Ludeon Forums

I didn't see this done yet, so I went ahead and did some number crunching.  This includes all edible plants, including wild plants & haygrass.  All raw data was taken from the A13 Defs files (the wiki is quite outdated).  This is all theoretical and hasn't been tested for accuracy (but should be correct).  Calculations were not rounded off at any point.  Since I don't know how the game handles numbers internally, expect to see some slight differences when compared to actual playing.  See the attached .xls file if you're a nerd like me and want to dig deeper.  And please let me know if I've made any mistakes!

The results could be classified as Holy Agave, Batman!! and has me questioning the value of Haygrass.

I've highlighted the wild plants & haygrass to make reading/planning easier:

(https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=20092.0;attach=13043;image) (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=20092.0;attach=13045;image) (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=20092.0;attach=13047;image)

Breakdown:

• Nutrition per day is what you want to max out for feeding your colony
• Market value per day is what you want to max out for selling
• growDays per plant is what you want to minimize if you need a harvest now (Ice Sheet, I'm looking at you)

Notes:

• Raspberry is a wild plant (unplantable), and is found in AridShrubland, BorealForest, Tundra, TemperateForest, & TropicalRainforest
• Agave is also wild, and is found in AridShrubland, Desert, & ExtremeDesert
• Strawberry & Wild Raspberry both harvest "berries", which are the same thing but grow differently
• Agave, when available, is generally the best thing going
• Raspberries are 2nd best
• If you're not exploiting wild plants, go with Rice @ HydroponicsBasin
• If you're skipping hydroponics, go with Corn or Rice @ RichSoil depending on your needs
• Haygrass always sucks, especially since animals that eat it can also eat other plants & meals (I think)
• Rice, strawberries, and potatoes are the only foods that can be grown in hydroponics
• The AteRaw debuff is given by Rice, Potato, & Agave.  Which means it is not given by Strawberry, Corn, & Raspberry.
• MarshyTerrain is not Marsh (which does not have a GrowSoil tag and cannot be planted on).  I'm not totally certain what MarshyTerrain is, or even if it's used, but it has the same fertility as Gravel, so meh.
• I make the assumption that harvestYield is the max crop yield for a plant. There is no more "minimum" amount harvested. Harvesting is based on the colonist's skill level, and there's a chance for total harvest failure.
• All calculations assume perfect lighting, temperature, and harvesting
• Plants don't grow at night, so I think Rice growing in a hydroponics basin actually needs more than 1 day
• I'm not totally certain about the function of fertilityFactorGrowthRate. I'm think it's a measure of plant dependency of soil fertility, with 1.0 meaning the plant is totally dependent on soil fertility and 0.0 meaning the plant completely ignores soil fertility.  I treated this as a linear interpolation between the two.
• I assume Tynan will nerf the wild plants and perhaps boost haygrass after he sees this :)

[attachment deleted by admin - too old]

Thank you for doing the hard work to get this  8)

LOL, I think I was right about the nutrition of plant vs harvested item.  Why do plants have nutrition?  Because animals eat them, silly milon! ;)

I'm working on a corrected version and should have it online shortly.  Watch for the edit!  It will also include Market Value per day!

EDIT - And update done!

EDIT 2 - Can anyone confirm / deny / provide info on Notes #11, 12, 14, & 15?

Nice list. Nothing terribly surprising on it, but nice to have the information.

The point about wild plants being "best" is sort of moot I think. Because you can't dictate where and when they grow, you can't harvest them reliably or depend on them for food. Any other growing option wastes much less pawn time overall walking and hauling.

Thanks a lot for the list, it really helps me out  :)

^ You're welcome, and I'm glad to help. I learned a lot from it. My biggest takeaway was this:
Hydroponics = rice
Rich soil = corn
Soil = rice/corn

I've exploited wild plants before. You just keep everything else cut, and occasionally harvest the wild plants. I've also seen maps (not mine) in prior alphas that were virtually all wild plants.  It takes a lot to get set up, but then I'd very profitable, immune to blight, and requires no planting time.

