[Mod Request] In-game food/crop requirements calculator

[tarator]

Waiting for A18, I haven't played the game for a long time, but when I did I tried to use a spreadsheet to figure out how much meals per year I need and how much crops I'd need to make them. After starving several times, I think it would be a big QOL improvement if it can be made as an in-game info window, that tells you:

1. How many squares you have zoned per crop
2. What yearly yield you can expect considering the soil fertility, growing days
3. How many simple meals you could make with that
4. How many meals per year your pawns are expected to need

Additions:

5. How much meat you'd need to make the harvest into fine/lavish meals
6. How much Hay you'd need to feed your animals for a year
7. The same, but minus grazing days
8. And how much Kibble
9. How much meat you'd need to turn that Hay into Kibble

[Varisha]

Hi,

i think the idea is not bad. But it can only show you the happy-path of the game
You cannot include any work priorities, events, number of pawns or psychological status into the calculation. So you only get a "if everything runs well without exceptions" calculation.

[tarator]

I know, it is still a lot better than nothing. It is up to the player to factor in inefficiencies and try to overproduce a bit. In a large colony with lots of animals it is easy to lose track of food supply.

Strangely I haven't found much on the topic, I guess people just wing it. Here is the spreadsheet taken from this topic. I used it to figure out the calculations and I made the animals sheet.

[Varisha]

I can imagine to give this a try soon

[Albion]

Well I guess there are too many factors to accurately calculate your crop need.
Just a small list:

• above mentioned inefficiencies with work priorities
• blight killing your crops
• difference in nutritional value of different meals. Depending on what actually gets eaten there is a higher/lower need for food
• do you hunt animals or get enough/any meat supply from milking or butchering? Do you eat raiders?
• do your animals eats meals, kibble, raw food or even gras the grass outside? All influences heavily
• how long can you grow stuff? An early cold snap can fuck your supplies for the winter
• soil influences. Are you growing in soil, rich soil or hydroponics? Different plants are more effective in one or the other.

I don't want to discourage anyone from doing such a mod but all the above mentioned factors will influence your crop needs which is why I personally am mostly winging it and adapt as I see my supplies dwindle.

[Varisha]

Yes i see that, thatwhy i mentioned it is only a "happy-path" calculation
Everyone can make his own assumptions with the result i think.

[tarator]

I'm revisiting the spreadsheet and there are confusing moments. Many places report different values for Growing time. Is the ingame info in this screenshot showing the true number?

So Corn has Growing time of 11.3 days. Accounting for 5% instagrowth that leaves 10.735 days. Plant rest time is 45%, so ideally it will take 10.735/0.55=19.52 days. This seems very long, which makes me wonder. But on the other hand it makes no sense for it to be wrong. I have absolutely no idea how RimWorld is built, but I guess that number comes from xml definitions and should be always actual throughout any patches.



To answer myself: Yes, it comes from XML. Yes, it is correct data.

[Nightinggale]

There are more factors to add in. For instance plants stop growing at night. However there is a mod, which allows 24h plant growth, which obviously requires artificial lighting. How would you even calculate this? Check for light source, but what if the player is using automatic switches and it only turns on if it's dark and there is at least 50% battery power?

I think the goal should be some baseline to give an indication. If the player is using power to allow plant growth at night, then the player should be aware that he will be able to produce more. Likewise players should be able to figure out that blight, fires and similar aren't included in the calculations.

I suspect this will easily end up being CPU hungry, which is ok if it's only calculated when you open a certain window. It's not ok to make such calculations in the background because the player might see it in a popup or whatever.

I really like the idea. While I seem to do ok with food, I always misjudge haygrass to a level where I either run out or I produce like 3 times the amount I need.

[tarator]

During finding out how things work (for the nth time), I've remade the spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m3Poylh6TAiUO9Ej7Q8FNM8d3ZRAyyquaDWS-8xDBVc/edit?usp=sharing

The animals tab is still using old/wrong data. The big mystery-solving there is how much do animals eat. I'll do it some other time, but since my request is pretty much to do the spreadsheet in-game, I figure it's useful to share.