Is 'Pickled Meal' (from Meal Lice) worth doing?

[Kittenpox]

I had my last base run out of water, because I was struggling to keep up and didn't get an expedition off to find a geyser in time.
So this time around, I figured I'd start with two Microbe Mushers and two Electric Grills. Lice Loaf is delivered to a Ration Box (for the storage space), and the rest is delivered to a Refrigerator (to avoid food spoilage.)

I had them making: Mush Bar -> Mush Fry, and Liceloaf + Pickled Meal.
With the priority set in order of water efficiency per calorie - so that they would prefer to make Pickled Meal over the others (because it doesn't use water), except when Mush Bars are available to be turned into Mush Fry.

I've currently got four Duplicants, with one of them set to primarily do cooking, but the amount of time spent producing Pickled Meal doesn't seem to keep up with the food consumption for even so few Duplicants. I currently have 11 farm tiles, because that's the amount that fits neatly under a Ceiling Light (I think).

Is it just that I need a 2nd cook for this to be viable, or that I need to improve my supply of Meal Lice, or is it not worth having at all?
(I'm sure the answer is probably obvious and I'm just not seeing it.)

What are people's methods/suggestions for early-game food production? :-)

[Thorin]

Currently the early, mid and lategame food production is simple: Mealwood. You need 4 mealwood per dupe (5 with nice buffer for anything), all other food generation is useles luxury for the time when you can afford it and willing to deal with the extra effort to get them (and also most of them are useing limited resource.)

[Star Paladin]

I have been very perplexed by the current food "pyramid". You would think that if you have to reasearch and build a grill, the pickled meal would be much better. Nope. I just ignore it totally, and do 99% liceloaf.

[Kittenpox]

Okay. My thinking was water-efficiency focused, but Liceloaf is the better option by the sounds of it.

Looks like I'd also been doing the math wrong for calories:water, anyway. I was thinking it was a 1:1 conversion for the various recipes, but it's not.
- Mush Fry uses 2000 kcal of Mush Bar... which is two of them, not one. So rather than being 75kg of water used per MushFry, it's 150kg of the stuff. (At 3000 kcal -I think?- that means it's 1000kcal per 50kg of water).
- Similarly with Lice Loaf: it only uses 50kg of water for a 1000kcal loaf, but it uses 5 lice rather than 1 (which I'd noticed, but never really thought about), and so my farms planning was way off.

Thankyou for the info, folks. Gonna scrap the grills and just spam Liceloaf instead. You're right - there's zero benefit to doing the others (at least until I get better plants anyway.)

[PhailRaptor]

No reason to make Mush Fry. Ever. It's a straight up calories lot and time wasted for no obvious benefit.

[Thorin]

If you want efficiancy, than leave liceloaf and stay with lmeallice directly. Need twice as many plant, but the plants need no tending beyond harvest, and you won't waste water, elecricity and cooking time.

[AquaX]

Just stick with mealwood. It will save you water. I have cut back on water so much, my only use for it is my 2 basins. O2 is currently 2 deoxidizer.

You can grow berries if you like but all other food sources are not long term. Also keep all natural growing plants so you can use them once in a while as a free source of better quality food.

[Butts McGee]

There's no reason to bother with anything above liceloaf right now. They're just not worth it (50% calorie reduction!) or require resources that are effectively unattainable (sleet wheat).

[Mechanoid]

Firstly, cooking stations kill the germs on the ingredients, producing "clean" food that won't infect dupes. As long as the dupe is clean, it doesn't matter how dirty the original items were, the food will be cleaned with no byproducts. Unwashed hands will still ruin everything, though.

Secondly, that's where Pickled Meal does have a use: "Pickled" is an actual disinfection state for food poisoning germs. After testing this, the amount of germs a dupe contracts is the amount on the item at the end of the eating animation. When picked up a dupe would put 4000 food poisoning onto a Pickled Meal, and when they had finished eating, it was at 1500. With a longer walk towards the mess table after picking up the Pickled Meal, it would've reached 0 food poisoning... all without having washed hands. In other words, this is the perfect food choice for medbays that are treating food poisoning.

Thirdly, most lost calories are made up for by making the food better quality by 1 or 2 tiers, which is always a good idea. In the case of Lice Loaf the amount of calories which are lost in cooking are made up for in boosting the base amount of calories in the item itself. This means you can pack in 10x more calories into the same fridge space with lice loaf than you could with just uncooked meal lice.

Lastly, Mush Bars and Fried Mush are not supposed to be a serious constantly-eaten food item. They're there to either: Dispose of excess dirt created by polluted water boiling, train up cooking skill for a dupe with something, or simply as desperation /panic move for when you're suffering from a shortfall for whatever reason and don't want to starve (or: don't want to starve and then starve anyways from food poisoning sickened dupes)

tl;dr
Cooking food items isn't always immediately benficial, but it does provide specific rewards or benefits and is generally always more efficient at something than the raw food would've been.

[Alukat]

Well, imo, they should make use of water optional.

Bristle berry, as example, already has 16 lifecycle when in wildlife without water, but once you want to grow it you have to add in water and the lifecycle changes to 4.
Options should be:
- grow without water - 16 lifecycle
- grow with water - 4 lifecycle

shouldn't be inbalanced, because 16 lifecycle doesn't need water but more space, electrity and heat management.

