Why are Nosh Beans so terrible?

[CannedSmeef]

First off, THANK YOU for adding a recipe for Nosh Beans that can be created early on, more variety in food is better.

But with that being said, these beans are horridly inefficient sources of food.  35kg of polluted water per cycle + 1kg phosphorite, with a growth time of 21 cycles.  We are already looking at 735kg of polluted water for just one harvest of 12 nosh beans.  Are they at least packed with calories?  As far as I can tell, nope.  It takes 6 beans to produce just 1,200 kcal of Tofu at the microbe musher.  Oh and you still need another 50kg of pure water per Tofu bar.  This means you're getting about 2,400 kcal per harvest minus another 100kg of water.

Just to put this into perspective, Sleet Wheat offers 18 grains when harvested, which equates to 6 frost buns or 7,200 kcal.  It also consumes just 20kg of water per cycle + 5kg of dirt per cycle, being harvestable after 18 cycles.  That's less than half the water (clear water i know) for 3 times the food.

Klei, I beg you, please make the Nosh Bean not horrendous.  I suggest making the bean grow much, much faster, being harvestable in 7 cycles.  It would consume more liquid overall than the sleet wheat, but it would be an alternative to using clean water.  Or just make the plant yield 3 times the beans, both would work.  They'd be about on par with sleet wheat at that point.

[Promethien]

Oh this has been noticed. As it stands they will see zero use outside of wild growing and I doubt most people will bother to keep them in their temp range as even that isn't really worth the effort for how little they give.

 

[bmilohill]

13 hours ago, CannedSmeef said:

Klei, I beg you, please make the Nosh Bean not horrendous. 

I'm sure there are several different opinions on this subject, but my take is beans being horrendous is a good thing. 

There is a lot of talk of balance between tech choices in these forums - ranching vs farming vs machines. Best ways to cool the base. Best food. Best CO2 deletion. But that should not mean that the less efficient choices need a buff. 

There are so many competitive multiplayer games out there right now that are getting CONSTANT balance patching to keep the game community happy (compare Overwatch's 14 patches this year to Starcraft:Broodwar's 7 patches in the first 3 years of the game) and it makes sense to do so for those games in the current gaming environment. 

And in ONI, Klei has given us a high number of patches - to add content and fix bugs. And so the high number of patches plus the bleed over notion of balance from other games makes it feel like all tech choices need to be good. There is another similar thread right now about how useless wild farming is (wild farming isn't farming - it's hunter/gathering. It should be bad). 

Don't get me wrong - I think all tech choices should be viable. I think if you want to survive only ranching, you should be able to. If you want to be able to keep you base cool using only one of the 12 different ways to cool a base, you should be able to. If you want 3 dupes to live to cycle 200 eating only nosh beans, you should be able to. This does not mean that eating only beans should be just as good as eating only wheat. 

Sorry for the rant. I agree with your evaluation that beans are bad, compared to other food. I disagree with the sentiment that it is a problem. 

[CannedSmeef]

37 minutes ago, bmilohill said:

I'm sure there are several different opinions on this subject, but my take is beans being horrendous is a good thing. 

There is a lot of talk of balance between tech choices in these forums - ranching vs farming vs machines. Best ways to cool the base. Best food. Best CO2 deletion. But that should not mean that the less efficient choices need a buff. 

There are so many competitive multiplayer games out there right now that are getting CONSTANT balance patching to keep the game community happy (compare Overwatch's 14 patches this year to Starcraft:Broodwar's 7 patches in the first 3 years of the game) and it makes sense to do so for those games in the current gaming environment. 

And in ONI, Klei has given us a high number of patches - to add content and fix bugs. And so the high number of patches plus the bleed over notion of balance from other games makes it feel like all tech choices need to be good. There is another similar thread right now about how useless wild farming is (wild farming isn't farming - it's hunter/gathering. It should be bad). 

Don't get me wrong - I think all tech choices should be viable. I think if you want to survive only ranching, you should be able to. If you want to be able to keep you base cool using only one of the 12 different ways to cool a base, you should be able to. If you want 3 dupes to live to cycle 200 eating only nosh beans, you should be able to. This does not mean that eating only beans should be just as good as eating only wheat. 

