Who loves nutrient paste???

[ambi]

All I can say is WOW! I love the stuff! No need for someone to cook, just dump the meat and vegies in a hopper and walk away! It's more efficient than normal cooking and makes you money in the long-term (any meat or vegies saved can be sold to traders for $$$, and the cook that you've now spared can be used for other money-making activities). Ka-ching!

The buff from a nice dining room should be enough to balance the debuff from eating nutrient paste, so all up, it's a very good alternative to proper meals.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Why waste steel, components, and power? If I ever have resource issues, like say on a frozen sea map

Because generating food isn't free - you need extra hydroponics basins, extra sunlamps, and extra heaters for the greenhouses but I guess that extra 0.9 hydroponics basin you can built with the steel you didn't spend on the dispenser will allow you to produce 200% more food (instead of 6 ingredients to produce a 0.9 nutrition meal your pawns will have to eat 18 raw rice instead)

A nutrient paste dispenser plus 1 hopper is 180 steel (90 base + 75 for 3 components + 15 for hopper) and uses 200w.

You should always have a decent quantity of extra raw food in order to handle solar flares, blights, and any other event that may impact your crops. So that extra food is already there sitting in storage, and after it builds up to a point you just end up selling it. Wasting some of that extra food to feed a prisoner is a non-issue. Build a hopper to save some of that raw food or build an extra wind turbine? No contest IMO.

Originally posted by Mytheos:

Late game, you should have spare power, and a ton of food, unless on an extreme biome.

In general I would rather my pawns do more than feed prisoners all day or clean up after them if you have several prisoners and use them for medical/social practice.

I mean even early game you should have a ton of spare power and food unless on an extreme biome. It's like literally only early game on a frozen sea that I have ever had any issues with generating a large suplus of food. During that early game period I'm not keeping prisoners around though, and mood is a big deal so I'm not going have a -4 penalty on all my colonists to save some of that food. Instead I just control my colony size to within what it can sustain.

When you do have a lot of extra food and you want to keep a bunch of prisoners around and not cook for them, I don't see the difference between using a nutrient paste dispensor and raw food. Sure you might have a ton of steel, but I'd still rather use that steel to build an extra weapon or turret than spend it on a paste dispensor. Though personally if I'm keeping prisoners around that I'm not trying to recruit, I remove one of their legs anyway so they can't escape, so I'm hand feeding them either way, and personally I'm not concerned about the small amount of time that takes.

[ambi]

So I started a colony in an extreme desert biome, and the decision to use nutrient paste has literally saved me. A boomrat manhunter pack appeared and set my crops alight. Fortunately I had a frozen raider corpse that I had frozen for a rainy day. Butchering It into yummy nutritious paste was enough to see me through the next 2-3 days until the boomrats disappeared.

Two colonists ended up in a mental state during this time. One walked out into the open in a daze and burned to death by a dying boomrat. His mother went berzerk from watching her son die, feasting on human, and sleeping on the cold frozen floor. A shotgun to the chest ended her quickly, and lo and behold, her corpse dropped two doses of Yayo. Two of the three remaining survivors snorted the stuff across the cold body of the mother, and waited out the final day high as a kite.

I love this game.

[Mytheos]

@Astasia

Well again I can get steel anywhere, but unless I build a dispenser, I can in no other way get back the time it takes to feed 3-4 prisoners with slower eating due to dentures half the time.

If you have more than enough people with most sitting bored, sure...if not its nice to get half a day back from the guy normally doing it.

Sure I can feed them raw things, but then they get sick and make a much larger mess...and again I have medical practice happening and I dont need people recovering with vomit dripping down from the ceiling.

[AlexMBrennan]

You should always have a decent quantity of extra raw food in order to handle solar flares

Simple maths would tell you that this food stash, no matter how large, will not be able to make up for you producing only 1/3 fo the food you are consuming. Besides, how do you plan on building up this stash if you are nowhere near able to feed your colony - the magic of developer console commands?

To feed a population on raw rice instead of raw rice put through a nutrient paste dispenser you will need to produce 3x as much food.
That is 3x as many hydroponics basins, 3x as many sunlamps, 3x as many greenhouse heaters.
A worked example: You could either feed your colony using 6 hydroponics basins and one food dispenser, 10 hydroponics basins and a cooking station, or 18 hydroponics basins if you are stupid enough to feed people raw food. Unless your colony is so tiny that you manage to get by on a single hydroponics basin you are better off cooking your food.

[ministrog]

Dispensers are good to have around. Cooked meals, however, are still the main option until times get tough. Raw food is not effiecient, will cause mood debuff and I suspect increases chances to get deseases. Even more personally, as a side note, I think dispensers look like ♥♥♥♥.

[ambi]

Just discovered that pawns won't make excess nutrient paste meals to take with them. So if you send them halfway across the map to mine something, every time they're hungry, they'll travel all the way back to the dispenser.

Also, if there's raw food that's much closer to them than the dispenser, they'll eat the raw food.