Analysis of resource requirements for foods

[Hakon]

Have you ever wondered what would cost you more resources: gristle berries or fried mushrooms? Or if you should fertilize my plants? Or how much high morale food items cost and which one is cheapest?

Don’t worry, I have wondered as well and now I have the answers! (or at least most of them)

Introduction

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I like to play this game on the ravenous hunger setting meaning my dupes need 2000 kcal per cycle to survive. The resource cost of farming can quickly add up so what recipe would cost the least in resources? Given a limited amount of resources, what plant should i farm to feed the most dupes? This is the main question i wanted to answer.

The complexity of the resource conversions is not included in this analysis and should be considered together with other factors before choosing what food you make. Wild planting and ranching for food are not included in this analysis as they can often be made without using resources.

Methodology

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The difficulty of comparing different foods is that they require different resources. To be able to compare the resource cost of all the plants, a resource needed to be chosen to convert all other resources in to compare them. I chose polluted water as the reference resource because it is a product of many conversions and it converts in a lot of things as well.

To do this analysis I made a spreadsheet with 3 sheets.

resources

This sheet includes the conversions used and a table with the resulting equivalent water cost of all relevant resources. For example the equivalent polluted water cost of natural gas is 0,8 that means that 1kg of natural gas is equivalent to 0,8kg of polluted water.

All the conversions in this sheet are assumed to be used. This includes ranching pufts, boiling fertilizer, ranching molten slicksters or slicksters with a petroleum boiler,... To achieve these resource conversions you would need to play hundreds of cycles but even if you haven’t achieved these conversions yet, they are still a good way of approximating the resource cost.

Some resources don’t have a way of being produced from polluted water, but they have a way of being converted to polluted water or other known resources (such as sulfur) in this case an opportunity cost is calculated that is used in the calculations. This opportunity cost relays how much polluted water can be gained from using the resource for something else than plant growing.

Some resources don’t have a way of being converted into polluted water or food in any way other than the way that is under question. (chlorine and salt) These resources are assumed to be valueless. 

plants

On this sheet the total equivalent polluted water cost is calculated for all the plants without and with fertilization with the farm station. The skill of the farmer doing the fertilization is chosen to be 15.

Food

On this sheet the equivalent polluted water cost for all recipes is calculated. For animal products I don't know how to find an equivalent water cost so I decided to choose values for all animal products that are similar in resource cost than most plants to at least be able to compare recipes that use both plant and animal products to other recipes that use only plant products. Especially the products that only use animal products shouldn’t be compared to other recipes.

The numerical results of the analysis are color graded and are  expressed in g of equivalent polluted water cost per kcal of food. As g/kcal is the same as kg/1000kcal and a dupe on regular settings needs 1000 kcal per cycle to live, the given value is the equivalent kg’s of polluted water needed per cycle per dupe and half of what you need on ravenous settings.

Results

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Conclusions

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The following are some conclusions i made:

• All plants that can be fertilized consume a lot less resources per kcal when fertilized, so fertilize your plants!
• Spindly grubfruit is more efficient than grubfruit but has lower morale. Both are super efficient with the roasted grubfruit nut being the most efficient recipe. This may be caused by an underestimation of the sulfur cost but what can be concluded is that if you want to get the most out of sulfur, you should farm (spindly) grubfruit.
• Making gristle berries will cost you more than 3 times the water you would use for fried mushrooms. This does however require ranching pufts to make the resource renewable.
• Farming lettuce is very resource efficient but requires bleach stone. To make bleach stone renewable you would need to ranch squeaky pufts so that would be challenging.
• Farming lumber for ethanol production is very resource positive.
• All recipes including pincha peppernuts are very inefficient. The peppernuts from wild plants are great but farming pincha peppernuts will waste a lot of resources.
• The high morale foods that require the least resources are the mushroom wrap(+12) and the mushroom quiche(+16). These recipes do require complex resource conversions.

 

Spreadsheet

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If you want to look at the spreadsheet formulas or want to play around with some things, please go ahead. The spreadsheet is linked below. If there are any mistakes you found or thoughts you want to share, please do!

oni food.xlsx

 

[blakemw]

Interesting analysis.

