Food Guide – Steam Solo

Overview

This Guide will explain what your Duplicant can eat and how much you will need.

Good to know

A Duplicant requires 1000kcal Food per cycle.
The Bottomless Stomach trait will increase the Duplicants food need to 1500kcal per cycle.
There are seven Food Quality Levels: Superb [+5], Great [+4], Good [+3], Standard [+2], Poor [+1], Terrible[0] and Grisly [-1].
Duplicants have personal preferences on food, i.e. a minimum food quality, else they receive a temporary low food quality trait that increases their stress. This value increases based on a duplicants highest job tier.
Low quality of food does not cause any significant penalties: 10% stress/cycle, but only during consumption. Consumption of 1000kcal takes roughly 1/30 of a cycle.
Edibles that are not stored in a Refrigerator or a Ration Box in an area with freezing temperatures or a sterile environment (such as in pure CO2) will decay within a few cycles.

The Beginning

When your Duplicants arrive in the Colony, they have not many choices. You start with 16,000 kcal of Nutrient Bar in your Ration Box. They can collect accessible Buried Muckroot plants, which do not provide seeds and are not replantable. They will find wild growing Mealwood plants that can be harvested for Meal Lice, or less likely wild growing Bristle Blossom plants that can be harvested for Bristle Berries. As soon as they found enough Raw Metal, they can build a Microbe Musher that can provide basic meals:

Mush Bar – (Quality: -1) – made from 75kg dirt and 75kg water per ration.
Liceloaf – (Quality: 0) – made from 1,200kcal Meal Lice and 50kg water. Cooking Liceloaf increases the provided calories by 500kcal (1200 kcal Meal Lice -> 1700kcal Liceloaf).

While your Duplicants eat dirt or lice, you can start researching Basic Farming. This will give you access to the Planter Box. Mealwood in Planter Boxes or later in Farm Tiles requires 3 cycles to ripen and yields 600kcal of Meal Lice per harvest and plant, compared to 12 cycles when growing wild.

All recipes that use food as ingredients increase calories and Quality. Hint: Using the Microbe Musher recipes consumes a lot of water. The water cost of the recipes quickly adds up and the water can easily become a carrier of Germs.

When you have researched Basic Farming

The dupes can now build Planter Boxes. Planter Boxes are considered ugly, they have a decor value of -10. Unlike the Farm Tile however it can be built on top of air permeable tiles or on top of a door that when opened will disable the plant’s growth cycle. It supports the following 4 edible plants:

Mealwood – needs fertilization of 10 kg of dirt per cycle. Needs a temperature between 10 and 30 °C and the air pressure above 150g.
Bristle Blossom – it needs natural or artificial light and water – in Planter boxes your dupes have to deliver the water manually.
Dusk Cap – it grows only in darkness and CO2 atmosphere – naturally Dusk Caps should be placed at the bottom of your colony. Beware of the temperature needs as well – Dusk Caps grow only between 5 and 35°C. The only attention a Dusk cap needs from Dupes is a supply of 4kg Slime per cycle.
Sleet Wheat – this one actually requires to be grown in a Frozen Biome or in an otherwise temperature controlled place, as it requires temperatures between -55 and 5°C.

Bristle Blossom requires 6 cycles to ripen in a Planter Box or later in Farm Tiles or in a Hydroponic Farm, compared to 24 cycles when growing wild. Each plant yields 1600kcal Bristle Berries per harvest. Bristle Blossom tolerate colder environments, 5-30°C, also require a light source and fresh Water supply. Sleet Wheat requires only 4kg of Fertilizer and 20kg of Water per cycle but it takes 18 cycles to ripen. The Sleet Wheat then produces 18 Sleet Wheat Grain – which are also seeds. The Dusk Cap does not require water when growing or in it’s Fried Mushroom recipe. It does requires slime, which also can be transformed to water via Algae Distiller instead of applied to the Dusk Cap. Also, slime typically hosts Slimelung Germs unless passed through an Ore Scrubber or a chlorine environment.

Because carrying water will keep your dupes running all day, you should research Agriculture for the Hydroponic Farm that allows water supply through Liquid Pipes. While the Bristle Berry can be eaten raw, you can use the Electric Grill to cook either Frost Bun or Pepper Bread from it increasing the calories per gram, yet another reason to research Meal Preparation quickly.

When you have researched Meal Preparation

You have now unlocked the Refrigerator which keeps your food from rotting, but requires power. A more elegant solution to prevent food from rotting is to store the food in an unpowered Ration Box in sterile atmosphere, i.e. not in Oxygen or Polluted Oxygen. Now you have access to the Electric Grill that allows you to make the dirt taste better (Mush Fry), but it has more recipes involving fruits and seeds you might have found while exploring your colony. Learning about growing and harvesting them in your colony has a guide on its own, here we consider you managed to harvest Bristle Berry, Dusk Cap, Sleet Wheat and Pincha Pepper. The Electric Grill improves food quality and increases calories. Sleet Wheat Grain and Pincha Peppernut are not edible on their own, but serve to a few Electric Grill recipes.

Food numbers

Often the question is, how many plants do I need to maintain to feed my Duplicant. Each plant has its own growth time, number of harvests and intervals between harvests, but using a little math you can calculate the average output per plant in kcal per cycle. Knowing that a Duplicant usually needs 1000kcal per cycle you can calculate how much plants need to be harvested for direct consumption or for use in any recipe you want to cook. The following table gives you numbers for the daily consumption of a single Duplicant. These numbers are absolute minimum under most optimal conditions. Delays in harvesting or planting and stifling during growth will not increase the cost, but will slow down growth. When plants are required for given food, the required irrigation and fertilization are listed, too, recalculated to the number of plants specified.

The maximum number of cycles required to get the food and the lowest possible rating for every plant:

Mealwood: After 12,5 cycles – from 2400 kcal do 4800 kcal. Remember that Meal Lice weights a lot and takes up a lot of space in your boxes/fridges. The quality is grisly (-3). You can make a couple better meals, such as Liceloaf (from 50kg of water and 5 units, i.e. 500 kcal, will yield a meal worth 1000 kcal).
Bristle Blossom: After 16 days, 4800 kcal. Bristle Berry is one of the best tasting fruits, the quality is relatively good (-1) for a raw meal, however, and its ideal temperature requires a lot of work if you want a lot of these.
Sweet Wheat: After 20 days from 25 to 75 seeds. If you use the whole yield to prepare a simple meal, Frost Bun, you will get from 25000 to 75000 calories. It requires some waiting, and the temperature has to be pretty low, but the high calories output should compensate. Notice that you use the seeds for both planting and making meals!
Pincha Peppernut: after 85 cycles you’ll get from 12 to 24 seeds. Used to season other meals, has no calories itself. Increases the quality of meals.