New attempt about food loss

[sorafis]

To the great developers who created ONI that makes think about real-world problems

In the real world, I feel good if I can consume all my food without it spoiling. I wish I could share this feeling with Duplicant.

Therefore, I would like to propose the following.

★Summary
If maintain zero food waste for 1 cycle, the morale of all Duplicants will increase by 2 for 1 cycle after that. However, the moment food waste occurs, that morale is lost.

“Food loss = food spoiled”.

★Target
・Plants grown on cultivation tiles
・Cooked food
・Food stored in the refrigerator
・Food half-eaten by Duplicants
・Food obtained from printing pods

Food loss occurs when food that falls under any of the above conditions spoils. Even if wild plants or wild animal meat spoiled, it does not constitute Food loss unless Duplicants are involved.

★New achievements
By continuing 100 cycles of zero food loss, players can obtain the "Minister of Food (pseudonym)" achievement.

 

To non-developers (perhaps a player)

I welcome your constructive ideas along the topic that would like to share with developers.

This is a suggestion forum, not a mod forum, so If you would like to provide someone with "just the mod information" related to this suggestion, I recommend you to post on the Mods and Tools forum.

[Meltdown]

I have mixed feelings about this idea.

On one hand, that or simmilar mechanics would probably feel nice when you suddenly find out that you gain benefit from it. Maintaining exactly 0 food loss is not trivial, and receiving some sign of acnowledgment from the game for doing this undeniably sound cool.

On the other hand, the bonus itself it not that relevant, since, I would imagine, the best solution would be to automate as much part of food production as possible (so, lots of sweepers, conveyor rails, sorting and access systems) and add dehydrator/some sort of deep freezing machine into the build. This would require advanced researcher and builder, therefore you probably won't really need that extra morale at this point, as you should have already covered that part (and there are plenty of tools for doing it).

But the main issue is treating morale bonus or just following the requirements for it as an objective. Players lack tools to manage the spoilage efficiently. Even if you tailor your calorie production to consumtion to avoid spoilage "mathematically", you cannot do anything about how would dupes select the food to consume. Therefore, there is no insurance from getting rotten leftovers. The deep freeze and dehydration, mentioned above, are mid-late game solutions that effictively turn off the spoilage mechanic for most cases, so, in that regard, players are stuck between two states:

• Not having enought tools to deterministically fullfill the requirements (so the bonus becomes "fluctuating" and less reliable)
• Getting access to the ultimate solution to the problem (the bonus suddenly becomes permanently enabled, while it's relative benefit and overall effect are unlikely to be impactful)

The lack of the mid/early game tools to manipulate food based on freshness can become a "noob trap" and create a situation where unexpirienced players (and some percentage of stubborn perfectionists) would go for the morale bonus too early without being able to consistently maintain it, leading to frustruation.

Overall, I would suggest adding more tools to manage the process of farming, ranching and distibuting the food, such as automation sensors/building settings that work with specific object properies (such as egg incubation progress, plant growth process or food freshness, etc). This would add flexibility to food production/preservation systems and would make such mechanics fit better to the game, especially for newer players.

[sorafis]

Thank you for spending so much time on this topic.

The important thing is to give players the opportunity to think about food loss, which also exists in the real world.

I think it's good to have a variety of approaches, including your thoughts.

[squanter187]

I eat spoiled food IRL- you should try it, it can be really tasty

[Jakepeng99]

On 1/3/2024 at 12:53 AM, squanter187 said:

I eat spoiled food IRL- you should try it, it can be really tasty

This is the most crazy thing i ever saw loll