[Alpha 8] Updated Numbers Behind Food Production and Consumption

[REMworlder]

Hey guys, I've ran through things again so the numbers I present are more helpful. My original look at food production and consumption ignored plant resting time. So here's the updated version! Now 54% less inaccurate! Valid at participating locations only!

There were a number of related topics I wanted to touch on, but they're really not *that* interesting compared to all the new incoming content. There's other, cooler stuff to spreadsheet. Plus correcting the numbers to account for plant resting was a pretty big mistake to fix.

Anyways:


PLANTS ARE LAZY
If you're not familiar with plant resting, it means that plants can only grow for 13 hours each day, from hours 6 to 19. In other words, only 54% of a day is 100% productive for a plant, and that's assuming lighting and heating are adequate.

Below, potential columns represent plants being able to grow nonstop. Actual accounts for 11-hour daily breaks from growing. Plants grow roughly 50% slower in reality than in the numbers I originally presented; the effect is immediately apparent.

Figure 1 - Plant productivity with and without rest periods


Figure 2 - How many plants to keep a colonist fed

Not a whole lot of content, but still important if you're starving. Here are two simple takeaways:
-a colonist needs 6 potato plants growing in normal soil, made into simple meals, to stay fed.
-one hydroponics table can roughly feed one colonists with simple potato meals.

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[Romi]

So this would be the realistic way of growing plants?

[REMworlder]

Yeah, this pretty much hits all the major factors:
-growing environment
-plant growth speed
-resting time

[milon]

Is this before or after researching the improved NPD efficiency?

[REMworlder]

The OP shows without paste improvement, here's a comparison of improved and plain paste. I also updated the OP to include improve paste.

[milon]

Cool, thanks!

[amul]

I appreciate the work you have put into this!

[giannikampa]

thank for this post, it helps a lot.
a question for clarification: Simple is the simple meal, Paste is the nutrient paste meal, Best Paste is either the fine and the lavish meal?

[Sir Wagglepuss III]

I imagine best paste is the paste meal with the research that has it take 10% less food per meal.

[giannikampa]

I imagine best paste is the paste meal with the research that has it take 10% less food per meal.

oh! so the 3 kind of meals from the cook stove have the same amount of nutrition (just different happiness) and is the "Simple", that makes sense, ty.

[REMworlder]

Kind of. I didn't include other cooked meal types because I'm only looking at food plant consumption. Fine and Luxury meals require meat, which is a pretty variable food input.

But you're not wrong about meal nutrition, even though meals DO have different nutritional values (Simple 85, Fine 90, Luxury 100). Having 90 or 100 saturation restored from a meal is almost meaningless, though, since a colonist will never have more than 100 saturation at any time. A colonist has to be starving or near starving to get full nutritional benefit from a luxury or fine meal. The takeaway is the mood bonus and cook skill improvement is the most important part of non-simple meals, and nutrition is a negligible benefit.

Example: your colonist gets hungry when he has 30 saturation left, then goes and eats a luxury meal. He loses 5 saturation more while walking over to kitchen and eating meal, so he's at 25 saturation. 25+100 = 125, so 25 potential saturation is instantly lost.

From a pure input standpoint, fine/luxury meals also become less efficient:

-I was surprised to see a lavish meal uses just as many inputs as eating raw food (of course this ignores mood effects, meat vs plants used, etc). This, plus the cap on a colonist's saturation at 100, means lavish meals are pretty wasteful for purely hunger. Though Fine meals use raw foods most effectively [note: as of A8 the new paste is now best from a pure raw food use perspective], this doesn't take into account how long hunting takes and how unreliable it can be.