Cooking worth it?

[Wish Granter]

Later in the game I loose a entire workforce 24/7h just cooking.
Adding up that I need alot of grain just for the oil and store that, is more fields, again, less people focusing on actual important stuff like clothes, research and electronics.


How you guys do that?
Are you also going for chef meals?

Or is the best tactic to just have her spam cook some quick meals and get berries to have 3 meals and enough food variety?

Since the electric stove...well...its not faster. I expected that at least.

[ubreitfeld]

Originally posted by Wish Granter:

Since the electric stove...well...its not faster.

Really? I'm seriously considering going electric at all.

But to your question: I'm going back from tasty meals to simple meals. The oil and cereal thing in particular is way too much work.

[Wish Granter]

Originally posted by ubreitfeld:

Originally posted by Wish Granter:

Since the electric stove...well...its not faster.

Really? I'm seriously considering going electric at all.

But to your question: I'm going back from tasty meals to simple meals. The oil and cereal thing in particular is way too much work.

Ye the electric stove only looks good doesnt to shovel otherwise.
Well, you dont need to refill it, thats about it, otherwise it requires a solar panel on its own.

But electricity you should go anyway.

Being able to freeze food is a live saver. And coolers dont need power during winter.

Not to mention , ya know, turrets.


With about 8 guys eating twice a day, and a tasty meal costing 2,5 hours (x2), and you need at least 4 sources to avoid the debuff, my god is that unecessary work.

+++ Simple meals can be cooked by anyone.
Even your pacifist crafter , if right now there is no work can do the cooking thing.


In my last run that got ended by flying spitty things, I had a level 10 chef and was just barely able to keep up with 7 people and tasty meals using micromanagment and the beloved rimworld Byphasic Sleep schedule.
Its already bad enough when the cook is 24/7 doing NOTHING else but cooking, but needing another 2 guys

(one to constantly reshove oil, and one to plant and haul the tons of grain) cooking just doesnt seem worth it compared to the time you can spare
= reinvest the worker force in building more, maiby even running berry and syrup plants on top to ensure food variety.

The people in this game a the biggest crybabys existing every anyway, and already want to break down when 1 second not playing darts, the +6 from tasty meals wont cut to much

[Godzealot]

Yeah if your base isn't well laid out or you have manpower issues then just go for the simple recipes and raw food. Skip the recipes that need oils or fat or alcohol. Those need to be extracted, a 2 step time waster. Go to your survivors' eating behavior, open up all the raw items and read them. Syrup, dried meat, fruit, pickled veggies do not cause unhappiness or sickness. You can pickle to make the bad veggies edible or preserve for winter.

Good recipes are: Meat pie (meat+chew root), buttermelon pie (grain+buttermelon), veggie pizza (grain+beefberries), or any of the quick ones. They don't require oils or fat, which take additional crafting time, and you need it for fuel (expedition rewards are OP). You can fine tune the stove recipes to not use dried meat and pickled veggies, because those are safe to eat raw.

If your base is well laid out where you can craft oil or fats with minimal walking, and also close to the cook area, you can use oil/fat recipes and also consider the chef's recipes. Don't use the recipes which need alcohol because actually it takes an expensive 100 fruit/grain and 24 hours to make the 5 alcohol. Instead do fruitcake, sweet meat, mushroom, ratatouie. They all use 3 common ingredients, and as long as your chef isn't walking all over the place to get the ingredients (put all 3 directly on a shelf behind the stove).... then those recipes are OK. The higher level recipes take longer to cook, you can make 2 stoves and still use 1 chef. This is because there is active cooking time, and then sometimes things still need to cook on their own for a little bit. So the chef can get a second cook started.

Plan the base layout ahead of time. Create a shelf with stove, crafting table, 2 oil presses on either side. Only allow grain, oil, meat, fat, and the raw ingredients you plan to use on this shelf, don't allow to place in any other far away shelf. So now your crafters and chef need to just turn around to grab it. The cooked meal can be placed a few steps further because it's a one time thing while gathering ingredients is sometimes 3 trips. The crafting table's queue can be set only fat making or maybe fuel making (since meat and oil is next to it). Just create another crafting table for other stuff. Also, put the fermenter close to this shelf if you plan to pickle, no craft time at all, just a drop it off and wait. In a way that's like cooking because you upgrade a sickness/unhappiness veggie into a plain meal. You can decide to make the pickling recipe use only your abundant veggies (depends on map) and conserve the others for recipe variety.

