A required varied healthy diet for dupes

[Henlikuoth]

Hello, 

There are many foods in the game and beautifully looking plants that you can grow in a greenhouse. For example bristle blossom, grubfruit plants, the mushroom, and many more. However, I noticed that if you reach a certain development in food production, practically all edible plants become useless and obsolete. I was able to exclusively and reliable produce berry sludge. They can never spoil (which is great) and they provide a big bonus to morale. Once I reached that point, all other plants as well as other foods (meat, fish, etc.) became worthless and I could ignore it. 
However, this is very bad for the game. The result is that the player will ignore and thus not enjoy the complexity of the different foods in the game and how they are produced. This also includes the fact that the players often don't even know how certain plants look like and consequently cannot enjoy the beautiful art of the game. This is kind of a tragedy. 

I would suggest the implementation of a required healthy diet. This entails that the dupes must eat a variety of different foods on a regular basis. They must do that to gain certain temporary buffs and bonuses and to avoid certain negative health conditions. I would argue that if someone only eats one source of food for too long, then a negative health condition should be imposed on that dupe. This is like in real life. Humans need a varied diet, otherwise certain health issues come up. The dupe will only get rid of that particular health condition if a variety of foods are added to the diet. If 5 different foods are available in the fridge, then the dupe can choose the one they need the most. If only 1 food is available, then the negative health condition persists and no positive buff is applied. 

If this system is properly designed and implemented, it will increase the value of cooking a lot and will force the player to pay attention to the different food types and thus appreciate them more. This increases gameplay fun: Attention to detail and effort are rewarded.

 

[MiniDeathStar]

I feel this would cause an excess of micromanagement. There are a few ways the game already incentivises farming plants and producing different foods:

1. Higher quality food requires plants and gives a huge morale bonus, very valuable at max difficulty.
2. The hermit from the story trait needs 3 different meals of quality of at least +4. If you produce that for the hermit, why wouldn't you keep producing it for your dupes?
3. The new spice mechanic makes food give different buffs. To make spices, you need the seeds of different plants, for example mushroom seeds for the piloting buff.
4. There is an achievement to mutate all plants in the game with radiation.

However, there are also a few ways that the game forces you to rely on 1-2 foods exclusively:

1. Locavore + Carnivore achievements shoehorning you into mushing bars and ranching hatches. Personally I think locavore should just be removed, since it also kills oxyferns as an early game oxygen source and forces you to torture dupes with mush bars.
2. Higher difficulty asteroids having too extreme temperatures to allow for most plants, while hatches can survive from -30*C to +70*C. This can be solved by nerfing hatches or rebalancing Carnivore to make it harder but without a deadline. Nerfing hatches should probably happen anyway though – I'd make them eat and poop twice as much, so you'd want to wean yourself off them at some point before they eat the whole planet, but maybe still keep a few around for the coal.
3. Most irrigable plants require polluted water, which requires a geyser to reliably make, and also makes no IRL sense and no ingame sense either (the database entry for polluted water says it's not safe to drink... so why can plants only drink that?). I've fixed this for myself by modding them to require clean water instead, except for the lettuce and the hydrocactus.
4. Food spoilage in space forcing you to make berry sludge. On the one hand, that is what real life astronauts do. On the other hand, it makes for unfun gameplay which could be fixed by making a new freezer building that only works inside a rocket but preserves food perfectly. Berry sludge will still be the easy solution, but not the only solution and not the best solution for dupes that need huge morale.

Overall, I agree somewhat that a problem exists, but I feel it can be easily solved by just tweaking a few things and adding a new building or two.

[Henlikuoth]

The points you mention are overall reasonable and I agree. However, this does not change the fundamental problem that I outlined in my text before. I still think this needs to be improved considerably. Regarding your reproach of "micromanagement", I want to respond that the whole ONI game is a game of micromanagement. You literally need to micromanage every tile, endless cables, devices, etc. So, this argument is not applicable here. 

I really would like to see the varied diet that I mentioned and a strong incentive to regularly use different plants. 

[Akrides]

While some food are clearly intended to move past once certain thresholds are met (like meal lice), I agree that the game focuses too much on "super foods": I.E. BBQ is so useful that many colonies don't even bother with other types of food.

Having a rolling bonus to having at least a few (I would say three processed, not raw) food, and a malus if fewer (2 mild, 1 high) food is consumed.
Or maybe, if you rotate food, you keep the highest bonus active for a longer period of time. For example, you could get the massive food bonus of the burger for longer, without having the "Soul food" malus, while using and "maxing" the value of lower end food, but by a maxed variance value (let's say +/- 4)
For example, day 1 - Burger (+6), day two - BBQ (+6 still, instead of +4), day three Meal Lice ( +3, degraded by three levels becasue of the differential between +6 and -1, max 4 variance threshold).
Which even degraded, +3 for meal lice instead of -1 is good. Then day four, Tofu (+4) brings back the bonus to +4 from +3.

Although having buildings like the smoothie (which uses raw lice, berry and mushroom) is a great idea to re-use low-level food sources, the ssame idea can be used for entertainment: dupes would cycle through multiple sources of entertainment, and derives a bonus for it. For example, lower the overall fun factor of most entertainment buildings, and use a bonus of +1 o +5 for each different building used over a long period (like, let's say, five days for a complete rotation).

Having special buffs like the spices would also be nice, like playing the Arcade with a friend (+1), same with dancing on the Jukebox (or just even watching). This would incentivize to design multiple entertainment rooms with different things in them.