It is time to nerf BBQ

[fifty_ducks]

BBQ / Fish Filets invalidates almost every food. It is a one ingredient meal cooked on the easy electric grill with many near-infinite ways to get. The 20-30 cycle warm up period for BBQ to come online is not a justification for such a crazy morale boost to its similar tiered food. 

Ranching critters already has a plethora of benefits, and meat already has higher tier foods tied to other crops. Yet BBQ is so massively strong that these items are never, ever used. Has there ever been a colony showcase of a long term base not sitting on a million kCal of BBQ?

[Alex_D]

Maybe increase the energy usage of the electric grill ? IIRC, 60W seems a bit low for something capable of a full BBQ meal.
Of course this will have other consequences. If this combo changes, the carnivore achievement may need to be revisited.

It may be interesting if coal (or so) is added as an "ingredient" for intensive heat preparation meals.

[goboking]

52 minutes ago, Alex_D said:

Maybe increase the energy usage of the electric grill ? IIRC, 60W seems a bit low for something capable of a full BBQ meal.
Of course this will have other consequences.

Only 2 of 11 electric grill recipes and 2 of 8 gas range recipes require raw meat, pacu filet, or raw shellfish, so nerfing the electric grill would disproportionately hurt those of us who put in the extra effort to build sustainable farms.

[degr]

I'm laugh of loud from electric grill 60W and arcade cabinet 1200W. Seems video cards in future require way too much power in order to provide graphics better then in real life.

[Steve8]

It's also that it's very easy to get morale from other sources later, so you don't need the extra morale from more hier tier food.

Maybe just grilled meat could be nerfed and to get the same effect you need a side dish with it. Spiced meat. Meat with salad. Something like that.

[Alex_D]

1 hour ago, goboking said:

Only 2 of 11 electric grill recipes and 2 of 8 gas range recipes require raw meat, pacu filet, or raw shellfish, so nerfing the electric grill would disproportionately hurt those of us who put in the extra effort to build sustainable farms.

Of course they will. The OP idea was more of a re-balance. And it's always worth to entertain the thought, IMO

More recipes will be interesting, like more steps for more elaborated dishes, such as sleet wheat noodles to name one. On one hand ONI isn't a cooking/restaurant game, but on the other it's a ONI-nerfed small world simulator. So anything is possible.

[Trilitariion]

There are a lot of things to consider, not just "nerfing BBQ." Although I agree with you. To strip it down, BBQ requires two things - Meat, and an Electric Grill.

Oh, and poor Meep on line duty.

The hard part isn't powering the grill or providing labour, of course - Meep will work for oxygen and a mushy dirt square. The real bottleneck is Meat.

There are many meat farms, ranging from a genocide of Cuddle Pips (Not efficient, very sad, -30 morale), to compact Shove Vole ranches which feed off of space debris and produce the most meat of any creature in the game. I think. We could try dead duplicants if we're really hungry, but from experience... they taste like plastic.

When you think of Meat, you should immediately recall these compact ranches, with automated shells and enough circuitry to launch Bubbles to a gas giant. The problem is how to slow down, lengthen, or complicate the process.

1: Slowing down the process

Tamed creatures only take a handful of cycles to mature from an incubated egg, hugged and loved by our dedicated ranchers - to thrust into a "evolution" chamber, drowning in continually recycled water and living in an area no bigger than Gossmann's luxurious bedroom.

I propose an organic solution - make more growth cycles for critters, like an Arbor tree extending its branches and growing out into the world. Breeding capabilities could start at the end of its maturity, and can be stunted when the critter is not given ideal conditions (Hungry, Cramped, etc.). Wild effects would also slow down the maturity time. (4x)

2: Lengthening the process

Why just slap some meat onto a grill? We could add so much more to the recipe. There could be a cooked variant of Meat, which gives a little more morale bonus, but is in-between the two. You could make this on the grill. Then, you would have to bring both the cooked meat, spice (using the spice grinder), and another type of meat to the grill - this could be Pacu fillets, raw eggs, Gristle berries, or fried mushroom. Notice how you need to cook the other ingredients as well.

These would be combined on the natural gas range to bring all of the flavours together, although in the image they would be sorted into 2 or 3 portions - just like the barbeque. 

The morale bonus would be a sum of all of the ingredient's bonuses, /2.

3: Complicate the process

The spice system seems pretty easy - just pincha peppernut. However, this could be expanded upon.

Waterweed seeds = "Wavy Spice"
Mealwood seeds = "Strand Spice"
Bristle Blossom seeds = "Berry Spice"

These could add unique flavour to the dishes and add another layer of bonus or morale on top of it. Of course, this would also mean making these foods with these spices (Only 1 per dish! Stop it, Bottomless Stomach!) would add larger morale bonuses and help space-faring duplicants have a home away-from-home. In their machine-fabricated mouths.