If a survivor has a favorite food, you can consider disallowing others to eat it and set the "cook until" to 1. So they always get the bonus. Some people might naturally be happy like Quinn, you can force him to eat raw or low level recipes. Nova, Naaras don't melt down, they can eat raw. Find out who constantly melts down and let them eat the higher recipe ones. Doesn't make sense to go though all that time and trouble to cook a chef meal and Nova randomly grabs and eats it. Let the person who is always about to melt down eat the good stuff. See if they can handle an extra hour of work in their schedule because of the happiness boost. The goal is to work your people as much as you can without melting down, but close.

Eating a raw or low level recipe isn't even that bad. Plenty of other happiness you can easily add.

There's plenty of other happiness you can do:
+18 Spacious Bedroom (5x4 room)
+18 Doing an interested activity
+15 In Love
+9 comfy bed
+9 many fun things to do (have a lot of relaxation items)
+9 food variety
+6 ate at table

You definitely want to get rid of disturbed sleep, (separate rooms or sleep far apart). Cave dweller (floors unfinished), working in darkness (manipulation and happiness penalty) put a shroom torch or something. Super easy and way more effect than cooking.

Also, I'm not sure if tea, alcohol, etc even fill the hunger meter. If they don't, its a huge waste of time. I haven't made those for a while.

As for electric stoves (and furnace) they are better because you cut out many handling activities where someone has to cut sticks, and deliver them, and then constantly refill things. If you add up all the time it took to walk to the bushes, cut, haul back, put it on the shelf, then someone else may occasionally drop what they're doing (they could be far away), walk to the shelf to get the sticks, deliver. It wastes a lot of time if you add it all up.

You can set the electric stoves, advanced research table, furnaces, soldering table, 3d printer, orbital radio, and satellites on the same circuit. Then have a switch in your house, turn it off (manually unfortunately) when everyone goes to bed, so none of them drain battery at night. Once I started doing that I found I could get away with a lot fewer batteries and panels/windmills. If you're good on power, then you can leave the furnace/printer on and start smelt/ print jobs before bed for slightly more efficency.

[Wish Granter]

Originally posted by Godzealot:

Yeah if your base isn't well laid out or you have manpower issues then just go for the simple recipes and raw food. Skip the recipes that need oils or fat or alcohol. Those need to be extracted, a 2 step time waster. Go to your survivors' eating behavior, open up all the raw items and read them. Syrup, dried meat, fruit, pickled veggies do not cause unhappiness or sickness. You can pickle to make the bad veggies edible or preserve for winter.

Good recipes are: Meat pie (meat+chew root), buttermelon pie (grain+buttermelon), veggie pizza (grain+beefberries), or any of the quick ones. They don't require oils or fat, which take additional crafting time, and you need it for fuel (expedition rewards are OP). You can fine tune the stove recipes to not use dried meat and pickled veggies, because those are safe to eat raw.

If your base is well laid out where you can craft oil or fats with minimal walking, and also close to the cook area, you can use oil/fat recipes and also consider the chef's recipes. Don't use the recipes which need alcohol because actually it takes an expensive 100 fruit/grain and 24 hours to make the 5 alcohol. Instead do fruitcake, sweet meat, mushroom, ratatouie. They all use 3 common ingredients, and as long as your chef isn't walking all over the place to get the ingredients (put all 3 directly on a shelf behind the stove).... then those recipes are OK. The higher level recipes take longer to cook, you can make 2 stoves and still use 1 chef. This is because there is active cooking time, and then sometimes things still need to cook on their own for a little bit. So the chef can get a second cook started.

Plan the base layout ahead of time. Create a shelf with stove, crafting table, 2 oil presses on either side. Only allow grain, oil, meat, fat, and the raw ingredients you plan to use on this shelf, don't allow to place in any other far away shelf. So now your crafters and chef need to just turn around to grab it. The cooked meal can be placed a few steps further because it's a one time thing while gathering ingredients is sometimes 3 trips. The crafting table's queue can be set only fat making or maybe fuel making (since meat and oil is next to it). Just create another crafting table for other stuff. Also, put the fermenter close to this shelf if you plan to pickle, no craft time at all, just a drop it off and wait. In a way that's like cooking because you upgrade a sickness/unhappiness veggie into a plain meal. You can decide to make the pickling recipe use only your abundant veggies (depends on map) and conserve the others for recipe variety.