And I'm at least hopeful that haygrass will get some kind of boost.

Quote from: milon on May 12, 2016, 10:49:55 AM

• Nutrition per day is what you want to max out for feeding your colony
• Market value per day is what you want to max out for selling
• growDays per plant is what you want to max out if you need a harvest now (Ice Sheet, I'm looking at you)

Surely you mean 'minimize' for growDays? The smaller the better, right?

11. I may be totally wrong, but IIRC the MarshyTerrain is a leftover from older versions of the jungle. I think it was the jungle equivalent of MossySoil. So if anyone happens to have an old alpha version handy...

14. Pretty sure that's the total duration of time spent actually growing, so not including any time it spends idle, eg. when the light/temp isn't sufficient for growing, or factored against its growth rate for sub-standard light/temp levels. It's not an literal count of game days.

Yes to all of those; that's what I was thinking. I'll go fix my typo now. :)

Particularly when your colony is small, you may need colonists to do more than one thing, in which case less labor for the same output is better -- that is, less labor going into nutritional output is better.  Corn is king for this -- your farmer doesn't have to sew nor reap as often, meaning they're more frequently freed up to do other tasks.  I often do need to sew a small farm of rice while waiting for corn, but once the corn starts rolling in, that's all I sew for food ... except haygrass, which I'm re-considering given the chart there.  The one advantage haygrass has is storage efficiency -- haygrass can be stored in stacks of up to 200.  I won't say its not a factor, but its not enough for me to stay loyal to it.

Raw DPS (nutrition per day or whatever) is not always the best. Work time has been mentioned. Sometimes you need food as fast as possible. Corn won't work too well in presence of a poison ship. Haygrass might not be stellar, but storage space benefit is awesome. If your growing period is 10 days, corn isn't a great idea.

On the other hand, if you have a colonist(s) with Green Thumb, you may want to trade their time to keep them happy. So go with rice.

Potatoes are slightly disappointing according to these stats, but they are very sturdy and take ages to spoil.

That's a good point about work to plant & harvest, and also about storage space. I usually run smaller colonies and neither has really been an issue for me. I'll see if I can build that in though.

But wouldn't the cost of labour be more apparent in a smaller colony than a larger one?

Probably, but I just kind of set-and-forget, so I haven't compared to anything else.  And I usually plant corn anyway, so it's not that often that I need to plant/harvest.  (And another reason why I did this - I was curious about the results.)

And while I'm looking at adding more stuff in, I may add in the rot time too.  Anyone know how the rot mechanic works?  There's daysToRotStart, but how long does something take to fully rot?

Fair enough, I probably wouldn't notice it either if I didn't mostly play the boreal forest.

Quote from: milon on May 13, 2016, 09:22:15 AM
Anyone know how the rot mechanic works?  There's daysToRotStart, but how long does something take to fully rot?

All food seems to rot instantly out of existence, so daysToRotStart would probably be the only thing to compare. Not unless you wanted to test the effects of heat and weather, though theoretically they'd all be affected the same.

What I would be interested in seeing is a comparison of butchered vs unbutchered corpse nutrition values. I'd like to know whether to chop up raiders before I feed them to my dogs/wargs.

Quote from: Damien Hart on May 13, 2016, 09:47:05 AM
Fair enough, I probably wouldn't notice it either if I didn't mostly play the boreal forest.

Quote from: milon on May 13, 2016, 09:22:15 AM
Anyone know how the rot mechanic works?  There's daysToRotStart, but how long does something take to fully rot?

All food seems to rot instantly out of existence, so daysToRotStart would probably be the only thing to compare. Not unless you wanted to test the effects of heat and weather, though theoretically they'd all be affected the same.

What I would be interested in seeing is a comparison of butchered vs unbutchered corpse nutrition values. I'd like to know whether to chop up raiders before I feed them to my dogs/wargs.