Sorry for the rant. I agree with your evaluation that beans are bad, compared to other food. I disagree with the sentiment that it is a problem. 

Interesting perspective, but the issue here is that beans are irredeemably inefficient.  You're getting about 1/6 of the food for the same amount of liquid.  Why would you ever domesticate these beans?  You can't rely on them being wild because they take 84 cycles to grow undomesticated, so they hold practically no value in choice of food.  I don't need beans to be exactly as good as sleet wheat, I need beans to be even the slightest bit worth it.  I'm a broken record I know, but these Nosh Beans are extremely wasteful to the point where they're not even viable as an intentional challenge.  Where are you going to get a stable supply of polluted water to cultivate enough beans to feed your colony?  The beans make a measly 114 kcal a cycle, so you're going to need about 8.7 domesticated nosh bean plants to feed a single duplicant.

So if I want to keep my starting colony of 3 fed off of nosh beans, I will need about 26 domesticated Nosh Beans, or 910 kg of polluted water PER CYCLE.

Or I could just grow sleet wheat.

[metallichydra]

what other recipes can beans be used in?

and how much morale does eating a tofu give?

[CannedSmeef]

1 minute ago, metallichydra said:

what other recipes can beans be used in?

and how much morale does eating a tofu give?

As far as I know, the beans can also be used to make spicy tofu, which takes all 12 from a harvest for 4000kcal plus pepper nuts.  So not much better still.  Regular Tofu is +2, Spicy Tofu is +5.

[bmilohill]

Sorry for not having the game open, but I'm curious - at one point you stated you need 6 beans for 1,200 kcal of tofu, but elsewhere you stated it takes all 12 from a harvest for the spicy tofu. A different thread stated that spicy tofu requires 1,200kcal of tofu + 1 nut. So which is it? 6 beans or 12, for 4000kcal spicy tofu?

IF it is 6 beans, that means you need 7.875 spouts and 1.5 peppers to maintain 3 dupes. So you are looking at only 275.625 kg pwater/cycle (plus the pepper's 52.5 kg pwater) for beans vs the 150kg of water/cycle (plus peppers) for wheat. 

Still worse, but not six times worse, not even twice as worse. And even if it is 12 beans needed, that still only means beans are about 3 times worse. Which is bad, but still viable. And certainly worth it if you goal is to have a base with a variety of food rather than a single staple. And it adds a bit of realism, since beans do take a stupidly high amount of water to grow IRL. 

[CannedSmeef]

46 minutes ago, bmilohill said:

Sorry for not having the game open, but I'm curious - at one point you stated you need 6 beans for 1,200 kcal of tofu, but elsewhere you stated it takes all 12 from a harvest for the spicy tofu. A different thread stated that spicy tofu requires 1,200kcal of tofu + 1 nut. So which is it? 6 beans or 12, for 4000kcal spicy tofu?

IF it is 6 beans, that means you need 7.875 spouts and 1.5 peppers to maintain 3 dupes. So you are looking at only 275.625 kg pwater/cycle (plus the pepper's 52.5 kg pwater) for beans vs the 150kg of water/cycle (plus peppers) for wheat. 

Still worse, but not six times worse, not even twice as worse. And even if it is 12 beans needed, that still only means beans are about 3 times worse. Which is bad, but still viable. And certainly worth it if you goal is to have a base with a variety of food rather than a single staple. And it adds a bit of realism, since beans do take a stupidly high amount of water to grow IRL. 

If the recipe is just 6 beans for spicy tofu, then fine.  I'm okay with that output.  But that doesn't change plain tofu being 6 times worse than frost buns, it's absurd.

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, bmilohill said:

Sorry for not having the game open, but I'm curious - at one point you stated you need 6 beans for 1,200 kcal of tofu, but elsewhere you stated it takes all 12 from a harvest for the spicy tofu. A different thread stated that spicy tofu requires 1,200kcal of tofu + 1 nut. So which is it? 6 beans or 12, for 4000kcal spicy tofu?