If a survivor has a favorite food, you can consider disallowing others to eat it and set the "cook until" to 1. So they always get the bonus. Some people might naturally be happy like Quinn, you can force him to eat raw or low level recipes. Nova, Naaras don't melt down, they can eat raw. Find out who constantly melts down and let them eat the higher recipe ones. Doesn't make sense to go though all that time and trouble to cook a chef meal and Nova randomly grabs and eats it. Let the person who is always about to melt down eat the good stuff. See if they can handle an extra hour of work in their schedule because of the happiness boost. The goal is to work your people as much as you can without melting down, but close.

Eating a raw or low level recipe isn't even that bad. Plenty of other happiness you can easily add.

There's plenty of other happiness you can do:
+18 Spacious Bedroom (5x4 room)
+18 Doing an interested activity
+15 In Love
+9 comfy bed
+9 many fun things to do (have a lot of relaxation items)
+9 food variety
+6 ate at table

You definitely want to get rid of disturbed sleep, (separate rooms or sleep far apart). Cave dweller (floors unfinished), working in darkness (manipulation and happiness penalty) put a shroom torch or something. Super easy and way more effect than cooking.

Also, I'm not sure if tea, alcohol, etc even fill the hunger meter. If they don't, its a huge waste of time. I haven't made those for a while.

As for electric stoves (and furnace) they are better because you cut out many handling activities where someone has to cut sticks, and deliver them, and then constantly refill things. If you add up all the time it took to walk to the bushes, cut, haul back, put it on the shelf, then someone else may occasionally drop what they're doing (they could be far away), walk to the shelf to get the sticks, deliver. It wastes a lot of time if you add it all up.

You can set the electric stoves, advanced research table, furnaces, soldering table, 3d printer, orbital radio, and satellites on the same circuit. Then have a switch in your house, turn it off (manually unfortunately) when everyone goes to bed, so none of them drain battery at night. Once I started doing that I found I could get away with a lot fewer batteries and panels/windmills. If you're good on power, then you can leave the furnace/printer on and start smelt/ print jobs before bed for slightly more efficency.

Great tips thanks.
lavish bedroom.....20 tiles. Insane. I need a nuclear power plant of heating cuze tmperature shifting in this game is..........................................
I guess I will settle for a lower tier bedroom.
Otherwise I usally build beds on day 1. Disturbed sleep is bad too but I try to get a house up before winter.

Sadly this game is not very kean on giving you more menpower. Last run ive been running around with 6 guys in year two with big family enabled.


Question aside, does setting the difficulty to "hard" also decrease mood or smt like in rimworld?
So far it only seems to affect spawn amount of enemies.
What else is affected by difficulty?

[ubreitfeld]

Originally posted by Wish Granter:

Question aside, does setting the difficulty to "hard" also decrease mood or smt like in rimworld?
So far it only seems to affect spawn amount of enemies.
What else is affected by difficulty?

I guess 'hard' really only affects the amount of attacking insects and the starting conditions, nothing else.

I play a peaceful game on 'hard', but can't detect any special challenges.

[SIX]

so i have solved the cooking issues for late game, the optimal set up is :

One cook that does only cooking
3 electric stoves with each having a different chef recipe set to until 10.
all the ingredients need to be inside the room and you need to have minimal walking.

[Rockoloco]

I just make porridge and veggie soup, this way I only need one cook, on stove and if they behave i'll give them a bread on new years eve lol

[R2_Opus2]

I find I'm making them eat a lot of that syrupy yellow plant more than anything. However yeah, if they require simple meals I'll make a few. Or melon pie thing that's only grain and them pumpkins.

[Seelander]

I usually spam quick meals based on meat, veggie soup and grain porridge, also i dont need a freezer urgently i just make sure i use the right stuff from farming.

Grain/wheat
Fuel
Grain porridge
2K-2,5K each harvest, twice a year roughly
Long decay time, so never decays before used for oil and food.

Glittercaps
Veggiesoup
Light shroom torches
Healing Balms
some 500-1K each harvest, twise a year, but the survivors seems to prefer grain porridge always end up having a very solid stock of glitter caps.
No decay under roof, my insurance if something goes wrong.

