Best way to store food

My long term food storage solution is always a live cow. It takes up only a single vehicle tile in a livestock carrier and provides far more food than you will need.

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I convert to flour because its lighter and if you have other food sources like meat and fish it stretches really well. Unless they changed something, flour has an indefinite shelf life. Mostly just do that for grain because cooking down rhizomes takes too much time.

I rarely build a vehicle. I actually like playing a character with wayfarer. I usually have my loot stashed in an out of the way secure location like a bunker or lmoe shelter. Carrying a little flour, water, fat and salt lets me stretch any food i find in the field. Its also kind of a roleplay thing for me.

I dont play this to meta game it and find the most efficient way to do something xD

Either way, theres lots of valid ways to preserve lots of food

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ASCENDED: put them in an ice lab that has a lav rift running though it so you can cook food while having it last forever until you cook it.

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Bonus: You yourself also get either cooked as wel or freeze to death so you stay preserved forever.

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Never seen this combination. Although for most of the builds that I’ve played fumaroles seem to have been either disabled or made incredibly scarce. Are they more frequent now? At this rate we might even see minefields returning someday.

Rifts apparently can be found less often as of a “recent” change, but since games_and_glory plays an older (stable) version (as s-/he stated somewhere else) it’s quite possible that s-/he still runs into them on a regular basis (and I’ve seen them in older versions in labs too).

Minefields are still in the game, I run into one recently (luckily not literally) while testing something else… they just changed in appearance (and frequency).

That explains it.

I haven’t seen them for a very long time. At least not the randomly spawning everywhere kind. I realize that putting 20 or so mines in the middle of nowhere is not going to seem reasonable most of the time but it was fun.

True, the minefield I’ve run into was on the road. And one in a prepper house, but that’s not really a “field”.
Military bases also should have them from what I’ve read, but I’ve not explored them in a long time, so I can not offer any personal experience with that.

But yeah, the random placed ones are “gone for good”, if I remember correctly.

Depending on the experience level of the player and his/her attention for detail, it was not only fun, but also !FUN! :smile:

Righteous.

Do I remember right that with low enough focus the player does not get warned when trying to step on a trapped tile? With the minefields gone I never encounter these conditions anymore. In the labs my characters die long before the focus has any chance of dropping this low.

If there’s no calorie malus from eating them raw, that’s wrong -there’s supposed to be one.

I’ve never encountered this. But I always were extra cautious around mine fields (or even just dirt mounds), so I don’t know if that was/is a thing or not…

Eating what raw? I don’t seem to be able to find the post that you replied to…?

Oh sorry, I meant to reply to post #17

Ah, yes, now I see.

Well, I’m not sure about the wheat… As for the cattail rhizomes though, they offer 250 (k)calories each according to the item description. After processing two of them into one starch, the starch has 500 (k)calories, so there’s no calories gain.
So, this would confirm @Trigon’s statement…

2 rhizomes -> starch results in 500 calorie starch.
Starch -> flour results in 15 portions of flour with 34 calories each
flour -> flatbread consumes 11 flour, and results in 2 portions of flatbread with… 248 calories each.

The malus is only retracted after the RAW item is cooked.

Ah, alright.
But that’s a lot of time-consuming steps…

2 rhizomes -> 1 starch takes 40 minutes at best (500 kcal or 250 kcal per rhizome).
1 starch -> 15 flour takes 2.51 minutes at best (510 kcal or 255 kcal per rhizome).
11 flour -> 2 flatbread takes 8.05 minutes at best (496 kcal or 45.1 kcal per flour or 338.2 kcal per rhizome)

So, at the absolute best, you’ve invested 50 minutes and 34 seconds (and 28 battery charges or 20 charges and a fire, but since solar is a thing, I’ll count this as basically free) for an additional 88.2 kcal gained per rhizome.

Therefore, while it’s true that you do get about 1/3 more calories out of your rhizome for processing it, Trigon’s also right that it takes more calories to craft it than you’ll gain from it (unless you have spare NPC time and/or special traits/mutations/CBMs), as crafting has a “MODERATE_EXERCISE” activity_level assigned, meaning roughly a multiplier of 4.5 calorie consumption on the (approximated) default calorie consumption of 86.8 kcals while idling for those 50 minutes.

So you’d spend a lot of time and about 390 kcal to prepare something that’s worth 338.2 kcal (at best) instead of eating it raw with no calorie cost and a worth of 250 kcal.
That’s about as wasteful to your (survivor’s) resources as it was to my time for doing this calculations :face_with_raised_eyebrow: .

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Pretty sure that’d get better with batching, and you can get Mills that grind your flour for free. But yes, still probably not a great trade.

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No. My numbers are based on level 20 cooking skill and 20x batch stack size next to a table. That’s why I’ve written “at best”.

Well, that saves 2.51 minutes… unless you can also grind rhizomes into starch at the mill, as this takes up the most time, it’s still not worth it.

Also last I checked mills can’t grind starch, unless that was fixed recently.

EDIT: Though I’m glad my napkin math held up under heavier scrutiny. Good to know I’m not crazy at least.

SECOND EDIT: Turning the rhizomes into starch is also nice for getting the plant fiber, but overall for food I still stand by raw rhizomes.

Well, I just recalculated everything. If you’re really skinny (0 stored calories), tiny (145 cm & “tiny” mutation, making you 45 cm small), of old age (the older, the better, but the max possible setting is 55 years in character generation), with no additional mutations, bionics, artifacts or changes to PLAYER_HUNGER_RATE… You’d use up around 0.6 kcal every 5 minutes or 6 kcal for the whole crafting process (not taken into calculation that it would take much longer when you’re starving), so you could profit from that… if you’d live to see the result, that is…
On the other hand… Eating to the max and getting a bmi of 468555 (2147483647 stored kcal), at full hight of 3 meters (2 meters + mutation “huge”) and at an age of 16, you’d loose 658933 kcal every 5 minutes or 6,589,330 kcal while crafting this.

And an other night wasted on stupid calculations and testing… Why do I keep doing this to myself?

Edit: Here are the values I used for the calculation (function name taken from source code):
get_bmr = 170 to 189772830
base_bmr_calc = 169.0875 to 189772829.080363629
height = 45 to 300
age = 16 to 55+ (you age “normally” as the game progresses)
bodyweight = 26.325 to 42169939.795636362
get_bmi = 13 to 468554.8866181818
get_kcal_percent = 0 to 39045.15721818182


Fun fact: If you actually manage to get to 2147483647 stored kcal, you’ll probably die of starvation, as it will overflow, turning into negatives (possible explanation: at that point you probably violently exploded and have therefore 0 fat left in your carcass body).
Second fun fact: I don’t see anything stopping you from reaching an age of 65+ at which, with almost no fat reserves and the smallest possible height, you’d never again need to eat, as you will actually gain kcal just from existing and even more from exercising. Just… don’t do anything that modifies your stored calories directly, like digging/mining or cutting wood… or you’ll starve to death.


Indeed. That’s one side effect I didn’t consider. You’d probably still be better off to spin cotton balls into thread, but it’s nice to basically have “free” plant fiber.

I’ve been saving every MRE I’ve come across in preparation for my first winter. I’ve hunted moose but most times the meat spoils before I get home and whenever I try to plan better by bringing my racks and charcoal along I don’t come across a moose :unamused: