About the New Food Spoilage Mechanic

[fpx007]

I’m not against the new mechanic, but devs may oversee the fact that spoiled food will further turn into polluted dirt, and finally pO2. This used to not be an issue as food items don’t spoil in sterile environment, but since the new mechanic, food items in these environment will still spoil, causing pO2 spawning in unexpected area. This  may bring serious consequences. For example:

Spoiler

 

1:Chlorine room for disinfection purpose may be easily ruined due to the new mechanic.

2: Food left in vacuum will easily ruin the vacuum environment, resulting in unexpected heat transfer.

3: Plants and critters spawned upon worldgen will create food items. these food items used to be harmless if they are located in sterile environments. But since the update, they will still spoil, turn into polluted dirt, and finally pO2. What’s more, the pO2 will accelerate the whole procedure, creating a vicious cycle. This issue is even more serious as these areas are usually beyond dups’ reach, so the problem can’t be properly solved in a long time.

 

To negate the side effect, 2 possible solutions are proposed here. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please comment below.

Spoiler

1: Spoiled food in sterile environment (defined before the patch) will not further turn into polluted dirt.

2: (This may break the game balance) Polluted dirt no longer emit pO2 naturally. To make up for it, sublimation station is also introduced to the base game. This will probably decrease the game difficulty (beyond the core opinion of this topic) in vanilla game, and increase the difficulty in DLC swamp map survivals.

 

[oosyrag]

Or you could...

Freeze the food with a single thermoregulator and wheezewort

Remove the spoiled food with a sweeper and optionally drop it in liquid before it turns into polluted dirt

Remove the spoiled food by hand to compost

Let the rest of the food spoil too, since there is literally no reason to stockpile food in oni due to lack of growing seasons. If you have the overproduction to allow for a stockpile to begin with, you're making more food than you can eat at any given time anyway. If you're paranoid you can always keep a pile of berry sludge stashed away that you'll never eat either.

[Sasza22]

Polluted dirt shouldn`t emit PO2 above 1,8 kg/tile. Pressurizing your rooms above that should fiz the issue. For natural spawns they could increase the gas pressure slightly so it prevents ofgassing.

[Spoonwood]

What exactly is the problem here though?  Polluted oxygen is breathable.  It can be an annoyance, alright, but I don't know how it kills duplicants.  More polluted oxygen means that oxygen production systems need to run less, and there's more mass to convert to clay via deodorizers.  Since I'm not seeing a way that the decay harms duplicants other than the food loss, and the food loss apparently isn't the issue, what is the problem here?

[fpx007]

Well, I'm not talking about the loss/over production issue of food, I'm talking about the the final product: pO2. Even you carefully manage your food production/consumption, there is still unexpected situations. For example, the randomness of critters. Critters, especially shovel voles  just move everywhere, and upon their death, they will leave meat, which usually turn into pO2 as the final form.

21 hours ago, oosyrag said:

Or you could...

Freeze the food with a single thermoregulator and wheezewort

Remove the spoiled food with a sweeper and optionally drop it in liquid before it turns into polluted dirt

Remove the spoiled food by hand to compost

Let the rest of the food spoil too, since there is literally no reason to stockpile food in oni due to lack of growing seasons. If you have the overproduction to allow for a stockpile to begin with, you're making more food than you can eat at any given time anyway. If you're paranoid you can always keep a pile of berry sludge stashed away that you'll never eat either.

You may freeze your base, your kitchen, your hall, but it is literally impossible to freeze everywhere. You can't have autosweepers sweep everywhere either. If you didn't notice it in time, it will emit pO2, and cause some unexpected issues. Well, you mentioned the compost, but currently we can neither select the allowed material types for compost stations to use nor mark a compost with "compost marked material only". Instead we can only mark the material as "wait to be composed". Since compost station always compost polluted dirt if available anywhere, one probable situation is that all your compost stations are filled with polluted dirt (from other sources, especially in a swamp map or when a lot of ethanol distillers are working), thus the marked material is left for a really long time until they are finely treated. (I have experienced similar situation when I marked sporechid seeds for compost. These seeds are left for a long time. However, I can wait for a long time on that occasion, but on this occasion I can't.)

