Cook X meals today

[BattleFalcon]

A new bill for a cook stove, "Cook X meals today" Your Chef(s) will cook say, 10 meals on that cook stove that day, then go do whatever else is on their priority list.

FYI: I think this would be either very easy or very hard to code, so don't hate me for that if it's very hard .

[Weyrling]

A new bill for a cook stove, "Cook X meals today" Your Chef(s) will cook say, 10 meals on that cook stove that day, then go do whatever else is on their priority list.

FYI: I think this would be either very easy or very hard to code, so don't hate me for that if it's very hard .

If you mean 'Craft X every day' that would be pretty useful, but 'craft X todayish' is already the default, it just never resets itself.

Craft until you have X is what I usually use for meals, where X is ~150% of colonists+prisoners (Unless X>10, then I turn it up). Personally I'd never use 'Cook X today', but there are lots of other crafting things I'd use that type of bill for.

[ToXeye]

I constantly have to tell my cook to make food in this game. It's weird.

How the food decays over time is weird too, because a stack of food can't contain several food items, it can only be a splittable food item.

[Weyrling]

I constantly have to tell my cook to make food in this game. It's weird.

How the food decays over time is weird too, because a stack of food can't contain several food items, it can only be a splittable food item.

If you click into the Bill options menu (The ... icon, if I remember correctly) there are 3 settings, "Do X times", "Do until you have X", and "Do Forever", I don't recommend Do Forever because you'll probably lose a ton of food, but you can maintain your number of meals at a certain level with no need to micromanage it.

You can also just grow tons and tons of berries, your colonists can eat them with no loss to morale, additionally you don't have to worry about starving during a solar flare since they don't need to be cooked.

[Cimanyd]

You can also just grow tons and tons of berries, your colonists can eat them with no loss to morale, additionally you don't have to worry about starving during a solar flare since they don't need to be cooked.

First, people won't starve without cooked food. Once they're urgently hungry, they'll be perfectly willing to eat the nearest raw food, whether that's potatoes, berries, or meat. (Urgently hungry is -20 morale, ate raw food is -10 morale, so it makes sense.)

Second, people consider berries raw food, and will not eat them unless urgently hungry, so they'll still have a -8 hungry morale effect until they're urgently hungry and eat, they just won't have morale problems after they finally eat the berries.

Third, berries have 5 nutrition, so 10 berries should add 50% to someone's food bar in the health tab. A meal costs 10 berries, and even though some of its nutrition is wasted if it's eaten at Hungry, it still has to give at least 70% food. So eating raw food (including berries) is a waste of nutrition, meaning you'd have to grow more than otherwise. Of course it would remove the cooking work, which could go toward growing.

I think if you want to avoid having colonists waste time on food, you should use a nutrient paste dispenser. They'll take any raw food. They require almost no colonist work to get food from. Very convenient. And, after the relatively easy nutrient resynthesis research, they actually have the best nutrition per raw food, costing 9 raw food to fill hunger bar from "hungry" instead of 10 with cooked meals (or without research) and (I think) 14 from eating the raw food plain (though they wouldn't actually eat it at hungry; they'd eat 16 or 17 at urgently hungry).

The only downside is a little -5 morale penalty. I'm considering starting to use the things myself.

[ToXeye]

I think that Cook X Meals Today instead of Make Until You Have X means that he will decide upon doing it at some point, but he won't constantly do it so that he can do other things aswell. For example, right now I am busy cooking food all the time because the cook has to wander around doing random things instead of just one thing. So Make Until You Have X is not enough because it doesn't take into account that food is eaten at different moments, thus causing the cook to wander around a lot - wasting time.

[Wex]

The only downside is a little -5 morale penalty. I'm considering starting to use the things myself.

Used regularly it becomes -8

[Minus]

I feel really silly, didn't realise there was already so much we could do to make food production less hassle. But the one improvment not yet mentioned here, is to make colonists pick the food closest to expiring first. I hate having enough food already set up, only to find that they've eaten the fresh stuff and the rest has gone rotten and vanished.

[Darth Fool]

I would like a "cook when below X until you have Y" option as opposed to the current system where X and Y are equal.  The current system forces the cook to come back every time someone eats a meal which makes having them do anything not in the immediate vicinity of the stove a real time waster.

[ToXeye]

I would like a "cook when below X until you have Y" option as opposed to the current system where X and Y are equal.  The current system forces the cook to come back every time someone eats a meal which makes having them do anything not in the immediate vicinity of the stove a real time waster.

This too.