Making Food Great Again

[Earl_of_Earlier]

There's a lot of uproar about the recent changes to food preservation. I'm gonna try to outline why I feel the players are upset, and why I think Klei still fiddles with food. Also, I'll propose a rough and raw idea on how to make food actually interesting.

The players' perspective

Food is tricky. We would love to automate it, but there really isn't much we can do to do so. There are essentially two ways to get food: Farms and Ranches. With farms, we can come up with workarounds to make them "toggleable". Ranches, on the other hand, are a relatively hard buy-in, even requiring very specialized duplicants that barely improve and barely get around to doing anything else. Food also is the only aspect where something you invest into can just vanish. It's punishing to not preserve food, so it's also punishing to over-produce food.

So we are at a point where we collect, inevitably, too many cooking ingredients. And because we hate to let them go bad, we build infinite food storages. And because there is a way to infinitely preserve edibles, we just cook up those ingredients and store the processed foods instead. Not because we want to. Because we have to, or we loose all our investment.

Klei's perspective

ONI is a game of complexity. That is what makes it awesome, and that is what keeps the players fiddling. Food should be, like Oxygen, an interesting resource that we need to manage. Currently, it's just about setting up infinite storage and be done with it forever. That is not interesting. Not to the players, not to Klei. The effort here is to take something that has a singular solution and feels like a chore, and turn it into an interesting challenge that fosters diverse, creative solutions.

So Klei is at a point where they need infinite food storage as the one-stop-solution to go away, and nudge players into making use of more of the game's toolset.

The current state

As of this point, as players it feels like we get the worst of both worlds: The supply chain for food stays at its unflexible same, while the storage of food becomes more complicated. On the other hand, the changes already sparked new ideas. Looking at solutions the the food storage, it's great to see that the barely utilized Thermal Regulator finds use. People have different approaches and priorities, and food storage is becoming a creative aspect of the game. All that being said, food is, at this point, a storage problem for a perishable resource. As such it feels punishing and inherently less interesting than a production problem; It's all stick, no carrot.

A proposal to a more interesting food challenge

There are two main things that I feel like would help to make food much more interesting:

1.) Production chain

Currently, we have raw and processed food. Many times, both are edible, and mostly a matter of quality. What would be much more interesting than that, would be a situation where we have:

• a) raw ingredients that are mostly inedible and perishable
• c) edible dishes
• d) long-term preservation options with trade-offs

Here's a possible example: Meal Lice, as the raw ingredient, only yields half the calories it does right now, and goes bad within 5 cycles. However, we can choose to do several things with that raw Meal Lice:

• Press it into Oil
• Mash it into Spices
• Preserve it in Oil or Brine, making it last 20x longer 
• Turn it into a higher quality dish by adding Oil & Spices

Different raw ingredients could enable us to make different qualities of Oil and Spices. Later game technologies could allow for better preservation methods (drying, vaccum packaging, glass jars, ...).

Then there's the current, and obvious, question of freezing. I feel like the current state of requiring deep freeze and sterile atmosphere is actually fine, and makes a lot of sense. I also feel that we really need a deep freezer box. Early tech. Low power usage. Like the box we all have in our basement, filled with frozen goodies. They don't need much power, and offer A LOT of storage capacity, and it is weird that we would have inefficient fridges, but no freezers.

At the same time, frozen food should not be edible, but require to be re-heated - requiring duplicant labor, but not a cook. Think microwave, or oven. Also, re-heating can lower the quality. Thus we would have a solution that enables long-term storage, but forces us to make certain trade-offs. Fresh food would still be desirable.

2.) Farming & Ranching

The second aspect of food that feels a little lackluster is farming/ranching. I feel like both would benefit from having more diverse options to process their products. Farming could benefit from the above mentioned possibility to make oils and spices, and raw farming products could also be used as critter food, or maybe even biofuel.

Ranches could yield more diverse ingredients than only meat. Maybe we can "milk" gassy moos, or get oil from slicksters.

Last but not least, the automation aspect of food could really use an upgrade. First and foremost, the fridge - and deep freezer! - need to have automation ports like the liquid reservoir to allow us to start/stop food production at relevant points. And while farming feels pretty okay, Ranching should be somewhat toggle-able as in: Critters that are not "harvested" use much less food and need only be groomed half as much.

Making it more interesting late-game, different foods could give different bonuses. Like a fitness-dish that gives +excavation/building, concentration food that gives +machinery, a dessert that makes duplicants require only half as much sleep, etc. pp., to actually reward a variety of foods.

And that's all I have.

These are just some initial ideas, and I'm sure they aren't perfect or specifically great. However, I feel like they outline that food still has a ton of potential to become a much more interesting mechanic.

[sakura_sk]

49 minutes ago, Earl_of_Earlier said:

[...] more interesting food challenge

"Interesting" as in "more complicated that it already became"?