Yeah, currently only corpses rot.  I think this was an oversight, I reported it as a bug since you can toggle 'Allow Rotten' ingredients for cooking, but no ingredients can actually rot, the game just deletes ingredients that lose their fresh status.  Tynan didn't say for certain ingredients would be allowed to rot in a future version when he closed the bug report, but I think they will.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Rotting food doesn't really add anything to gameplay, it would just be a timesink to haul it away. It seems more like a case of gameplay over simulation.

Quote from: Damien Hart on May 13, 2016, 09:47:05 AM
What I would be interested in seeing is a comparison of butchered vs unbutchered corpse nutrition values. I'd like to know whether to chop up raiders before I feed them to my dogs/wargs.

Thanks for the daysToRotStart tip.

Corpses, kibble, butchering, etc would be great to get some stats on, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm doing.  It's unlikely that I'll be the one to tackle it, but I'd be really interested in seeing the stats on it too.

Quote from: Damien Hart on May 13, 2016, 09:47:05 AM
What I would be interested in seeing is a comparison of butchered vs unbutchered corpse nutrition values. I'd like to know whether to chop up raiders before I feed them to my dogs/wargs.

Cooking skill has a dramatic impact on the amount of leather/meat gained from corpses. So it's not just a question of do/don't. Corpses provide easy food for wargs/dogs/pigs, but I think the problem of this method is "overeating", just like when animals get into your beer stash and drink themselves to death. Animals keep eating until they are full and they will often consume more nutrition than they need. Turning their food into smaller bits generally ensures they eat only as much as they need.

Quote from: cultist on May 13, 2016, 12:41:55 PM

Quote from: Damien Hart on May 13, 2016, 09:47:05 AM
What I would be interested in seeing is a comparison of butchered vs unbutchered corpse nutrition values. I'd like to know whether to chop up raiders before I feed them to my dogs/wargs.

Cooking skill has a dramatic impact on the amount of leather/meat gained from corpses. So it's not just a question of do/don't. Corpses provide easy food for wargs/dogs/pigs, but I think the problem of this method is "overeating", just like when animals get into your beer stash and drink themselves to death. Animals keep eating until they are full and they will often consume more nutrition than they need. Turning their food into smaller bits generally ensures they eat only as much as they need.

There are tradeoffs, of course -- unless you have a cook that has immunity against butchering humanlike mood debuffs, slicing up a humanoid corpse might not be worth it.

If an oversight on your part or some kind of event results in corpses becoming rotten (like Toxic Fallout), so far as I know you can't butcher those, so might as well put 'em in a freezer near your animal sleeping areas -- its something you can't use for your colonists, and every bit of nutrition your animals get from a source you can't use is more food for your colonists (because the animals will be full and thus not eating food your colonists need).

Kibble has a basic bonus of 20% in terms of nutritional output (the kibble produced) versus the input (ingredients).  I really like the combo of making kibble from hay and human meat (if you have a cook that can absorb the mood debuff from butchering humanlike).  I don't know if the kibble output increases with better cooking skills or not.

Quote from: cultist on May 13, 2016, 12:41:55 PM
Cooking skill has a dramatic impact on the amount of leather/meat gained from corpses. So it's not just a question of do/don't. Corpses provide easy food for wargs/dogs/pigs, but I think the problem of this method is "overeating", just like when animals get into your beer stash and drink themselves to death. Animals keep eating until they are full and they will often consume more nutrition than they need. Turning their food into smaller bits generally ensures they eat only as much as they need.

I hadn't considered cooking skill vs meat amount. Does anyone happen to know where to find the total nutrition value of a corpse? I had a look through some of the defs but I couldn't find anything specific, and I can't really compare the two without it.

I didn't know they overate from an unbutchered corpse, but that would definitely be something to watch out for.

Quote from: Chibiabos on May 13, 2016, 02:24:38 PM
Kibble has a basic bonus of 20% in terms of nutritional output (the kibble produced) versus the input (ingredients).

On that subject, simple meals have a 70% increase and they can be fed to most animals, so aside from the added labour cost, meals are still more efficient for feeding your animals, at least in terms of food cost. That would probably be a bigger deal where food production is difficult, eg. deserts or ice plains or maps with short growing seasons.

