Calorie debuff for single-food colonies

[n_t_p]

I'd like to suggest a mechanic to incentivise a diverse and healthy diet for our duplicants.

A diverse diet gives a buff of -10% calories burned per cycle. I believe that's about 100 kcalories per cycle, or 150 if the dupe has the bottomless stomach trait. Dupes start out with this buff when they're printed.

Every 5 cycles the dupe goes without eating a new food they get a debuff:

Lv1 - 100 less kcalories per cycle per dupe (10%)

Lv2 - normal kcalorie requirements

Lv3 - minus 5% 

Lv4 - minus 10%

Lv5 - minus 20% (1200 kcalories daily, or 1800 for bottomless stomach dupes)

At lv 5 the debuff will mean every dupe eats 200 extra kcalories

Eating a new food resets this. Your dupe immediately gains the diverse diet buff and all the debuffs are removed. Food will be "new and tasty" again 16 cycles after a dupe last got a buff from it. This means with 3 foods in your colony it's possible to maintain the buff most of the time. With just two foods you are at about the baseline. An all-barbeque colony will inevitably sink into malnurishment. Players could choose to ignore this if they have excess production, but it's inadvisable.

Surf-n-turf and spicy tofu gives the buff for twice as long. (10 cycles instead of 5)

This is meant to urge players to diversify their food systems. By building more food systems each colony will likely have a much greater surplus of food late game, which will go towards the ravenous tree. Hopefully this way the tree doesn't need to get nerfed. (Too badly)

A door system on a timer might need to be built by the players in order to automate this food management. I think this is probably for the best, since it make the refrigeration problem more interesting and a preference system in the dupes pathing would lead to unusual behavior.

EDIT
Maybe the incentive should be bigger and the punishment for not doing it should be smaller. That would work too I think. Another way to make the incentive bigger would be to have it apply to the tree as well. When you're feeding the trees millions of calories a little bit of automation to get an extra 5-10% resin comes out to a lot of food.

A food quality debuff or buff according to this same pattern would allow dupes to self-select their best foods, removing the need for automation. Food selection is based on quality.

EDIT - I've reworked the numbers to be more clear and give a bigger incentive. After some thought the tree should receive this bonus as well. It needs to work a little differently for the tree though, since the tree can consume a lot of food during a brief time-based buffing period. Instead every kcalorie of a given food decreases the value of that food by .0001%, up to a minimum of -20%, while simultaneously increasing the value of all other foods by .0001%, up to a maximum of +10%
30%/.0001% = 300,000 kcalories (from the max to the min)
This will be a good use for rail meters. 

[sakura_sk]

Healthy diet... Dirt is one of the choices 

The only thing I see this method will accomplice is rake performance even more due to calculations of every dupe every single second of a cycle. You don't need variety if you have excess food accumulating anyway. Dupes needing to eat more is just like having a colony of bottomless stomach ones (500kcal/cycle by the way and not 50) Food already has the buff of morale if someone needs to diversify his foods/dupe needs. Maintaining a stable food production is more difficult than just producing excess of everything and micromanaging so that every dupe eats properly.

[n_t_p]

14 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

Healthy diet... Dirt is one of the choices 

The only thing I see this method will accomplice is rake performance even more due to calculations of every dupe every single second of a cycle. You don't need variety if you have excess food accumulating anyway. Dupes needing to eat more is just like having a colony of bottomless stomach ones (500kcal/cycle by the way and not 50) Food already has the buff of morale if someone needs to diversify his foods/dupe needs. Maintaining a stable food production is more difficult than just producing excess of everything and micromanaging so that every dupe eats properly.

It's a good point that mush bars would count towards food diversity. That's probably a bad idea. Perhaps they could have an exception the way I suggested surf-n-turf and spicy tofu should. Mush bars don't give the bonus.

I don't think it'll be a performance issue. I don't know much about how other buffs and debuffs work, but I've never heard of someone having performance problems from hypothermia or heat stroke. It'd work the same way as those buffs work.

I know about morale buffs, but that has more to do with stress and productivity. I don't think these kinds of buffs and debuffs are interesting, as they become quickly irrelevant once you get a massage table and some decore. Decore and morale and stress and everything work fine and good, and their impact on spaced out doesn't really change compared to base game. It's still the same fundamental experience, except maybe for rocket pilots.

The calorie economy does need to be reworked I think because of the tree. Considering the massive amount of calories the tree takes and the refrigeration changes it's clear that the devs want us to make more food and do so with greater consideration. The logical next step would be to make an incentive to use more food systems instead of just scaling one food system bigger and bigger.

Maybe the incentive should be bigger and the punishment for not doing it should be smaller. That would work too I think. Another way to make the incentive bigger would be to have it apply to the tree as well. When you're feeding the trees millions of calories a little bit of automation to get an extra 5-10% resin comes out to a lot of food.

[sakura_sk]

13 minutes ago, n_t_p said:

The calorie economy does need to be reworked I think because of the tree. Considering the massive amount of calories the tree takes and the refrigeration changes it's clear that the devs want us to make more food and do so with greater consideration. The logical next step would be to make an incentive to use more food systems instead of just scaling one food system bigger and bigger.

Or... the tree needs a rework to something more reasonable. 

Usually when a new system is introduced, it needs to line up with existing ones and not the other way around.

[n_t_p]

7 minutes ago, sakura_sk said:

Or... the tree needs a rework to something more reasonable. 

Usually when a new system is introduced, it needs to line up with existing ones and not the other way around.

They clearly went into spaced out with the intention of reworking food. Maybe not all of the changes like refrigeration were planned, but plant mutations clearly were, and I don't think people are using those. So something needs to give in order to make food production itself more interesting instead of the current meta which is just "add 4 more stone hatch stables". Everyone's still on barbeque like it's 2018. Nobody in their right mind grows nosh beans. The game needs to move on from barbeque. 

[sakura_sk]

Barbeque is used because it's the easiest solution. Easiest because there is plenty of rock and starvation ranching+minimum dupe labor works fine. Starvation ranching works because critters were getting extinct otherwise. Complicating things more would only lead to a "meal lice only solution" which I see it as equal to the current "one food only" result. I prefer berry sludge by the way not barbeque but I haven't reached the tree yet. Guaranteed cold geysera make things so much easier to grow sleet wheat and bristle berries.

If mutations don't seem intriguing enough maybe they need something more. (like the rad lamp that seems to be on the works )

[n_t_p]

I've reworked the numbers to be more clear and give a bigger incentive. After some thought the tree should receive this bonus as well. It needs to work a little differently for the tree though, since the tree can consume a lot of food during a brief time-based buffing period. Instead every kcalorie of a given food decreases the value of that food by .0001%, up to a minimum of -20%, while simultaneously increasing the value of all other foods by .0001%, up to a maximum of +10%

30%/.0001% = 300,000 kcalories (from the max to the min)

This will be a good use for rail meters. 

[Slavon Blue]

This sounds like an interesting idea for a mod, but not something I would like in the base game. It's needlessly complex for little reason. Also, in game lore already says every food option gives all required nutrients. So those gravitas logs would have to be retconed.