Food Museum

[GuyPerfect]

A year and a half ago, I started putting food on Pedestals. This was a thing that someone allowed me to do, so I did it. Eventually, I developed the concept into a full-blown art installation, creating the halls and floors of a museum with every food item in the game as exhibits. Now that we have Display Shelf, the passion is reignited and my quest to become a master connoisseur began anew.

The objective is straightforward:

• Produce every food item in the game
• Display them in something one might consider an artistic manner

The rules:

• No care packages
• No teleporters
• No story traits (which means no Printerceptor)

Last time I did this, I took those cheaty shortcuts and employed minimal innovation to get the job done. Ultimately I just stood around until the Printing Pod gave me all the components I needed, which I feel is a bit disingenuous. The life of a treasure hunter is not defined by spoon feedings; it is defined by adventure. I need to build rockets, for space adventure. There are ingredients out there in the great beyond, and they're not gonna procure themselves.

It is done now. Behold greatness:

This is every consumable at the time of posting, and that thing in the bottom-right is Table Salt. Actually, it's Dasha Saltvine Seed, but Table Salt uses the same exact graphic. And as of the update that added Display Shelf, Dasha Saltvine Seed is finally Pedestalable! Table Salt is, after all, a consumable unto itself, and it is used to enhance the flavor of foods such as Mixed Berry Pie, Soufflé Pancakes and Eco Power Bank. It's nice to have the full ensemble.

Each color in the backdrop represents a different category of food item, according to how you acquire them:

• Top red - Nutrient Bar is given to you directly
• Top orange - Starter food plants that can't be grown, but also never spoil
• Yellow - Critter flesh
• Right green - Microbe Musher recipes
• Left blue - Raw crops
• Pink - Electric Grill
• Black - Power Banks
• Right blue - Deep Fryer
• Bottom green - Gas Range
• Bottom orange - Smoker
• Bottom red - Rock Crusher?

Within each group, items are arranged by base game availability, then each of the DLC availabilities. I labored to find an arrangement where these categories fit neatly into a rectangular boundary and also have a one-cell gap between them. It's not easy, but I managed to pull it off. You try it!

Plant Meat had me going back and forth for a while to decide which category it belonged with. While in-game mechanically it is the same as a regular crop and has to be harvested, it conceptually is not a plant product. It is a critter product, processed through a plant machine. I put it in with the critter flesh. Dissenting viewpoints are welcome; I'm confident we can get to the bottom of this.

The journey had its ups and downs. Here are some of the highlights:

• The first seed I rolled didn't spawn a single Ovagro Node (or its seed) on Relica Fragment. I searched the entire planetoid and uncovered all the buried objects, but there simply were none to be found. Like some kind of doofus, I wound up visiting Relica Fragment last, even after producing Curried Beans, so that's when I found out I'd have to start over.
• Getting my hands on Tallow without ever interacting with a Spigot Seal was so exhilarating! I made sure to roll for Slime Molds to make it easier to craft Biodiesel early on, which is trivial to freeze by just dumping it on the ground in a Tundra biome. I was able to run a Deep Fryer without ever setting foot on Ceres Fragment.
• I forgot to grab some Peat when I brought Sweatcorn Seeds back to my home planet. Fortunately I had a Lumb in tow because I needed it for Tender Brisket, so I ultimately didn't have to make a second trip back to Relica Fragment. We had plenty of access to bona fide home-grown bootleg moonshine unregulated domestic Peat, like the kind we had back on the farm.
• Power Banks are so clutch! I used 'em to run a Liquid Pump on Glowood Wasteland to gather up some Ethanol for me while I was busy not running on a hamster wheel. The sheer utility of those things is remarkable: you can just set up remote or temporary power grids without even bothering with a battery.
• I wound up with an overabundance of Wood. Four full Storage Bins of it before I said enough is enough and uprooted the Arbor Trees I imported. This is the part where someone suggests that I could have built an Ethanol Distiller instead of pumping it into my rocket on another planet.

All-in-all, the project was a lot more fulfilling this time around. By forcing myself to engage with the Starmap in a top-down direction and minimizing resource expenditure in the interest of "ain't nobody got time for that", I expanded my familiarity with the game as a whole and, unlike most of my saves, I have something to show for it!

This is what the previous one looks like:

Since I'm a proponent of three spaces between floors and everyone else seems to be incapable of doing anything but four, I decided to do five in this museum just so that everybody was equally annoyed.