The Numbers Behind Feeding Hay (and why you maybe shouldn't)

[REMworlder]

On a suggestion for trained animals to avoid cooked meals and eat raw foods instead, NoImageAvailable brought up that animals eating cooked foods was actually a good thing because of the improved nutrition in meals. That made me curious about the nutritional relationship between hay and other foods when they're cooked.

I used the recently posted data behind the Detailed Crop Growth Information on r/rimworld by Oertelbrein. I only used the given harvest yield/day and didn't adjust for difficulty. If any errors do exist, I'm hoping they're equally applied since this is for comparative purposes.

I started by cleaning up the data and looked at the best case growing scenario for each plant. The yield/day is how many units of output are grown every day, best case scenario. The following is the non-cooked nutritional output each day of growth represents.

_{In terms of raw nutritional yield/day haygrass is the best}

When a meal is cooked, the nutritional value per input unit rises. A simple meal costs 10 input units and gives 85% nutrition. So the improved nutritional value per unit is 85%/10=8.5%. What does cooking the raw food given look like?

_{When the raw food is cooked, haygrass becomes the second-worst source of nutrition}

When the raw food is cooked, haygrass becomes the second-worst source of nutrition, just a little better than strawberries. But this is assuming every plant is growing in its optimal location like hydroponics or rich soil. What happens when all the plants are grown on regular soil?

_{On soil the relative rankings still hold.}

The takeaway is the high yield of hay makes it initially attractive, but since hay lacks conversion value crops with lower yields that can be made into food become more attractive. So if you have a decent cook be sure to use it. Since I don't know current hunger tick stats to give an applied colony or herd feeding example, here's an example of the value of cooked food in play:

An animal eating 5 times equals roughly 85% nutrition consumed five times= 85%*5=425% nutrition. In cooked simple meals, feeding 425% nutrition requires 50 raw food units. In uncooked raw foods, that same 425% nutrition requires 85 raw food units. Over the course of 5 meals 35 raw foods units are being saved by not eating raw food, which is enough for 3 meals by itself.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet I used.

[Limdood]

sure, but now consider (though its less likely to be able to easily be fit into your graphs) cooking time/effort.

Your chart only really matters if SPACE is the issue...eg. i can't FIT more food into my base/map/hydroponics/whatever.

assuming you have enough space to grow whatever food you want, how does the comparison hold up when you factor in the time it takes for cooking the meal (hauling ingredients, cooking, hauling meal....even with ideal stockpiles, there is still a LITTLE hauling done) in addition to growing the food.

What about non-ice maps, where lots of people will be using fine meals as their primary meal source, and now are cooking with meat too (also, more hauling...)

The colonist effort in planting, cutting, and hauling is about 70% higher for haygrass than meals (85 ingredients vs. 50), but i'm sure that 70% disappears...and then some...when you factor in cooking labor.

If you're in a situation where each scrap of food matters, then cooking is the way to go (or mass creating nutrient paste meals via feeding/cancelling prisoners and patients), but if you just want an efficiently running colony where production per colonist labor hour is maximized, then maybe raw is better.

[REMworlder]

I'm going to try and focus on this in terms of animal feed, but these results translate into human feeding too; cooked is better than uncooked.

Your chart only really matters if SPACE is the issue...eg. i can't FIT more food into my base/map/hydroponics/whatever.

If you have lots grazing land and no winter, you don't need to grow animal food. Only if the player runs out of land or has winter, then stored animal fodder is needed. In either case of limited available land or limited winter storage, space is a constraint.

In terms of total labor involved, cooking time grows inversely with needed hauling. Cooking decreases the raw food needed by 41% [(0.85 - 0.5) / 0.85], and this is a massive reduction in the necessary raw food that needs to be hauled. For 1000 uncooked nutrition that means 2000 raw units need to be hauled. When cooked only 1177 units need to be hauled. This frees up a lot of time. Even if haygrass does grow slightly faster, the player is still moving massive amounts more for the same nutritional quantities as cooked food. One last thing is a cooking colonist gets better at cooking, but a hauler doesn't get better at hauling.

