Cost of crops in dupe labor time

[DarkMaster13]

There are useful sources for the resources needed for the various food types in the game, but nothing relating to the labor costs of them.  So I made my own spreadsheet trying to roughly estimate how much each food source costs in dupe labor to feed your colony.  This is only looking at foods that are made exclusively with crops.  Also not including pickled meal, since it doesn't change the Kcal of the meal lice, just gives it a longer shelf life.

Firstly, for those who don't know it takes 10 seconds for a skill 0 dupe to harvest a plant and 45 seconds for a skill 0 dupe to cook a meal.  Extra time has been added to each of these to try and account for travel times for the jobs.  Second, while each increase in agriculture and cooking skill gives a work speed increase of 5%, which means at skill 20 it takes them half the time to finish the job, the information here assumes that all jobs are done with skill 0 dupes.  That said, it is worth noting that no dupe will ever be able to cook on a grill or oven without at least +2 cooking skill and over time everything will get more efficient as your dupes gain athletics skill. 

Plants that require fertilization will have a dupe come by every 3 cycles to deliver 3 cycles worth of fertilization to the plant.  It only takes the dupe a couple seconds to pick up and drop off the fertilization, but usually there's some travel time involved and dupes will pick up enough to fertilize several plants at once so it's estimated to have an average time of 7 seconds per fertilization.  We will also be assuming that any plant that requires irrigation will be inside a hydroponics farm, so it doesn't have to be fertilized twice.  The longer it takes between harvests, the less labor dupes need to spend on harvesting the plants and moving the crop to and from storage or the kitchen. 

The total labor time is the sum of the time it takes to harvest the plant, fertilize the plants, and cook the plants, calculated in seconds / 1000 Kcals.

Spreadsheet with data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y4I1GvFLBzCMGHsXjA-wddyxH5QXh2UhAR-8iOzoBRA/edit?usp=sharing

The clear winner right away is raw bristle berry.  That's because it's the only item here that requires no fertilization.  Once it's in hydroponics, the only thing dupes need to do is harvest it.  Lettuce also does surprisingly well, considering on the surface it looks like it would be a very demanding crop.  However waterweed actually consumes very little water and bleach stone for its Kcal, the only real downsides being a short shelf life and taking up a lot of storage space.  Berry sludge is the only cooked food that actually beats out a raw food for labor costs, which is mushrooms (also the most expensive raw food to grow in labor costs).  Otherwise cooking food always costs more labor than not cooking, though it also almost always costs less resources to use cooked food instead of raw food and always gives better morale.

[Promethien]

Fertilization can be done by a sweeper.

[DarkMaster13]

36 minutes ago, Promethien said:

Fertilization can be done by a sweeper.

Yes, you turn the labor cost into a power cost instead.  You can also make the plants completely labor free by waiting an extra 4 cycles between harvests and letting the plant drop it's crop on its own, if you're willing to pay extra resources.  However that requires the mechatronics engineering skill and by the time you have that the value of dupe labor changes dramatically.  It's also pretty far on in the game, past the point where experienced players would be concerned with food types and new players probably won't use auto-sweepers at all.

This guide is most useful early on and might be something worth adding to other guides or the assistant.

[Chthonicone]

1 hour ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Yes, you turn the labor cost into a power cost instead.  You can also make the plants completely labor free by waiting an extra 4 cycles between harvests and letting the plant drop it's crop on its own, if you're willing to pay extra resources.  However that requires the mechatronics engineering skill and by the time you have that the value of dupe labor changes dramatically.  It's also pretty far on in the game, past the point where experienced players would be concerned with food types and new players probably won't use auto-sweepers at all.

This guide is most useful early on and might be something worth adding to other guides or the assistant.

I can get mechatronics going in the first 70 cycles usually, sometimes as early as 50 cycles.

I've always liked bristle berries mind you, but you missed a food on this chart: Pickled Lice. How does that compare? It's very calorie dense allowing dupes to eat it faster, and works on the faster grill. It also is the only exception that "cooked food is better quality" with it being tied in quality to it's source. It also has a longer shelf life.

Btw,  yes, Dupes eat faster when they eat smaller calorie rich portions. With high quality food, my dupes often have time after eating and going to the bathroom to spend some time in a rec room. Never happens with lower quality foods.

[Promethien]

Mechatronics is hardly late game. My last game I had sweepers before I even had an oil well tapped. Though I did dig up a bunch of lead all that did was save me effort at the crusher. 

[fox_kirya]

Spoiler

W/o debug or sandbox. 12 dupes are being fed with neither labour nor resources spent, except cooking ofc.

 

Great thanks for your spreadsheet!

[Chthonicone]

4 minutes ago, fox_kirya said:

  Hide contents

W/o debug or sandbox. 12 dupes are being fed with neither labour nor resources spent, except cooking ofc.

 

Great thanks for your spreadsheet!

I could have gotten a lot more sleet wheat per sweeper, though having such a large natural area dug out like that is difficult. Did you use shove voles?

[fox_kirya]

17 minutes ago, Chthonicone said:

having such a large natural area dug out like that is difficult

It's not difficult, it's long. I'm on 800+ cycle now and still don't have a rocket built. Playing contemplating. =)

17 minutes ago, Chthonicone said:

shove voles?

Shove Voles and boiled Algae. 

EDIT: and buildable dirt tile mod. xD Using Shove Voles is cool but even I am not such a contemplater...

