Peculiar plants

[DimaB77]

A simple article about new plants and mutations.

Additions and comments are welcome.

[Coolthulhu]

Yield per cycle is not a big deal if you aren't fertilizing. Yield per resource unit spent/job performed is much more important, even if you are fertilizing. So comments on grubfruit are wrong: it's a very efficient plant, since sulfur has a guaranteed geyser and not many uses.

Hydrocactus could use analysis on optimized builds, like farm station+grubs+mutation. It would be hard to get good mutations due to it being slow-growing and work-intensive (must fertilize), but with good muts, it may be better than arbor trees at generating water. Or it might be worse. Does it actually spawn in the game?

[DimaB77]

46 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Yield per cycle is not a big deal if you aren't fertilizing.

I think that the advantages of the scheme (farm) should be evaluated holistically. It is very easy to deliver the feed with conveyor. And if the player has a lot of feed, he will choose this farm because it produces twice as much without labor costs. If he has no fertilizer, he will choose another scheme.

54 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Hydrocactus could use analysis on optimized builds, like farm station+grubs+mutation.

The first part of this article looks at the new plants added in the DLC. Of course, by applying certain mutations you can get very different results.

[sakura_sk]

You find mealwood as the best source of calories because of a mistake: 1 mealwood produces 1 mealice per 3 cycles 600kcal not 1200kcal (liceloaf needs 1200 meaning you will need two plants after 3 cycles to produce one) which will make a mealwood plant yield 200kcal per cycle or, in your proposed farm, 9x200= 1800kcal/cycle not 5100. That means bock bucket is more efficient than mealwood as it produces 280kcal (rounded) per cycle per plant.

Pincha peppernut isn't edible so it shouldn't have kcal/cycle by itself. It's confusing.

 

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

I think that the advantages of the scheme (farm) should be evaluated holistically.

Adding more conveyors + parts is a one-time cost that quickly becomes negligible compared to the cost of input to plants. It's fine to list just output per cycle in a table, but the comments should not glorify an unimportant measure like that.

You also neglect dupe labor, making the evaluation not holistic at all. If dupe labor matters, then liceloaf becomes expensive. If it doesn't matter, then building an extra farm becomes a better option than relying on mealwood.

Either way, kcal/cycle "per farm" is a measure only useful in very early labor-constrained colonies, or in very space-constrained colonies.

Also note for a different guide that seems to be yours:

https://oxygen-not-included-guide.fandom.com/wiki/Farming#Mealwood

Here you list meal lice cost as 90kg dirt, but kcal output as 5100 kcal, which seems to be 3 liceloafs. Meaning you list cost of producing only the lice, not the loaves, but kcal of the loaves. Similar for nosh sprout, but less misleading because the player will quickly notice something is wrong with the guide.

Then there's the pincha pepper... The most positive way to describe giving 7650 kcal value to it is "very misleading".

[DimaB77]

The remarks seem fair. I will check them carefully tomorrow, and I will be sure to correct them if the calculations are wrong.

[DimaB77]

Yes, there was a mistake (somewhere I took its caloric value to be 1200 kcal).
The correct way is this: Nine farms would give 5400 kcal of Meal Lice or 4.5 Liceloaf, 1700 kcal each and 7650 kcal total. Or 2550 kcal/cycle.

14 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

Pincha peppernut isn't edible so it shouldn't have kcal/cycle by itself. It's confusing.

Yes, of course. But that's what I wrote: "Not edible in raw form"
Not specifying a caloric value for it, imho, is even worse.

14 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Either way, kcal/cycle "per farm" is a measure only useful in very early labor-constrained colonies, or in very space-constrained colonies.

Why, it's easy to estimate both the total farm size and space needed and the total irrigation/fertilizer consumption.

14 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

You also neglect dupe labor, making the evaluation not holistic at all. If dupe labor matters, then liceloaf becomes expensive.

Farms operate in automatic mode, with the exception of harvesting. You can completely prohibit the passage of dupes for the time of growth, as it is done here.

[Yobbo]

It seems this is more focused on 9-plant farms than on the plants themselves.

If it were about the plants i'd expect measures of plants-per-dupe and resources-per-dupe-per-cycle to be more useful, but these are not obvious from the way the information is presented.

Actually i'm not sure what information it's trying to present. If i divide the calories per cycle by 1000 it gives dupes-fed-per-farm, so i suppose this would be useful for determining how many farms to stamp out if copying these blueprints, but then you'd still run into the problem of not knowing how much resource input is required to feed however many dupes you have.

