Vegetarian fine meal

See also: Fine meal and Carnivore fine meal

A vegetarian fine meal is a variant of the fine meal created from vegetarian ingrediants.

Acquisition

Vegetarian fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. Each meal requires 0.75 units of nutrition from vegetable or animal products (milk or eggs), 450 ticks (7.5 secs) of work to make, and a Cooking skill of 6.

Summary

A fine meal can be eaten by humans or animals for 0.9 nutrition. As it takes 0.75 nutrition of raw food to create, vegetarian fine meals provide 120% nutrition efficiency, which is less than regular fine meals.

Eating a fine meal or any of its variants gives the +5 Ate fine meal moodlet for 24 hours. This moodlet stacks with the +12 Ate lavish meal from lavish meals. If Ideology DLC is active and the meal was made out of raw fungus, its normal moodlet will be applied.

Analysis

Vegetarian fine meals are useful for the fine meal mood boost if meat is unavailable, or if it is forbidden by ideoligion. Vegetarian meals are less efficient for food than simple meals or fine meals. However, they are reasonable for daily use, if your colonists have the time to produce the extra food. They can also be saved for mood-related emergencies.

Even if meat could be available through hunting or ranching, it might be easier to grow the +44% extra food for a +5 mood buff.

Extra work from fine meals

To establish how much extra work a vegetarian fine meal would take, we would need an estimate of how much is required to feed a pawn with simple meals. In Losing is Fun, 25 tiles is a rough over-estimate of what would feed a baseline pawn if they were in a temperate biome, assuming a competent planter and simple meals.

If you were planting 25 tiles of crop to feed per colonist before, you'd need to plant 36 crops to feed colonists using vegetarian fine meals. With an extra 11 crops of food, it would take a Plants 8 grower an average of 4,070 ticks (1.13 mins) more work for every harvest. Rice plants take ~ 5.54 days to grow in regular soil when considering day/night cycles.

With rice, you'll need 734.7 ticks (12.25 secs) of work, per day per colonist. With corn in regular soil, it'd take only 195.1 ticks (3.25 secs) of work, per day per colonist. If you have anyone better than Plants 8, or if you are playing on a lower difficulty than Losing is Fun, then you'll need even less work.

By spending a single game-hour of work, you could upgrade 3.4 colonists to vegetarian fine using rice, and 12.8 colonists with corn. Again, assuming Plants 8. You can always downgrade if a blight ruins your harvest during the fall.

Overall, the upgrade ends up being a fairly small amount of work for a +5 mood buff. This analysis does not include the extra, pre-skill 150 ticks (2.5 secs) of work of work required to actually cook a fine meal (of any type).