To food problem or not?

[The Plum Gate]

I've been running into an issue where dupes will disregard the lower end foods even when their morale is quite high. To the point - they could eat the grizly foods and not stress out. They seem to go for the highest quality available regardless of how content they already are.

I know I could enforce a certain food for them, etc.

The issue I'm considering using to solve this is to not go beyond the base skill tree until I really need to so that they finish off the muckroot, swamp shard, etc, without much fussing with categories until I have well established farming.

A question however, Do the duplicants continue to accumulate skill points and level up even if there are points available to spend? I'm thinking so, yes, because of how the skill scrubber appears to work.

[ghkbrew]

Here's my take: I always try to be making more food than my dupes eat. Given that assumption, if I'm making more high quality food than the dupes are eating, why bother making them eat the low quality stuff?

I generally use infinite food storage of one sort or another, so there is literally no downside to having a few 100kcal of pickled meal sitting around while everyone eats bbq.

I just consider it my backup food supply for when my main food source gets borked.

 

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

A question however, Do the duplicants continue to accumulate skill points and level up even if there are points available to spend?

Dupes will continue to gain experience and skill points even if they have unspent points. Late game my dupes all have a bunch of unspent points. After a everyone has maxed out their designated skill trees I just stop checking.

[The Plum Gate]

@ghkbrew, I found my biggest issue was mass storage of ingredient type things ( stuff that is a ingredient of other food, etc ). For others, ...

Just an update about the issue I was having and the non fiddly solution I found:

I found that dupes will pick up the closest food to them on their way to their mess tables. So, I can get my dupes to finally eat the lower quality stuff without fiddling with the consumables. I just need to put the lower quality food storage between their workspace paths and the mess tables. Tricky, I know, but it's been working well to get rid of the lower quality foods that take up space in my storage. Things like swampy delights, muck root and so on.

I generally set the nicer stuff in a fridge near the grill, and or near the mess hall, this has turned into a mistake. Now I put the nicesties fridge somewhere farther away from the mess hall and out of the way of traffic - I have considered moving my kitchen and storage somewhere out of the way as well ( for instance, down a 1 way in and out corridor and storing the nice foods and the far end of that room while storing the lower quality foods in the mess hall or at the beginning of the kitchen corridor ( or both ).

I can deal with stressed out / poor diets with the consumables - when it gets to the point where swampy delights or liceloaf is a morale tarnishing stress inducer, I can turn it off for the duplicant and deal with their diet and morale at that point. Naturally they will pick the nicest food out of the same storage container, so this has proven a good solution for me.

If I want an emergency store of Kcals, I can just turn the consumable off until I need it, or store them in a sterile or refrigerated environment somewhere out of the way.

I suppose the key here is to deal with morale such that their diet is sufficiently beneficial to food production - this way you aren't producing loads of uneaten food. I don't know what it is exactly, I keep a good atmosphere in my base, but food still seems to be loosing quality over time, even in continuously powered fridge.

 

[ghkbrew]

5 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

I found my biggest issue was mass storage of ingredient type things ( stuff that is a ingredient of other food, etc ).

Why is that an issue for you? Ingredients go in one pile (usually a corner-built vacuum tile) next to the stove and are delivered to it by an auto-sweeper. Finished foods are swept up and delivered by rail to a second (dupe accessible) pile.

5 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

I found that dupes will pick up the closest food to them on their way to their mess tables. So, I can get my dupes to finally eat the lower quality stuff without fiddling with the consumables.

Oh, nice find. I always assumed they went after the highest quality food they have access to.

[The Plum Gate]

3 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

Why is that an issue for you? Ingredients go in one pile (usually a corner-built vacuum tile) next to the stove and are delivered to it by an auto-sweeper. Finished foods are swept up and delivered by rail to a second (dupe accessible) pile.

Oh, nice find. I always assumed they went after the highest quality food they have access to.

I do need to get more creative with the automation - it's usually a while since I get automation and shipping working, I don't always need to worry with the original issue by that time - I'm storing everything in refrigerators and don't worry with it - basic ingredients get stored somewhere else. I usually cook in batches anyway.

[Milliways]

I have found that using a combination of infinite storage and fridges makes it a lot easier to "micromanage" what my dupes eat. I started doing it this way because I fundamentally think that infinite storage is too powerful, and I wanted to use the fridges without having to completely switch over, since I would then have to limit food production to avoid spoilage.

It is set up so that dupes can only access the the fridges in the great hall. The fridges get filled by the autosweeper, and any food dropped on the floor will be swept up by a dupe and placed in the conveyer loader. All I have to do then, if I want them to eat the remaining lice loaf or whatever, is to only allow that food type in the fridge. A few cycles later when the low quality food is all eaten I can set my fridges to accept all foods again. Problem solved.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's considerable easier than using the consumables tab, which is often quite sluggish to work with.

 

[The Plum Gate]

@Milliways,

I like that whole conveyor chute in the vac tile thing, this looks like a winner to me.

My biggest problem is getting a dupe or two leveled to the mechatronics engineer - this takes me a while, but once it's done, it's done.

Just out of curiosity, what are the motion sensors for?

[Tsabo]

1 hour ago, The Plum Gate said:

Just out of curiosity, what are the motion sensors for?

Not Milliways, but: I'd put money on it being for the lights. Illumination increases work speed for the grill / microbe musher / espresso machine, but there's no point in having the lights on if no dupe's there to get sped up.

[Milliways]

1 hour ago, Tsabo said:

Not Milliways, but: I'd put money on it being for the lights. Illumination increases work speed for the grill / microbe musher / espresso machine, but there's no point in having the lights on if no dupe's there to get sped up.

Spot on

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

@Milliways,

I like that whole conveyor chute in the vac tile thing, this looks like a winner to me.

My biggest problem is getting a dupe or two leveled to the mechatronics engineer - this takes me a while, but once it's done, it's done.

Just out of curiosity, what are the motion sensors for?

When you pick your first 3 dupes, you could chose one with the Mechatronics Engineering skill. Only took me 10 rerolls to get one.

[yoakenashi]

I once suggested that food consumption have priorities like tasks. Place a higher priority on certain foods if available, and lower priority on other foods. For a low morale duplicant once could then prioritize lower quality foods.

[The Plum Gate]

I was considering the light sources also - that lit workspace bonus is nice, not a very noticeable buff unless you're looking at the dupes info window.

23 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

I once suggested that food consumption have priorities like tasks. Place a higher priority on certain foods if available, and lower priority on other foods. For a low morale duplicant once could then prioritize lower quality foods.

This is such a good idea. the "box and arrow" system they have with the 5 priority settings arrows would be great to throw onto the consumables window - get rid of the check box, etc. Sort of unify the priority semantics.

[Niil945]

21 hours ago, Milliways said:

When you pick your first 3 dupes, you could chose one with the Mechatronics Engineering skill. Only took me 10 rerolls to get one.

I like them, but because of skill scrubbers breaking the bonus I don't use them anymore. If you do just don't skill scrub the dupe. It won't let you pick mechatronics back up until you meet the pre-requisites and even then it costs a skill point to re-buy it so it effectively removes the bonus. I'm sure this will eventually be fixed by adding a check onto a completed scrub as part of the reset looking for the traits but until then just be aware of it.