Besides emelin who is the best chef i do recommend Edmund as an alternative. That quick sleeping time can be felt quite a bit giving him more time to cook and have some left over time, if house/living space is build smart i do beleive he can handle everything, combined with being the designated cook. He also adds manipulation and consciousness for the rest of your crew from his story writing so overall the team perfoms 10% better in research, crafting and cutting etc.

[Flin Fredstone]

I use 4 regular cooking stations. Not the electric ones. The non-electric don't break down, don't shut down when power runs out and only need a few sticks that are plenty to farm.

I spread the recepes across the 4 stations and don't use "until" but rather a set amounth and load the recepes with 0 to make. Once the stations are set i punch a batch of 10-30 of one recepe on each station ( provided i have the resources ). I can see how many of the cooked food are in stock in the cooking station, so i know which ones need to be made.
With the raw food storage near the cooking stations even the chefs food is easy to keep stocked. low level cooks handle the simple meals and the skilled ones the higher tier.

For the food that require oils i will set those to make once i stocked up on oils first. Sort of special event food. We don't want to spoil them to much.

I use 2 freezers to store the prepared food. Once there is enough food in the freezers i will halt the cooking for a while and have everyone available for other tasks like mining, building etc.

[Seelander]

In my last run that got ended by flying spitty things, I had a level 10 chef and was just barely able to keep up with 7 people and tasty meals using micromanagment and the beloved rimworld Byphasic Sleep schedule.
Its already bad enough when the cook is 24/7 doing NOTHING else but cooking, but needing another 2 guys

I have 8 survivors on my current insane/chaos game and have no issues with cooking as long as it is quick meals. all that luxury stuff can come when edmund my current cook is lvl 10 cooking. That said i have no problems feeding my people with him and still have leftover time. More likely than not it is not worth it doing more time costly meals at least not until you build up a quick meal stock (some 3x your survivors number of quick meals, so with 8 survivors i would problably set until 29 grain porridge, 29 veggie meals and 29 meat stews, then i would consider doing more delicious dishes. Early game until y3 ish, i would rather use that extra time helping out building up the camp though to be ready for the flyers. once stock is dropping i would go back to stockpiling quick meals again. in other words better meals than quickmeals should not be made before you are fully set in terms of defences/housing.

[Seelander]

Question aside, does setting the difficulty to "hard" also decrease mood or smt like in rimworld?
So far it only seems to affect spawn amount of enemies.
What else is affected by difficulty? [/quote]

Weather events and frequenzy of spawns. mood stays the same.

I play on insane/chaos

Y1 attacks every 3 day, Y2 attacks seems to increase to every 2-2.5 day.
in larger numbers have had up to 100 skarabies on day 5 attack and 50 on the morning of day 3, armed with bows. Not a problem though if you know your ways.

more weather events
within the first 12 days roughly you always have 1 toxic ashes lasting for 2 days and 1 extreme heat wave lasting for two days, Usually you get hit by the first real weather event on day 9, can be either. on day 12 ish you problably had both, but again if you know your ways its not to much of an issue either, but it is a constant race against events early game.

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by Rockoloco:

I just make porridge and veggie soup, this way I only need one cook, on stove and if they behave i'll give them a bread on new years eve lol

Since Emelin joined my crew (all recipes max satisfaction), I also do this

I'll consider the 'new year's treat'...

[wcbarney]

I don't have my survivors cook, unless they absolutely have to use up a bunch of otherwise useless insect meat or the base is getting overwhelmed with storing grain. I don't let them eat the survival food packs unless -- you know -- there is nothing else to eat. Hunting is too time consuming also. My survivors get the food variety buff by eating:

1. Pickled vegetables -- made mainly with those squash things + the orange mushrooms
2. Beefberries
3. Bush Berries
4. Sweet syrup from Heptagonias
5. Grain porridge once in awhile
6. Insect meat soup every so often
7. Veggie soup sometimes

[OKOK]

Originally posted by wcbarney:

I don't have my survivors cook, unless they absolutely have to use up a bunch of otherwise useless insect meat or the base is getting overwhelmed with storing grain. I don't let them eat the survival food packs unless -- you know -- there is nothing else to eat. Hunting is too time consuming also. My survivors get the food variety buff by eating:

1. Pickled vegetables -- made mainly with those squash things + the orange mushrooms
2. Beefberries
3. Bush Berries
4. Sweet syrup from Heptagonias
5. Grain porridge once in awhile
6. Insect meat soup every so often
7. Veggie soup sometimes

How is your people happiness with this setup?