Suggestion: Improvements on Stale Food mechanics

[boiledDupe]

I'm having a bit of a hard time making a deep freezer box, and for the issues I'm addressing I wonder if it's worth the effort.

• Food in a -20 Celsius CO2 box takes a long time to cool down. 
  • I can use metal tiles and a heat sink to cool the food prior to drop - or another room with H2, but just seems overly complicated
  • In my current setup I pre-refrigerate the food coming in as the fridge does a good job of bringing it down to 1C quickly
• Fridges in a cool box warm food up to 1C if the food was colder
• It's difficult to work with Conveyer loaders (high mass intake) and shipping filters (lacking support for multi select of food types) making it a challenge to ship the right amount of ingredients to cooking stations vs mess hall.  BBQ is a good example where it could be turned into surf n turf or eaten outright.  I prefer the closed box approach vs dupes grabbing things diagonally or opening up the box to dupes.
  • With a shipping loader, it will make it difficult to use the automation of Fridges (where I'd like to store most of the food) to react to oversupply (like shutting down a farm, or allowing/disallowing BBQ for consumption in favor of burgers)
• If the food is unreachable to a dupe it's difficult to understand how much food is in the colony.

Here's an early design blueprint I have, and I know the challenges and how I can make it better (bigger heat sink, smarter automation for delivering food to cook stations) but it does start to fell more like a chore to build all that out esp considering in the real world I'd just have a true freezer.

Some suggestions:

• Have a freezer building, but still require a sterile environment to work correctly.
• Increase the conductivity of food, so that it doesn't take ages to cool down in CO2
• Allow the use of multi select shipping filters
• Include unreachable food as a subcategory of calorie metrics
• Disable the pre-filling of Conveyer loaders when disabled and/or allow setting the max size of the loader.

[misotoma]

They posted recently a few kitchen idea setups in this forum. Maybe it can help. 
This is my setup in a sandbox. To explain quickly: there are three spacings on the kitchen floor. Starting from the left - the salt water boxes in critter eggs that you want to “evolve” into meat for bbq. Have a conveyer hook up from your ranch and drop here. The second and third requires a vacuum since I pressurize it with chlorine. The middle box is for material storage (indefinite storage for meat, meal lice, grubfruit, etc.) the last box is final storage of cooked food. You see the gas pipes - I use a thermo regulator to cool down hydrogen to minus whatever you want. The metal tiles help the chlorine reach a deep freeze temperature. The food doesn’t have to be frozen just the chlorine. The food will detect what temperature it is sitting in and switch to deep frozen even if it isn’t. Duplicants only drop into refrigerators. Auto sweepers do all of the work. Also access to food is no longer available, but if you have an auto sweeper picking up the food then it will display how many calories you have crammed in there. Hope it helps.

[boiledDupe]

Yup here's a screen shot of my blueprint (with oil in the lower gap.  The thing I didn't realize is that the room temperature matters & not the food temperature for the deep freeze buff. I can now remove the "pre-refrigerate phase" - so thanks for sharing!  That also removes my main criticism (on how comlpex it is would be to cool down an item of food to that temperature, esp with item combination (two 1kg bbq becomes one 2kg bbq item with temp averaged). 

Some of my other criticisms still remains wrt to the loaders.  I'm personally not a big fan of the diagonal grab, as IMO it feels a bit cheap.

 

[ghkbrew]

12 hours ago, boiledDupe said:

The thing I didn't realize is that the room temperature matters & not the food temperature for the deep freeze buff.

Technically, the temperature check is done against the lower of the two temperatures (food or environment). Unless it's in vacuum, then only the food temp is checked. There's generally not much difference, since they will tend to equalize eventually, but it does let you do things like carry cold food through hot rooms without spoiling. Or keep hot food "deep frozen" without actually cooling it:

 

[boiledDupe]

Yeah makes sense.  What makes it slightly frustrating is that if I want to do it the "fancy" way with automated loaders, then I do need something conductive to reduce the building heat that they generate (and by extension then the food within them).  I actually put back in the pre-fridge exchange in my blueprint as that is a cost-effective way of cooling down the food prior to the deep freeze room. 

The game really wants me to dump it on the ground as debris and call it a day - but IMO this feels backwards.  The current setup/needs just feels a little broken atm.

 

[Orzelek]

18 hours ago, boiledDupe said:

Yeah makes sense.  What makes it slightly frustrating is that if I want to do it the "fancy" way with automated loaders, then I do need something conductive to reduce the building heat that they generate (and by extension then the food within them).  I actually put back in the pre-fridge exchange in my blueprint as that is a cost-effective way of cooling down the food prior to the deep freeze room. 

The game really wants me to dump it on the ground as debris and call it a day - but IMO this feels backwards.  The current setup/needs just feels a little broken atm.

 

You can put it into the unpowered fridge and cool the whole thing. You will need to precool food anyway esp from grill or it will coold down quite slowly.