Please feel free to add comments or suggestions below! A lot of this was made by Nisbet wayyyy past their naptime.

[goboking]

Here are a few more possibilities.

4.  Make the amount of meat dropped by a critter scale based on its age.  Young critters (especially those just hatched) could drop very few kcals worth of meat, while those given time to fatten up could drop the max.

5.  Add a Vegetarian trait to the trait pool.  Vegetarian dupes who eat meat could receive a morale penalty that lasts until their next meal.

6.  If you don't like the stick, perhaps the carrot?  Give dupes a hefty morale boost for having a varied diet. 

[ZenTea]

Maybe just ad salt to BBQ recipe, makes it more complicated but still viable.

[6Havok9]

In ONI the existence of a powerful "meta" option does not invalidate the other options. It's a single player sandbox game. 

However, I understand that many players will settle for nothing but the best, most powerful, easiest, "meta" things available or allowed in a game, to the point of optimizing the fun out of it. And other less "hardcore" but still efficiency oriented players might see viable, but decidedly subpar options as a waste of time and resources, so not fun. An argument could be made that the devs should "protect the players from themselves" in order to prevent the first case from happening, and strive for some balance to prevent the second case from happening. So..

If we consider BBQ too powerful, we also have to consider that is its existence that allows some high difficulty runs to be barely even possible. Nerfing it then does not seem a sensible approach, neither does nerfing the grill.

Making the other food types more appealing and rewarding would be a way. Unique effects for eating them, some "varied diet" buff, vegetarian dupes, or just straight up buffing some of them. 

This might appease most players who do not necessarily want the best thing possible, but neither want to pursue options they consider wasteful.

[misotoma]

Francis inspired me to hire only dupes with the Mouth Breather or Bottomless Stomach traits ONLY

it's hard to keep up with oxygen and food unless you make a proper deep freeze food storage

basically if you can get 2kg/s of sulfur its basically the same thing. 

or get a nice water geyser to feed bristle blossoms or get pips to give you free food lol idk... BBQ is a buffer in my opinion. But if you want to nerf it consider the other side of the pancake... will it really be harder to play this game? I personally don't think it's that overpowered.

 

[degr]

Guys, I can't understand what are talking about.

In early game you have manual generators and eat dirt

In mid game you have coal-wood-petroleum-hydrogen-natgas generators and eat mushrooms, nosh beans or meat from hatches and so on

In late game you completely get rid of that routine problems such as energy and food shortage, because you have sour gas boiler (or something similar) or 30 petroleum generators and shove voley farm with 500 critters, and you may focus on any monstrous buildings such as rocket shaft, regolith or abyssalite melter.

Why you even try to make your life more difficult? What the point of it?

[blakemw]

Funny. For me it's Berry Sludge that invalidates every other food type, especially in Spaced Out. If you can mash together a Steam Turbine and Aquatuner, and have a source of water, it's not particularly difficult to grow. Unlike every other food in the game you don't have to worry about staleness (more relevant in Spaced Out), you don't even need a cook to make it (more relevant in Spaced Out).

BBQ is popular with those who find climate control scary because critters are super tolerant of temperature.

I do think there are balance problems with meat production. Like I don't know how anyone can look at starvation ranching of shove voles (or starvation ranching of any critter where the population is sustainable) and think "yeah, yeah, that's a reasonable thing". If I were in charge of critter balance it'd be "calories not included" when it comes to critters, hatch with only enough calories to last a cycle or so, have to be full grown and fully fed to get full meat drop, starvation makes egg progress go negative and the critter dies when starving and egg progress is 0%. And I'd make wild critters starve eventually but last a lot longer without food than tame critters.

[Farsight]

Yeah, I'd definitely address infinite meat/seafood issues before worrying about recipes. I'd agree that tame critters should need to be fed to produce calories and eggs. It'd cause a riot in the short term, but I think it would overall make the game more interesting and fun by requiring better strategy.

But don't you dare touch my Berry Sludge!  

[Henlikuoth]

I agree that Berry Sludge invalidates all other foods (as I also mentioned in another post about a varied diet).

This is, of course, easy and convenient for players, but also boring and without any suspense or need to regularly check and overview food production and preservation.

I also agree that meat production is too easy.

[Xheotris]

Meat production is just waaaay too cheap, is my issue with it. Given a choice of 4 tons/cycle out of 1234E85447 tons of igneous rock, or .25 tons/cycle out of ~100t of dirt, I know what I'm picking every time. On the other hand, between composting and ranching, I'm betting the dupe labor equation comes down on the side of compost being cheaper, but that would eat into my pdirt supplies for oxygen.

