Food.

[The Plum Gate]

I always end up with far too much food - has anyone got a spreadsheet or something for the farming?

I usually just let my critters die of old age or overpopulation - so fish meat and barbq are kind of a bonus.

Also it seems that pokesheels that die of old age don't seem to drop meat - is this a known thing with them or haven't I looked to the advanced gourmet cooking?

[Red Shark]

Oni Assistant has a pretty good calculator for figuring out what you need to feed your colony.

Pokeshells never drop meat -- you ranch them for their shells alone (which turns into Lime)

[The Plum Gate]

Oh this is a very nice website for this type of thing.

Although it seems to be out of date for DLC at least - most recipes remain the same.

[The Plum Gate]

Alright, so I was cheesing my food storage with a vac tile and a conveyeor drop and this turns out to be problematic for gathering wild food and am now considering having a duplicant dedicated specifically to cooking -  they would have their own apartment, bathroom etc, but wouldn't be allowed to leave the area except to visit the great hall and the break room ( using door permissions ), this would give him access to food and give dupes access to conveyor loaders to transport food they pick up outside the farms and would prevent food stored in vac tiles from being constantly taken back to conveyor loaders. ..sort of.

Has anyone else done something like this? It would require locking the kitchen, and locking the great hall or wherever they pick up food at, lots of door permissions and cycle timers.

It just seems easier to use a fridge - but having over-produced food is a constant issue for bulk storage and the automation to produce food based on the full / not full signal from the fridge is rather binary - I would much rather have the tank/reservoir automata on the fridge but this still leaves the possibility of the grill getting cut-off half way through cooking.

. .I know, that's what the unlimited button is for, right? Maybe just use the grills as storage and drop cooked food in vac tiles while having a low priority fridge to gather scraps?

[Occam Blazer]

This is my favorite pantry setup to avoid over-producing food.

Spoiler

The fridge holds your minimum calories. Set the capacity to the number of calories you would need to run your base until you to fix a catastrophic ranch/farm failure. I typically have 20-30 cycles of food in reserve. The grill/musher/range turns on when the first calorie of food comes out of the fridge.

The weight plate sets the upper limit of how much food to keep on hand. When this goes green it shuts off the grill and your cook can go off to do other tasks for a few spins.

Change the door permissions so dupes can't get in there to mess up that fragile airlock and you're set.

Dupes seem to prefer picking up food off the ground before the fridge although it would be better if the system were last-in-first-out. C'est la vie.

Spoiler

Check the wiki for converting kilograms to calories. For example, let's say you're running your 15-dupe colony on Spicy Tofu. That delicious stuff is 4,000 calories per kilogram. A regular dupe needs 1,000 calories per cycle, so you need 15,000 calories every cycle. To keep those dupes alive for 25 cycles you need a fresh reserve of 375,000 calories. That's 93.7 kg, rounded up to 94. Set your fridge at that. I'll set my weight plate to keep a couple cycles on hand, let's say 3 cycles on the ground. That's 45,000 calories or 11.2 kg. Se the weight plate to go green when the mass is above that.

 

[ghkbrew]

5 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

Has anyone else done something like this?

Here's what I use:

Dupes deliver food to the conveyor loader.  The chute drops it out of reach of the dupes in the chlorine room.  The auto-sweeper fills the fridge.  Fridge priority is set 1 higher than the loader which stops dupes from taking food out of the fridge to put in the loader in a loop.

Overall:

Infinite capacity preserved food storage.

Automatic food delivery (including picking up what's dropped in the great hall).

No delivery loops

No door permissions

[The Plum Gate]

Nice. Both setups, @ghkbrew and @occamrazor

After much deliberation I have decided not to create an apartment of disparaged cooks, there's only so many hands on deck. I like this out of reach concept and the sterile atmosphere is a bit less cheesy.

I have created, instead, in the last hour, a regrettably cramped kitchen with some automation. I use the door permissions to only allow the cooks into the kitchen, and the door below it to disallow the cooks ( this already happened to be a grubfruit farm, so there was already some automation going on in there with a conveyor loader ) - this is where the conveyor loader is to load things into the kitchen ( ingredients, manual use allowed ), cooked stuff is sent up to the upper left and can be accessed from the corner by everyone. The other conveyor loader is for sloppy dupes in the great hall ( with the great hall there's a shadow of area where the pot and the soda fountain are that are out of reach for the upper loader arm - I haven't had any food spoil on me - but I could just send a touch of bleachstone through the system if I wanted to deal with food poisoning germs.

