Food/Crop diversity problem

[Hexicube]

One of the problems I've noticed with food is that there always seems to be one food that is just objectively the best food, and that it sometimes changes when balance happens for the related crops. Instead of trying to get "perfect" balance, what can instead be done is balance in a way that still has a best crop but that crop cannot be used alone.

Here's the things I would do to make diversity either ideal or mandatory:

• Duplicants will attempt to eat higher quality food before lower quality food, and will prefer something that they did not eat recently (last two meals)
• Duplicants that eat three different foods back-to-back that are at least quality tier 1 will gain a "Well Fed" buff, which could reduce calorie burn rate or give stat increases similar to early bird
• A new food, field rations, that requires a diverse ingredient list (possibly needing all crops); duplicants will always keep one on hand if possible and will eat it on the spot if not within a certain range of their mess table (would help with long-distance mining mid-late-game)

Additionally, some of the crops just feel massively imbalanced due to their domestic requirements being so disparate. Some of the crops just need to be brought back in line, since the cost per kcal on some makes no sense at all.

First, here's every crop yield material cost:

• Meal Lice is 30kg dirt
• Mushroom is 30kg slime
• Bristle Blossom is 120kg water
• Sleet Wheet is 20kg water + 5kg dirt per grain (you get 18 each time)
• Pincha Peppernut is 70kg polluted water + 1kg phosphorite per nut (you get 4 each time)

The phosphorite cost is basically not important since dreckos can convert balm lily (a crop with no domestic growth cost) into phosphorite, but I'm going to include it for completeness. Polluted water is also kept separate for now since converting clean water into polluted water on these scales requires a duplicant, therefore meaning they are only equivalent if most of your water starts out polluted in the first place.

I'm now going to represent every crop-based food (no BBQ/muckroot/nutrient bar) item available in terms of material cost per 1000kcal (raw crops listed to show improvements for processing):

• Meal Lice is 600kcal, 1000kcal costs 50kg dirt
• Mushroom is 2400kcal, 1000kcal costs 12.5kg slime
• Bristle Berry is 1600kcal, 1000kcal costs 75kg water
• Liceloaf is 1700kcal and costs 2 Meal Lice + 50kg water, 1000kcal costs ~29.41kg water + ~35.29kg dirt
• Fried Mushroom is 2800kcal and costs 1 Mushroom, 1000kcal costs ~10.71kg slime
• Gristle Berry is 2050kcal and costs 1 Bristle Berry, 1000kcal costs ~58.54kg water
• Stuffed Berry is 4000kcal and costs 2 Bristle Berry + 2 Pincha Peppernut, 1000kcal costs 60kg water + 35kg polluted water + 0.5kg phosphorite
• Frost Bun is 1200kcal and costs 3 Sleet Wheet grain, 1000kcal costs 50kg water + 12.5kg dirt
• Pepper Bread is 4000kcal and costs 10 Sleet Wheat grain + 1 Pincha Peppernut, 1000kcal costs 50kg water + 12.5kg dirt + 17.5kg polluted water + 0.25kg phosphorite
• Berry Sludge is 4000kcal and costs 1 Bristle Berry + 5 Sleet Wheet grain, 1000kcal costs 55kg water + 6.25kg dirt

There's a few things to spot here:

• All recipes that use one ingredient are objective improvements, which should be obvious
• Since polluted water can be cleaned, this means Gristle Berry (~58.54kg) is objectively better than Stuffed Berry (95kg) and Pepper Bread (67.5kg) for pure caloric content, making peppernuts a useless crop with current recipes
• Frost Bun is objectively better than Pepper Bread (same water+dirt requirements, pepper bread has additional needs)
• If you have slime, it should always be fed to mushrooms and not converted into dirt for other crops, since at best you can only get a 1:1 ratio
• All crops (except for the two involving peppernuts, and mushrooms) can be expressed in a linear progression, trading dirt for water:
  • Liceloaf is 29.41kg water + 35.29kg dirt
  • Frost Bun is 50kg water + 12.5kg dirt
  • Berry Sludge is 55kg water + 6.25kg dirt
  • Gristle Berry is 58.54kg water
  • There is an approximate conversion rate of 5kg water per 6.25kg dirt

Looking at this information, it should be fairly clear why the only two crops that seem to get used are Bristle Blossoms and Dusk Caps. The first has the best caloric cost (Berry Sludge is good if you have the dirt, but that also uses the same crop), and the second is extremely effective for using up slime that you may have.

It's worth noting that, other than Liceloaf, all of the sub-optimal meals actually provide a higher meal quality. However, in my experience, any gained stress from eating +1 food does nothing to cause issues once you have a mess hall and latrine to provide their respective buffs. Therefore, all meals should be compared for their caloric content alone.

