Preservatives: an alternative to refrigiration

[Simon_Science]

As it currently stands, the only food item that makes use of a preservatives is pickled meal, and it shows a pretty bad picture of trying to use preservatives instead of refrigirating them. Taking 3 meal lice to cook and only providing a mere 100 calories makes it practically impossible to use this as your primary food source.

So, i propose that preservatives should be rebalanced into a viable start to mid game alternative to refrigeration upon which you could actually feed your colony. 

Most food preservatives work because food dosent rot because it ''exists''. Food rots because of bacteria, and the game tries to simulate this with ''sterile enviroments'' where food wont rot. However, the world is allready filled with bacteria wich will rot food. The way refrigerators prevent this is by slowing down the metabolism of bacteria enough so that they rot the food more slowly. However, food preservatives work by making the enviroment of the food hostile to most species of bacteria exept ones that arent harmfull to humans, and therefore wont rot food. This is how beef jerky, pickles, and cheese work, and when done correctly can preserve food for ages with no refrigeration.

In the game, this could be simulated having food itself as a source of the ''food poisoning'' bacteria (Upcoming outbreak upgrade), where the bacteria itself causes rot in the food instead of a internal clock. Putting the food in conditions where the bacteria wont survive becomes the goal of preventing spoilage, wich permits preservatives as a viable solution.

Obviously, there is one last point I would like to adress, and thats being able to find any food preserving ingredients at all. While vinegar could be prepared from some other agricultural product (Bristle Berry), another important preservative is salt, wich currently isint in the game.

 

My proposal for adding salt to the game would be a new plant called the Salt Cane, but it could also be some mineral found in rocks like bleach stone.

Salt cane though, I see as a sideways-growing bamboo-soot plant that extracts salt from the soil or water to use salt for its own metabolism.

Actually one idea I had was extracting salt by ''breathing in'' clean oxygen and ''Breathing out'' polluted oxygen, with the implication that it is using the air to seperate the salt from the ground somehow (This could also be done with water and polluted water).

Anyways yeah, preservatives!

 

[x4550]

I'm with you on adding salt and additional preserving methods.  But making food itself the source of food poisoning?  Man, that sounds tough.  Great ideas!

[Vincie]

I usually keep my food in a cloud of carbon dioxide, that works well and I don;t need to use refridgerators... I would rather see a slide in a cooking station - "cook until colony has x calories". That way you could balance your cooking and consumption. I would also be happy to see a new dupe stat, "favourite food". Consuming it could reduce stress massively (like 5%).