50 minutes ago, Earl_of_Earlier said:

1.) Production chain [...]

I think that there are already too many food options that I tend to just ignore and produce just one or two dishes (usually barbeque, pepper bread and sometimes cooked fish, Surf'n'Turf). Not that I'm against new recipes though but I would prefer to see more manageable the existing system before adding more complexity to it. 

What the update to food spoilage accomplished is different stages of rotting and not an "on or off" situation (either rotting or preserved for ever). We still have the "preserve forever" as "deep freeze" but rotting can now be varying more, depending on temperature and not only environment, resulting in more options until perfect preservation is achieved.

The problem I find in current situation is that we still can't determine the spoilage of food. You either need to manually compost stale food or very meticulously designing everything beforehand to avoid staling (I think dupes prefer fresh food to stale but I'm not sure if that occurs between stale +quality food and lower quality fresh food).

1 hour ago, Earl_of_Earlier said:

2.) Farming & Ranching [...]

Ranching is somewhat more toggle-able. Grooming station has automation and "Critters that are not "harvested"" groomed do use much less food as they are "glum" (-80% metabolism). Pacu have a bugged fish feeder so... glum always it is 

[Primalflower]

I feel like people are getting so caught up in preserving food that they forgot to consider why people were preserving food to begin with, and as such are desperately searching for a solution to food preservation that completely stops spoilage, when you don't.... need to.... The main  use of edible matter is to keep duplicants alive, and in order to do this, one only needs to preserve as much food as it takes to get duplicants to the next batch.

As a result, unless you're doing something like, I guess wild farming where the times between harvest are dozens and dozens long, you're very likely going to be able successfully avoid starvation with very little food preservation involved. As such, the idea of infinitely storing countless amounts of food for your entire game, seems a little silly or arbitrary to me, and I personally have been getting along perfectly fine cooking pepperbread, with a few fridges in co2 for sleet wheat, and a singular powered fridge for pepperbread (~12 dupes).

As much as I would like to have duplicants flitting around with kitchen buildings, I think it's fine enough that there isn't all that much inbetween, between harvesting a plant and cooking it into a high quality meal. I think that the fact that we only go as far as refining metal, rather than continuing to shape it into, for example, metal sheets, is a showcase that klei doesn't really want the crafting to be too complex. 

I would however be very interested in things like a deep freeze building more automation complexity to the fridge buildings, more diverse ingredients from ranches, and the concept of duplicants not being able to - or just not liking to eat their food frozen, and needing a microwave or equivalent building to heat it up before eating (perhaps another use case for the meter valve?). I would love to milk gassy moos, and perhaps use that with some sucrose to create ice cream, even!

[rsxstock]

I think the complexity to infinite food storage and no spoilage is fine. Even if you can't make that storage, you shouldn't really be making so much more food than your dupes can consume. If you can afford to overproduce, you can afford to have the extra food spoil.

 

I do want to see a food priority system where I can choose to have dupes eat up my lower quality and staling food first.

[crbd115]

16 minutes ago, Lbphero said:

I feel like people are getting so caught up in preserving food that they forgot to consider why people were preserving food to begin with, and as such are desperately searching for a solution to food preservation that completely stops spoilage, when you don't.... need to.... The main  use of edible matter is to keep duplicants alive, and in order to do this, one only needs to preserve as much food as it takes to get duplicants to the next batch.

As a result, unless you're doing something like, I guess wild farming where the times between harvest are dozens and dozens long, you're very likely going to be able successfully avoid starvation with very little food preservation involved. As such, the idea of infinitely storing countless amounts of food for your entire game, seems a little silly or arbitrary to me, and I personally have been getting along perfectly fine cooking pepperbread, with a few fridges in co2 for sleet wheat, and a singular powered fridge for pepperbread (~12 dupes).

As much as I would like to have duplicants flitting around with kitchen buildings, I think it's fine enough that there isn't all that much inbetween, between harvesting a plant and cooking it into a high quality meal. I think that the fact that we only go as far as refining metal, rather than continuing to shape it into, for example, metal sheets, is a showcase that klei doesn't really want the crafting to be too complex. 

I would however be very interested in things like a deep freeze building more automation complexity to the fridge buildings, more diverse ingredients from ranches, and the concept of duplicants not being able to - or just not liking to eat their food frozen, and needing a microwave or equivalent building to heat it up before eating (perhaps another use case for the meter valve?). I would love to milk gassy moos, and perhaps use that with some sucrose to create ice cream, even!