17 hours ago, Spoonwood said:

What exactly is the problem here though?  Polluted oxygen is breathable.  It can be an annoyance, alright, but I don't know how it kills duplicants.  More polluted oxygen means that oxygen production systems need to run less, and there's more mass to convert to clay via deodorizers.  Since I'm not seeing a way that the decay harms duplicants other than the food loss, and the food loss apparently isn't the issue, what is the problem here?

I admit they are safe under most circumstance, but not always. it is harmless to dups, that's right. But, it is not completely harmless to machines/structures. For example, some structures need vacuum to prevent heat conduction, but even a small piece of polluted dirt can fill the space with unexpected gas, which conducts heat! And you should know how time consuming when creating vacuum using gas pump in a large space. Last time when I was using a gas pump cleansing the CO2 in an area with a size of around several hundred blocks, It took me several cycles to pump out the last several hundred microgram of gas. You should know that when a structure is completed, the geometry of terrain gets even more complex, thus gas flows slower, and it takes even longer to draw the gas. (Or you can deconstruct and rebuild it of course, but this is also expensive.)

22 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Polluted dirt shouldn`t emit PO2 above 1,8 kg/tile. Pressurizing your rooms above that should fiz the issue. For natural spawns they could increase the gas pressure slightly so it prevents ofgassing.

This is a good solution, which has a similar concept to my second idea. But i think, instead of increasing the natural gas pressure, it is better to decrease the threshold of emission pressure. Since the threshold for gas vent is only 2kg, we only have a tolerance of 200g, or 10%. And since gas in this game doesn't flow very quickly, the gradient of gas pressure is usually very high, thus the gas pressure in low-pressure zone can easily go below 1.8kg. Since we already have sublimation stations, and in DLC the emission rate is already reduced (to 1/10 original rate), I think it is proper to also have the threshold reduced here to compensate for the tweak of food spoilage mechanic.

[QuQuasar]

9 hours ago, fpx007 said:

Instead we can only mark the material as "wait to be composed". Since compost station always compost polluted dirt if available anywhere, one probable situation is that all your compost stations are filled with polluted dirt (from other sources, especially in a swamp map or when a lot of ethanol distillers are working), thus the marked material is left for a really long time until they are finely treated.

Notable: spoiled food becomes "rot piles", not polluted dirt. There is a category for them in the storage compactor. A Priority 9 compactor set to recieve rot piles is great for sweeping up spoiled food specifically. (This is true in the DLC. Not 100% sure about the base game)

When it comes to shove voles, it's best to not let them infest your map from the start. They can't path through pneumatic doors, hard materials or over two-wide gaps, so make sure your printing pod is an island and put a pneumatic door in the abyssalite between the surface and the rest of the map, and they will be contained to only those locations.

[gabberworld]

8 minutes ago, QuQuasar said:

Notable: spoiled food becomes "rot piles", not polluted dirt. There is a category for them in the storage compactor. A Priority 9 compactor set to recieve rot piles is great for sweeping up spoiled food specifically. (This is true in the DLC. Not 100% sure about the base game)

When it comes to shove voles, it's best to not let them infest your map from the start. They can't path through pneumatic doors, hard materials or over two-wide gaps, so make sure your printing pod is an island and put a pneumatic door in the abyssalite between the surface and the rest of the map, and they will be contained to only those locations.

rot piles i think at some point turns to polluted dirt

[QuQuasar]

4 minutes ago, gabberworld said:

rot piles i think at some point turns to polluted dirt

Correct, but if it's priority 9 the sweeping will happen first. Assuming you're not setting massive projects to priority 9. And especially if you have a duplicant prioritizing storage tasks among your crew.

[RonEmpire]

Biomes with critters has always had meat drop from critters dying off. And thus has always created po2.   This can been seen as a positive thing since you get pockets of po2 where dupes can survive some of these areas when exploring without suits. 

 

The new mechanic does change things up a bit with these side effects.    Is it that big of a deal?  Not really.   Just minor player adjustments and adoption.  It's a nerf and there will always be some sort of resistance to nerfs at the start. But if you consider it from a new players perspective playing the game for the first time a year from now its just game mechanics to accept at the end of the day and nothing to fuss about because they didn't experience anything else to compare it with. 

1800kg is max pressure so fill your chlorine or hydrogen  room and no other Gass will off gas from polluted dirt.