Adjusting for yield size per plant, corn gives 22 units and hay gives 18. For the 1000 nutrition example, the difference is planting 432 corn plants versus 802 hay plants. I'd guess this also reduces planting and harvest time in addition to hauling.

Here's a rough sketch


Another problem with hauling massive amounts of crops is that as crop volume increases, distance from the colony also increases. A small field can be close to the colony, but as the field grows larger so does the distance the farming colonist has to travel.

I'm ignoring hauling from the cooking station because the stove can be next to or inside the stockpile and the cook can drop the meals at his feet. This means effectively no cook-stockpile hauling needed, or very minimal.

What about non-ice maps, where lots of people will be using fine meals as their primary meal source, and now are cooking with meat too (also, more hauling...)

Mood is the only upside to lavish meals. Lavish is a little worse raw food in terms of input efficiency. Absolute best case scenario the base nutrition per unit of a lavish meal is 100%/20=5%, or on par with raw food. But the additional nutrition from lavish meals is negligible and often partially unused since eating begins around an 80% so the actual nutrition added per unit is much worse, like 80%/20=4%. So, feeding animals lavish meals is an especially bad idea.

if you just want an efficiently running colony where production per colonist labor hour is maximized, then maybe raw is better

In terms of maximizing wealth as the output of production, the cost savings mean the colony can focus on growing the most profitable crops instead of raw food, or doing the most profitable activities instead of hauling.

Going back to the 1000 nutrition example, consider 100% of the field planted with hay (802 plants), or 53% planted with corn (432 plants) and the remaining 47% filled with crash crops or medicine.

If anyone wants to give me some hypothetical hauling or cook times I'd be happy to stab at modeling this. I'm sure there's a meals/day cooking constraint at some point equal to (total time in day)*(average cook's cooking rate). Unlimited trained pig haulers and only one cook station could look like this.

[zandadoum]

sure, but now consider (though its less likely to be able to easily be fit into your graphs) cooking time/effort.

if he has to consider that, you need to consider the increment of time/effort on HARVESTING and HAULING on huge fields.

plus: bigger fields, more stuff will be set on fire by raiders. that equals even more time on putting out fires

it takes very little time for my 2 day cooks and 2 night cooks to go from 0 to 300 normal, 150 nice and 100 lavish meals, provided there are materials
it does take forever to harvest and haul huge fields tho.

also, a colonist eating a lavish meal, won't be hungry for a good while AND have a mood bonus.
lavish meals can be made out of veggies and eggs, which can easily be grown in any biome either outdoors or indoors or with hydroponics.

i see no reason WHATSOEVER to eat anything raw on purpose.

[Jarwy]

I would like Hay to be a more nutrisious source of food for animals, for sure. Simple solution would be to increase the Hay yield to levels where it should be. And while Tynan or Ison are on that, make animals not eat all the chocolate and drink all the beer. I know how to stop them from doing that, but I would prefer the added realism of Alpaca's not popping corks off the beer bottles with their teeth.

[Regret]

Interesting discussion, thanks for making this thread.

How about a biodome?

large building with growlamps and Haygrass fields used solely to keep and feed your animals, the warmth and constant light greatly increase the growing efficiency and since the animals sleep where their food grows their food requires no hauling.
Just make sure to forbid storage of haygrass anywhere else.

