storing food method

[MythN7]

So I have noticed that the fridge when un powered in cold areas does not get the refrigerated trait, nor does it get the sterilized trait when in c02.

so my question is.

1 its obvious the ration box is the best choice by far if in cold and in c02 cause of the extra trait, but also its storage capacity and no power need.

But what about these options, which would be better if you have to pick only one of the following and why do you think so?

2a- ration box not refrigerated but in sterile condition?

or

2b-powered fridge?

 

Additional suggestions.

Would like to see the ration box have a 2nd storage volume bin separate from the food volume that holds ice, to give it the refrigerated trait as long as it has a min of X ice inside it, and have this ice melt faster than normal maybe?  Or even have it turn to polluted ice over time?

 

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, MythN7 said:

So I have noticed that the fridge when un powered in cold areas does not get the refrigerated trait, nor does it get the sterilized trait when in c02.

It does, you must have had impure atmosphere. Create a proper CO2 pit where all tiles are neatly covered in CO2 and check again.

The best option is underpowered refrigerator in CO2 pit or hydrogen reverse pit (I prefer CO2 variant because it doesn't chill dupes who enter, plus it's a bit cheaper).

[MythN7]

3 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

It does, you must have had impure atmosphere. Create a proper CO2 pit where all tiles are neatly covered in CO2 and check again.

The best option is underpowered refrigerator in CO2 pit or hydrogen reverse pit (I prefer CO2 variant because it doesn't chill dupes who enter, plus it's a bit cheaper).

when i did it it was in the ice binome and i had ration boxes first setup, then when I unloced fridges, I dismantled a ration box and put a fridge there, was not refegerated or sterile, but the ration box in the same spot was.

I will try again and make sure its in heavy CO2.

But this is typically the food storage I set up after I get my wheat farms going.

I pump all my CO2 from a filter into this room, and any excess buildup flows over the walls down to the scrubber that is right beside the only way in, so it cant fall down into my base very easily.  Making it so no CO2 can get out from any side access, and no other gases can get introduced.

https://gyazo.com/206f62067ad3b104e59f2ee60f682b89

 

[Masterpintsman]

1 hour ago, MythN7 said:

But this is typically the food storage I set up

It's easier to make the access from the top, then just fill the pit with CO2 and have scrubber(s) (more than one in case you pump in massive amounts of CO2 or have problems with the pressure of the oxygen above it changing) ontop to keep it from coming out.

Sterile Athmosphere is enough to keep the food from spoiling, works also with fridges (even when they don't show it in the interface):

[MythN7]

1 hour ago, Masterpintsman said:

It's easier to make the access from the top, then just fill the pit with CO2 and have scrubber(s) (more than one in case you pump in massive amounts of CO2 or have problems with the pressure of the oxygen above it changing) ontop to keep it from coming out.

Sterile Athmosphere is enough to keep the food from spoiling, works also with fridges (even when they don't show it in the interface):

how come some of your fridges have solid doors? ive never seen this in game.

[Kasuha]

1 hour ago, MythN7 said:

how come some of your fridges have solid doors? ive never seen this in game.

All fridges have the gauge. Some just draw it behind them. That's common bug, more often seen with storage containers.-

[Drach]

22 hours ago, Kasuha said:

All fridges have the gauge. Some just draw it behind them. That's common bug, more often seen with storage containers.-

yes, and it is incredibly annoying, atleast to me. Along with fridges now storing sleetwheat grain, and if you don't know how to turn it off, it will fill up your fridge very quickly.

[vonVile]

How much CO2 is needs to make the Frig sterile? I know a Ration Box is roughly 45-50g.

[Coolthulhu]

It's not about CO2 - CO2 is only there to displace oxygen. Once there is no oxygen, the atmosphere counts as sterile.

[MythN7]

https://gyazo.com/39c469ef96a2cb9951fc7a0aa47febed

so heres a screen clip showing that fridge does indeed not get the sterile trait.  Which is why I was starting this topic of ration box sterile or powered fridge as the better option.

[Sevio]

The fridge does not show the Sterile Atmosphere indicator but if you track the freshness of its contents you'll notice it doesn't go down.

