Storing food, cooked vs raw

[Geneva Any%]

Pretty soon after my colony started growing past 5 I decided to start cooking every piece of food that came into my food storage area. In my mind it made more sense that cooked food was more compact.

Is this a viable strat? Has anyone done the math on whether to store all food cooked or store it raw and only cook what you need?

[gimmethegepgun]

If you don't have a freezer yet, vegetables shouldn't be cooked until needed, as they have a drastically longer shelf life than meals.

If you do have a freezer, meals are more compact (except for eggs) as 10 raw food will make 1 meal, and 75 raw food fits on a tile whereas 10 meals fit.

However, there's 2 important things to note about this: Meals other than packaged survival meals can't be sold (meat is good money), and using a nutrient paste dispenser instead of a stove is dramatically more efficient in labor and nutrition, and prevents food poisoning.

[HunterSilver]

In terms of storage space viability: Meat from larger animals is always more efficient to store as a whole animal carcass vs. as butchered meat. A corpse takes up 1 tile of space, the same space that a stack of 75 meat can sit on (I think I'm remembering that right, I'm very tired and my game isn't up right now.) That means you can store 75x0.05 nutrients in 1 tile with cut meat, or 3.75 nutrients. So anything bigger than a Fennec Fox is better to store until you need the meat.

In terms of meals, a simple meal is 0.9 nutrients and stacks up to 10 per tile, allowing you store 9 nutrients per tile with meals. This makes them ~2.5x more efficient to store when compared with raw foods.

If you don't mind animal management, the actual most efficient way to store nutrients is live, large carnivores. A grizzly bear consumes 0.56 nutrients per day and produces 14.51 nutrients when butchered. If fed with raw meat, a Grizzly bear nets a loss of 0.94 nutrients from birth to adulthood. If fed with kibble you end up with a net gain. While alive it does not need to be refrigerated.

The most efficient animals to use for this are actually big cats though. The Lynx consumes 8.28 raw meat from birth to adulthood and yields 9.45 nutrients, a net profit of 1.17 nutrients. Those profits go up if you use kibble and Way down if you use cooked meals.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

In terms of meals, a simple meal is 0.9 nutrients and stacks up to 10 per tile, allowing you store 9 nutrients per tile with meals. This makes them ~2.5x more efficient to store when compared with raw foods.

For storage efficiency with meals, the nutrition per tile isn't what's important, it's how much space the total ingredients use if they're separate or if they're cooked.

[HunterSilver]

What? I don't even really understand what you're trying to correct there?

If you mean 'Does the 0.5 nutrients necessary to cook a meal mean that the meal is less space efficient', the answer is still no, simple meals are more space efficient. 0.5 nutrients, or 10 raw ingredients, to produce a meal means that 1 tile of raw ingredients is equal to less than 8 simple meals, so 1 stack of simple meals is more efficient as it stacks up to 10 meals.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

What? I don't even really understand what you're trying to correct there?

If you mean 'Does the 0.5 nutrients necessary to cook a meal mean that the meal is less space efficient', the answer is still no, simple meals are more space efficient. 0.5 nutrients, or 10 raw ingredients, to produce a meal means that 1 tile of raw ingredients is equal to less than 8 simple meals, so 1 stack of simple meals is more efficient as it stacks up to 10 meals.

The magnitude. They aren't 2.5x as space efficient, they're 1.33x.