That rail coming from the right is coming from the fish farm - so I get egg shells mixed in with the food, but they store this elsewhere.

I'll tidy this up with the other cooking stations, but at least I have a better idea of what to do. The cooks can't access the ingredient conveyor loader, so they don't try to sweep the ingredients out of the kitchen, and the gatherers can't access the ingredients once they've been stored. So there's that. The loader arm in the kitchen can reach the ingredients so the grill gets loaded as soon as I start a cooking processes - no delivery issue. I could add couple more tables there and still get coverage from the loader at the top. Loaders are industrial equipment aren't they ruin a great hall requirement? Don't mind the pixel backs, I'm still trying to figure those out and just like them black.

If I had to rework the whole thing I would probably use a Co2 or chlorine pit to capture anything that might fall off the ladder or pole there, but that can be avoided entirely by moving the corner pulled food storage tile further into the great hall - perhaps where the loader arm's shadow is. This turned out to be less of an issue that I thought.

I put a light in for the speed bonus - it's connected to a motion sensor.

 

[ghkbrew]

29 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

I have created, instead

I've used almost this exact setup before. It works great. As long as food has to be cooked before eaten it's very simple. It's pretty much the only reason I make pickled meal.

One tip, I like to put the cooked food storage at the back of the great hall. That way any food that gets dropped will be closer than the food storage, so dupes will preferentially pickup the dropped food in the great hall and eat it.

Also auto-sweepers can be placed in the great hall. Only the loaders are "industrial machinery".

[MachineryMan]

On 2/10/2021 at 10:35 AM, The Plum Gate said:

some automation

Make a self-adjusting warehouse for sulfur, which will be closed after filling, extend the conveyor line from there and put an unloader near the auto-sweeper, which will receive the sulfur. You'll save a lot of dudes' time, because grubfruit will be fertilized automatically + always a full worm feeder.

By the way, it is better to place the food storage tile in a nature reserve. Plan it in advance when building your base. Free morale.

[The Plum Gate]

1 hour ago, MachineryMan said:

Make a self-adjusting warehouse for sulfur, which will be closed after filling, extend the conveyor line from there and put an unloader near the auto-sweeper, which will receive the sulfur. You'll save a lot of dudes' time, because grubfruit will be fertilized automatically + always a full worm feeder.

By the way, it is better to place the food storage tile in a nature reserve. Plan it in advance when building your base. Free morale.

It's already set up like that, I have sulfur in the bin and sucrose in the feeder there. ( well not a full warehouse ).

The shaft the food is accessible to is actually connected to a part of a nature reserve already.

I like to make abbreviated nature reserves when I can - I use closely spaced plants and incorporate a ladder and pole into the reserve ( hence all doors in the area in the pictures ). This way they're always passing through a reserve ( unavoidably ).

They will inevitably pass through one nature reserve or another if not more during the cycle anyway.

Good advice!

Sometimes I will drop cots in future nature reserve areas in the early game to keep myself from destroying the area. The biggest problem I have is when the natural plants are growing in sand - I have to wait for pips and replace the whole thing to make things tidy for walking.

[MachineryMan]

3 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

It's already set up like that, I have sulfur in the bin and sucrose in the feeder there. ( well not a full warehouse ).

The problem there is that if you have a sulfur box, dudes will haul sulfur there instead of in the plant bed. It gets a little more efficient, but it still wastes a lot of time. So the idea came up to create a warehouse that will only open when relatively empty, to relieve dudes from the endless running with 10 kg of sulfur. For three days I thought about how to do it. 

I can also advise to leave a space of 3 tiles wide for the ladders, the pole and, in the future, the transport tube. Usually when you decide to sneak it in, you realize there's nowhere to do it, it's better to think ahead. You can also leave a 1-cell shelf near the side doors to the left and right of the main vertical route. It's a good place to put statues. Bah... English is too complicated, it's easier to show...

 

Spoiler