One solution that I can see is changing this conversion rate to be far more water intensive, so that the vastly more renewable water is balanced out and your choice can be tailored more appropriately. This could be done by dropping the sleet wheat dirt requirement down to something like 2kg per cycle, and also dropping Mealwood dirt requirements (or increasing water requirements of Liceloaf) so that it matches the new progression. Water is the more renewable resource by far, with production rates measured in kg/s from geysers, which makes sense given that the best method for renewable oxygen is electrolysis.

I'm going to go ahead and make an excel sheet, so that I can fiddle with domestic crop needs to see when values start looking more reasonable.

I also propose a new crop growth tile:

• Requires a 2x1 footprint (2 wide, 1 tall), as well as appropriate air space above/below for the chosen crop
• Requires a farmer to periodically clean the dirt (daily?), which would take the form of removing polluted dirt and replacing it with normal dirt (making composting more relevant)
• Crops grown on this tile use wild requirements (no irrigation/fertiliser requirements, but grows slow)

This would mean you can grow some of the more interesting crops without worrying about their consumption, at the cost of large amounts of duplicant work. These crops would only really be effective for bases that can afford to devote duplicants solely to farming, and ideally should be done in a way where the amount of duplicant work needed to maintain these crops is too high for a base to use them exclusively. Having the work be too much would mean you end up with hybrid farms, where plots have wild segments to fill out farmer workload and domestic segments to satisfy the colony, which would be far more interesting than the ever-expanding ever-consuming domestic farm of doom.

Having this non-domestic tile would also be useful as a supplementary crop growing area. For instance, you could use regular crops growing Bristle Blossoms and wild crop growers growing Pincha Pepperplants. This would basically serve as a quality booster with minor caloric benefits on top, with Gristle Berries being a fall-back if your dupes are no longer able to work the wild farm plot.

[Coolthulhu]

Few problems with this analysis:

• Pinchas are plentiful in nature and very hardy. You can feed a mid-sized colony with peppered food without ever planting a single one. The whole part regarding cooked pincha foods is invalid because of that. The fix for underpowered farmed pinchas would have to involve changing domestic pincha requirements, not working around them.
• On higher difficulties, for dupes that don't work in the nice part of the base, each +5% stress (from missed point of food quality) is about 1/12 of a cycle spent on massager, not counting the trip to massager itself. This isn't very important, but isn't minuscule enough to ignore it entirely.
• It assumes that the major food source in the colony comes from plants. There already are low cost, high maintenance sources of food: hatches. Unless your colony is uberhuge or ancient (40+ dupes, 1000+ cycles), it's critters that are the renewable source of food.
• No mention of fertilization/farmer's touch. This does change the plant math rather noticeably, even if not heavily.

Your solution isn't good either. It makes plants act more like critters (low/no material cost, high maintenance) and sounds like it's specifically for the pinchas, which, as mentioned above, should be solved by altering pinchas, not working around their requirements.

[Hexicube]

• Pinchas add no caloric content to food (bristle is 2000kcal, grain is 400kcal), so I'm tempted to just ignore them entirely when talking about crops since they're basically a quality booster.
• I haven't yet fiddled with increased stress difficulty, but I don't think that should be something that balance works around. Crops should be based around default difficulty, with the difficulty options accounting for what the values are when balanced for normal difficulty. With a default world, food quality is basically irrelevant, the only time I've ever seen a dupe get stressed from eating was when I planted meal lice for my glossy drecko and a dupe ate it since I planted in a planter box and not a farm tile. This added a decent chunk, which quickly vanished over the same cycle...and they work in the mines.
• Crops are the scale-able solution to food, for a plethora of reasons. Space-effectiveness, yield time, scaling speed. I'd be very surprised if hatches can compete.
• The wild crop plots were not being proposed as a solution, but rather an addition to the system for added choices.

As for Farmer's Touch, that's an interesting point. I forgot to account for the material cost of fertiliser, thinking it was just a flat halving of cost (assuming it doesn't double the consumption rate of crops).

One use is 5kg, which is ~2.7kg dirt and 1.625kg polluted water. Going to go ahead and ignore the phosphorite cost, because it's renewable basically for free by using balm lilies and dreckos.

Since one use doubles growth, it basically halves cost. You get the following:

• Bristle Blossom: 120kg water -> 60kg water + 8.1kg dirt + 4.875 p. water -> 8.1kg dirt for 55.125kg water
• Sleet Wheat: 360kg water + 90kg dirt -> 180kg water + 45kg dirt + 24.3kg dirt + 14.625 p. water -> saves 20.7kg dirt and 165.375kg water
• Dusk Cap: 30kg slime -> 15kg slime + 20.25kg dirt + 12.1875kg p. water -> worse off due to algae distiller (algae -> dirt via heat), but might be good if you have dirt

Basically just halves the cost for bristle and sleet (bit worse for sleet because 18 cycle grow time), but is ineffective with dusk caps. Dusk caps are probably fine as they are anyways, slime can be produced via pufts + morbs and you don't need large quantities. I was doing the math and found that dusk caps are effectively 320kcal/cycle (sleet is 400kcal/cycle, bristle is 333.333kcal/cycle), so that's 12kg per dupe-cycle.

