Kibble vs. Pemmican

[Hans Lemurson]

Which is the more efficient Animal Feed?

Pemmican has the higher nutrient conversion ratio, but Kibble enables the use of high-yield Haygrass.  So which ends up being better?

Haygrass has a growth-cost of 5.00 and a harvest yield of 18.  This gives it a crop-efficiency of around 3.60.

Potatoes (as representative of food crops) have a growth-cost of 3.15 and a harvest yield of 8.  This gives a crop efficiency of around 2.54.

3.60/2.54 = 1.42 
This means roughly that it takes 14 tiles of potatoes to get the same nutrition as 10 tiles of Haygrass.

For comparing Pemmican to Kibble, I will be assuming that you have a quantity of meat already available to you and are deciding whether to grow Hay to convert it into Kibble, or Potatoes to make it into Pemmican.  Both Kibble and Pemmican use Meat and Vegetables in the same ratio, so the only differences are the output multipliers for the recipes, and the agricultural cost for growing the vegetables.

The "Make pemmican" recipe converts 5 units of meat and 5 units of veggies into 18 pieces of Pemmican.  The vegetables here cost 1.42x as much to grow as Hay does, so I'm going to give the recipe a cost of 5 + 7.1 = 12.1 food. 
18/12.1 = 1.49 raw->processed efficiency.

The "Make Kibble" recipe converts 20 units of meat and 20 units of veggies into 50 pieces of Kibble.  I have assigned Hay a cost of 1.0, so the recipe has a cost of 40 food.
50/40 = 1.25 raw->processed efficiency.

Pemmican looks like the winner in terms of efficiently converting your food into a processed good.  I'm still a little uncertain as to whether I did the math right in the cost analysis, but even if you assign the meat a cost-value of 0 (or assume that the products are made from 100% veggies), Pemmican comes out slightly ahead at 2.53 vs. 2.50.  Any increase in the value of meat only make Pemmican proportionally better.  So Pemmican *IS* more resource efficient.

But Pemmican has one major drawback compared to Kibble:  It's a lot more work to make!  How does the extra cooking labor relate to the amount of labor required to plant and harvest a somewhat larger farm?  No idea.

Addendum: If your land is poor and you are having to subsist on Gravel-Potatoes or Hydroponic Rice, then this more heavily favors Pemmican.  If your Rich Soil is plentiful, then Rice will perform comparatively better against Haygrass, and Pemmican gets better.  Aside from the additional labor and the danger of contaminating your food supply with human-meat, Kibble just can't seem to catch a break.

[SpaceDorf]

What are the nutrition values of pemmican and kibble ? Are they the same, because you don't declare it in your calculation.

[b0rsuk]

For simple use, yes pemmican seems better. Note however that pemmican can't be made of animal products, but I think eggs can be used to make kibble.

Kibble has other advantages you didn't mention:
+ kibble is a way to use meat you would otherwise not touch, like bugmeat, or human meat. Note even with a psychopath colonist the entire colony gets a lasting -5 mood because someone butchered a humanlike. But is kibble really a more efficient way than just letting your carnivores eat human corpses ? At least kibble doesn't rot.
+ kibble is good when you get hay somewhere cheap, like drop pods
+ note that in a16 haygrass has been changed. It used to have high fertility sensitivity, like corn and rice. Now it doesn't care about soil and you want to save fertile soil for something better.

[Hans Lemurson]

What are the nutrition values of pemmican and kibble ? Are they the same, because you don't declare it in your calculation.

To the best of my knowledge all food items except eggs provide 0.05 nutrition per unit.  I didn't think to specify this since it seemed like common knowledge.

For simple use, yes pemmican seems better. Note however that pemmican can't be made of animal products, but I think eggs can be used to make kibble.

Kibble has other advantages you didn't mention:
+ kibble is a way to use meat you would otherwise not touch, like bugmeat, or human meat. Note even with a psychopath colonist the entire colony gets a lasting -5 mood because someone butchered a humanlike. But is kibble really a more efficient way than just letting your carnivores eat human corpses ? At least kibble doesn't rot.
+ kibble is good when you get hay somewhere cheap, like drop pods
+ note that in a16 haygrass has been changed. It used to have high fertility sensitivity, like corn and rice. Now it doesn't care about soil and you want to save fertile soil for something better.

Kibble is no more effective for "man-flesh laundering" than Pemmican since humans who eat it get a mood penalty regardless of ingredients, and pets don't care about human-pemmican.  Whenever possible, raw food should be converted into a processed form because all recipes multiply the total nutrition.  Letting carnivores devour corpses however does let you avoid the "butchered human" penalty though.  I haven't noticed any difference between a husky tearing off a chunk of a corpse, and eating the equivalent amount of butchered meat.

Yes, if you do get your hands on hay, the best thing to do is process it into Kibble.  The main questions are "Should I try planting Hay at all?" and "Do I actually have the ingredients to make Kibble?".  If you're growing plants directly for animal fodder, then Hay is the best, but if you have meat available, then growing a food crop and turning it into Pemmican is the way to go (to maximize nutrients for your resource input).

Haygrass as far as I can tell has a 60% fertility factor, compared with 40% for Potatoes.  This means that in poor soil, Potatoes are proportionally better compared to growing both in normal ground, and in Rich soil Rice is proportionately better compared to growing both in normal soil.

