Food/Radiation/Barf Loop

[Jasozz]

A couple of times I've gotten myself into a loop where eating any food makes my radiation level high enough that I barf, which lowers my food, meaning I need more food, which makes me barf - this is all cooked alien parts so they have low levels of radiation.

I can stop the loop with iodine tablets, but those are so few and far between that I'm wondering if there's something else I should be doing.

I'm early game - anyone else bumped into this?

[Crayon]

yes

[Vigilante]

Eat food from the vending machines until ur radiation is gone

[Slideshow]

Have you been carrying radiated meat non-stop? I've carried radiated meat around but not long enough that I suffer from too much radiation poisoning.
Have you been eating raw meat? Cook them first.
If you wont find it a chore, grow some tomato. Tomato seeds can be found quite early and the materials for tge farm plot are nearby the seeds too. Those wont give radiation.

Edit: forgot to mention. Get your first aid skill high enough and you can unlock a med that lowers radiation. Grinding first aid is pretty tedious though. Forcing yourself to bleed to apply bandages on yourself gets old quick

[MechWarden]

This is something you can discover in game after getting a Geiger counter.

You have to wait out the radiation sickness before you can start eating. Each time you... expel* stuff, your accumulated Rads will go down.
*(yes this includes taking a dump.)

You also slowly lose Rads by not being around radiation. It decays at a decent rate, but will stop if any radiation is near by. The clue that you are in radiation is seeing the white spots in your vision (that isn't a game glitch, that's a feature).

Eventually you will both get a reliable source of meds, and can make better food, so you aren't doomed. Just check the item info on things, make sure you aren't holding radioactive stuff for too long, and you should be fine.

[Trellek]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

(that isn't a game glitch, that's a feature)

And a weirdly realistic one, to boot. Video recording equipment displays radiation as a sort of 'snow' that drifts across the feed. The human eyeball isn't susceptible to it, but it's a good way to display that the area you're in is experiencing ionizing radiation.

Anyway, if you cook your food you should have trouble accumulating enough radiation to get sick from it. And, as it happens, the stove in the kitchen off the cafeteria where you start the game (the one with the porkchop in a pan) works just fine. Pull off the porkchop, leave the pan, and cook your alien meat before you eat it. Once you find or craft a pot you can start boiling ingredients (one pest rump, one pest meat, and one salt is an easy soup recipe, for example) which removes the radiation altogether.

Further, storing uncooked meat in plastic bins (the kind you have to craft on the workbench) reduces the radiation it outputs by 10%, iirc. Also, in and/or around the area you find the bagged dirt and tomato seeds, there's often a lead-lined vest that reduces the effect of incoming radiation when you're, for example, carrying an inventory-load of fresh meat..

[Xuhybrid]

I got stuck in this loop and went through so much food, but eventually got out of it by waiting out food/drink timers as much as possible and pooping.

Soup should remove all your rad intake.