Nutrition

Nutrition is a property of food and plants, that represents the how much saturation it gives the creature eating it. 1.0 nutrition is enough to satiate a adult human from 0 saturation; they will seek out food before then, though. Body size impacts how much saturation a creature can hold.

Food Nutrition

	Nutrition
Agave fruit	0.05
Baby food	0.05
Berries	0.05
Carnivore fine meal	0.9
Carnivore lavish meal	1
Cassowary egg (fert.)	0.5
Chicken egg (fert.)	0.25
Chicken egg (unfert.)	0.25
Chocolate	0.1
Cobra egg (fert.)	0.25
Corn	0.05
Duck egg (fert.)	0.25
Duck egg (unfert.)	0.25
Emu egg (fert.)	0.5
Fine meal	0.9
Goose egg (fert.)	0.5
Goose egg (unfert.)	0.5
Hay	0.05
Hemogen pack	0.1
Human meat	0.05
Iguana egg (fert.)	0.25
Insect jelly	0.05
Insect meat	0.05
Kibble	0.05
Lavish meal	1
Meat	0.05
Milk	0.05
Nutrient paste meal	0.9
Ostrich egg (fert.)	0.6
Packaged survival meal	0.9
Pemmican	0.05
Potatoes	0.05
Raw fungus	0.05
Rice	0.05
Simple meal	0.9
Tortoise egg (fert.)	0.25
Toxipotatoes	0.05
Turkey egg (fert.)	0.5
Twisted meat	0.05
Vegetarian fine meal	0.9
Vegetarian lavish meal	1

Plant Nutrition

While rooted plants can't be eaten directly by human pawns, plants provide nutrition when eaten by animals. The largest herbivores, like thrumbos, will graze on trees and bushes available to them, as well as the typical herbivore diet of grass, dandelions, healroot, ambrosia, and fungi. All plants are completely destroyed upon animal consumption, trees do not leave stumps in this case.

Hungry, herbivorous animals will find and consume accessible plants after plant growth reaches maturity, typically around 65% of its total Growing time and when it first becomes available for colonist harvest. Nutrition provided upon consumption is a plant stat, where the final value is a species base value multiplied for plant growth.

Nutrition (final value) = species' base value * growth percentage multiplier

The food requirements of an animal is largely species dependent. The relevant stats are called Grass to Maintain and Food Consumption.

Food Consumption (Nutrition eaten per day) = species' base value * relevant health conditions (e.g. pregnancy)

Tamed animals will eat mature plants and consumable items they have access to, either in their pen or in their assigned zone. Tamed animals can traverse closed doors and fence gates to reach food if it's all within their assigned zone.

Crops

The harvest yield is a crop stat for the quantity of items the plant is converted into when a human harvests the plant. Harvesting completely destroys most plants, except ambrosia, berries bushes, cocoa trees, and agave fruit, which can produce multiple harvests before the organism dies at the end of its life span. The equation for plant Harvest Yield is

Harvest yield= (species' base value) * story difficulty multiplier

The final quantity of product harvested from a plant is a function of the plant's harvest yield as well as the colonist stat stats#plant_harvest_yield. These two different mechanics have the same name apparently.

Analysis

Harvesting a mature crop plant generally produces more nutrition than letting an animal directly consume the living plant, except in cases where the harvesting colonists have exceptionally low plant harvest yield stats. Keep in mind that low colonist Harvest Yield stats have a chance of botching the harvest completely, yielding nothing while killing the plant.

For example, consuming a full-grown haygrass plant provides 0.30 nutrition. A 100% harvest yields 18 hay with 0.05 nutrition each: a total of 0.90 nutrition. Processing the hay further into kibble increases final nutrition yield at the expense of meat, time, and work.

However, the viability of free grazing depends on the abundance of plant life on your map, e.g. soil fertility, sunlight, temperature, snow, and biome. Animal malnutrition results in slowed Growth rates, miscarriage, health penalties, and even death by starvation.