Personally, the only complaint about this or any other area of items is that please allow some form of stacking. It seems ridiculous to have to stack a single tomato with a single pumpkin, etc. I would not care if it was a limited amount of stacking but by having only allowance for 1 item per slot, you make the machines full too quickly - or if all else fails...make the end product stackable. It would be nice to see a stack of 5 cans or perhaps 25 per stack.....flour, wheat, etc. stack of 25 or 50 or 100. You can keep the plant stuff separate as they have decay markers which would make it more work than worth to make them stackable without rendering the rotting factor into that stack.
+1 I fully agree. I believe the current limitation is based on how to handle spoling timers, but maybe if you could stack food items with similar timers will at least reduce the space required, moreso when you have 6 tomatos harvested at the same time.
It may also be that they wanted to prevent hoarding of food. Make it so space is taken up so you have to manage and continue to harvest over time as you eat it down, instead of just store so much. Kind of like how you can only place '1' fuel in a slot in fuel tanks, or o2/h/h20 generators... or only 1 oxygen unit in the o2 tank slots. It would be off kilter to stack 50 o2 tanks in there or fill your fuel tanks with hundreds of packs =D
Well, the Emergency Rations are a tid bit more expensive and time consuming to manufacture, but we do hoard them every time we can
Fully agreed & i've felt that way for a long time. What the hell happened between now & the 24th Century to make 24th Century people have such stupidly fast Metabolisms?
I kinda wish the cans of food would stack in inventory. I can stack 999 cubic meters of steel, but not a can of food? IIRC, I can stack cargo and fridge blocks that can hold cans of food, but not food. Of course, if you can stack cans of food then higher tier fridges are not as useful, I suppose.
Meh, they'd still be good for holding stuff like Egg Plant Parts & Aloe Vera till ya were ready to Craft them into their Product.
I think the best way to handle separate decay times and combine them with stacking is to have the info panel which appears on the right side on mouseover display the upcoming decay times, the number of decay times being based on how much room is in the UI, and how many of each object are in that decay time - for instance, I'm holding a stack of 10 raw meats. They were all harvested over a long period of time. Three of them are going to decay in about 6 hours, five are decaying in 4 hours, and the other two are about to decay. As the latter two decay they are taken from the stack and deposited in a new spot - or if the inventory is full, they are dropped.
If anything, I feel like the food point depletion rate is a bit slow, considering how trivial a food supply becomes once you have your first 3x3 farm. If you just grow 9 Space Durians, you get nearly twice as much food as you need per half-hour. . . On the other hand, I've not played any multiplayer, so perhaps it's more annoying for factions with multiple players to keep fed. Mostly, my opinion is that the various foods themselves need rebalancing; right now there's basically no incentive to produce anything besides the canned foods and Space Fries. The stackability issue is also somewhat annoying, but I understand the logic thanks to the posts in this thread. However, I would note that Don't Starve implements stacks of perishable items by simply averaging the perish values when stacks are combined. Finally, I'd like to see stack sizes of 5 for foods.
We just farm rows of Tomato, Pumpkin, Durian, and make gobs and gobs of canned veggies. And we are not vegetarians!!! Some foods are a pain to make, for what they provide vs others which are easier to make. So I agree, a bit of adjusting may be in order to make many foods alll viable choices. I mean, I really wanna make pizza and burgers all the time, but the needed resources are a pain.
Shouldn't food be more ... spacey? Wouldn't I store food in recyclable plastic tubes instead of tin cans? Wouldn't fries and popcorn be awkward in zero-g? Where's the Tang?
Mmmm spacey foods, Freeze dried Burgers/Pizza in a plastic bag. Space Cubes Grey Nutrient Supplement And my personal favorite Emergency Dehydrated Water (just add water)
With regard to stackable food and spoilage timers, that's easy. Just like with real food, if you put fresher stuff with things that are going bad, you ruin the good stuff fairly quickly. Therefore, if you insist on stacking foodstuffs, you do so knowing that all spoilage timers will sync to the lowest one in the group. With making food 'more spacey', Option for the food processor to dehydrate fresh veggies so that they can be stacked and stored until later (Food Processor rehydrates with veggie pack and purified water) Use of clone bays to make more 'meat'. The faux flesh is not as good as the real thing, however. Nutrient values will be reduced (especially if you make a clone of a clone / Replicative fading eventually reduces the values to zero and fresh meat must be acquired) (If there is no intention to have a ranching sort of mechanic for ground bases, then McClonald's could prevent hunting the planet's surface bare) With the ability to make Emergency Rations which completely fill up your food bar, setting some mechanic in place to make getting the components a challenge might be a good plan. Or, alternatively, simply scale their effectiveness with player level. Just like a healing potion in D&D, they are considerably more effective when you're low-level. As you progress, you need to find stronger and stronger potions to get a similar effect. There's another idea rolling around in the back of my head for using food (fresh and spoiled) for bait to lure animals and plant creatures into traps....but I'll put some more thought into that one before I offer up any details.
I think, just like the wildlife, the current food system isn't going to work when you have an entire galaxy to explore. Are you really going to explore thousands of systems and each one of them has the same "ahax fruit" as all the others? What's even the point of having multiple star systems if they all contain the same things, right? I was thinking you could genericize all the lifeforms you can harvest/collect/kill so that you get a few basic "nutrients" from your hunting/gathering, and then the food processor turns those into (powders, oils, crystals) that you store. Then when you make food it uses certain mixtures of these raw materials along with water to create the familiar meals like fries, pizza, soup, etc which you then eat. For example, you kill a critter and get some "meat" which gives you some macronutrients (fats and proteins, a little carbs) and harvest some fruits which give you a different mixture of nutrients (mostly carbs, some protein, a little fat.) Each plant or critter (or other alien lifeform) would have its own ratio of these. Some of them (like nightmares and plant monsters) would also use non-compatible energy sources so that you get no usable nutrients from them.
