Eating Speed

[Chained Phoenix]

So I like to play on the max difficulty settings, but it REALLY slows you down too much in regards to how long they take to eat.  It usually means you have to run a massively extended downtime or they will be in a hot tub when the sun comes back up and then fall asleep somewhere during the day.

Is there anyway to balance this so it's just more calories and not more time to eat it as well?  The challenge is providing that much food, but it ends up being more so about taking twice as long to do anything due to the massive eating time

[CastleCustodian]

If I eat twice as much it usually takes me twice as long.

[cyberwarlord]

I think mass/kcal making more effective meals for higher tier would be a fair trade. It's a healthier meal, not more of it if you look at it that way.

For instance, if every meal requires 1 time block. (With light a little less). But the dupe eats the whole meal (this stops partially eaten food everywhere). A higher tier meal would take just as long, but offer more calories. 

The dupes selection for meals would need to be prioritized different. Maybe eat meals allowed based on moral and kcal needed at meal times. So if they ate a large kcal meal yesterday it would prioritize a smaller meal with the best moral allowed because it only needs half as much today.

With that dupes could potentially over eat if only given access to heavy meals each day and give us a new negative debuff in the later game.  

Could also reduce eating time on rations /food produced in the micromusher. Save time over moral or when dupes don't need a full meal.

[DolphinWing]

Add lights to your dining hall. Lit workspace also applies to eating at mess table.

[Meltdown]

This sounds a bit strange. While I haven't played with this setting myself, it does not sound like eating should warrant allocating much more additional time.
Quick googling showed that dupes gain 30 000 kkal/cycle (50 kkal/second) while eating. This number is also reduced by metabolism, so is 29k kkal/cycle (48.3 kkal/second) for normal settings and 28k kkal/cycle (46,6 kkal/second) in your case. 
So, with normal settings dupe should take 1000 / 48.3 = 20.7 seconds, and 2000 / 46,6 = 42.9 seconds. Thats a 22.2 seconds difference. With single timeslot lasting 600 / 24 = 25 seconds, eating should take a bit less than 2 timeslots, without accounting for time to get the food, reach table and use salt (if you do use it).
With default difficulty, it would take 1 timeslot less, which is already considerable amount of time, but it is also does not seem to be a reason for a "massive" increase alone. I would assume that OP also meant greater time loss.

I think the problem need some clairifications. Does actual time spent for eating the food allign with calculations (like when dupes end up consuming more food or if calculations/source numbers are wrong)? How much time is typically spent on getting food and getting to the table consume? How many times dupes fetch food? The exact problem may range from dupes failing to calculate proper required kkals and ending up going for the food 2-3 extra times or having to consume more than 2k kkal (and definetly sounding like an issue) to underestimating some other things that take time during the break, like mentioned Hot Tub taking almost 4 time slots (90 seconds) and being a massive time consumer on it's own.

On 11/10/2023 at 4:21 AM, DolphinWing said:

Add lights to your dining hall. Lit workspace also applies to eating at mess table.

Regarding light effect, again, I can only provide some calulations, not a practical expirience.

Lit workplace gives 15% increase in speed, so it bumps base calorie speed to 34,5k kkal/cycle (57.5 kkal/second).
This results in 33,5k kkal/cycle (55.8 kkal/second, or 111.6% effective increase of speed) = 17,9 seconds for regular settings and 32,5k (54.1 kkal/second, or 108.2% effective speed increase) = 36,9 seconds for maximal settings. 
So light can save about 6 seconds in ideal scenario for hard settings, which is something, but not a lot.

Source for kkal speed: