What's the point of Hothouses?

[your literal mum]

Hey all,

I gotta say, I really don't GET Hothouses. Compared to a hunters' cabin:

1) they take up significantly more space
2) they require a steam core
3) they need better heating conditions
4) they have a lower food output

They're not really accessible in the early game due to tech and material contraints (you really wanna burn your starter steam core on THAT?) and by the time they'd become viable, they're massively outclassed by Flyers' Cabins.

Am I missing something here? I feel like they must be there for a reason, but I just can't figure it out.

[|Pipe Dreams]

you can put kids in there and get extra food without sacrificing workers

[LuuMor]

There is no restriction on the building like workers only. So you can use children, engineers and automatons.
Plus it provides food per hour and not per day like hunters.

Hothouses are more useful if you're not using child labor, because then you just cannot put 150 workers to hunt, because you need people to work on coal as well etc.

[Medium Difficulty]

As above, you can put children to work producing food. You can also put an Automoton on the building so it produces 24h/day. Automotons cannot be used on hunter's posts. Lastly, and very minor, is that it produces at a pace rather than in lump sums. This means if you aren't paying attention to storage you don't have to worry about lost resources.

You can also use corpses for fertilizer if you go down that route and have a lot of death happening

[wusch]

I like Hothouses because they deliver Food on a regular basis at day, while Hunters Cabins only deliver food each morning.

[Salmon]

They can help prevent hunger and starvation by having more consistent food.

[Irimi]

same here. in mid game you have more than enough workers to send them hunting. cores much better to be spent on automations (to send them to mines with no heating at all with no risk. And flyers are warm enough by themselves most of the time - you don't even need to heat them till climax.
Again, people are much easier obtainable resourse that cores. Ususally there so many of them - you don't know how to utilize 'em all).
I might be missing smthing or flyers just OP.

[Your Death]

Apart from the Arks, you have tons of free ppl. The greatest thing, Hunters Hut/Flyers have not to be heated and can be placed anywhere.

[Stephen Hawking's Wheelchair]

TL;DR For every two days' worth of game time, your hunter's hangar will give your city 224 soup rations and my industrial hothouse will net me 1112.


A fully upgraded industrial hothouse will easily outperform a fully upgraded hunter's hangar, and if used correctly will make the idea of using hunters hangars laughable in many cases.
A hunter's hangar will produce 45 food per day, which if turned into soup will result in 112 rations per day. That's it. 112.
An industrial hothouse will produce by default (fully staffed with workers, all working at 100% for 10 hours) 6.9 food per hours, or 69 rations a day. That comes out to 172 food, already considerably more than the hangar. Change the hours to extended shifts for a negligible increase in discontent and you're up to 97 food a day, or 242 rations, over double what the hangar will bring in.

In my current playthrough I have one automaton tending to my fertilized industrial hothouse and by using the foreman ability I'm getting two different daily yields: On the day I activate the foreman ability I get 264 food a day which results in 650 rations (after the 10 ration cost of activating the foreman ability). The following day during the foreman ability cooldown, I get 185 food or 462 rations. So every two days a hunter's hangar will result in 224 rations whereas the industrial hothouse will net 1112, nearly five times as much. Three steam cores is easily worth it, and you can dismantle the hothouses just before the storm and turn the cores into infirmaries.