Packed Lunches, Food on the go?

[KDStudios]

I was just playing around with my experimentation colony and it just dawned on me...

Visitors have food on them.
They actually carry around food inventory, can do things like shoot and even walk around.

... Why can't my colonists?
Sure perhaps they should be a little miserable about eating from the floor.
But why can't they stuff food in their pockets or in their backpack when they're off to construct/mine/hunt/whatever?
Instead of hauling their backside from the other side of the map to the mess hall of the colony?

Too many times have I seen colonists do their little mining operation on the other side of the map and almost lose their minds on the walk back because they're hungry.
I dunno, I just like the idea of packed lunches. Instead of prioritising eating them, it'd be an inventory thing they grab when they wake up or something.
*shrugs*
Just an idea/suggestion.

[Evul]

Agree!
I actually had a colonist that entered the map with food and later ate it. But I agree that colonist should be able to have food to go on lokger tipps.

[Solanus]

I was going to suggest this as part of a larger effort to see access to multiple zones for your colonists (not necessarily the other colonies' zones).  Considering that you'll normally run out of the higher level survival meals before you would feel adventurous enough to venture that far away, you would need a way to make new travelling meals, a new recipe for the cook stove.  It would also be handy to pair that up with a better method for managing meals - including being able to prioritize meal consumption, allow for meal movement without making them available for consumption, and weighing meal accessibility against meal quality for determining where to get your next meal.

I would set a travelling meal at somewhere around the difficulty of a fine meal (level 6 Cooking, 5 each meat/veggie) and a shelf life of at least 15 days (1 month) unrefrigerated.  You might be able to make something close, if not identical, to the packaged survival meal, after a research unlock and a higher level recipe.

I would also set a weighted priority list for meals based on their type/quality, with general and user-defined groups having separate lists.  This would allow you to ensure that prisoners get the lowest quality meals, while people with troublesome mental break thresholds could be prioritized for the best meals.  This would be in parallel with another more automatic weighting that has a pawn value a nearby meal more highly than a distant meal.  These would work together, not to exclusion - a pawn could be indicated to really dislike the travelling meals, and they would be more likely to double-back to high quality meals rather than eat their trail mix, assuming they weren't too far from the stockpile.

Lastly, especially for the travelling and packaged survival meals, you should be able to mark those as forbidden from eating while still unforbidden for movement.  This would allow pawns to produce the meals and collect them into the stockpile without risking them getting consumed out of turn, especially if you're planning on an expedition to the other side of the map (or another zone) at a later point.

[Mihsan]

I would also set a weighted priority list for meals based on their type/quality, with general and user-defined groups having separate lists.  This would allow you to ensure that prisoners get the lowest quality meals, while people with troublesome mental break thresholds could be prioritized for the best meals.

I also suggested something similar (not only for food, but for medical stuff too). Good thing than I'm not alone in this.

My suggestion:

Distribution management for food and medications:
- Some table in which I can specify what my colonists and prisoners can use as food and for healing and in which order (something like manual job order distribution)
- Ability to segregate my colonists in consumption (and creating different groups of segregation)

For example:

Group #1 (hunters & soldiers)
Will eat: 1) Survival meal, 2) Simple meal, 3) Raw food
Healing: 1) Glitterworld med, 2) Medical kit, 3) Herbal med

Group #2 (too smart, neurotic, volatile... but needed people)
Will eat: 1) Lavish meal, 2) Fine meal, 3) Simple meal
Healing: 1) Medical kit, 2) Herbal med

Group #3 (prisoners & worthless colonists)
Will eat: 1) Simple meal, 2) Nutri-paste, 3) Raw food
Healing: 1) Herbal med

Group #4 (prisoners, that i want to recruit)
Will eat: 1) Fine meal, 2) Simple meal, 3) Nutri-paste
Healing: 1) Medical kit, 2) Herbal med

Also nice idea about meals for travel. But i am not sure in the need to create additional type of food like "travelling meal". Let's not create new entities, when we already have survival meals. We just need some way to create it (pirates are getting dozens of them somewhere, right?).

How about crafting survival meals with upgraded nutrient paste dispenser (NPD)? This will make it more useful and also has some idea behind it: "survival meal" sounds like something crafted with large industrial machine (like NPD) and not on regular kitchen stove. Also i think that crafting such meal should have some additional difficulty (like long time to craft or/and high electricity consumption).

[Johnny Masters]

There was some talk about canned food a weeks back. I'd just introduce a new production building that transforms already made meals into survival packages, so it'd would require energy, materials, operator and a meal. If it's too bothersome to introduce survival package quality types, based on meal used(simple, fine, lavish), then it could simply be "crafted" by the station.

I also don't think we need a new type of food just for traveling. Survival packages fits the concept and could be used for a lot of things once it becomes craftable.

[Anduin1357]

There was some talk about canned food a weeks back. I'd just introduce a new production building that transforms already made meals into survival packages, so it'd would require energy, materials, operator and a meal. If it's too bothersome to introduce survival package quality types, based on meal used(simple, fine, lavish), then it could simply be "crafted" by the station.

I also don't think we need a new type of food just for traveling. Survival packages fits the concept and could be used for a lot of things once it becomes craftable.

I would like to add that although Johnny is correct that Survival meals fits the concept, I personally think that something along the lines of an MRE for long distance travel is much more logical. It would be something with a really, really long shelf life of like 6 months, tastes like ****(mood impact) and fills the colonist to a very high percent like 95%.
If inventory was made, this meal would take the least space due to it being dry and the fact that preparing it only requires a liquid (urine, anyone?), it would be the perfect meal for exploratory fieldwork. Survival meals are more like nutri-bars, plain water packets, stuff that takes up lots of space for civilian use on large transport spacecraft in case of emergency.
Ready made survival meals need lots of packaging while MREs need very little packaging and uses very little space.
All we need to really craft MREs is a stove and a vacuum packing machine.
Canned food is a good idea, though, it uses some metal to create a can which seals cooked food from the elements.
Maybe all we need is Survival Meal research to Canned food research to MREs. Is that good?

[Kinakin]

Seems like you are adressing multiple issues at the same time. Mostly:

Colonist ability to carry multiple items(stacks)
Colonist ability to travel long distances

There has been multiple suggested solutions to these challanges. And they affect many many aspects of the game. So far we havent heard much about how the Dev plans to handle them.

But they are the kind of thing that once he adds a solution to one it will solve many different sub issuea related to them.

[Eleazar]

Why do we need a new meal type?

The simplest solution is to have the pawn grab a meal when he's pathing more than X distance.

[Johnny Masters]

Why do we need a new meal type?

The simplest solution is to have the pawn grab a meal when he's pathing more than X distance.

Travel-food (or survival food crafting, or canned food) was suggested as a feature for world map exploration, where traveling distance and food spoiling would be more of a thing. Surely, for your own region/map/colony a regular meal would suffice.

[Kinakin]

While you are talking about how to avoid colonists going hungry when traveling long distances. The solution can be tackled different ways. As suggested the ability to carry food or you could add mechanics that decrease travel time.

The second solution reduces the need for the first one. And when you play on bigger maps with larger colonies you will find that the ability to travel quickly and moving more stuff is the biggest limiting factors.