I believe now there are 2 recipies:
6 beans +50kg of water for small tofu at the microbe musher for +2 quality 1200kcal (comparable to the berry sludge)
12 beans and 1 pincha peppernut for big tofu at the gourmet cooking station for +5 quality 4000kcal

[wronny]

 

• Tofu, 1200kcal; 6x Nosh Bean + 50kg Water; Standard Quality [+2]; Microbe Musher
• Spicy Tofu, 4000kcal; 1x Pincha Peppernut + 1200 kcal Tofu; Superb Quality [+5]; Gas Range

[nakomaru]

Wheat was, it seems, intentionally left out as the only plant that cannot be replanted wild. Some maps must go to space to find them. It makes a little sense for them to be more powerful. Even still, beans are very weak.. you can't even support 3 dupes with this many tiles:

[chemie]

lettuce is arguably worse than beans

[PhailRaptor]

3 hours ago, chemie said:

lettuce is arguably worse than beans

Only since the addition of Bleach Stone for fertilizer.  This makes Waterweed dependent on not only having multiple Chlorine Geysers (their output is a joke), but also ranching a high population of Squeaky Pufts (themselves ridiculously inefficient) to sustain the Waterweeds.  For a food crop that is very low on the Morale scale.

Before Bleach Stone, they were an early game rung on the ladder to stability.  After Bleach Stone, they are an early game product dependent on late game mechanics to function effectively.

[Grimgaw]

1 minute ago, PhailRaptor said:

Only since the addition of Bleach Stone for fertilizer.  This makes Waterweed dependent on not only having multiple Chlorine Geysers (their output is a joke), but also ranching a high population of Squeaky Pufts (themselves ridiculously inefficient) to sustain the Waterweeds.

How many weeds are you farming? One Chlorine geyser can support 12 Pufts, one Puft supports 10 plants.

[Promethien]

Updated my numbers comparison post on wheat vs beans. Still double the water cost of wheat but it was quadruple before so we have had some improvement. Still nowhere near good enough I think.

[chemie]

1 hour ago, PhailRaptor said:

Only since the addition of Bleach Stone for fertilizer.  This makes Waterweed dependent on not only having multiple Chlorine Geysers (their output is a joke), but also ranching a high population of Squeaky Pufts (themselves ridiculously inefficient) to sustain the Waterweeds.  For a food crop that is very low on the Morale scale.

Before Bleach Stone, they were an early game rung on the ladder to stability.  After Bleach Stone, they are an early game product dependent on late game mechanics to function effectively.

end game, there are a ton of better options so I do not even see a fit there for lettuce

[PhailRaptor]

3 minutes ago, chemie said:

end game, there are a ton of better options so I do not even see a fit there for lettuce

That's why I classified it as an "early game product".  Being dependent on late game mechanics renders it pointless.

[BaloneyOs]

Probably caused by:

1. When sieve would always output at 40C cool water much more valuable. Costing more polluted water made more sense because it was much more costly to sieve and chill water than to use polluted water straight up.

2. Infinite shelf life rendered trivial by CO2 food storage. Pickled meal kinda has this same problem. However if you nerf CO2 food storage then you also further "nerf" lettuce by severely punishing overproduction.

Only real strength I can think of is that for wild beans its main biome can't ever melt so it's less susceptible environmental accidents, and is still preserved in any gas environment. Plenty of room for other small buffs.

[metallichydra]

it might be easier to just supply with polluted water and phosphorite, than dirt, since it is (i think) easier to get a renewable source of phosphorite than dirt.

[Nebbie]

3 hours ago, metallichydra said:

it might be easier to just supply with polluted water and phosphorite, than dirt, since it is (i think) easier to get a renewable source of phosphorite than dirt.

Dirt comes a fair bit from polluted water anyways, and renewable phosphorite is dreckos, which for a while will be on mealwood for glossy, which means dirt, which comes from polluted water. Ultimately, all of the inputs for pepperbread and spicy tofu can be satisfied with polluted water and filtration medium and some processing, and if you do it that way, then the numbers work out in favor of spicy tofu (ignoring the dirt from making that 50kg water, spicy tofu is over 4 kcal/kg polluted water, while pepperbread is around 2.5).

