Food calculator [Updated/Extended]

[TunderLock]

Hi all, 

Thanks to the great feedback on the original tool, I have gone ahead and made some adjustments to the food calculator including:

1. Handling of fertilizer's effects on plant growth and its own requirements
2. Handling of "wild only" farms for those running dupe counts around 12 or under that want to "live off the map"
3. Handling of automated farms, where dupes are not permitted to pick the crops but instead crops drop themselves 4 cycles after maturation
4. Handling of different game difficulties

Particular thanks to MorsDux, Lilalaunekuh and Christophlette for their feedback.

I'm looking at expanding the tool to allow users to select the meat/egg source for relevant foods and the follow on requirements. If there's any other requests or feedback please post below. 

Cheers, 

[Lilalaunekuh]

I really love the new options, but I would recommand some information regarding "max possible calories" vs "safe calories".

 

1. If I build just the recommanded plants (duplicant-harvest enabled) my duplicants will starve.

It takes always some time to harvest a plant, so everything using duplicant harvest is calculated with an instant harvest in mind.

(Same goes for fertilizer, even if your farmer sleeps right in front of the farm harvesting/fertilizing will take some additional time.)

 

2. Duplicant-free harvest is achievable without additional resource requirements (besides building a farm for more plants^^).

=> You need more plants, but not more resources to work duplicant-free.

(The plants need no resources in the 4 cycles after they became harvest ready.)

 

(3. Could you set the default value for the duplicants with "bottomless stomach" to "0".)

[TunderLock]

On 02/03/2019 at 4:37 PM, Lilalaunekuh said:

I really love the new options, but I would recommand some information regarding "max possible calories" vs "safe calories".

 

1. If I build just the recommanded plants (duplicant-harvest enabled) my duplicants will starve.

It takes always some time to harvest a plant, so everything using duplicant harvest is calculated with an instant harvest in mind.

(Same goes for fertilizer, even if your farmer sleeps right in front of the farm harvesting/fertilizing will take some additional time.)

 

2. Duplicant-free harvest is achievable without additional resource requirements (besides building a farm for more plants^^).

=> You need more plants, but not more resources to work duplicant-free.

(The plants need no resources in the 4 cycles after they became harvest ready.)

 

(3. Could you set the default value for the duplicants with "bottomless stomach" to "0".)

All great points. Will update. 

In regards to point two, have you seen a farm functioning in this way? I was doing some testing with bristle blossom. You would have to  cut the water manually correct? Otherwise the plants will keep drinking. 

In this case, all the plants would have to be synchronized, otherwise cutting the water would stop others from growing that weren't yet in the 4 cycle pause. 

This, combined with the resetting of the 4 day count on save/load leaves automated farms that don't consume resources during the 4 cycle pause only theoretically possible correct? Practically is it actually done?
 

[Lilalaunekuh]

9 minutes ago, TunderLock said:

In regards to point two, have you seen a farm functioning in this way? I was doing some testing with bristle blossom. You would have to  cut the water manually correct? Otherwise the plants will keep drinking. 

I tinker with my existing 240 bristle berry farm to achieve input flow based lighting and no water loss while auto-harvest happens.

My current ideas:

Spoiler

- Using an manual shut off to control the flow before my farm works but isn´t a real option xD

- I don´t like long buffer changes to build clock >1 cycle.

=> Why not use a fixed input to feed my plants ?

- I have 40 plants in a row with some pipes that need to fill before the lights are started (to cool the farm with the input water)

=> 40 (plants) * 20 kg ((water/cycle)/plant) * 6 (cycles) = 4800kg water

So if I attach one liquid reservoir to one row of my farm it works for one grow season.

 

At the moment I need a way that "feels right to me" to know when the plants have been harvested.

- Buffer gates ?  ...

- Liquid clock ? Not if I can prevent it^^ (/ Hard to keep in sync with the plants afer save/reload cycles.)

- Power consumption of the sweeper arms and conveyor loaders ? I like this idea ...

...

Open for input

=> With fixed input (not my goal) and a batch system to process one liquid reservoir I am able to farm with a little water overhead.

 

Only problem is to automated the start of the next batch beyond save/reload cycles.

[Saturnus]

Please make it possible to input decimal numbers of dupes. For example, I might have room or water for 28 bristle blossom. Now I know that's 9.333(3) dupes with stuffed berries but with your calculator it's not currently possible to reverse engineer from a stand point of knowing what you have resources for and then find out how many dupes that'll feed.

It'll probably require a separate tab so you can either calculate by how many kcals you need and find out what resource you need as it does now, and then a separate tab where you input the resources you have and the output will be how many kcal you can make with that.

EDIT: It might also be a good idea to insert a disclaimer in the calculator. For all dupe harvested plants the calculation is only accurate if the plant is harvested the very instant it's ready to harvest. Even waiting half a cycle before the harvest actually gets done due to priorities and travel time can have quite dramatically different results, especially for plants with short growth cycles. 

[Christophlette]

Love your tool. It's awesome.

Two improvements I see to make it the ultimate tool. Here is a screenshot : 

First improvement : Maybe make a summary of all resources consumed at the bottom of the tool. Here we can see that dirt has 3 different entries, making it difficult (not that much I agree) to know how much dirt you will consume per cycle. (Here it is 165kg of dirt)

Second improvement is maybe display a checkbox next to each plant. Because in this case I would want to optimize dirt consumption. So I would want to use fertilizer on wheat but not on pepper plants.

It's an amazing tool for planning. You can already do the things I mentionned by ticking checkboxes on and off and it's very nice already !

[natanstarke]

Man thank you for that super cool tool!  I think its cool enough to even be in the game itself! . Now things i think we could add is a sorta off mixed bag of foods, for example i want to feed my colony with mush, barbeque and frost, would be fun, its already possible to do it moving the dupe count, maybe just add more dupe count selection boxes then i can select like, 5 dupes with mush, 5 with other food and so on. thanks again!