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 ingredients.

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.

Functionally identical fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. A (vegetarian) fine meal requires 0.25 units of nutrition from vegan items, 0.25 units of animal products -- this is equal to 5 units of raw vegetables and 5 units of milk 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. 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 its variants gives the +5 Ate fine meal mood for 1 day. This replaces the +12 Ate lavish meal mood for 1 day from lavish meal if present. 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

Vegetarian fine meals are useful for the fine meal mood boost if meat is unavailable, or if it is forbidden by ideoligion.

Vegetarian fine meals are reasonable for daily use, even if they are less nutrition efficient than simple or fine meals. In fact, going out of your way to obtain meat can take more time than just making vegetarian meals. For reference, you would need to grow +50% more food to make vegetarian fine meals. The time spent hunting animals can take longer due to travel time and missed shots.

Meal Work Comparison

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 (vegetarian) simple meals. In Losing is Fun, 25 tiles in regular soil is a rough over-estimate of what would feed a baseline pawn with year-round growing, assuming a competent planter and simple meals.

Extra planting work required to grow veg. fine meals.
Left: Food to feed 1 colonist with simple meals.
Right: Extra food from simple meals to make vegetarian meals.

If you were planting 25 tiles of crop to feed per colonist beforehand, you'd need to plant 38 crops to feed colonists using vegetarian fine meals. With an extra 13 crops of food, it would take a healthy Plants 8 grower an average of 4,810 ticks (1.92 in-game hours) 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 an extra 868.2 ticks (14.47 secs) of Plants work, per day per colonist.
With corn in regular soil, it'd take only an extra 230.6 ticks (3.84 secs) of Plants work for the same thing.
By spending a single game-hour of work, you could upgrade 2.9 colonists from simple to vegetarian fine using rice, and 10.8 colonists with corn.

Remember that these values are for a grower with Plants 8. 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.

This analysis makes multiple key assumptions. First, it neglects the "spike" in work caused by each harvest. Second, it assumes a temperate, year-round ground biome with 0 negative events harming your crop production. Finally, it does not include the extra, pre-skill 150 ticks (2.5 secs) of work required to actually cook a fine meal (of any type). After taking these assumptions in mind, you can compare it to the effort of gathering meat.

Overall, vegetarian fine meals are very affordable in terms of work. Growing more food is a simple task, especially in temperate and warm biomes. If a cold snap or toxic fallout ruins your food supply, you could always switch back to simple meals, giving you a nice food buffer. (Assuming you don't cook all your food right away.)