Quote from: Chibiabos on May 13, 2016, 10:12:02 AM
Yeah, currently only corpses rot.  I think this was an oversight, I reported it as a bug since you can toggle 'Allow Rotten' ingredients for cooking, but no ingredients can actually rot, the game just deletes ingredients that lose their fresh status.  Tynan didn't say for certain ingredients would be allowed to rot in a future version when he closed the bug report, but I think they will.

I'm pretty sure things spoiled back in Alpha 8. Having them evaporate instead was just a shortcut around some meaningless micromanagement.

Some nice work, but there is much accounted for in the balance that was kind of overlooked in the discussion.  I started writing this to talk about the perceived imbalances, especially with haygrass, but rambled a bit more.

1.  This was addressed, but wild foods vs agricultural, the nutritional values side is not uncommon.  Most wild food products far exceed the farmed version per unit of measurement in terms of nutritional value.  If you started mass farming agave for example, they would compete for resources.  So you either are inefficient per square land area, or you are dropping the value of agave.  Same with the raspberries vs strawberries.

Growing strawberries myself, if you get the plants too dense, their productivity can drop significantly.  If you use fertilizers and other means to up their production, then the quality tends to drop.  Try garden strawberries vs the flavourless grocery store ones, you will know what I mean.  Difference is, you can grow strawberries in much larger quantities and hydroponically.  Raspberry bushes can take several years to reach a usable size to get food.

2.  Haygrass is useless?  Nopers.  You are viewing from an ideal world, essentially potentially easy mode.  In any play I have done, rich soil is very limited and usually reserved for vital food growing crops.  With long summers, corn.  With short summers potatoes.  To be addressed in 3.  Haygrass is and should never be grown on here.  So exclude using the ideal land, now nutritionally is much higher.

Grow them on the normal or poor soil.  It is easy to allocate a section of land to growing hay and have your animals go out there to feed.  They eat some hay as it grows, the surplus stockpiled and stored without need for refridgeration.  No degredation and lasts for a long time.  Stacks high.

More importantly, is it is efficient.  It was addressed meals are better.  So minimum meal of ten food items.  Check all that a chicken needs.  Like two hay.  So you feed them meals and your waste is over 5x  This continues for the other animals as well.  Make hay/meat for your cats/dogs/etc and that efficency goes up.  Get desparate and use hay/human meat kibble?  Effective return goes through the roof.

3.  Growing times is something very important to consider.  You addressed it in the growdays chart quite well.  But overall, need to balance the grow days to nutrition side.  I call it starving slowly.  Sure you get a quick feed, but it runs out faster.  You slowly starve.  So a mix is needed at start.  Some to get that initial suppliment while another plot grows a hearty meal.  While nominally corn is always better than potatoes, that is only if you have ideal growing seasons.  Potatoes are more rugged and survivable.  They can grow sooner, later, handle the heat better and are faster.  While corn may ideally be tops, if you are getting two potato crops for every one corn crop?  Well your yearly productivity with corn is nil.

It gets even more risky and this is something that anybody who has played on extreme bios knows.  Losing crops to a solar flare.  Bam.  Doesn't matter your passive power, or any of it.  Corn is putting all your eggs in one basket.  You are at 70% corn, and a flare happens that lasts a while.  Room drops below freezing and voila, all your food is dead.  With potatoes, you had one harvest in that period of time, and is half as long to get recovered.  Corn is very nice, but it is also all or nothing.  Oh, hello blight!

4.  Hydroponics.  To hydroponics feed with rice is optimal.  It is like a stream of food.  But if you are running livestock, you are also having to look at what you need to get one sunlamp of hydroponics running.  Each lamp is usually a windmill and three solars average in my builds.  Or abouts two per geothermal.  This is estimates.  It is good if you got the resources, but is also something that is later game focus. 

So that is part of the consideration.  You will up your colony wealth considerably plus invest significant levels of materials and components.  Haygrass on the other hand is something you just plug and forget for feeding.  I usually grow the stuff in my entry fortifications.  Animals sleep in barn, go out for sun.  If attacked, change their zones to stay in barn.  Aside from the planting which goes quick, is else zero investment.