[Chthonicone]

_________
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W_______W
D___S___D
_W__S__W_
WD__S__DW
D_______D
WWWWWWWWWW
DDDDDDDDD

Why not an area of wheat like this? Probably can get this built in a much smaller area. My illustration is probably off a bit, and  you likely can get more in per sweeper.

[fox_kirya]

4 minutes ago, Chthonicone said:

Why not an area of wheat like this?

Because

1) I didn't try to optimize the "sweepers per wheat" ratio yet and therefore

2) I don't see a profit of this optimization.

If the farm becomes smaller - then ok. If a profit is just number of sweepers - then why. Sorry, it's hard for me to understand your illustration...

[Chthonicone]

Just now, fox_kirya said:

Because

1) I didn't try to optimize the "sweepers per wheat" ratio yet and therefore

2) I don't see a profit of this optimization.

If the farm becomes smaller - then ok. If a profit is just number of sweepers - then why. Sorry, it's hard for me to understand your illustration...

Currently you have about 6 wheat being harvested by each sweeper. To feed your 12 dupes, you have an area that is huge. I'm just suggesting you can maximize the number of wheat per sweeper and reduce the total size of that area. This give you more room for whatever you want.

[fox_kirya]

21 minutes ago, Chthonicone said:

My illustration

Correct? If so, you can't plant plants so tightly using Pips. The idea was to have "free food", without using any water/dirt/labour.

But I'm absolutely agreed it's a very area-hungry setup. =) Now, IMO, it's worth it for me.

[Chthonicone]

49 minutes ago, fox_kirya said:

Correct? If so, you can't plant plants so tightly using Pips. The idea was to have "free food", without using any water/dirt/labour.

But I'm absolutely agreed it's a very area-hungry setup. =) Now, IMO, it's worth it for me.

Oh, but if each planting was in a box that size, and then you removed the walls of the box, you could do it. Also, as I said, I think you can do more than that, but I'd have to be in game to view the sight range to get it right.

[Juggzor]

2 hours ago, fox_kirya said:

  Reveal hidden contents

W/o debug or sandbox. 12 dupes are being fed with neither labour nor resources spent, except cooking ofc.

 

Great thanks for your spreadsheet!

You're using 1 extra space vertically.

See section 3 of this thread:

Quote

 

 

[Foefaller]

I'm glad for this chart. I recently had a discussion with a friend about why I bother with farming when he just use ranches of hatches and/or pips almost exclusively and lives on omelettes with almost no resource input.

Now I can point to this and say, "because I can feed a base of about 40+ dupes with just one guy whose only job is to harvest bristle blossoms all day, that's why."

[DarkMaster13]

If you're on a sandstone start, it's a great idea to plant as many Bristles as you can around the printer pod as soon as you have hydroponics just for the labor savings.  Don't bother cooking them.

[0xFADE]

10 hours ago, Chthonicone said:

Btw,  yes, Dupes eat faster when they eat smaller calorie rich portions. With high quality food, my dupes often have time after eating and going to the bathroom to spend some time in a rec room. Never happens with lower quality foods.

That is a nice detail. I wonder what the time trade is between cooking and dupe eating time. 

It looks like ranching wins in the end? Fish farms are a zero labor thing except for collecting the filet.  And with meat producers you are also getting a product out of them. Like oil, slime, etc in addition to the at the end.  Don’t forget about the lime. 

[Segato]

Now, the best question would be @DarkMaster13

Whats your favorite Food in general?

Whats the best food in Arboria? (You didnt included the beans in your chart)

[DarkMaster13]

4 minutes ago, Segato said:

Now, the best question would be @DarkMaster13

Whats your favorite Food in general?

Whats the best food in Arboria? (You didnt included the beans in your chart)

Pepper bread?

Yes they are, tofu and spicy tofu.  You have to cook sleet wheat grains and nosh beans to eat them.

[Segato]

1 minute ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Pepper bread?

Do you farm the sleet wheat or pick it up from around the map?

Is hard for me to not freeze the water when farming it.

[zOldBulldog]

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I've always insisted on going straight to bristle farms because I knew they saved huge amounts of dupe labour in the early game. It is nice to see that not only was I right in doing so but they are far superior to anything else you can possibly grow early game.

I did really well one time when I went to Bristle Berries very early in the game and cooked them into Gristle Berries.

But I absolutely hate the time pressure they cause because you then have to find and cool water much sooner than I feel comfortable with and leading to messy choices.   I much prefer to build slowly and in an orderly fashion.  I love the game, but the constant time pressure to get one resource or another is very irritating.

[DarkMaster13]

1 hour ago, Segato said:

Do you farm the sleet wheat or pick it up from around the map?

Is hard for me to not freeze the water when farming it.

Like this.  All but the right most bin are filled with 200 kg of ice and are regularly refilled whenever they melt.  The rightmost bin is ice at max capacity, refilled when it gets low and is used to supply the other bins.  Warm water is added to the system when the overall level gets too low.  Note this is an older setup, my current one has the water pump in the far left side with more ice bins filling up the whole bottom.  I don't use an air pump to remove the CO2 and let it flow out with airflow tiles.

[Chthonicone]

4 hours ago, Juggzor said:

You're using 1 extra space vertically.

See section 3 of this thread:

 

You know, I didn't even think about the restrictions on pips. Now i see why you made it so large. Well almost, the height between sets is a bit of a mystery to me. 4 high is all you'd need going from top to bottom.

One other thing you might not have realized. Pips can plant in stone and metals too. Not that you'd want to plant in metals, but stone definitely. I've gotten them to plant in stone up to Very Firm (80) Granite so far. Have not tested firmer stone like Obsidian or Abyssalite yet.