4x meals

[definitive_prankster]

Hi all

Only just noticed you can make 4x meals! The info tab suggests this wastes some ingredients, but the inputs seem to be 4x the single meal inputs so I'm confused.

Should I be making 4x meals even when raw food is low or is that wasteful?

[Narrowmind]

Up to you, but if there's some mistake, all the meals get that mistake that would have only been limited to 1.

[Jigain]

Usually, the "wastes some ingredients" notice is for lavish meals, which are less nutrition-effective compared to fine and simple meals. My bet is you looked at the info tab for lavish meals.

[Chadwick Strongpants]

Is there actually a reason to not do 4x meals all day?

[Astasia]

Making batch meals does not waste any resources, it also doesn't reduce the amount of work required, and the food poisoning chance is applied to all meals in the batch at once meaning you are more likely to have clusters of food poisoning outbreaks.

Batch meals are more for inefficient kitchen setups where your chefs are walking a lot to get ingredients, this can reduce the amount of walking required by a lot and save a lot of time.

If you have an efficient kitchen setup with ingredient stockpiles next to it and a drop on floor or deposit stockpile behind the chef, then batch meals don't save any time and don't have any advantage. It's a question of whether you want, on average, a single food poisoning case every once in a while, or a cluster of 4 colonists getting food poisoning all at once 1/4 as frequently.

[Big [REDACTED] Marty]

Originally posted by Copper Knight:

Is there actually a reason to not do 4x meals all day?

4x meals technically aren't more or less efficient, but are actually more time efficient, as your cook will spend much less time walking while making meals, the downside is of course greater risk of food poisoning

[Raymond]

there is no waste material compared to making single order, and batch meal reduce your chef walking time. Instead of wasting time to walk back and forth 4 times, your chef only spent one trip, so there is no reason not to use it. You should still set up single cooking order in case you run low and food.

[whatamidoing]

Originally posted by Big Dicc Marty:

Originally posted by Copper Knight:

Is there actually a reason to not do 4x meals all day?

4x meals technically aren't more or less efficient, but are actually more time efficient, as your cook will spend much less time walking while making meals, the downside is of course greater risk of food poisoning

The risk of food poisoning isn't any greater, it'll just poison all the meals at once if it gets rolled. With single meal bills you'll tend to get smaller but more frequent bouts of food poisoning, while with 4x meal bills you'll tend towards larger but less frequent outbreaks.

[definitive_prankster]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Usually, the "wastes some ingredients" notice is for lavish meals, which are less nutrition-effective compared to fine and simple meals. My bet is you looked at the info tab for lavish meals.

I checked and double checked and I'm as sure as I can be now I'm away from my PC that I was looking at 'fine', as that was my first thought too.

I'll switch to 4x going forwards, it's worked out better so far.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by definitive_prankster:

Originally posted by Jigain:

Usually, the "wastes some ingredients" notice is for lavish meals, which are less nutrition-effective compared to fine and simple meals. My bet is you looked at the info tab for lavish meals.

I checked and double checked and I'm as sure as I can be now I'm away from my PC that I was looking at 'fine', as that was my first thought too.

I'll switch to 4x going forwards, it's worked out better so far.

I'm still not convinced this isn't a definitive prank...

Regardless, as others have said, the recipes for making multiple items at a time never uses more materials per item than making them individually does. Astasia does a good job of bringing up both the advantages and the much less obvious disadvantages, so do take that into consideration. Speaking from a personal standpoint, as someone who values aesthetics over mechanical advantages and as such keeps raw materials several tiles away from the workbench, I just set up 4x bills whenever possible and leave it at that throughout the entire game.

[frozenjellyfish]

The only reason not to do 4x meals would be because they take longer. For instance, if your sick cook can't keep from vomiting before completing a batch of 4, just have them cook one at a time.

[gimmethegepgun]

You may have been looking at the Carnivore/Vegetarian Fine Meal option, which for both the 1x and 4x bills is less food-efficient than the combo meal.

[definitive_prankster]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2835586840


Fine meal x4 - mentions wasted food.

#Edit that sounded huffy, I merely meant 'Look, I'm not crazy!'

[Astasia]

I would honestly report that as a bug on the official forums or discord. Somebody added extra flavor text to the meal recipes but suffered some sort of brain fart during the process. They forgot to add it to 1x vegetarian and carnivore fine meals, and it was an error to add it to x4 normal fine meals since normal fine meals don't waste any nutrition.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

I would honestly report that as a bug on the official forums or discord.

Done

[Cryptic]

I think it's fine as it is. Why would it automatically waste ingredients realistically if you just make bigger portions?