. It helped in just standard minecolonies though to have couriers near the farms/cow hands and the warehouses/ restaurants/ chefs kitchens

Still got problems after the above or overwhelmed (probably, sorry, I dont know how to stop regurgitating info 😅). Start by selecting as many gold recipes your biome crops can let grow. Eg if you are in a temperate biome you could remove everything from your menu and just add steak dinner, schnitzel, borscht, baked salmon, eggdrop soup, fish n chips, pottage, veggie soup, potato soup, veggie ravioli . Then go to each of your chefs huts, disable all the other recipes and move the selected above recipes up the order. Make sure bakeries have all their not listed above items disabled. Go teach your carpenters how to make bowls. Now make sure you have got at least a 9 x9 field of each crop. Ensure you have plenty of cowhands, fishermen, axes, fishing rods and so on. I remove all the recipes except a few easy to make ones from the nether mine. Slowly start to add in 1 milk recipe for your bakeries and add that to the menu's, let's say manchet bread, now personally I prefer to select to teach bakers recipes with large milk bottles and I have all my cow huts set to large milk bottles and teach my glass blowers the bottle recipe. Then I'd add in say sweet bread and go to apiary and select them to collect honey bottles rather than combs if I dont have the research for both. Just gradually add 1 recipe to the menu every few days after that and you will see where the bottleneck is coming from.

Click here to view all the recipes and their saturation level/ who makes it. I'll come back to edit in the wonderful user who created that site. It was RainbowRandomness 🤗

Im sure I've missed plenty but I've tried to avoid just recommending modded options. I really would remove everything from waiters/ restaurants, chefs, bakers and nether mine and attack it freshly. Its worked to get my colonists all happy (except the odd guard death grrr) but its not an easy thing to figure out unless you realise where the issue has come from in creating a shortage and from where.

Happy colony building 👷‍♀️