And, yeah, you can spend 15 hours wild planting sleet wheat in aerogel glass with 1000+ clicks and loads of downtime, ooor you can just ranch Shove Voles for inputless food with a few dozen clicks.

[SharraShimada]

On 5/8/2023 at 11:53 PM, degr said:

I'm laugh of loud from electric grill 60W and arcade cabinet 1200W. Seems video cards in future require way too much power in order to provide graphics better then in real life.

They play in 64K Hyper-Dupeinition with a octo-SLI 8090 RTX full raytracing. 

[DolphinWing]

13 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

They play in 64K Hyper-Dupeinition with a octo-SLI 8090 RTX full raytracing. 

But Virtual Planetarium looks way cooler than Arcade Cabinet, isn't it.

[Farsight]

I just don't use starvation ranching. I can still produce enough Surf n Turf for my 40 dupes, but it takes 16 fed fish and about 56 fed critters of various types. It feels about right for effort/reward.

Unless they do a complete morale revamp (or a Death-to-all-Dupes difficulty setting), I don't think we're going to get food variety bonuses or anything that would greatly reward more effort in food production.

[cpy]

Reduce BBQ morale to +1 and done. Problem solved.

[tuxii]

Gameplay-wise it is a bit strong but I think BBQ is fine and doesn't need a direct nerf.  Ranching and Cooking are required skills.  It takes several cycles to establish a good meat producing ranch, so the reward should be worth it.  Also, players usually also have to transition to different critters as the game progresses, for example from hatches to stone hatches to slicksters.

As an analog to real life, BBQ is also mostly accurate.  You take meat and vegetables and have a skilled cook grill them you are going to end up with a pretty tasty meal even if it is devoid of all spices including salt and pepper.

I do think they could indirectly nerf BBQ though.  Make wild critters drop lower quality meat ("gamey") and BBQ made using that meat would also be lower quality, perhaps the player calls for the recipe Barbecue but when gamey meat is used Gamey Barbecue is produced.  Also, make wild critters drop less meat.  It could be a straight reduction, such as having wild critter produce 1/2 the meat domesticated critters do.  Or, it could be dynamic and based on how much food the critter consumed in its lifetime so critters who never get to eat anything produce no meat or a meat not fit to eat.

I like the idea of penalties for non-varied diets as well.  Anyone would get tired of any food if they only got to eat one thing all day every day, unless Spice Grinder.

 

Berry Sludge is a bigger issue.  It is too easy to set up a pip-planted Sleet Wheat and Bristle Berry farm and have endless free high quality never-spoiling Berry Sludge.  Even domesticated and thirsty they are overpowered.  They could hard nerf it from +3 quality to +1 and it would still be an amazing food in ONI.  That change is perfectly fine too because anyone whose eaten a fruit cake in real life stops enjoying it within the first few bites anyway.  Could you imagine a life where you had to live on fruit cake and nothing else?

[DolphinWing]

11 hours ago, tuxii said:

Could you imagine a life where you had to live on fruit cake and nothing else?

I guess that's why Zion will fall and they need Neo to save them. After all, everyone likes the steak. Who wants to eat protein-rich porridge everyday. 

[Nova Starlight]

On 5/13/2023 at 1:35 AM, degr said:

Guys, I can't understand what are talking about.

In early game you have manual generators and eat dirt

In mid game you have coal-wood-petroleum-hydrogen-natgas generators and eat mushrooms, nosh beans or meat from hatches and so on

In late game you completely get rid of that routine problems such as energy and food shortage, because you have sour gas boiler (or something similar) or 30 petroleum generators and shove voley farm with 500 critters, and you may focus on any monstrous buildings such as rocket shaft, regolith or abyssalite melter.

Why you even try to make your life more difficult? What the point of it?

Seconded.

[Henlikuoth]

On 5/18/2023 at 7:33 PM, cpy said:

Reduce BBQ morale to +1 and done. Problem solved.

This might be the easiest and most straightforward solution.

I would add that this constant killing of critters by drowning exhibits animal cruelty. I would go so far as to penalize it for exactly that. Also, why not implementing a new building, something like a butchery (without the cruelty in it)? Through this way one could process critter meat "legally" and in an ordered manner, instead of creating a strange mass drowning machinery. 

[Farsight]

There is a butchery/fishery mod. It works great, and even has fitting animations.

I've used it for a while, as it always seemed bizarre that the dupes can kill critters by command, but not as part of ranching.