Yeah I think part of the reason some people are freaking out is because they are trying to preserve the large food supply they had before the update went out. Some people also just have that bad habit of overproducing because they haven't had to worry about it before now. I find the current system of using a fridge until you have access to an aquatuner/regulator fine. Though I would like their to be a freezer building as well just for the option to bridge over to the late game infinite version. I went 200 cycles with just one powered fridge in my most recent playthrough and I think that's more then reasonable.
People just need to get used to only increasing their food production with their increase in duplicants population in the early to mid game, rather then just making a big farm right away to forget about.

[Yunru]

4 hours ago, Earl_of_Earlier said:

I'm gonna try to outline why I feel the players are upset

some players, please.

[Tytan]

whenever there's a nerf, there's always someone upset about it, which doesn't mean that everyone is, whether here, in the league of legends, or in any game

oh ****, here go again in this theme

[Peter Han]

One thing that might improve the food situation (especially early game, where it is easier to keep food supply in sync with consumption) is to reduce the Refrigerator's power usage. 120 W all the time is actually an incredibly high power usage - 120 W * 600 s = 72 kJ/cycle (two full Jumbo batteries worth!). Most early game bases will uses less than that for everything else put together, as high wattage loads like the Rock Crusher or Water Sieve usually have very low uptimes, and the Rust Deoxidizer / Oxygen Diffuser use much less power. Even if the Refrigerator preserved food indefinitely for 72 kJ/cycle, almost nobody would power it until late in the game - one Duplicant must run on the Manual Generator for 180 seconds (almost a third of a cycle) just to keep one Refrigerator running before any other power demands are taken into account.

[Cairath]

I like the change. You really don't need to store half a million calories worth of food. 

[Solon64]

6 hours ago, Peter Han said:

One thing that might improve the food situation (especially early game, where it is easier to keep food supply in sync with consumption) is to reduce the Refrigerator's power usage. 120 W all the time is actually an incredibly high power usage - 

...

Even if the Refrigerator preserved food indefinitely for 72 kJ/cycle, almost nobody would power it until late in the game

Heck, I used to use a mod that reduced its power usage to 20W, and even that was... considerable, but it was nice to have a "set and forget" food storage, as I never bothered to use "infinite" storage in a CO2 pit, felt too exploity to me. I also never bother to overproduce food, because again, why would I spend that much time/dupe labor/energy making food that was never going to get eaten?

Every 1600kcal of gristle berry represents 120kg of water that are just tied up permanently, as well as 5w lamp * 3600 seconds / 8 (total number of berries grown on that lamp) = ~2.25kj of power, per berry, PLUS lamp heat, PLUS labor to harvest, PLUS cook time, PLUS grill heat, and you can later add in shipping/hydroponic farms to reduce travel time cost at even MORE power cost (although small).

Doesn't look great when you take all the numbers into account. It's necessary: dupes gotta eat, of course, but if they aren't going to eat it, all of that was, literally, wasted effort and materiel.

I get it: people don't want to see all that wasted by spoilage, but you can avoid that by just not committing it to food growing in the first place. They seem upset because the CO2 pit was laughably easy, and it was, but I think the change was good: now you really have to think about whether you want to do all that AND have a freezer set up, or just accept some of it as lost to spoilage, or carefully calculate exactly how many dupes you want and how much food you want to make, etc.

It's a good change in my opinion. Lot of options opened up after the (vaguely exploity, imo) "best" option got nuked.

[Smithe37]

People aren't upset by the fact you need to produce food. People are upset because automating the food production process has become needlessly complex and endgame.

Now I need to built really complex infrastructure to super chill the food  and store it JUST so I can reliably automate food production without underproducing or excessively wasting.


I honestly don't mind some of the changes, they were needed as it was far too easy and free to store food. Perhaps there is a happy medium such as a "deep freezer" that takes a moderate amount of power or midgame materials like plastic to produce.

[Padishar]

Well, to be honest I think that the DLC massively buffed food production, so the recent food conservation change is not a huge problem. Now everyone should be comfortably able to overproduce food, especially in the mid-late game.
The buffs consist in 

- more food types and recipes allowing to depend les on specific resources to produce food.
-radtion modified seeds and/or grubgrubs allow to massively boost your production in farms.
-pacu now eating seeds (0.3 seeds per cylce) has made pacu ranching a viable (exploits free) way of producing food. The radiation modified plants also increase food through pacus since you can use some of the modifications to incease seeds production. Btw thanks Klei for this! I really love pacus and I hated the previous version where pacu farming was almost impossible.

Last but not least the introduction of the sublimation station allows for an automated water free oxygen production, using wild arbor tree you can produce a lot of polluted dirt with ethanol distillers. In fact with only wild Arbor Tree you would be water positive by burning the ethanol.
Therefore, using such a setup for oxygen production will allow you to have more water to invest into farming.

[Sasza22]

Currently i`m using pickled meallice. In a powerd fridge in CO2 this thing spoils by 0.3%/cycle. It will take 333 cycles before it spoiling becomes a problem. By that time i`m fairly sure i won`t have food issues in my colony.