However, pepperbread is only a problem on dirt, because conversion of polluted water to dirt is really poor. If you've got sufficient compostables to deal with dirt, then things shift massively in favor of growing sleet wheat, as pepperbread boasts nearly 15 kcal/kg [polluted] water, vs. barely over 8 for spicy tofu.

It's actually quite interesting that it's so large in each direction, clearly meaning that there's meant to be a difference of which one you want based on dirt availability. However, if dirt production really is a problem, you could just do stuffed berry, which will use way less [polluted] water as well.

[Rhogar]

There are more difficult asteroids.  That means we may have to deal with worse morale food that is harder to grow.

[Coolthulhu]

On 7/10/2019 at 7:12 PM, nakomaru said:

Wheat was, it seems, intentionally left out as the only plant that cannot be replanted wild.

Not necessarily intentionally: sleet wheat lacks the seed tag, which changes its item classification from seed to cooking ingredient. It looks too weird to be an intentional special case against wild planting, I'd expect it to be tied to the fact that wheat is supposed to rot and be stored in fridges, unlike all other seeds.

[nakomaru]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Not necessarily intentionally: sleet wheat lacks the seed tag, which changes its item classification from seed to cooking ingredient. It looks too weird to be an intentional special case against wild planting, I'd expect it to be tied to the fact that wheat is supposed to rot and be stored in fridges, unlike all other seeds.

I thought this too, but nosh beans share the seed/ingredient duality. Since beans can be wild planted, I figure the exception is on purpose.

[Troxism]

Dirt production/requirement for Sleet Wheat is a moot point since Ethanol production produces an absolutely stupid amount of polluted dirt, plus if you have the forest biome, it has a stupid amount of dirt in general, plus even before this version you could cook algae/slime from space in large quantities to supply even large sleet farms with zero labour (ie no compost flipping) since astronauts don't require any life support (I used to run a 80 sleet wheat farm in QOL MK III this way). Also Sleet Wheat is there on every single map, since the Ice Planet at 40,000km is a 100% spawn (was before, still seems to be post update). Although to be fair, when you you get to space, Shove Vole BBQ is a cheaper food source once you have your sweepers setup for regolith.

Also the fact that you have to 'cook' Nosh Beans twice to make them even remotely calorie efficient, AND have to waste time delivering water bottles (a process that cannot be automated away completely) for the first part of the recipe makes it pretty labour intensive, which isn't great. And ofc the fact that they use over twice the water of wheat (the water for peppernut is irrelevant as it's the same value per kcal for both). Also the fact that the only way to make enough polluted water for a large bean farm (Showers/Toilets/Sinks would be a drop in the proverbial bucket) would be either to have polluted/slush geysers on your map, or to consume a whole bunch of CO2 into Carbon Skimmers which comes at an opportunity cost as well. They aren't totally non viable anymore like they were in the original preview release, but they could still use some help.

Also honestly, regardless of any balancing, I dislike how similar they currently are to Sleet Wheat in general. I don't see the point of having two plants that are very similar (both need radiator based cooling/like very cold temps, both use water in large amounts with a minor amount of fertilizer, both are ideally cooked with peppernut in the Gas Stove to give morale 5 food, both have +2 morale versions that are simple, although regular tofu has trash water efficiency atm) with the only differences being pretty minor in practice (phosphorite vs dirt is kind of a moot point in most cases as you have tons of both to 'start with' anyways and there are easy ways to sustain both in the current version, and clean vs polluted water is again sort of similar). It just means one is always better then the other, and if the reasoning is to have a 'backup' on asteroids that lack one or the other, then maybe the better solution to that would be allow them from the printing pod and then make them actually unique in some meaningful way.

Edit: For that matter it bugs me that Trees/Peppernut/Nosh Beans all use exactly the same irrigation/fertilization. Probably a case of copy pasted stats, but still. It would make sense for there to be changes in this area, even if just in terms of quantities.

[goboking]

8 hours ago, Troxism said:

Also honestly, regardless of any balancing, I dislike how similar they currently are to Sleet Wheat in general. I don't see the point of having two plants that are very similar

Agreed.

8 hours ago, Troxism said:

For that matter it bugs me that Trees/Peppernut/Nosh Beans all use exactly the same irrigation/fertilization.

Agreed again.