The part on mutations seems clear enough though, and i like the pictures showing all the thimble reed mutations.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

Yes, of course. But that's what I wrote: "Not edible in raw form"
Not specifying a caloric value for it, imho, is even worse.

If a player was to trust your guide, he'd expect pincha to be very efficient. Actual caloric value of pinchas is at best 400kcal per nut, when it enables a recipe like spiced tofu.

2 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

Why, it's easy to estimate both the total farm size and space needed and the total irrigation/fertilizer consumption.

• You aren't optimizing the farms for space, including the space for cooling/ladder for CO2 chamber/covering variants farm station or critter arrow. The player is best off doing math on space by himself.
• In a practical farm, the number of plants will most likely not be cleanly divisible by 7, as there would be under/over production in this case.
• Multiplication by an integer is easy

These make the output per "farm" per cycle pretty useless. And output per input is almost always very important.

2 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

Farms operate in automatic mode, with the exception of harvesting. You can completely prohibit the passage of dupes for the time of growth, as it is done here.

I did take it into account.

• More harvests mean more labor.
• Liceloaf always requires pumping and hauling water.

There are extra work it will quickly become more work than setting up another farm, which is a one-time cost.

Hence your approach isn't holistic, just "multiplied by 9".

[sakura_sk]

3 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

Or 2550 kcal/cycle.

Hmmm.... I don't think so...

It will still be 1800kcal/cycle per 9 plants farm if you don't count anywhere how much water is needed for making liceloaf 

[DimaB77]

1 hour ago, sakura_sk said:

t will still be 1800kcal/cycle per 9 plants farm

That's because I'm counting for the finished dish: "the yield per 1 harvest and the yield per 1 cycle for the finished dish and the cost per 1 cycle will be given. Quality is given for a dish with minimum cooking costs (usually on an electric grill)."

It is impossible to calculate for a raw product, because some ingredients are not consumed without cooking.

[sakura_sk]

That's where the guide gets confusing. You either need to calculate raw food brought from farms only or cooked dishes by calculating all ingredients. Otherwise it's not clear what one needs to have to reach your calculated kcal/cycle.

[DimaB77]

Coolthulhu, The form can be made as very large and automated, or very simple. I needed something to build on, so I chose to include a single Auto-sweeper as a criterion. In this configuration, the farm is not large, but almost fully automatic (except for harvesting).

How do you think it is worth building such an article?
1. A few Farm tile, no automation?
2. A large farm, with a 3 dupes (or 10? or 50?)

Sketch out your version, at least for a few plants, in the sandbox. If it turns out to be more understandable and correct, I'll be happy to rewrite the article.

7 minutes ago, sakura_sk said:

Otherwise it's not clear what one needs to have to reach your calculated kcal/cycle.

I agree, that's a good point.
It was:

Harvest: 1 Bristle berry 1600 kcal or Gristle berry 2000 kcal. Quality: +1
Yield per cycle: 3000 kcal

Became:

Harvest: 1 Bristle berry 1600 kcal
Yield per cycle: 3000 kcal (Gristle berry. Quality: +1)

Is that better?

[sakura_sk]

20 hours ago, DimaB77 said:

Is that better?

Still doesn't seem clear to me. I could be wrong (english is not my native language) but "yield", when referred to farms, is always the "farm's yield", what the plant produces, the raw product. Also, even if gristle berry doesn't need other ingredients, like water or another crop, it still needs a "cooking skill" to be produced.

[DimaB77]

1 hour ago, sakura_sk said:

Still doesn't seem clear to me. I could be wrong (english is not my native language)

For me, too. Somebody write it down in a way that makes more sense.

[Coolthulhu]

On 7/31/2021 at 12:15 PM, DimaB77 said:

1. A few Farm tile, no automation?

2. A large farm, with a 3 dupes (or 10? or 50?)

You mean for evaluating labor? It's incredibly variable, so no matter what you assume in your example, you won't get a reliable number.

You should show per-plant data no matter what you want to optimize.

The farms should be only examples, unless your farm is some complex design that needs a specific shape to achieve full efficiency. And even then, you should give per-plant data as well, only summing it up for the farm as a small note.

Good data to display:

• Statblock of the plant that the game already displays.
• Resources per 1000 kcal (including all extra ingredients like water, bristle berries or pincha nuts) per plant.
• How much kcal one plant produces per cycle. Excluding labor and production of other ingredients. Assuming everything is cooked. Pincha gets nothing here!
• Alternatively, time to get 1000 kcal per plant instead of kcal per 1 cycle. It would fit better with resources per 1000 kcal.

And that's it.

Data that is just data per plant * number of plants is worse than just data per plant.