Dirty Cooking Area?

[Kadjai]

Just a thought and a question about cooking areas.

I notice that even with metal tiles and instructing my pawns to clean it manually, I still get frequent food poisoning from dirty cooking area.

After starting a new game I don't have my cooking area on any floor (just ground) and they never get food poisining from dirty cooking area.

Is this an oversight or is it just better not to have a floor in the kitchen.?

[Slye_Fox]

Keep your butcher table seperate from your stove.
If you can, put your stove in it's own room with sterile tiles.

[Astasia]

The "cooking area" is the entire room the stove is located in. So things like a butchering table covered in blood a few tiles away will contribute to food poisoning. You generally want an isolated kitchen room with sterile flooring to minimize food poisoning, but it's not a requirement and the cleanliness required to not get the extra food poisoning chance is fairly lax. A room with a normal floor and no filth anywhere would have a cleanliness score of 0, a room needs to be at below -2 cleanliness to get a food poisoning chance penalty, so there's a decent buffer there.

[Kadjai]

Hmm maybe its because I have my storage for meals in my kitchen too so everyone is always traipsing in there creating dirt constantly. I do do my butchering elsewhere. Should I have a separate storage for meals?

Also to my original point, regular ground doesnt make dirt, so obfuscate the 'dirty cooking area' entirely by not putting floors for only an insignificant beauty penalty?

[Tarshaid]

Originally posted by Kadjai:

Hmm maybe its because I have my storage for meals in my kitchen too so everyone is always traipsing in there creating dirt constantly. I do do my butchering elsewhere. Should I have a separate storage for meals?

Also to my original point, regular ground doesnt make dirt, so obfuscate the 'dirty cooking area' entirely by not putting floors for only an insignificant beauty penalty?

Regular ground is slightly dirty, but doesn't create "more" dirt as you've noticed. So if you end up with a floored room that you can see has a lower cleanliness score than regular dirt, you might just get rid of the flooring. Better would be to identify why and how so much mud gets tracked into that room.

You mentioned that your pawns are "always traipsing in there". Do they come in from an area with no flooring? That's the common issue (at least common for me) when you start putting floors: you either put a lot of them down, or the changes between floored and non-floored zones will put mud everywhere and result in a worse situation than before. An answer to that issue would be to put flooring around the kitchen area (or around the zones you want flooring in), so that the pawns track mud before they reach the kitchen.
If that's too big of a task for the moment, the most important would be to make sure that when your cook (or hauler) brings in ingredients, he doesn't walk through mud doing so, since even if you come to clean afterwards, that may be too late: practically, if your freezer if next to your kitchen, put flooring in the freezer and between them.

[narf03]

I think the game is trying to "looking for trouble", like an invasion or sickness or short circuit event, when starting a new game, the game will go easy on you, after some time, difficult goes up, so the food even 99% clean, will still get the poisoning.

[Kadjai]

Well my current stove is in a 11x16 'warehouse' with all my other crafting stations (incl butcher) and no floor and Ive never had "dirty cooking area" poisoning. But it's time to move it out into proper kitchen for temperature sake.

Here's the kitchen in my other game that's always getting people sick from dirtiness. They are at least walking through the rec room first but I guess it's not far from outside. Still, it's remarkebale how dirty it constantly gets.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/938337923487215264/42C1DDF0953D1F3C561A7D1D73CB7B1010D8696A/

[Astasia]

Smaller rooms suffer a larger impact from each individual spot of filth. It's averaged out over the total number of tiles in the room or so, so a 11x16 room has 176 tiles and a spot of dirt that's -10 will cause the cleanliness of the room to drop roughly 0.05 if I did that quick math correctly, 10/176, where as the tiny room in your image there is only 12 tiles so that same spot of dirt will cause the room to drop almost an entire point, 10/12, 0.83.

[Kadjai]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Smaller rooms suffer a larger impact from each individual spot of filth.

Thanks, that does help to explain it. I assumed it was the total number of filthy spots. So that makes me think even more that I should rip up the floor in my older game lol.

[Kadjai]

And this one in my old one has never gotten anyone sick from dirty cooking area.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/938337923487339540/75ACE3734DF41365846B9392C0963CDC01570C2E/

[Slye_Fox]

I personally use 2 seperate rooms for kitchen tables, and use the Path Avoid mod to make it so pawns only go into the stove room if they are using the stove.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Kadjai:

Originally posted by Astasia:

Smaller rooms suffer a larger impact from each individual spot of filth.

Thanks, that does help to explain it. I assumed it was the total number of filthy spots. So that makes me think even more that I should rip up the floor in my older game lol.

There is a bit of a threshold to pass. If you can only place a few floor tiles it's not going to be very worth it and might just cause more problems than it solves, but you definitely want to aim for covering everything in floor eventually as that increases movespeed and makes the rooms much more enjoyable for colonists to be in granting various buffs. If colonists aren't walking on dirt they don't pick up any dirt to track around, so it's very easy to keep everything clean if you can get past that threshold.

[Thulsa ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Doom]

I use one large freezer for stove, food and drug storage, and the butcher table. I manually tell my cook (or some other scrub) to clean before he cooks, and when my colony gets larger, I usually have an otherwise useless soldier that is prioritized to clean. Perhaps you should set your meals to "drop on floor" so the cook isn't travelling around so much. Good luck.

[Kadjai]

I definitely love movement speed so you almost have me at that, but food poisoning causes so much degrade to a colonist's everything (including movement) that having everyone walk an 1/8 slower for 3 steps is probably better.

"But Beautification!" you say. Yes I get it! But it's not beautiful if it's dirty!

And that spot between Merc and the cook in my first screenshot (assuming it works - Steam screenshots should be way more integrated), that tile is always dirty.


So I guess the real answer is to plate my outside non-farming area with my favorite flagstone?

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Kadjai:

So I guess the real answer is to plate my outside non-farming area with my favorite flagstone?

Yup, or concrete.

Another option is this mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1508778962

Stick those at the entrances to your base, and backups outside of the kitchen and hospital areas, sucks the dirt off colonist's feet, the mat still needs to be cleaned regularly, but the dirt stays out of the rooms you don't want it in.