Still some control over the amount of spoilage would be nice. Both for better storage management and feeding the resin plant experiment. Like a fridge slider that allows only food above a certain freshness threshold. That alone would fix a lot of issues.

[Nebbie]

There are three big issues with food storage right now:

1. Fridges are basically a trap with their power usage and heat production, but are now almost mandatory because temperature matters.
2. Fridges and ration boxes expose their contents to the atmosphere, which includes any rotting stuff.
3. There is no freezer building, leaving us with stupid, overly-complicated builds just to get frozen food.

1 and 2 are closely-related, they both come from the fact that, unlike real fridges, the fridge in ONI doesn't shield it's contents from the air in the room. If it protected food from outside air while closed (not having something being put in or taken out; contents would exchange heat with the fridge itself), and then only used power when it had something to cool, it would be decent. The ration box could also be useful this way just for protecting food from polluted oxygen (a big problem in swamp starts). A freezer could also be added that's just basically a fridge but 2 tiles wide and 1 tile tall, and that has a lower target temperature.

[Steve8]

4 hours ago, Nebbie said:

heat production

Jeez. It's 500 DTUs. As much as a lamp. It's really impossible to take some of this drama seriously

[Solon64]

5 hours ago, Nebbie said:

There is no freezer building, leaving us with stupid, overly-complicated builds just to get frozen food.

Insulated tile box, unpowered fridges, fill with CO2 or Cl, thermoregulator and radiant gas pipes. Enter from top so the heavier gasses stay inside.

Took me about five minutes to set up. About 3 cycles later: -10°F, food frozen and sterile, thermoreg doesn't even have to run more than a few ticks a cycle or so. Don't need fridges either, you could just dump the food on the floor, although that would use debris heat exchange so take a bit longer to cool.

I'm loving that the thermoregulator now has a really nice, proper use.

Sure, a little bit of the cold leaks out the top, but CO2/Cl have really crap TC so it's not bad at all, and if it becomes a problem you can just run a hot liquid over it in pipes.

Not complicated at all, can be made within 20 cycles, you can make it arbitrarily large without greatly increased cooling needs, and it works perfectly.

[Nebbie]

13 hours ago, Steve8 said:

Jeez. It's 500 DTUs. As much as a lamp. It's really impossible to take some of this drama seriously

Lights I put in for dupe speed are always tied to automation so they aren't constantly heating up the place. Also note that thermoregulators and aquatuners, the things actually useful for cooling, don't produce any waste heat currently. Yes, they probably should, but if Klei goes that route, they should probably reduce the heat output of a few things like lamps to compensate; it's kind of insane having a fridge have more side effects to it than industrial solutions.

12 hours ago, Solon64 said:

Insulated tile box, unpowered fridges, fill with CO2 or Cl, thermoregulator and radiant gas pipes. Enter from top so the heavier gasses stay inside.

Took me about five minutes to set up. About 3 cycles later: -10°F, food frozen and sterile, thermoreg doesn't even have to run more than a few ticks a cycle or so. Don't need fridges either, you could just dump the food on the floor, although that would use debris heat exchange so take a bit longer to cool.

I'm loving that the thermoregulator now has a really nice, proper use.

Sure, a little bit of the cold leaks out the top, but CO2/Cl have really crap TC so it's not bad at all, and if it becomes a problem you can just run a hot liquid over it in pipes.

Not complicated at all, can be made within 20 cycles, you can make it arbitrarily large without greatly increased cooling needs, and it works perfectly.

Hmm, maybe I've underestimated carbon dioxide for thermal isolation. I'd still rather have an actual freezer building I can just shove in a great hall, especially for rocketry purposes, but a bit of testing found that for about 100W average, I can keep 2 fridges cool and at least get close to -18 C without having a top over things...

[TuxSam123]

What I would like is if we had a revamp of the food system. In my eyes, a duplicant shouldn't feel very good if they are eating a 1% stale food. There should be a difference in quality based on the food's decay. A 1% moldy pepper bread shouldn't be as fullfilling as a 100% one. That way, players would have an incentive to preserve food, other than infinitely storing it. We also need some simpler way to give deep freeze to food. Sure, players can create insulated cold rooms and deep freeze their food, but to appease all players Klei needs to add some sort of freezer building. It could be like the refrigerator, consuming large amounts of power and producing heat. This, however, showcases the biggest problem with refrigerators: they are bad. You spend 120w continuously to somewhat preserve your food. It doesn't protect your food from the atmosfere and it only applies the refrigerated buff to the food. To surpass this problem, Klei needs to buff fridges. I'd suggest halfing the cost and actually making the fridges protect your food from the air (i.e. when a food in on the fridge it shouldn't receive the -15% normal atmosfere debuff)