Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

[alficles]

Food is necessary, but the penalties for bland food (liceloaf all day, every day!) are not enough to make dealing the the complexities of the other options worth it. You could, of course, punish bland food more harshly.

Or... you could give food specific boosts. We've already got a great interface for restricting which food each person can eat. Give foods day-long bonuses to specific skills. For example, a somewhat basic, but decent, food might provide +3 athletics (or whatever number is reasonable). A fancier food might provide +5 creativity and learning, so you'd only apply it to your researchers and artists. Another might provide bonuses to digging. Another might provide Diver's Lungs.

Some foods might also suppress traits like "flatulent" or "loud sleeper".

We don't need a huge range of food for this either. You can kinda pile on traits that don't overlap much. For example, an Algae Berry Salad that provides a boost in creativity, learning, suppresses the flatulent trait, and increases the dupe's feelings about decor (both for good and ill) could still be balanced because it's fairly unlikely that a single dupe could benefit from all the traits at once, but it's still a decent buff for any of them.

But at the end of the day, make me care about what I feed my dupes.

[wutzelputz]

Love this idea!

Getting a bonus for "good" food instead of a malus for "bad" one will not increase the difficulty for new players while giving players in higher cycles still something to tinker around, experiment optimal layouts etc.

[bajosi]

Good idea

[Jayndreh]

Definitely think the certain meals suppress certain negative traits is wonderful. Flatulant dupes can only eat xx.

[alficles]

9 hours ago, wutzelputz said:

Getting a bonus for "good" food instead of a malus for "bad" one will not increase the difficulty for new players while giving players in higher cycles still something to tinker around

From a balance perspective, there's not much difference between a bonus and malus. It just changes the setpoint of everything in the game, which is what's balanced against. But you're right that new players tend to react better to bonuses.

It's tempting to try to balance the bonuses with maluses to keep things even. But players will play around the negatives and play to the positives. (The only exception I might suggest is a food that adds the flatulence trait. A clever player might be able to power his base from dupe-farts!) And it's usually better to keep it simple. We don't need 200 kinds of food, of which we'll pick the "best" two and ignore the rest.

[vovik]

In addition to this i would suggest to add "x units per day" on cooking stations. 

[Otis Miller]

I would second this and add that it would be great if you could set specific meal times each day. I've tried doing this by locking doors, but the only way I could make it work was much more inefficient than not.

It's a shame that I couldn't make a separate 'lunch' table for wherever my duplicants were working most during the day.

Also I think if they did add a multitude of food types, the results should be REALLY good for somehow combining them all. One of the most challenging things in this game is being able to farm a multitude of crops. If you could somehow make mushroom berry lice stew, it should supercharge your dupes, giving a real reason to farm more than one kind of food.

[alficles]

I think a generic "need bell" could work nicely there. Instead of creating a new overlay or interface, just create a building that has checkboxes for "needs". When the bell is powered and activated (it should have an automation input, of course), it would tell any dupe that can hear it to attend to that need, even if they don't actually need it, as soon as the bell is activated. Standard needs would be "eat", "pee", "shower", "breathe", and that sort of thing.