[brummbar7]

I kind of wish they'd rethink the food preservation thing a bit.  It's just too easy to use sterile atmo storage.  Turns fridges into pretty ration boxes.  For one thing, chlorine should not decrease food decay.  Sure, it'll technically prevent the food from decaying, but I guarantee you that you will not want to eat chlorine-saturated food.   I think the same would probably be true for natgas.  The others, I think should only slow decay, not stop it.   Cold storage should work, but storing it in *too* cold of temperatures should cause freezer burn (decreases calories).  Making it difficult to use passively (eg just leaving your ration boxes in a cold biome).  That would leave fridges as the simplest and most sure-fire in terms of player attention, but also requiring most electricity.  I think it would balance things out a lot better.

[Kasuha]

3 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

That would leave fridges as the simplest and most sure-fire in terms of player attention, but also requiring most electricity.

At current stage of game implementation, there's no problem running lots of fridges once you get your natural gas power production running. I actually avoided the sterile atmosphere path completely this recent playthrough. It may help save power but having fridges full of food right beside mess tables, and fridges full of ingredients right beside cooking tables saves dupes some running around.

I just wish sleet wheat was discovered in the fridge ingredients list so I can choose where it will and where it won't go. Or maybe devs could add a 'mill' building processing sleet wheat (seed) into flour (ingredient) to get rid of that seed-ingredient duality.

 

[Coolthulhu]

The problem with non-sterile fridges is that polluted oxygen still causes freshness loss.

[brummbar7]

58 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

At current stage of game implementation, there's no problem running lots of fridges once you get your natural gas power production running.

As long as you have plenty of geysers, yes.  My current base I've still found only one natgas geyser, having explored maybe 2/3 the map.  Which is in stark contrast to my previous runs, so might be an outlier case.  But still, what you're basically saying is the game right now is a choice between easy-mode1, or easy-mode2.  Not very interesting gameplay-wise, especially when mode1 is available from day 1.

I don't think flour for sleet wheat would fix the main imbalance - that one harvest of one plant produces enough seeds to replant an entire farm system serving 20+ dupes, in contrast to the other plants.  I'm very interested to see if they change sleet wheat somehow down the road, or if that is simply the plan in the long term.

 

6 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

The problem with non-sterile fridges is that polluted oxygen still causes freshness loss.

Not that big a deal.  I currently play as if polluted oxygen is bad, and keep it out of my living area, under the assumption we'll have to face those conditions eventually.   It's not difficult and this is coming from me.   Folks who just run bases full of polluted oxygen right now are simply being lazy.

[Coolthulhu]

25 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

Folks who just run bases full of polluted oxygen right now are simply being lazy.

Or simply rational and efficient, considering that cost of removing polluted oxygen is well above the reward of doing so.

[Kasuha]

24 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

As long as you have plenty of geysers, yes.

You don't need many geysers for a lot of power. One natural gas geyser, about quarter of steam geyser, and 16 fertilizer makers are about pollution neutral (net production 2.5 g of polluted water per second) with about 3 kW of power left. My own base ran on two gas geysers, 20 makers, and one steam geyser for quite a while, including 6 running fridges.

27 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I don't think flour for sleet wheat would fix the main imbalance

It was about fixing the problem that it counts both as seed and as ingredient and likely for that reason cannot be found in fridge setting although it gets stored there. It bothers me more than imbalance in food production.

[Kasuha]

4 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Or simply rational and efficient, considering that cost of removing polluted oxygen is well above the reward of doing so.

The present game actually rewards you for having your dupes in polluted oxygen. Dupes don't consume it and it's very easy to generate (with polluted water). Occasional bubble of clean oxygen in it is no problem and neither are sick dupes.

Assuming you want to undergo the challenge of keeping the base clean of polluted oxygen, you soon realize that it's easy to get your base polluted (e.g. dupes carrying some slime through your base, sick dupe just passing through, not mentioning airlock malfunctions) and it's pretty hard to get rid of it since it doesn't separate up or down, it just keeps wandering around. So the only way to keep the base clean is to have deodorizers everywhere, spending bits of sand here and there until you clean the whole asteroid.

 

[brummbar7]

10 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Or simply rational and efficient, considering that cost of removing polluted oxygen is well above the reward of doing so.

