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Sure you can feed your dupes with wild plants, and even cook decent meals from it. The problem ist, the further you progress, the more probable you destroy your food sources in the wild by accident. To hot, wrong gas, flooded... It happens all the time. 

You cant rely on that forever.

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Food supply is meant to be an early game problem that later evolves into a commodity to provide the highest quality food with the least amount of labour.

 

However, there is a very good point to be made that food can be stored indefinitely by storing it in any gas that isn't oxygen. Food preservation is just too easy which cuts out an interesting mechanic where you could balance your production and consumption to avoid spoilage of excess food.

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3 hours ago, Lacost said:

However, there is a very good point to be made that food can be stored indefinitely by storing it in any gas that isn't oxygen. 

As long as you're also counting "Polluted Oxygen" as "Oxygen."  Polluted oxygen will make your food decay much faster than oxygen, but most other gasses preserve food.   This works in the real world as well -- which is why potato chip bags are shipped full of nitrogen.

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Playing on higher difficulties increases the food demand. You can do that if you want a challenge. Also 9 dupes is not a lot. Those could easily live off the land. Try sustaining 20.

As for farming you can farm plants for other things. Reed fiber for clothers. Balm lilly for medicine. Or mealwood to feed dreckos (they eat the plant not the fruit so keep them in the same room).

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1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

This works in the real world as well -- which is why potato chip bags are shipped full of nitrogen.

Oxygen free gases can't prevent food spoilage in the real world. The only thing they do is prevent oxidation (potato chips don't get rancid) but that's it for the most part. Most enzymes and a good portion of spoilage microorganisms don't rely on oxygen. For instance, canned foodstuffs are mostly filled with normal air because the oxygen isn't really doing that much. Filling a package with oxygen free gases is not a crucial part in food preservation but is simply one of these little steps to optimize food quality.

 

You could compare this to light which can cause some off flavours in beer (good beer is always in dark bottles). Stating that darkness can prevent spoilage in the real world is equally wrong as stating that oxygen free gases can prevent spoilage. Technically they can prevent certain types of spoilage but can't prevent the really big causes that turn the foodstuff completely inedible.

 

This is why it doesn't make any sense to have sterile atmospheres in the game.

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5 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Sure you can feed your dupes with wild plants, and even cook decent meals from it. The problem ist, the further you progress, the more probable you destroy your food sources in the wild by accident. To hot, wrong gas, flooded... It happens all the time. 

You cant rely on that forever.

Pretty much wrong. I feed 12 dupes from wild-grown plants using pepper bread. With some care, that is infinitely sustainable.

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storing grains in nitrogen or carbon dioxide also allows them to keep for decades. Mostly because pests (beetles, moths, ...) need oxygen to survive, like us. Nitrogen is completely inert, so actually a better choice, but there are plenty of examples for using carbon dioxide.

You wouldn't store grains in chlorine gas, which is definitely non-inert. The grain would become both rancid and poisonous.

More commonly, any (un-cracked) grains in your pantry are probably covered in pesticides. Which is why we usually wash them so thoroughly.

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On 5/18/2019 at 1:05 PM, Lacost said:

Oxygen free gases can't prevent food spoilage in the real world. The only thing they do is prevent oxidation (potato chips don't get rancid) but that's it for the most part. Most enzymes and a good portion of spoilage microorganisms don't rely on oxygen. For instance, canned foodstuffs are mostly filled with normal air because the oxygen isn't really doing that much. Filling a package with oxygen free gases is not a crucial part in food preservation but is simply one of these little steps to optimize food quality.

 

You could compare this to light which can cause some off flavours in beer (good beer is always in dark bottles). Stating that darkness can prevent spoilage in the real world is equally wrong as stating that oxygen free gases can prevent spoilage. Technically they can prevent certain types of spoilage but can't prevent the really big causes that turn the foodstuff completely inedible.

 

This is why it doesn't make any sense to have sterile atmospheres in the game.

I was under the impression they spoil in real life even in a vacuum because the foods themselves contain trace amounts of oxygen.

However, a non-oxygen based plant that can grow in a non-oxygen based atmosphere may not function the same.

 

For all we know these alien plants could be more like peanut butter, which may last a very very long time in a vacuum, and even if it did rancify would still be edible for even longer.

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Can't you just dump all food into a bottomless pit of CO2, with a weight plate at the bottom, when enough food has amassed, divert the output to drop excess food into a rotting pile, which composts down to dirt, which isn't a bad thing, as dirt is a limited supply; you only have a few thousand tons!

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