One downside is that this uses a lot of power.
One possible other downside is that the animals eat partially grown plants, whether this is a problem depends on how the nutrition value grows as the plant ages. If it is linear there is only the problem of extra growing work, if it is asymptomatic this plan becomes unworkable.
Some micromanagement using multiple biodomes could solve this problem, letting the plants mature and be harvested before letting the animals in. If this is done it is trivial to add Wargs to the cycle, just add some chickens for meat, slaughter them on the spot and don't let your cooks or haulers get to them. The wargs feed on the chickens, the chickens feed on the haygrass, and the haygrass feeds on your growlights. Now you've effectively reduced the problem to a powerissue.
... Damn, that makes you susceptible to powerloss events. Don't do this under a mountain so you can open up the roof as needed. Also, build in a large redundancy, you want at least 10% of your hay to be superfluous so you have a buffer.

I would like Hay to be a more nutrisious source of food for animals, for sure. Simple solution would be to increase the Hay yield to levels where it should be. And while Tynan or Ison are on that, make animals not eat all the chocolate and drink all the beer. I know how to stop them from doing that, but I would prefer the added realism of Alpaca's not popping corks off the beer bottles with their teeth.

hahaha, thanks for that image.

[zandadoum]

How about a biodome?

One downside is that this uses a lot of power.

biodomes or similar are way more efficient powerwise than hydroponics AND are immune to loss of crops due solar flares.

i take biodomes over any other ingame solution right now. any day, any time. and if made over rich soil, even more so.

[b0rsuk]

Cooking meals is already time intensive, even for simple means. If you're going to cook even for your animals, it's going to require a full time cook... or two! It's not better, you're trading pawn time for food.

It's also a bit unfair to not use hay's fertile soil advantage. When I plant hay, I plant it quite far from colony, wherever the rich soil is. Unless it's directly on the way of raiders, they probably won't bother.

So the advantages of hay are:
+ very little plant/harvest time
+ easy to store
+ no need to cook
+ hay growing zone doesn't use much space

That doesn't mean I wouldn't give meals to animals. But it's not viable in a colony full of animals. If you absolutely want to minmax, Nutrient Paste Dispenser is unbeatable. I believe animals eat NPD meals too, they just aren't smart enough to use the machine. This may change because I proposed "NPD training" for animals.

[METATERREN]

Hay works pretty well for my herd of 30 labs and boars. It requires a huge field. There's no way I can cook enough meals. After the hay is harvested I made a restricted area at the field and a small building with a hay stockpile that's next to it. Sent 8 of my 10 colonists to gather hay and it took too much micro'ing having to encourage them to keep hauling hay. Perhaps hay should be called a small volume item and carried upto 200 rather than 75 to make harvests less of a pain.

I tried leaving the hay to be 'naturally' hauled by my 8 hauling animals and the occassional hauling from my colonists, but the rain had nearly destroyed the first 20 or so units of harvest sitting in the field and I went to the restricted area group harvest & haul deal.

Anyway, despite the somewhat advanced micro'ing required via spending a couple of days with all colonists restricted to joy activities (to build mood before 20-40 hours of hauling), setting the field and stockpile restriction, and the day or two out of my colony that it took hay is way more effective than having to cook for the herd! My cook can spend his time providing for the colonists and then butcher, or clean if there is nothing to butcher. My cook is at a high skill level and would not be able to provide enough food for 10 colonists and the herd.

In the case of meals, might animals end up eating at relatively higher nutrition levels and end up wasting that excess nutrition? Right now, I just watched a labrador eat at 25% hunger, consumed 15 hay and reach 100% nutrition. Waste due to eating at too high of a nutrition level would be an additional drawback against investing in cooking the meals. What the total nutrition in a meal compared to 10, 15, 20 hay?

I like more and more a decrease in the volume of hay for hauling purposes.. Its nice how it bales into 200 units.

[RickyMartini]

Hey thanks REM for doing all of this, I love reading things like this and I believe this is mainly what this game should be about.

[REMworlder]

Thanks Skissor! I like doing this stuff, but it's hard to find a good topic with numbers behind it. I'm always happy to hear feedback.

I'm trying to get a rough list of all the questions being brought up to try and address a few later in depth. Feel free to point out what I've missed or add.

zandadoum:
-How do hauling and harvest times increase as field size grows?