I do quite like the food side of things in the game.  Chickens and their ability to spew out highly nutritious eggs for minimal hay investment is an excellent way to supplement meal productions!  That is something to add to your charts.  Hayfed hen conversion factors to eggs.  That also is a 20% upgrade (or is it more?) since one egg is 5x a crop.  Is why they only need one for a fine meal.  I don't know what that works out to per day, but colonists even like em raw, similar to berries and corn.


Overall, it is a dangerous way to play to fall into numerical strategies.  What may be numerically best, isn't situationally best.  Especially with a game like rimworld.  The best crops tend to not be the most reliable.

@Damien Hart, I think you want to look for MeatAmount and baseBodySize tags in the ThingDefs_Races files.  I suspect (but can't confirm) that baseBodySize is used to calculate how much meat an animal will give, and MeatAmount (if present) overwrites the value calculated from baseBodySize.

@Vaporisor:
1 - That's the real world. RimWorld farming doesn't work like that, and crop effectiveness doesn't drop due to "overcrowding".

2 - Haygrass does decay over time, just like anything else.  Yes, it stacks high and decays slowly, and that's why I highlighted it in the charts.  But unless you're having storage problems or power fluctuations, there's no advantage to haygrass.  You could plant rice instead, still feed your animals, and sell the extra or store it for emergency.

3 - You are correct about growing times and number of harvests per year.  None of this has been tested in-game, and obviously getting 2 harvests is better than 1.  That is highly dependent on the specifics of your map, and I don't go into that here.  None of this information is meant to be taken in isolation.  It's just meant to inform the thinking, not confine it.  (If anyone did take this as absolute truth, they'd deserve the results they got!)

4 - Yes, hydroponics is expensive to set up in terms of materials and time (and research too, if you're just starting out).  That's why I gave recommendations for a no-hydroponics setup.

I agree that it's foolish to play only by a few numbers.  It always comes down to player style and map limitations.  This is meant as a guide to help the decision making.

And I would consider adding crops >> chickens >> eggs, but then I'd also want to include milk options and other animals, etc and that's a far larger scope than I want to get into.  You are welcome to work it out, and so is anyone else.  If you do it, please post it!  I'd love to see it.

@milion

1) was just me justifying as to Raspberry and Agave being superior in every way to other crops and not farmable is all ^.^  If it was "farmed" then the yields in a crop situation would be reflectively lower :p

Perhaps I am not seeing the rice vs haygrass as you are seeing it.  I see it in terms of the complete package, rice being more of a do-all by feed for colonists and livestock.  Functionally though is where haygrass' advantage seems to really lie.  The more livestock, the more it kinda shows.  Get into something with limited growing season and larger animals, haygrass kind of shows more i thinks.  Hrm.... need to dig into the numbers more to see how it grows.  Sowing labour, etc?  Darn, no time to really dig in and find the code values.

You can see the Excel attachment in post #1 for details.  And sowing labor (sowWork in ThingDefs\Plants_Cultivated.xml) is 150 for EVERYTHING except daylily and rose (400 for each of them).

We may not agree on this, and that's fine.  I think it makes more sense to plant something that yields more crop faster and is worth more rather than something that stacks well.  But that's where playstyle comes in - I play smaller colonies.  Like I said, if storage is a concern (ie. large colony with a lot of stuff) then haygrass' stacking ability is a stronger argument.

Quote from: milon on May 14, 2016, 04:11:40 PM
You can see the Excel attachment in post #1 for details.  And sowing labor (sowWork in ThingDefs\Plants_Cultivated.xml) is 150 for EVERYTHING except daylily and rose (400 for each of them).

We may not agree on this, and that's fine.  I think it makes more sense to plant something that yields more crop faster and is worth more rather than something that stacks well.  But that's where playstyle comes in - I play smaller colonies.  Like I said, if storage is a concern (ie. large colony with a lot of stuff) then haygrass' stacking ability is a stronger argument.

