Well, hoppers and nutrient paste dispensers have practically been out of the game since alpha 6, correct? No-body uses them anymore! But, personally, I enjoyed the idea of hoppers. Rather than making a stockpile and fiddling around with the options menu, why not be able to put a hopper on a textile mill or a smithing bench and have it store the needed ingredients! (They would have to hold more than 75x per square, as a lot of crafting recipes require 100+ ingredients.) Ideas?
Meh, a lot of different ingredients could be used and hoppers are meant to let ingredients feed into a machine, not just store stuff.
Hoppers are used to feed prisoners cheap or to feed colonists on harder biomes.
And there's that. I also use cook stoves, but if you don't want to have a colonist cooking which takes a lot of work/time, they're necessary, and useful for feeding prisoners.
Better to have slight debuff than food poisoning during battle. :P
I often use nutrient paste dispensers, and I feel a lot of people underestimate them. Colonist time is arguably one of the most valuable things in the game. and the amount of time which can be saved by not having a dedicated cook and growing less food is actually pretty astounding. And the mood debuff is small enough that it is quite manageable to overcome with the extra colonist time.
I use the nutrient paste dispenser in most games for the first year or more, until a colony is large enough for more specialization.
If you put corn in nutrient paste dispenser, you're safe even during a solar flare. I've seen eating raw corn give a colonist food poisoning, but never from nutrient paste dispenser.
My current colony has about 7-8 people and the best cook is 6 with no passion. Clearly putting him in charge of my kitchen would be a waste.
Nutrient paste dispensers are great! Can't remember the last time I bothered with a cook stove.
I find it's very rare to really be so short on labor as to not have a cook. My colonists do tend to eat raw food sometimes (more problematic is when they feed raw food to prisoners, it would be nice if there was a way to tell them not to), but it's not very often and food poisoning is only temporary.
NPRs to me are a huge waste of metal (and space...the thing's enormous) and are just the thing that's going to push an angry prisoner or volatile colonist over the edge.
Worse, last time I tried them in a prison, the prisoners were eating out of the hoppers instead of the NPR.
You put the end of it in the wall so only the tip feeds into the prisoner room, and have a path to the hopper. I put my prison right beside my freezer, the hopper and back of it is in the freezer, the front feeds prisoners.
Clever!
I used to make a paste maker for my colonists to use until I had enough time to get a stockpile of meals cooked. Since using the bulk meal preparation mod (basically is lets your cook make 4 or with research, 8 meals at a time.) I found I was able to cook sufficient quantities for my colonists without needing a paste dispenser to hold them over.
(I still usually keep one around though for emergencies since in a pinch you can load the hopper with human meat and still feed the colony without the cannibalism debuff.)
I have to admit I like the idea of some kind of hopper for the stone cutting bench to cut down on the number of trips a colonist has to make to the dumping grounds for chunks of stone; having a stack of 10 stone chunks right at the bench would be really handy, especially on harsher maps where building the bench outside isn't possible do to environmental extremes.
Really? I got the cooked cannibalism debuff on a prisoner when he ate a human meat paste meal. That sounds tasty!
Quote from: GarettZriwin on August 29, 2015, 04:05:18 PM
Hoppers are used to feed prisoners cheap or to feed colonists on harder biomes.
I never thought of that
BRB placing hoppers in the prisoner barracks