[Butts McGee]

Originally posted by Mechanoid:

Firstly, cooking stations kill the germs on the ingredients, producing "clean" food that won't infect dupes. As long as the dupe is clean, it doesn't matter how dirty the original items were, the food will be cleaned with no byproducts. Unwashed hands will still ruin everything, though.

Secondly, that's where Pickled Meal does have a use: "Pickled" is an actual disinfection state for food poisoning germs. After testing this, the amount of germs a dupe contracts is the amount on the item at the end of the eating animation. When picked up a dupe would put 4000 food poisoning onto a Pickled Meal, and when they had finished eating, it was at 1500. With a longer walk towards the mess table after picking up the Pickled Meal, it would've reached 0 food poisoning... all without having washed hands. In other words, this is the perfect food choice for medbays that are treating food poisoning.

Thirdly, most lost calories are made up for by making the food better quality by 1 or 2 tiers, which is always a good idea. In the case of Lice Loaf the amount of calories which are lost in cooking are made up for in boosting the base amount of calories in the item itself. This means you can pack in 10x more calories into the same fridge space with lice loaf than you could with just uncooked meal lice.

Lastly, Mush Bars and Fried Mush are not supposed to be a serious constantly-eaten food item. They're there to either: Dispose of excess dirt created by polluted water boiling, train up cooking skill for a dupe with something, or simply as desperation /panic move for when you're suffering from a shortfall for whatever reason and don't want to starve (or: don't want to starve and then starve anyways from food poisoning sickened dupes)

tl;dr
Cooking food items isn't always immediately benficial, but it does provide specific rewards or benefits and is generally always more efficient at something than the raw food would've been.

Wait, the cooked foods are more calorie dense? That might give a reason to use them for long term storage... Except... I don't cook food until just before I need it to preserve freshness.

Still, something worth considering once you have perfect storage established (refrigeration in a chlorine environment) for long term pre-cooked food storage.

[Mechanoid]

Originally posted by A Gay Stoned Cat:

Wait, the cooked foods are more calorie dense?

If the kcal listing of the resulting cooked item is green, yes, it gains kcal from being cooked on a per-kg basis. Lice Loaf and Barbeque are the only foods (i think) that do this, though technically speaking, sleet wheat is totally inedible before cooking so you could consider that cooking sleet wheat is a kcal improvement, too.

All food items though apparently have a weight of only 1kg, and then the kcal is dependent on the item type. 1 fridge full of lice loafs is equal to 10 fridges full of raw meal lice; 2 tiles space and 120 power vs 20 tiles space and 1200 power. Then of course, a single fridge full of bristle berries is 60% better kcal storage than lice loafs... However, the best storage method is simply leaving the raw food to sit in the farm room surrounded by CO2; 100,000kg stack size and zero energy/space costs.
Everything needs to be hauled to the cooking station eventually anyways, so why move it three times when you only need to move it twice? Once to the station, and then the cooked item to storage (which can be chlorine-filled)

[Butts McGee]

Originally posted by Mechanoid:

Originally posted by A Gay Stoned Cat:

Wait, the cooked foods are more calorie dense?

If the kcal listing of the resulting cooked item is green, yes, it gains kcal from being cooked on a per-kg basis. Lice Loaf and Barbeque are the only foods (i think) that do this, though technically speaking, sleet wheat is totally inedible before cooking so you could consider that cooking sleet wheat is a kcal improvement, too.

All food items though apparently have a weight of only 1kg, and then the kcal is dependent on the item type. 1 fridge full of lice loafs is equal to 10 fridges full of raw meal lice; 2 tiles space and 120 power vs 20 tiles space and 1200 power. Then of course, a single fridge full of bristle berries is 60% better kcal storage than lice loafs... However, the best storage method is simply leaving the raw food to sit in the farm room surrounded by CO2; 100,000kg stack size and zero energy/space costs.
Everything needs to be hauled to the cooking station eventually anyways, so why move it three times when you only need to move it twice? Once to the station, and then the cooked item to storage (which can be chlorine-filled)

Cooking actually halves the number of kCals. It takes two liceloaf to make one fried loaf, and the fried loaf is only worth 1000 kCal. Not +1000kCal on top of the 2000 you invested.

So if all food items are 1kg, then cooked food is less calorie dense than raw foods.

EDIT: oh, I gotcha. It takes 4 kg of liceloaf to make 1 Kg of fried loaf. So it's technically twice as calorie dense, at the price of wasting half the calories to produce the food item. Gotcha now.

[edc]

Doesn't pickled meal only give 100 kcal? Or is that just a typo?

[Butts McGee]

Originally posted by edc:

Doesn't pickled meal only give 100 kcal? Or is that just a typo?

1000 kCal. It's half the kCal of the input.

[AquaX]

Cooking usually makes you lose kcal in exchange for raising the food quality which reduce the stress build of dupes when they reach 0 quality. The only exception is the bread line since you can not eat those items.

Their deco caps at 50 and food quality at 0. Anything less will risk stress increase.