If you play smaller colonies, then I think time spent sewing and harvesting is more of a critical concern because you can less afford dedicated a colonist to one task, so the less time one colonist has to dedicate to one task, the more time they can help out with other tasks whether its taming, cooking, constructing, crafting, hauling, researching, etc.  Smaller colonies need colonists to be more generalists.

With strawberries and rice, your colonists will be tied up for more man-hours with both planting and harvesting compared with corn for the same food output.  That means they won't be available as much for other tasks that need to be done.  Larger colonies can more readily spare some colonists to specialize in one task, because other colonists can fill in the gaps on other tasks.  Fast crops are important of course to keep/get things going.  And as for colder climes where corn is at high risk of being wasted, check out my tip thread on using geothermal vents (no geothermal generator tech/construction required!) to make solar flare-immune greenhouses:  https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20183.0

Aaah!  Saw the .png attached, but not the other attachment.
Thankies.

It is very much playstyle.  Unless I am reading wrong, doesnt the haygrass yield 50% more when planted in ground over rice and even corn is still relatively quite a bit lower?  10% between grass and corn?  That can be fairly significant to food and goods production.  I have one colony where I make hay/human kibble and that is very effective at sustaining my worg pack.  I guess it is situational as well.  I very rarely find that food enters the market from my colonies.  If I start getting too much surplus, I turn up the production of lavish meals and sell them :D

Oh, and crop rotations.  If I find I am getting real high in one area, I tend to switch to healroot, cotton, or devilstrand and up that production.  All the rice you want wont match the niceness of having a production line of fine devilstrand apparel.

Geothermal heated growing zones on ice sheets... VITAL!

Yes haygrass yields slightly more than corn, but only slightly more and your colonists can't eat it. As I said, you have to weigh and balance all variables to decide what you want to plant. And I totally agree about devil strand and other crops - I'm just focusing on food plants with this breakdown.

Chibiabos, thanks for the tip! I'll have to try that out.

Quote from: milon on May 14, 2016, 02:25:46 PM
@Damien Hart, I think you want to look for MeatAmount and baseBodySize tags in the ThingDefs_Races files.  I suspect (but can't confirm) that baseBodySize is used to calculate how much meat an animal will give, and MeatAmount (if present) overwrites the value calculated from baseBodySize.

From looking at the defs, the baseBodySize stat is a multiplier for the base MeatAmount of 90. There's also a postProcessCurve, but I'm not sure how that works. The generic MeatAmount def has a list of points, which I assume are used to build a curve, but there's nothing in the race defs to say how that curve might factor against the final meat amount. A chicken has a body size of 0.25, but after the curve is factored, in game it has a meat amount of 27, up from 23.

At any rate, there wasn't anything specific about whether a corpse provided more or less nutrition if an animal eats from it unbutchered, so I can only assume the total nutrition is the same as you'd receive from a 100% butcher yeild.

So basically, to get the most out of your animals/raiders, the only thing to consider is making sure your colonist with the highest butchery efficiency stat (at least 100%) does all your butchering. Butchery efficiency directly affects the yeild of butchering, and it goes over 100%. Cooking skill and manipulation and sight efficiency are all factors on butchery efficiency, so it won't just be your best cook.

As an example, my current best cook is level 16, which has a 116% efficiency, but he's missing an eye and two fingers, so his actual efficiency is 75%. Another colonist with level 13 cooking, which has a 108% efficiency, also has fibrous mechanites, bringing his efficiency to 156%. I just had him butcher a muffalo for 280 meat, and a muffalo has a normal meat amount of 180.

Quote from: Damien Hart on May 15, 2016, 10:45:16 AM
As an example, my current best cook is level 16, which has a 116% efficiency, but he's missing an eye and two fingers ...

Are you harvesting meat from live colonists now? ;)

Quote from: Chibiabos on May 15, 2016, 04:00:26 PM
Are you harvesting meat from live colonists now? ;)

Maybe he inadvertently did it himself, but don't ask me how he managed to take out his own eye  ::)