Fine meal

A fine meal is a higher quality meal that requires both meat and vegetables to create.

Acquisition

Fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. A fine meal requires 0.25 units of nutrition from vegetarian items, 0.25 units of nutrition from meat or animal products -- this is equal to 5 units of raw vegetables and 5 units of meat or an equivalent nutritional yield of animal products. They require 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, or 90% of a human's hunger meter. As it takes 0.5 nutrition of raw food to create, fine meals provide 180% nutrition efficiency, equal to simple meals.

Eating a fine meal or 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 the meal was made out of insect meat or human meat, their respective moodlets will be applied. If Ideology DLC is active and the meal was made out of raw fungus, its normal moodlet will also be applied.

Analysis

Fine meals are a quick and easy mood buff if you have some supply of both meat and vegetables. Animals like chickens and cows can produce a continuous stream of edible products. Whenever meat is easy to obtain is highly variable - hunting rats isn't worth it, but a ranching economy could be.

Insect meat only gives a −3 moodlet when cooked, which results in a net +2 mood when used for fine meals. If a colonist's ideoligion prefers insect meat, then fine meals of insect meat provide a great mood buff. If ideoligion permits cannibalism, then human meat can be used to the same effect.

Vegetarian fine meals give the same fine meal moodlet without using meat, at the cost of using +50% more food. Many colonies can afford to grow 50% more food; just 1 hour of a grower's time can "upgrade" multiple colonists from simple to vegetarian fine. Using vegetarian meals might take less work than regular fine meals. See vegetarian meal's Analysis section for more details.

If colonist mood is alright with just simple meals, even during the worst draft conditions (hungry and tired), then fine and lavish meals can be saved for when a colonist is on verge of a mental break.

If a colony is able to reliably harvest a steady yield of animal products or meat, fine meals should be strongly considered. Because they require equal amounts of nutrition from both meat/animal products and vegetables, fine meals can allow a colony to reduce the size of growing zones devoted to crops. These growing zones can be turned to growing haygrass (if the colony relies on ranching) or to producing psychoid plants, smokeleaf plants, or healroot for sale to make money.