[b0rsuk]

The main advantage of hay is trival storage. Hay rots in more than 3 seasons, which means if you have a winter hay will last over a year. If not, it's plenty of time to get an infestation or thrumbo and make kibble. 200 hay per tile is nice too, and I noticed that in A16 pawns with Enhanced manipulation can finally carry more than 75! It's finally the time to train elephants for hauling.

[Hans Lemurson]

Hay is an easy and convenient vegetable fodder.  I'd prefer it if it grew faster though, in exchange for a lesser yield.  You'd think Haygrass would be a quick crop, but at 5 growth-days it's longer than Potatoes, Hops, Cotton, Strawberry and Rice.  If you run low on feed, you cannot depend on Haygrass to solve your problem in any speedy way.

[HybridRam812]

Pemmican, Everything Can Eat Off it.

[mumblemumble]

its important to note that kibble still has the benefit of keeping human meat away from humans. For instance, you can feed dead raiders via kibble to pigs, and then  live off pig meat without the debuff much easier.

This factor alone makes kibble worth it, imo, in addition to being able to grow haygrass easy.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

its important to note that kibble still has the benefit of keeping human meat away from humans. For instance, you can feed dead raiders via kibble to pigs, and then  live off pig meat without the debuff much easier.

This factor alone makes kibble worth it, imo, in addition to being able to grow haygrass easy.

The human/animal food supply separation was the first thing I thought as well. Sure you could probably do some crazy micro using zones and swapping haulers in and out of the correct zones to keep them separated, but something is bound to screw up eventually.

[Wishmaster]

Did you mention Nutrient Paste Meals ? I think they can compete kibble and pemmican, given how cost efficient they are.
It costs 0.3 nutrition to make 0.9 nutrition (one unit) of nutrient paste, which sets the awful meal to a nutrition cost-efficiency of 3 !
While pemmican stands at 1.8 and kibble at only 1.25 (but has the pro of hay).

The only cons of paste are
* They can't be "splited": don't feed cats with it.
* They can't use hay
* They need a dispenser (or it's a pro because you don't need pawn work)
* You can't feed your pets using the dispensers, except when they're downed. If only a mod made it possible...

In other words, it can much more profitable to feed your Husky with paste than kibble.

I think kibble really needs a buff or a rebalance, because it also negates cannibalism thoughts.

edit: kibble thought is actually worse than raw cannibalism though.

[Hans Lemurson]

Nutrient Paste Dispensers are OP.

Kibble replaces the cannibalism malus with the more severe "ate kibble" malus.

The way I keep Human Meat away from my Humans is by feeding them Simple/Fine meals and feeding pemmican to the animals.

[makkenhoff]

I'm unsure if the point of the topic was to discuss player preference or not. I prefer kibble, it doesn't spoil. Pemmican spoils. Any other factors are irrelevant for me, personally. I want food reserves that don't require refrigeration, and will not spoil. For my animals, I just use hay for herbivores and human corpses for carnivores. Personally, the very notion that I'm feeding humans to my animals sickens me, but it provides a rather gamy way to remove otherwise unusable human corpses without resorting to using up my limited space with graves or my limited power generation. (I have a tendency to build rather small bases.)

Should A17 re-balance this corpse factor, I would revise how I operate. I find meat to be a pain to collect, personally - I'd almost rather have the ability to set certain types of animals to be allowed to hunt, but I kind of like having the control too.

[travin]

Kibble is more efficient because you can make it using chicken eggs since they are spawned, free resources.

In fact, all animal breeding currently spawns free resources from nothing so choose a fast breeding animal and slaughter the offspring for kibble.

[mumblemumble]

Paste is nice, BUT : it requires electricity, takes up a pretty large amount or real estate in your room, cannot be taken for travel, and tastes icky.

Its handy when shorthanded, but really, if you have the hands, meals are better.

[Hans Lemurson]

Kibble is more efficient because you can make it using chicken eggs since they are spawned, free resources.

In fact, all animal breeding currently spawns free resources from nothing so choose a fast breeding animal and slaughter the offspring for kibble.

You get more nutrition by waiting for the egg to hatch and slaughtering the innocent newborn.

I'm unsure if the point of the topic was to discuss player preference or not. I prefer kibble, it doesn't spoil. Pemmican spoils. Any other factors are irrelevant for me, personally. I want food reserves that don't require refrigeration, and will not spoil. For my animals, I just use hay for herbivores and human corpses for carnivores. Personally, the very notion that I'm feeding humans to my animals sickens me, but it provides a rather gamy way to remove otherwise unusable human corpses without resorting to using up my limited space with graves or my limited power generation. (I have a tendency to build rather small bases.)

Should A17 re-balance this corpse factor, I would revise how I operate. I find meat to be a pain to collect, personally - I'd almost rather have the ability to set certain types of animals to be allowed to hunt, but I kind of like having the control too.

I made the post to showcase the math, because I realized that with two different efficiency factors involved (three if you try to evaluate meat) it is not obvious whether Kibble or Pemmican is numerically superior.

There are of course many non-numerical differences between them which make up the bigger difference, such as the durability of kibble and organization of your food stocks.