Regret:
-Biodomes: can heated and constantly-lit buildings provide a boost?
-What effect does animals eating growing plants have?
-Does the nutritional value of a plant change as it matures?

b0rsuk:
-How time intensive is cooking meals?
-How does hay storage efficiency compare?-

METATERREN:
-How many colonists/animals can a cook provide for? (note: this is hard to do without exact hunger/tick info)
-What wastage happens with meals when they provide more nutrition than the consumer actually needs? How does this compare with raw foods?

+ hay growing zone doesn't use much space

Just to address this point, it's the opposite of what the numbers show. Compared to cooked food growing hay takes up almost twice the space for the same nutritional value. The 1000 nutrition example illustrates this a few different ways, from cooking lowering overall raw food needs to corn having a higher natural yield per plant.

As for rich soil, it's actually included in the second table of the OP where best case growing scenarios are compared. To that end, corn receives a bigger fertility boost than hay in rich soil, and if you cook it the nutritional disparity between corn and hay is actually bigger than on regular soil (3.6% vs 2.5% nutrition/day)

[Komyets]

Wait... Rice is actually better in nourishment then Potatoes? How... well.. It could be true, yet, since Rice yields food so damn fast, it seems to require far more Work to sow, harvest and haul, then Corn yields lots of food at once making hauling its ridiculously big quantities a tedious job. Strawberries yield little, and have the tendency to spoil fast, so I always thought Potatoes were the most efficient. Oh well, this is a helpful insight of growing, thanks! No more Hay for the animals

[Regret]

-What effect does animals eating growing plants have?
-Does the nutritional value of a plant change as it matures?

I did some testing.
Animals won't eat the plant until they are about 70 60% grown.
For partially grown haygrass they only get 10% nutrition.
They don't have a preference for harvested food  over partially grown plants, they eat whichever is closer.

Conclusion:
Keeping your animals in the field where you grow their food does not work.

I will try rotating growing/herding biodomes now.
The main benefit is removing the need to haul animal feed, so I really hope this works.

EDIT: Rotating seems to work perfectly, one sunlamp-sized area can easily feed 10 alpaca for the time it takes the other field to mature and be harvested. They did start to eat some of my newly grown plants because the plants in herding biodome got to 60% before the plants in the growing biodome get to 100%, so that requires either 3 biodomes or some extra planting. In theory, if it stabilizes, it should be possible with only 2 biodomes.

Sidenote: I love the fact that this game models biology so well it even exhibits some of the chaotic behaviour of ecosystems.

This is ridiculously effective.
My estimate of 10 per sunlamp was very low, the second area was just harvested and they only ate half of the hay in the first area. I estimate 20 alpaca per sunlamp, with this system you could effortlessly have hundreds of animals that barely take up space.
I'm seriously starting to consider getting some wargs in there as well to eat the butchered old creatures.

Results below.
INPUT:
- A couple thousand MW of constant power, so keep some extra hay or corn for feeding in case of a solar flare.
- planting and harvesting one of the biodomes every 10 days, that should take a single pawn about half a day.
- starter animals
- about 600 wood for walls
- a couple hundred steel for sunlamps and temperature control (depending on needs)
- construction work

OUTPUT:
- Animal products like wool, milk, eggs, meat, leather
- If needed you can use the meat to feed wargs. It would take a huge animal production to feed wargs sufficiently though.

[Shurp]

A simple fix to all of this; shouldn't hay grow a *lot* faster than corn?  We're talking about grass after all, just really tall grass... should be a piece of cake for someone to Mod.

[draba]

Note that not all animals eat at the same hunger levels.
Alpaca tries to find food at 60% percent or below, gets 9 raw vegs or a single meal. In this case the 9 hay is obviously a better deal than anything else(husky tries to eat around 25-30%, gets 15 raw food or a single meal).