Food solutions which don't use infinite storage?

[QuQuasar]

Not that I'm against infinite storage, I just thought that with all the compounding requirements now needed for late game food supply it would be an interesting challenge to try and build a freezer/kitchen/great hall without it.

Goals:

1. Sufficient storage space without using single-tile piles of infinite food.
    a. I make an exception for organized piles. For example, seperate piles for sleet wheat, lettuce and meat each on it's own weight plate.
2. Deep freeze and sterile atmosphere for all ingredients and prepared food items.
3. Sweepers to transfer food to and from the kitchen appliances without requiring any duplicant hauling.
    a. Ideally, the ingredients should remain in deep freeze right up until the moment they're needed.
4. Automation to lock off the farms and prevent overproduction.
5. Prepared food access as close as possible to the great hall.

I'm toying with a few idea's but don't have anything concrete just yet. I've been trying to fit it all into an 18x10 interior space in my base, and it's not been quite enough vertical space for what I have in mind.

[Tranoze]

I need more info, what type of food do you prepare for your dupe, pepper bread or spicy tofu or frost burger?
Because if you make mutiple type of food at the same time, we cant do organized piles.
Also how many dupe do you plan to feed?

Also which of these is your base interior?
 

[QuQuasar]

Currently aiming to produce frost burger as a staple, berry sludge for rocket trips, and pincha peppernuts for coffee. It would be better to support more food variety than that, though.

This colony will include 16 ravenous duplicants, and the space I'm working with is 18 on the horizontal, 10 on the vertical. 13 on the vertical if I'm willing to deconstruct some storage space.
 
Those are just the particulars of my specific situation, though. I'm interested to see general approaches as well.

[fishoutofwater]

afaik this is francis john's build, more or less

Spoiler

Spoiler

i know u said no to infinite storage but i insist.

2 loaders to the right are on manual use: one is for left over food and the other is for ingredients, they have to have lower priority than fridges.

2 conveyors chute in deep freeze and sterile atmosphere; one is for cooked food the other is for ingredients.

each of those fridges contain only 1 type of cooked food and can be set to certain amount.

[QuQuasar]

Welp, I tried. This hasn't really worked out. It's not like it wouldn't function (sorta), but it's kind of an ugly build and the right-hand sweeper doesn't reach the grill.

If I want cleaner lines and better décor distribution I'll need to make more space for it.

[Saturnus]

@QuQuasar You don't technically need the right sweeper to reach the musher as I assume the goal is high quality food only, so any tofu made is brought to the gas range for spicy tofu, and berry sludge don't need to be stored at all.

[QuQuasar]

21 hours ago, Saturnus said:

@QuQuasar You don't technically need the right sweeper to reach the musher as I assume the goal is high quality food only, so any tofu made is brought to the gas range for spicy tofu, and berry sludge don't need to be stored at all.

Good call. Actually, the range is the only thing that needs a wide variety of foods: the microbe musher takes a limited range of ingredients, and the grill always takes one ingredient per recipe. So theoretically, if I have two grills running different recipes...

Okay, it's looking quite a bit cleaner now. I expanded it to 21x13 to fit a different spot in my base and that was the right call. This is much cleaner than the last one.

The storage uses priorities system to gradually fill up from right to left...

... and the two fridges on either end can provide automation signals to detect full and empty states. Still need to work the wiring out to prevent them from always being on. 

The far right fridge can be used for... medicine doesn't spoil, so juicer and espresso machine ingredients I guess?

I've yet to test this design, so there will still be some issues in it. The fridge in the hall needs to shut off the conveyor chute, for example. But it's coming along.

[Occam Blazer]

I use this pantry system to keep calories in hysteresis.

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.

I've fooled around with a similar system for raw ingredients, but have better luck just sizing the ranch or farm for the number of dupes I take on.

[degr]

First 100 cycles I just drop food straight where is cooked, it never rot, because dupes eat food (I have max for 2 cycles into future).

Next 200-300 cycles I have hot box with CO2, and I drop food where it cooked. If some food fall down in a great hall, it rot and transformed into dirt.

In late game, when I have viscogel, I make like on schema:

orange is conveyor rails, blue is small gas pump, and purple is viscogel.

I don't know how "rot" mechanics work, but look like, if you drop 100% fresh barbeque into 20% rotten barbeque, you get one pile of 60% fresh barbeque. May be I'm wrong, but with this storage my colony reach 20.000.000 calories, and I disable cooking. And after I did it, around 10.000.000 transform into rot pile. However, I plan to rot it into 500.000, and I really can't understand, why somebody need infinite storage of food.

Think I can use chlorine instead of vacuum, but I did not use it.

[icuurd12b42]

my setup is pretty simple. if I have enough good food, I close the kitchen and the farm(s)

One of the farm door is lockable the other is set to exit only. so not to lock anyone in. you can have 2 doors on top each other 

to make for a more condensed setup, which I don't really see the point myself..

Anyway, I also make sure the tiles are not accessible to farm from outside the room though the ones near the locked door will still be managed up except for harvesting. 

When the good food fridge is full (the only fridge that is plugged in for the signal), everything shuts down. so the cook only cooks for the food that's taken out. I allocate about 2-5Kg dupe so 20 to 50 Kg for 10 dupes. The farming happens when the fridge is not full. so a few times a day for me since all my dupes have their own offset schedules. The second fridge is not plugged in and is basically there to force the dupes to pickup the harvest else the cook would go grab the harvest on the field... which is OK at first

As you can see my field is ready for harvest and ready for a dirt run. I assume, as long as the fruit is left on the branch, there is no spoilage. So my cook cooks with very fresh ingredients..

Unfortunately there is still food rot in the fridge. I think the dupes only eat the freshest thing. and leave the rest to rot... I don't mind that much