On max hunger difficulty I'm usually more interested in labor efficiency than resource efficiency, because in most cases there are plenty of resources, especially with respect to stopgap foods.

Labor efficiency varies greatly. Some of the best are Berry Sludge and BBQ, both are 50s recipes that give 4000 kcal.

Kcal/s is based on unmodified time. Dupes fed assumes a Dupe has 5.5 schedule slots of non-work (3 downtime, 2.5 sleeping), max hunger difficulty, lit workspace, and a cooking skill of 4

The worst food by a very large margin is Mush Fry, on max hunger difficulty to feed 12 dupes with Mush Fry you'd need 3-4 full time cooks! Mush Bar is a lot better (one of the random things is it only takes 40 seconds to cook, which is unique) and it's vastly preferable if you can destroy the germs with radiation or consider the penalties from food poisoning to be preferable to the huge amount of time wasted. Mush being a "stopgap" food you're not going to use it very long until BBQ or something kicks in and so the resource consumption tends to not be a consideration.

Frost Bun is surprisingly bad. In fact, if you consider it reasonable to only have 1 cook per 12 dupes, then Frost Bun, Stuffed Berry, Cooked Seafood and Roast Grubfruit Nut all take an uncomfortable amount of cooking time.

The cooking time efficiency champions are Berry Sludge, BBQ and Pepper Bread. Even on max hunger difficulty a single cook with merely middling skill could feed 24 dupes making these recipes. It doesn't hurt that Berry Sludge and BBQ are the best foods in all regards except morale anyway (Berry Sludge for care-free management in Spaced Out, and BBQ for low resource requirements).

While it resists mathematical analysis, I've also examined cooking vs raw food production. Like if you aren't doing Locavore, you may find yourself considering mealwood vs mush bar. Both consume a similar amount of dirt, but growing mealwood is ridiculously more labor-efficient in terms of basic calories, like probably at least 5x. It must be admitted, those basic calories are dropped on the floor in the farm while Mush Bar production can be extremely streamlined like just dropping the Mush Bars on the floor between the Bathroom and Mess Hall so dupes grab some with no extra errand time.

[Hakon]

It's interesting to see the labor efficiency as well. What surprised me is the dupe time needed to cook recipes like frost buns. That really takes a lot of dupe time. However I think most cooks probably have a higher skill level than 4 so it would be a bit faster. 

I can understand that you mainly care about labor efficiency because the water geysers give so much that it becomes a challenge to even use them all. Maybe you run out if you have more than 100 dupes but I haven't gotten there yet. However I used to play the game back when you only had 2 cool steam vents as a water source. Back then resources were the limiting factor and that is still the way i approach the game. I like playing the game much more if i force myself to focus on resource efficiency.

[Gurgel]

You know, my end-game is always wild-planted. Usually Sleet Wheat, because that is really simple and you can make Berry Sludge and accumulate food to eventually feed to the aggressive tree. But colonies with no water work well with wild trees and Gristle Berries. 

[LadenSwallow]

Honourable mention could go to auto - cooked omelette. Missing on the list appears to be mushroom quiche, which if enabling auto - cooked omelette, would sit around tofu efficiency levels, and offer radiation resistance.

[Hakon]

On 2/18/2024 at 8:57 AM, Gurgel said:

You know, my end-game is always wild-planted. Usually Sleet Wheat, because that is really simple and you can make Berry Sludge and accumulate food to eventually feed to the aggressive tree. But colonies with no water work well with wild trees and Gristle Berries. 

Yeah that's what most people do. It's sad that it replaces all these options in resource management and makes it all competely free. I personally think it's a bad game mechanic, that's why I don't use it.

[Gurgel]

8 hours ago, Hakon said:

Yeah that's what most people do. It's sad that it replaces all these options in resource management and makes it all competely free. I personally think it's a bad game mechanic, that's why I don't use it.

I tried shipping first, but the launcher and rockets are just too hard to automate reasonably. And it is not free, it still takes dupe time.