Too much cooking really takes away from the game...

[BBQSauce]

Seriously. I only have 13 colonists, with my food next to kitchen. No crazy amount of animals feeding off of it or anything. 3 dedicated cooks. Still barely able to keep up with food demands... WTF? I'm basically relying on my food paste dispenser.

Any reliable mods out there for bulk cooking? I don't generally enjoy using mods, but this is just ridiculous. I have 3 guys locked up in cooking, when they could be doing plenty of other things.

[Daffy]

Vegetable Garden is what you are looking for

it lets you bulk cook and adds a lot of new options to grow.

i am not at my PC atm so can not direct link it.


PS: there is many extra mods to Vegetable Garden so check it out :)

[The Hat]

Yeah vegetable garden is a must for me, there are so many sub mod options to pick from I suggest you have a look through. As food is a big part of the game it is a good area to add to with mods imho.

edit:
Link:

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1185272266

[Arey Vermillion]

That might help
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=729690064

[TwoTonGamer]

Something does seem off with 3 full time cooks for 13 colonists. My current game has 1 full time cook and 2 backup cooks for 24 colonists.

My first guess is travel time from the stove to ingredients and back again may be slowing things down.

Does your cook have to walk a long way for ingredients? If so you can make some small stockpiles of ingredients near the stove. They are usually used before they even get close to spoiling out of the freezer.

To further reduce travel time you can set a small stockpile for finished meals near the stove, too. Colonists can grab those when they need to eat instead of going in the freezer.

Also, if your stove is in the freezer the work time for each meal will be slowed because of the cold temp.

Oh! And check your cooks health! Maybe there is something reducing their manipulation stat.

[meme]

How have you set up the kitchen and stockpiles ? I had the same problem, but didnt really understand all the stockpile set up to make it the fastest.
All i did was go into the bill details and ask for the meals or whatever to be "dropped on the floor" for me i found that this solved everything and it didnt take to long at all to have an abundance for over 12 pawns and two mufolos. I also made a 11x11 of package survival meals and i have 11x11 of simple meals along with 11x9 of kibble all full at all times. It took about 2 years to fully build this up.
I use a 2x3 stockpile for corn and stuff like that and a 2x3 for fresh meat next to the cooker, by using the drop on floor in the details tab the cook can cook the food so fast.
Hope this helps.

[Astasia]

I never have more than 1 cook, even for colonies of up to 20 people. Not only do they easily handle cooking meals for all those people, but most of their day is spent doing other jobs because cooking takes a trivial amount of time.

Each colonist only eats 2 meals per day, each meal takes like 2-10 seconds based on cooking skill (significantly less with certain traits and/or bionics) and there are 16 minutes in a day. Even a terrible skill 1 colonist can churn out ~100 simple meals per 16 hour work day.

Set ingredient stockpiles next to the chef so they don't have to move to get them, have them drop the meal when finished, and set the bill to pause when a certain amount is reached and resumed once at least a day's worth of meals are consumed. Your cook will be at the stove for a very brief amount of time every 1-2 days if setup correctly.

Bulk recipes are entirely pointless for meals.

[M.K.]

Originally posted by BBQsauce:

Seriously. I only have 13 colonists, with my food next to kitchen. No crazy amount of animals feeding off of it or anything. 3 dedicated cooks. Still barely able to keep up with food demands... WTF? I'm basically relying on my food paste dispenser.

Any reliable mods out there for bulk cooking? I don't generally enjoy using mods, but this is just ridiculous. I have 3 guys locked up in cooking, when they could be doing plenty of other things.

ONE cook (skill 16-18) can keep a colony of 25 pawns supplied with lavish meals.
That same cook can provide simple meals for about 50-60 pawns.

i.e.
You are doing it wrong.

guide:
1) Cook must never haul anything. That's what lesser pawns/dogs/minions/serverbots/etc are for
2) Setup stove with comfy chair, in good temperature. Cook must be healthy and happy. No cripples please. Bionic arms are a bonus, but not needed.
3) put *all* of your meal ingredient 1 square away from the chair. Your cook must just reach to get ingredients, never walk to it. Set up mini stockpiles of high priority to achieve this.
4) setup meal bill to "drop" completed meal right there. Again, haulers will cart it away.
5) Don't make the kitchen a walkthrough area. Don't make it a social gathering spot. You *dont* want your cook chatting and greeting everyone that passes. Cook must cook. Put kitchwen in a "dead-end" room, so the only traffic to there comes from haulers bringing ingredients and taking meals.