I think it has no real impact on what crop you use. If you have slime available, dusk caps are so far ahead in terms of material mass that not being able to double effectiveness doesn't stop them being great.

[Coolthulhu]

9 hours ago, Hexicube said:

• Crops are the scale-able solution to food, for a plethora of reasons. Space-effectiveness, yield time, scaling speed. I'd be very surprised if hatches can compete.

They can.

They need no cooling, while all important plants require energy-intensive cooling that takes a longer while to set up - especially the part where you need to find some place to dump all the excess heat. So scaling speed of hatches is actually better.

Hatches are clearly superior in midgame. They lose their speed after about 200k dupe-cycles (that is, dupe count * cycles) because by that time you start running out of trash rock and clay to feed them.

Advantages of plants:

• Labor-efficient. Fertilization takes only a moment and can be done by a sweeper. If you fail to apply the buff, you still get 50% efficiency
• Can be faster to set up in an emergency, provided you still have a <30C spot in your colony
• If you have a farm set up, it's faster to restart it after shutdown than it is with a stable
• Consume water, which is generated by 2 guaranteed cool steam geysers
• Sludge doesn't rot in storage
• Minor space advantage when not counting the cooling gear (which can be big, though)
• Less tedious. The incubator UI is really borked, with each critter egg being placed manually. What the hell.
• Doesn't randomly drop critters all over the place because an idiot dupe fell asleep/went to crapper while carrying a critter. What the hell x2.

Advantages of critters:

• No cooling. This is huge early on, before you can pollute water on demand to sieve it into 40C water. Don't even think about cooling geyser water directly.
• Because of the above, it's much easier to find a good spot for them
• Consume crap rock, which you would otherwise lie useless in compactors
• Consume CO2, which would otherwise be only useful for scrubbers and tiny one-time investment for food storage and shrooms.
• Lime for steel
• Byproducts like coal and petroleum
• If you fail to meet their demands, they stop consuming resources instead of just wasting water for nothing
• In a pinch, you can breed dreckos, which produce food "for free" (labor cost). But their long lifetime means they're inefficient

tl;dr Plants save labor, critters save everything else and are the only source of lime

[Hexicube]

I've not managed to scale critters up to the point of actually using them for meat drops, but I do know that the -1 food quality of that meat is able to cause minor problems with stress. I'm currently using Gristle Berries, with a helping of Frost Buns and Pepper Bread using natural drops, which means quality is usually not bad enough to cause problems (I think they want +2 right now). Raw meat is not, and I find some dupes can accrue over 50% stress from a large helping should they happen to choose to eat it.

[Yunru]

27 minutes ago, Hexicube said:

I've not managed to scale critters up to the point of actually using them for meat drops, but I do know that the -1 food quality of that meat is able to cause minor problems with stress. I'm currently using Gristle Berries, with a helping of Frost Buns and Pepper Bread using natural drops, which means quality is usually not bad enough to cause problems (I think they want +2 right now). Raw meat is not, and I find some dupes can accrue over 50% stress from a large helping should they happen to choose to eat it.

Then... don't eat it raw?

[Hexicube]

That then defeats the point because I would require a Pincha Pepperplant farm.

That said, BBQ is the only recipe where the nuts have actual caloric value...

[Coolthulhu]

43 minutes ago, Hexicube said:

I've not managed to scale critters up to the point of actually using them for meat drops, but I do know that the -1 food quality of that meat is able to cause minor problems with stress.

Disable consumption of uncooked meat. It's wasteful and hurts morale.

13 minutes ago, Hexicube said:

That then defeats the point because I would require a Pincha Pepperplant farm.

You have those already scattered all over the map. Just collect the wild ones and you will have enough.

[BlueLance]

I have two critter farms at the moment, 1 for hatches, which i am currently trying to turn back into normal hatches, and shiny dreckos.

All excess are put in a pit and left to starve, they still generate eggs every now and again and a slow but steady supply of meat. If i were to have 3 rooms of hatches I think I would be drowning in meat. Currently i only have 11 dupes, but I can just increase the farm numbers and dedicate another 1 or 2 dupes to ranching if i increase it.

Point said, I do agree that food is unbalanced and it always is. But I try to offer my dupes a varied diet already. and unless you have a good infrastructure it is hard to homegrow it all, and dupes would most likely become so stressed if they changed it so that you had to vary it at the beggining because most people don't have the luxury to have multiple food types at the beggining.