Too much food

[GoHereDoThis]

I got issues with food in my last few colonies so this time, I think I went too far the other way.  16 dupes, 1.6M calories available.  I got lots from stone hatches and pacu, but I still have some fried mushrooms in the fridge from earlier food options.  I can make lots of surf n turf now with my hatches and pacu, but I don't really want to reduce my hatch population as I need them for coal production too.

What do you guys do with excess food?  Do you just calculate what you need and produce that much?

[crypticorb]

1.6 million kCal?

For 16 dupes, that's about 100 cycles buffer, assuming you have an infinite food storage set up and none of it goes bad, and you don't have any bottomless stomachs or stressed binge eaters.

Long term (1000+ cycles and beyond) you will want to set up a permanent food source that requires the least amount of dupe time, such as shove voles or wild pip-planted farms. You can use  https://oni-assistant.com/tools/foodcalculator to calculate exactly what you will need and how much of each raw resource required to produce the amount of food for any amount of duplicant.

My current colony has about 20.5 million kCal of stored food, and I'm not planning on slowing down production any time soon. Having a surplus is a VERY good thing, because when something goes wrong you will want to be able to survive until you can find the problem and fix it, which can sometimes be tens of cycles delayed.

[SharraShimada]

Put excess meat somewhere safe on the floor and let it rot. Then move it to compost, make dirt, and use this for other things. 

[yoakenashi]

17 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

when something goes wrong you will want to be able to survive until you can find the problem and fix it, which can sometimes be tens of cycles delayed.

I agree. Anytime I have a surplus of food, I store it in a CO2 ration box and wall it up. I save this as a just in case food store. Walking it up instead of using a door removes it from your kcal total. 

[crypticorb]

34 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

I agree. Anytime I have a surplus of food, I store it in a CO2 ration box and wall it up. I save this as a just in case food store. Walking it up instead of using a door removes it from your kcal total. 

You could also have autosweepers ship everything cooked by your grills into a 1x1 box of chlorine, and use the corner trick to allow dupes to access the food as they need it. I have all 20 million kCal of food in one spot because of this, works perfectly.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

Put excess meat somewhere safe on the floor and let it rot. Then move it to compost, make dirt, and use this for other things. 

Meat is one of the better foods already.  You also don't need to let it rot before you can compost it, and dirt is unlimited these days with arbor trees.  Not worth throwing away meat for a few extra kgs of the stuff, and then the only thing you can use it to grow that is better than meat is sleet wheat, which doesn't need much.

[KILLABUDZ]

8 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

What do you guys do with excess food?

Feed more labor.

[suxkar]

Since I'm switching to wild pepperbread, the 60 molten slicksters I have will feed radiant bugs with barbecue  each one eats like 4 dupes and basically does nothing in return, so it's a huge waste, but who cares! They will clean up my reserves.

 

 

[GoHereDoThis]

So just store it?  But the problem will only get worse as I max out my stone hatch ranches and they lay more and more eggs which turn into more and more meat.  I'm not sure I want to spend electricity keeping all of the meat refrigerated and even with that all-meat-in-one-tile hack, it'll just keep piling on, really.

[psusi]

33 minutes ago, GoHereDoThis said:

So just store it?  But the problem will only get worse as I max out my stone hatch ranches and they lay more and more eggs which turn into more and more meat.  I'm not sure I want to spend electricity keeping all of the meat refrigerated and even with that all-meat-in-one-tile hack, it'll just keep piling on, really.

Who uses refrigerators?  You just dig a pit to put a ration box in and let it fill with CO2.

[Angpaur]

5 hours ago, psusi said:

Who uses refrigerators?  You just dig a pit to put a ration box in and let it fill with CO2.

And why not placing there 2 unpowered refrigerators, instead of the ration box?

[Glassyfo]

58 minutes ago, Angpaur said:

And why not placing there 2 unpowered refrigerators, instead of the ration box?

This. It doesn't look it but a ration box takes up four tiles of space.

[psusi]

5 hours ago, Angpaur said:

And why not placing there 2 unpowered refrigerators, instead of the ration box?

Hrm... I guess you could leave it unpowered.  It only holds 100kg instead of 150 but I suppose you can fit 2 in the same space so you end up with 200kg of storage.  I'll have to do that.