If you let a lot in in the first place, maybe.  Otherwise it's trivial.  Don't get me wrong, I don't make any great effort to purge my slime biomes of it, where I operate my pincha farms and other stuff.  And I'm not saying my main base doesn't have flecks here ant here.  But it's not hard to mostly keep it out of the base living area, which is where I have my food stuff.  I mean, you could say it's 'rational and efficient' to take advantage of bugs and broken mechanics as well.  And where better options do not exist, or it's almost impossible to avoid the mechanic, sure.  But we'll have to agree to disagree as far as taking advantage of easy/cheap to avoid things.  I do take advantage of unpowered airlocks being the same speed though (which I assume at some point will change), I'll admit that.

 

4 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

you soon realize that it's easy to get your base polluted....and it's pretty hard to get rid of it since it doesn't separate up or down, it just keeps wandering around. So the only way to keep the base clean is to have deodorizers everywhere, spending bits of sand here and there until you clean the whole asteroid.

I guess that's not been my experience.  But then, I carefully avoid all dupes with flatulence, and keep slime biomes behind multiple airlocks with a deodorizer in-line.  I keep distillers in the slime biomes so most slime traffic stays there.  A few deodorizes here and there in the living area has done fine for me so far - They only use sand when converting (near as I can tell) so it's not like they're a continual draw.  I admit that relying on deodorizers is not necessarily sustainable over the mega-long-term, but it is for any amount of time I care to play a given colony, and indications have been that it will be made renewable at some point, so I don't sweat that.  Again, to be clear, I'm not saying it's easy to clear the entire asteroid of polluted air, or keep your core 100% free.  I'm just saying it's easy enough to keep it mostly out of your core base, where your fridges presumably are. 

[Kasuha]

26 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I carefully avoid all dupes with flatulence

Flytulence is not a problem, the dupe produces natural gas, not polluted oxygen. But one of sicknesses makes dupes release polluted oxygen now. It was one of less pleasant things to discover for me.

One time I ran out of sand in deodorizers and it was wonderful how fast the base started sucking in pollution from outside. And another time a puft somehow passed into the base and made himself comfortable at the top near electrolyzers. It was a disaster.

Anyway, even with your lack of bad experience it's way easier and rewarding to keep dupes in polluted oxygen than in clean so I think it doesn't change anything on my statement.

 

[Masterpintsman]

I hope the polluted oxygen situation will get better as soon as the duplicants actually breath it.

[Executive_Lurker]

Wait, they don't breathe PO? Has it always been like this?

[Coolthulhu]

5 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

I mean, you could say it's 'rational and efficient' to take advantage of bugs and broken mechanics as well.  And where better options do not exist, or it's almost impossible to avoid the mechanic, sure.  But we'll have to agree to disagree as far as taking advantage of easy/cheap to avoid things.  I do take advantage of unpowered airlocks being the same speed though (which I assume at some point will change), I'll admit that.

Ill-defined voluntary handicaps aren't the default playstyle, a challenge nor anything like that. Just a subjective, personal theme to playstyle.

Letting polluted oxygen into base isn't an exploit. Neither is not-removing it when it gets there. It's not something that you can write down as a verifiable rule (unless you count extreme ones like "a dupe who catches a disease must be set to not eat anything and not be rescued from starvation") because "kinda try to get rid of it" is not a rule.

You can't compare not getting rid of PO2 to actively exploiting the bridge cooling bug (this one can be prevented by requiring an extra tile of pipe on the bridge output), hatch/morb herding with pneumatic doors, door clipping climbing, superheating the tepidizer, gas vent overpressure bypass, diagonal vacuum food storage, door/gas permeable tile pressure damage avoidance, or disabling the cots to get dupes to stay up all night.

It is such a non-exploit that the only feasible way to truly avoid "exploiting" it is to play in debug mode only, without any dupes. That makes it even more of a non-exploit than not-cooling the water before electrolysis/scrubbing/filtering/etc. (objectively avoidable by not doing any electrolysis/etc. ever). But still less of a non-exploit than the falling fluid cooling bug, which is unavoidable even in debug mode.

[brummbar7]

14 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

You can't compare

It's not about the mechanics compared against each other (be they bug, exploit, as-is issue).  The standard of 'rational and efficient' just strikes me as absurdly broad, and it could be used to justify basically anything.  It basically sounds like a standard of what is 'convenient'.  Look, I don't care what you or anyone else actually does.  Exploit all the stuff you want, I don't care.  This all stemmed from me using the word 'lazy'?  Fine, sorry.  Strike that sentence.   Replace with "Folks running bases full of PO could easily have clean base cores if they put a little more effort and planning into it, so PO vs fridges shouldn't be an issue."  Better?