Food needs reabalancing. Late game foods need to be worth it.

[UncleSlim]

Right now mealwood farms are all you need, even well into the late game. Here are a few remedies to make late game foods worth it and bring mealwood in line

1. Nerf meal lice. Make plain meal lice have less calories but keep liceloaf the same. Currently the time & effort of making lice loaf is not even worth it unless you are confined on space, but these maps are so huge that shouldn't be a problem. Lowering the calorie count of meal lice or increasing the time it takes to produce them would help.

2. Make the quality system more impactful. Because stress isn't impactful until 100%, combined with dupes barely being stressed from eating low quality food, the quality system can be ignored entirely. I've stated in another post that stress needs to become a factor in a tiered fashion or possibly even scaling debuff up until 100% stress. Because of all this, higher quality foods do not matter.

3. Make end game foods provide specific buffs. On top of the quality benefit mattering, give a tangible incentive to creating difficult meals. For example, Pickled meal lice could boost your immune system. Frost buns could improve your heat resistance so dupes would be more tolerant to the "toasty surroundings" debuff and getting heat stroke. Pepperbread and stuffed berries could offer stat boots like +athletics or +strength for the day. 

 

The food system is very broken at the moment and needs some purpose. Currently late-game players don't see much reason to build anything besides mealwood farms other than for the fun of it.

[AileTheAlien]

Some other ideas:

- Dupes get increased stress from eating raw meal lice. (Or raw *anything* for that matter.)

- Food doesn't 100% stop spoiling in CO2. Maybe 50%? Personally, I'd want 90% the rate of non-CO2 spoilage, since it's so easy to set up. (Just make a wall / pit around your boxes, and CO2 will naturally settle there over time, or if you pump it in.)

- Pickles provide 90% of the calories. This, combined with better high-tier food and CO2 spoilage, would actually make pickles worth producing.

[vovik]

You forgot that blistle berry now requires a LOT of water. Grain was good to use before nerfing agriculture - it was producing !75/5! sleet wheat at right conditions, now it gives 25/5 days and requires water. Pincha requres phosphorite, but it is finite.

Also,water is limited - 4kgs per second through geyser so that limits base growth.

[Zarquan]

My thinking is that the only way to make the higher level plants worth it is to reduce the amount of water they need.  What kind of plant requires 80 kg of water a day (bristle blossoms do)?  That is about 20 gallons of water PER DAY!  Tomatoes only need around 3-5 gallons, and that is in suboptimal conditions where evaporation can happen.  The main issue is that this isn't like the real world, where the water returns to the system to be reused eventually.  In ONI, the water is effectively destroyed, which makes the cost far too high.  We need that water to breathe!

Also, sleetwheat wants to be colder than the freezing point of the liquid they want to be irrigated with.  Maybe sleetwheat could be irrigated with polluted water instead (lower freezing point).

How do you feel about immersing the food in chlorine?  Should that make it stable?

[Coolthulhu]

On 12/26/2017 at 9:06 PM, vovik said:

Grain was good to use before nerfing agriculture - it was producing !75/5! sleet wheat at right conditions, now it gives 25/5 days and requires water.

Excellent conditions on grain weren't worth it, though. All the good players just kept it at normal and good, since you could get it for free, without any water or labor-intensive fertilization. Similar to current lice meal.

The new sleet wheat is the opposite of that: you always need to work on it, actively cool it or the water you pipe into it, keep its environment cold as the water warms it up. All of that at once, making it the worst food plant out of the 4.

42 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

What kind of plant requires 80 kg of water a day (bristle blossoms do)?  That is about 20 gallons of water PER DAY!  Tomatoes only need around 3-5 gallons

Irrelevant, unless you can find a tomato that produces nutritious (1600 kcal = ~400 grams of combined sugars and protein) fruit every 2400 seconds, without needing to consume any nutrients from soil or air, while only illuminated by faint glow of a 10W light bulb.

The question shouldn't be "what would real plants need", it should be "how much water should it consume to be worth farming". At the moment it consumes more water than it is worth, but that's mostly because raw meal lice are so incredibly strong that no other plant can compete.

[Mjello]

All they need to do is make the dupes stop working when they don't get the food quality they want.

Then we have all the incentive we need to make the high quality food.

