Anyone else experiencing this?

[Ghengis_John]

Hi. Just bought the game, running into a problem. My dupes aren't eating the food I've gone through the trouble of having prepared for them (Liceloaf). Instead they're eating all the raw meal lice. :/ This is a real problem as this seems like it's a lot less efficient. There is no way that I can see to tell them to stop eating raw ingredients making it that much harder to keep them fed.

 

I am assuming it has something to do with the order in which food is eaten, like the fresh picked raw stuff is favored or something. Assuming don't starve style mechanics here but I'll wager the raw stuff spoils faster so they're "helping" me by eating it first? Has anyone encountered this and does any one more knowledgeable than myself know how i can make it stop. Thanks in advance.

[brummbar7]

@Ghengis_John At the upper right is the "consumables" tab.  You can use that to tell dupes what they can and cannot eat.

[Ghengis_John]

Thankyou SO much brumm.

[Whispershade]

Raw meallice is actually more efficient in that preparing liceloaf costs calories and water.

[FloomRide]

31 minutes ago, Whispershade said:

Raw meallice is actually more efficient in that preparing liceloaf costs calories and water.

Liceloaf actually adds calories and decreases mass (so you can hold more of them in a ration box or fridge).

It's a good fallback food if your colony falls into the red with food production early on.

[BlueLance]

On 31/08/2017 at 1:34 AM, FloomRide said:

Liceloaf actually adds calories and decreases mass (so you can hold more of them in a ration box or fridge).

It's a good fallback food if your colony falls into the red with food production early on.

Early game this is akin to suicide, you are using up precious water and until you find a steam geyser it is probably best to avoid using liceloaf until you have a way to get water.

[brummbar7]

I think it'd benefit the game greatly if ALL foods required water, but much less than the musher does currently - maybe just 5kg per 1000kcal.  But then you also always get this all back from dupe bathroom breaks.  So no food results in a net water loss.   This would tilt the game away from avoiding all water-requiring foods, and simply towards dealing with the waste water, which is more in line with the 'fun' aspects of the game.  Then they could focus on getting us to move up in food grades simply due to increasing dupe pickiness, via increasing penalties for gross food.

[BlueLance]

15 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I think it'd benefit the game greatly if ALL foods required water, but much less than the musher does currently - maybe just 5kg per 1000kcal.  But then you also always get this all back from dupe bathroom breaks.  So no food results in a net water loss.   This would tilt the game away from avoiding all water-requiring foods, and simply towards dealing with the waste water, which is more in line with the 'fun' aspects of the game.  Then they could focus on getting us to move up in food grades simply due to increasing dupe pickiness, via increasing penalties for gross food.

I actually think this is a really good balance choice, 

[Whispershade]

4 hours ago, BlueLance said:

I actually think this is a really good balance choice, 

Yeah I dont think that is a terribly bad idea either. Though most of the cooking station recipes do cost caleries in their production.

I thought liceloaf was the same because of that, but I hadnt built a micro musher since my first colony months ago.

[Michi01]

6 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

I think it'd benefit the game greatly if ALL foods required water, but much less than the musher does currently - maybe just 5kg per 1000kcal.  But then you also always get this all back from dupe bathroom breaks.  So no food results in a net water loss.   This would tilt the game away from avoiding all water-requiring foods, and simply towards dealing with the waste water, which is more in line with the 'fun' aspects of the game.  Then they could focus on getting us to move up in food grades simply due to increasing dupe pickiness, via increasing penalties for gross food.

If this was added they should probably add penalties for using geyser water for food production (such as not allowing players to use hot water to irrigate plants that don't grow in hot environments) or else people might end up simply ignoring the mechanic

[Cilya]

A simple idea would be that Heat is not destructed while irrigating. 90° water to plants would dramatically heat the surroundings and stops the growth of the plant.

[brummbar7]

Just now, Michi01 said:

If this was added they should probably add a penalty for using geyser water for food production (such as not allowing players to use hot water to irrigate plants that don't grow in hot environments) or else people might end up simply ignoring the mechanic

Ignoring which mechanic? The heat deletion seems to be a combination of not wanting to allow us to easy-mode delete germs (hence the heat-deleting of certain buildings like the electrolyzer) and just allowing it to happen so we can survive, since we don't have good water cooling tools (crop tiles being unaffected by irrigation water temperature).  Although we actually do *have* a machine that can cool large amounts of water simply now, it's extremely power hungry.  And I think you'd need, what, 3 of them in-line to cool geyser water down to an appropriate level at 100% through rate?  If they did allow water temperature to affect crop tiles, and come out buildings at 100% temperature, I feel like they could allow another steam geyser or two, since the infrastructure to use the geyser water would be pretty hefty, I think.  The germ deletion would not be worth the side-effects of super heated water, imho.

 

[Michi01]

10 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

Ignoring which mechanic? The heat deletion seems to be a combination of not wanting to allow us to easy-mode delete germs (hence the heat-deleting of certain buildings like the electrolyzer) and just allowing it to happen so we can survive, since we don't have good water cooling tools (crop tiles being unaffected by irrigation water temperature).  Although we actually do *have* a machine that can cool large amounts of water simply now, it's extremely power hungry.  And I think you'd need, what, 3 of them in-line to cool geyser water down to an appropriate level at 100% through rate?  If they did allow water temperature to affect crop tiles, and come out buildings at 100% temperature, I feel like they could allow another steam geyser or two, since the infrastructure to use the geyser water would be pretty hefty, I think.  The germ deletion would not be worth the side-effects of super heated water, imho.

 

My thought was that long as players can use hot geyser water to produce food, it doesn't really matter if food causes water loss or not, but if players were discouraged from using it (and food wouldn't cause any water loss), they'd actually try to recycle their water toilet water for food production and create a somewhat closed system with. Although now that I think about it, there's issues with that, like the fertilizer synthesizer using polluted water.

[brummbar7]

20 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

My thought was that long as players can use hot geyser water to produce food, it doesn't really matter if food causes water loss or not,

If food does cause water loss, it matters very much (for the fully sustainable players).  Because right now geysers don't supply enough to maintain enough electrolyzers and irrigated crops to support a very large colony (infinitely).   We're better than we could be at this moment because we can just get by on meal lice and not use any water for food OR irrigation.  So right now geysers can be fully used for electrolyzers and skimmers. But assuming that at some point we are forced to wean ourselves from (pure) meal lice, the water demands will increase through irrigation demands for higher quality food if nothing else.   And in that context it would be helpful if food were water-neutral.  That is, unless we're just going to always use wild crops.  Which could also be a way to go.  I've never added up how many sleet wheat spawn in an entire map.  Using water in all foods would also spread the food poisoning risk around a lot better.  Right now you can Basically ignore water sterilization by simply not using the musher.

If ice behaved in a logical fashion it would help offset things.  And moreover, there's no reason to assume that the supplies we have now are all we will ever have.  Klei could add more plants and animals that produce things that could net some water, they could add tech that allow you to drill a water well.  There's a lot of ways to address the issue down the road, and make it part of a tech/creature tree.  So the player has to employ several different strategies to get all the available water on the map.  That's what I'm hoping for in the long term.