Repeat. ONE cook can feed 50-60 with simple meals, or 25 with lavish meals.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by BBQsauce:

...Any reliable mods out there for bulk cooking? I don't generally enjoy using mods, but this is just ridiculous. I have 3 guys locked up in cooking, when they could be doing plenty of other things.

Read the posts that detail how to set up your cooking spot so your cooks do not have to move to get ingredients. (I'm just reiterating the importance of those posts.)

There is no reason why you can't feed your pawns other than "something is being done in an inefficient manner." :)

You need to go through each process in the chain to be sure it's streamlined as much as is possible. Start with your Work orders and make sure you have enough haulers, plant cutters and growers. All your primary food crops need to be in a greenhouse setup close to where the food will be taken. Put down tiled walkways to increase haul speed. Ideally, where the pawns go to pickup their meals needs to be close to the dining area so they don't waste time, but shouldn't be the "main refrigerator" if it can be helped. (To reduce temp changes.) It's not unusual to have meals stored separately in a smaller freezer near the kitchen or in a smaller storage zone next to the doorway. (I prefer having a small freezer area for meal storage that is right next to the dining room. BUT, I now use Rimfridge because I just love that darn mod... :) )

Check each process involved in your setup. Streamline it. If you do that then there is no reason why, as long as you have a decent source of foodstuffs, that you can't easily keep your pawns fed with that setup.

Important Note: By the way, what stock levels have you set for food? It's very possible to forget to raise your stock levels so your cooks can catch up and surpass demand. IMO, that's one of the things that first appears when you expand and forget that you need to expand... everything. It can often manifest itself as "I can't catch up to their demand for food." So, set your new inventory levels for food appropriately. If you do not, your cooks will always be cooking and your pawns will never seem to have enough food... (Even decent cooks can get you over this hump so you can have a surplus of meals stored.)

(If you have or can acquire a Night Owl, that can really help you catch up on meal prep surplus.)

[stevasaur]

Here's an example of the kind of cooking area that I go with: it's not 100% efficient, but it's pretty good. In theory, putting 1-tile stockpiles next to the stove would be more efficient, but I'm too lazy to do that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1500686390

I DO have some small stockpiles near the door that are higher priority than the general Freezer stockpile, so that my haulers will keep some food near the kitchen.

EDIT: Had this screenshot on hand because I was constructing a "welcome tour" document for my colony, and I thought this was an amusing way for Ivisvine and Tatty to hook up.

[Trickst3r83]

I have 15 colonists in my recent save and 2 part time cooks, maybe one of them is almost full time. I guess the raw food distance helps, also setting your cooks to drop the meal instead of transporting it to the nearest and most compatible stockpile helps, since he will just cook and drop the meals so others do the hauling and you save a lot of time by it, doesn't seem much but it saves you around 30-40% more time and efficiency, also making auto-doors between the stockpiles and stoves help a bit

[Raymond]

and here I am wondering what to do with 1400 lavish meals lying in the fridge and the number still growing. I am currently feeding 28 colonists 50+ domestic animals.

[Raymond]

you can use this mod to increase food production, it doesn't actually raise the cooking speed but it raise cooking efficiency.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1421806244

[meme]

Originally posted by Morkonan:

Originally posted by BBQsauce:

...Any reliable mods out there for bulk cooking? I don't generally enjoy using mods, but this is just ridiculous. I have 3 guys locked up in cooking, when they could be doing plenty of other things.

Read the posts that detail how to set up your cooking spot so your cooks do not have to move to get ingredients. (I'm just reiterating the importance of those posts.)

There is no reason why you can't feed your pawns other than "something is being done in an inefficient manner." :)

You need to go through each process in the chain to be sure it's streamlined as much as is possible. Start with your Work orders and make sure you have enough haulers, plant cutters and growers. All your primary food crops need to be in a greenhouse setup close to where the food will be taken. Put down tiled walkways to increase haul speed. Ideally, where the pawns go to pickup their meals needs to be close to the dining area so they don't waste time, but shouldn't be the "main refrigerator" if it can be helped. (To reduce temp changes.) It's not unusual to have meals stored separately in a smaller freezer near the kitchen or in a smaller storage zone next to the doorway. (I prefer having a small freezer area for meal storage that is right next to the dining room. BUT, I now use Rimfridge because I just love that darn mod... :) )

Check each process involved in your setup. Streamline it. If you do that then there is no reason why, as long as you have a decent source of foodstuffs, that you can't easily keep your pawns fed with that setup.