[Zarquan]

If they did that, then the size of a colony becomes severely stunted or you would have to live with a large amount of dead weight.  If your people demanded stuffed berries, then you could only have 19, maybe 20, people in your base.  Any more and you couldn't give the plants enough water and people would start starving.  As a point of comparison, my base has 52 duplicants in it currently.  Every plant requires water other than mealwood and, unlike in the real world, the water is destroyed.  If this is to work, what would need to happen is that digestion needs to be consistent.  Dupes would have to (and probably will in the future) drink water.  They would have to drink less water based on the food they eat and the water from the plants would need to feed back in to the system, or at least produce oxygen like real plants do.

The main conceptual issue is that the plants consume water but don't produce oxygen like real plants do with their water.  All the water that is poured on to a plant either leaches to a lower level of the soil (in game, it would drain to the floor), is consumed by the plant to produce sugars and oxygen, gets put in the fruit to make it juicy, or evaporates.  Juiciness could be reflected in the future as needing to drink less water or produce more polluted water.  Sugars get converted to water by digestion.  All of this should lead to water being added back in to the system eventually, just like in the real world.

Also, we cook food to increase the amount of calories we can get out of it.  If you eat raw wheat, you don't get nearly as much out of it as if you were to eat bread.  Unless you burn the food, the usable calories should either increase or stay the same.  All the cooking recipes drastically reduce the calorie count, requiring farms an order of magnitude larger, which requires even more water.

[Mjello]

ONItionally invented solutions to address the water limitation will have to be invented offcourse  

Or they could just make a lot more water available in the game.

I personally ended up pasting a few more geysirs in the game. It is EA so balance issues are to be expected I think.

I like all the fancy foods so no meal lice in my colony  

[AileTheAlien]

I'm not sure about chlorine. I actually want it to be a corrosive gas, so that dupes walking through it get stressed and damaged. Maybe your food doesn't "spoil" if it's in chlorine, but it gets contaminated in some way so that it makes the food less effective? "Bleached food - +10 stress" or something.

[Coolthulhu]

15 hours ago, Zarquan said:

If they did that, then the size of a colony becomes severely stunted or you would have to live with a large amount of dead weight.  If your people demanded stuffed berries, then you could only have 19, maybe 20, people in your base.

20 dupes is more than anyone needs. And dupes don't demand stuffed berries - you could have a ridiculously huge colony on frost buns.

I'm not saying that the idea with lack of work is good - there are much better ways to solve this, such as extending the stress debuff for low quality food to whole cycle and increasing its magnitude. But if it actually solved the problem of plant imbalance (without breaking normal size bases), it would totally be worth it, even if it made those rare and extreme edge case superbases impossible.

Having to rework whole water physics to account for this rare and extreme edge case would be a lot of heavily misplaced effort and it would certainly flip the whole balance on its head. The most probable outcome would be that all plants would be like meal lice, which is opposite of the proper solution (which is making meal lice like other plants).

15 hours ago, Mjello said:

Or they could just make a lot more water available in the game.

There is more than enough water for anything without "super" in name. Game balance should not focus on challenge runs like "recruit all dupes", those shouldn't be considered anything more than few bonus points for handling an edge case.

Still, having endgame labor-heavy solutions for those bases wouldn't hurt. Say, vapor condenser that consumes electricity and requires dupe operation to produce water from abstract water vapor that doesn't have an in-game representation but is expected to be there. Basically the opposite of hydrofan.

[Mjello]

3 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Still, having endgame labor-heavy solutions for those bases wouldn't hurt. Say, vapor condenser that consumes electricity and requires dupe operation to produce water from abstract water vapor that doesn't have an in-game representation but is expected to be there. Basically the opposite of hydrofan.

I like the idea of water not just disappearing in the hydroponic farm tiles.

Could be very cool if it all balanced out making a "closed cycle" possible where water could be reused and cleaned indefinately, by steam cycle or water sieve. I doubt they would make the game so. But I could imagine a mod doing that without it being too difficult.

• Match calorie consumption and air consumption with toilet water (Would be 60 liter of water I think pr. dupe or something like that. Rather ridiculous)
• Let water not turned into calories be emitted as water from the hydroponic tiles

I doubt the developers actually have any real clue as to what they want this game to be. A bit like minecraft. Never played the basic game.

But it is a great sandbox with lots of fun toys. And with good modding support. All these ideas could become mini games in themselves.

As to the number of dupes.. Well when you run out of stuff to do... Just add more dupes until the game can't handle it ;-). I did that once too. But after that I only go back when I think of something new to build. Almost every update has resulted in several hours playing this game again. And well 10-20 dupes are plenty for that.