Return of Hoppers

[LouisTBR]

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?

[Toggle]

Meh, a lot of different ingredients could be used and hoppers are meant to let ingredients feed into a machine, not just store stuff.

[GarettZriwin]

Hoppers are used to feed prisoners cheap or to feed colonists on harder biomes.

[Toggle]

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.

[GarettZriwin]

Better to have slight debuff than food poisoning during battle.

[Menuhin]

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.

[akiceabear]

I use the nutrient paste dispenser in most games for the first year or more, until a colony is large enough for more specialization.

[b0rsuk]

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.

[RemingtonRyder]

Nutrient paste dispensers are great! Can't remember the last time I bothered with a cook stove.

[Nebbie]

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.

[Toggle]

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.

[LouisTBR]

Clever!

[Lady Wolf]

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.

[LouisTBR]

Really? I got the cooked cannibalism debuff on a prisoner when he ate a human meat paste meal. That sounds tasty!

[Bob_Namg]

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