Important Note: By the way, what stock levels have you set for food? It's very possible to forget to raise your stock levels so your cooks can catch up and surpass demand. IMO, that's one of the things that first appears when you expand and forget that you need to expand... everything. It can often manifest itself as "I can't catch up to their demand for food." So, set your new inventory levels for food appropriately. If you do not, your cooks will always be cooking and your pawns will never seem to have enough food... (Even decent cooks can get you over this hump so you can have a surplus of meals stored.)

(If you have or can acquire a Night Owl, that can really help you catch up on meal prep surplus.)

I just wanted to say how amazing and responsive, and helpful this community can be! I think this posts question and the detailed responses are such a good example of this, its a perfect example to me of the best possible responses that, well lets be honest in most other community chat rooms the question would probably be have taken as maybe a troll type of post (Im not saying that is was, just that it could so easily have been taken that way, with all of the usual and predictable vicious and nasty responses that i see every day in other games forums.)

I hope they will help the person that posted this........

[Trickst3r83]

Originally posted by meme:

Originally posted by Morkonan:

Read the posts that detail how to set up your cooking spot so your cooks do not have to move to get ingredients. (I'm just reiterating the importance of those posts.)

There is no reason why you can't feed your pawns other than "something is being done in an inefficient manner." :)

You need to go through each process in the chain to be sure it's streamlined as much as is possible. Start with your Work orders and make sure you have enough haulers, plant cutters and growers. All your primary food crops need to be in a greenhouse setup close to where the food will be taken. Put down tiled walkways to increase haul speed. Ideally, where the pawns go to pickup their meals needs to be close to the dining area so they don't waste time, but shouldn't be the "main refrigerator" if it can be helped. (To reduce temp changes.) It's not unusual to have meals stored separately in a smaller freezer near the kitchen or in a smaller storage zone next to the doorway. (I prefer having a small freezer area for meal storage that is right next to the dining room. BUT, I now use Rimfridge because I just love that darn mod... :) )

Check each process involved in your setup. Streamline it. If you do that then there is no reason why, as long as you have a decent source of foodstuffs, that you can't easily keep your pawns fed with that setup.

Important Note: By the way, what stock levels have you set for food? It's very possible to forget to raise your stock levels so your cooks can catch up and surpass demand. IMO, that's one of the things that first appears when you expand and forget that you need to expand... everything. It can often manifest itself as "I can't catch up to their demand for food." So, set your new inventory levels for food appropriately. If you do not, your cooks will always be cooking and your pawns will never seem to have enough food... (Even decent cooks can get you over this hump so you can have a surplus of meals stored.)

(If you have or can acquire a Night Owl, that can really help you catch up on meal prep surplus.)

I just wanted to say how amazing and responsive, and helpful this community can be! I think this posts question and the detailed responses are such a good example of this, its a perfect example to me of the best possible responses that, well lets be honest in most other community chat rooms the question would probably be have taken as maybe a troll type of post (Im not saying that is was, just that it could so easily have been taken that way, with all of the usual and predictable vicious and nasty responses that i see every day in other games forums.)

I hope they will help the person that posted this........

This community is way better then other type of games, specially FPS games with all those kids and manchilds being toxic and salty towards each others all the time, gladly in a game of this type we rarely encounter problems of toxicity, but the amount of salt in FPS forums would put all the 7 oceans at shame

[kevinshow]

One thing I didn't fully understand when I first begin playing, is the minor and major interest in skills. An example would be in cooking.

At first when playing the first few times, I just put any pawn to do cooking (as well as the other tasks), without considering their interests. Over time as the colony grew, I felt like I was not able to keep up, so back then I had a lot of hauling animals just so that my pawns could do other stuff.

But later, when I understand better about focusing on pawns that have an interest in that activity, their skills go up faster, they do it better and faster, and therefore, they were better able to keep up with the demands of the colony over time, and the # of colonists and hauling animals I needed were less, because everyone did their job better.

So don't forget to use colonists who enjoy cooking, so that their skills will go up faster and they will get better at cooking...along with all the other tips that everyone else has suggested.