Nutrient paste meal
Nutrient paste meal
A synthetic mixture of protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins, amino acids and minerals. Everything the body needs, and absolutely disgusting.
Nutrition Facts
- Nutrition
- 0.9
- Taste
- Awful
Base Stats
A nutrient paste meal is produced from a nutrient paste dispenser, using raw food ingredients worth 0.3 points of nutrition (ie. the raw nutrition is tripled). When consumed, it gives a -4 mood penalty ("Ate awful meal"). The meals are dispensed on demand, and no cooking skill is required. Nutrient paste meals never cause food poisoning. The nutrient paste dispenser requires power to dispense a meal.
The mood penalty from eating the meal and power requirement are offset by several substantial benefits:
- Producing a nutrient paste meals requires 0.3, but produces 0.9 nutrition in results -- a 200% net nutrition gain. This is substantially better then the next best options (simple and fine meals), which only provide an 80% net nutrition gain.
- Nutrient paste never causes food poisoning, while cooked meals always carry at least a small chance of food poisoning.
- No cooking is necessary, completely avoiding the work and oversight associated with cooking as well as the need for a skilled chef
- Eating nutrient paste meals only gives a -4 mood debuff compared to the -7 for eating raw food
- This is negated if the colonist eating it has a precept "Eating Nutrient paste" as "Don't mind" for their Ideoligion.
Nutrient paste is useful during famine, as the nutrient return is the highest of any meal. It is advised to not give nutrient paste to pawns with a trait that gives a negative modifier to mental break threshold, because they can push a pawn over the edge. Because pawns prefer normal meals over nutrient paste, you can set restrictions to prevent normal pawns from consuming all of the good meals and leaving none to the volatile ones. Nutrient paste is the most efficient animal food, but using it as such requires a pawn to manually produce nutrient paste meals, since animals can't use the dispenser.
Stockpiling
See Nutrient paste dispenser for further details.
Typically, nutrient paste meals are dispensed by a hungry pawn and then immediately eaten. They cannot be produced by bill like other meals can. This means, short of buying them from the rare trader that stocks them, it is impossible to stockpile the meals. This prevents them to be fed to animals or stored for when there is no power to use the dispenser. However should the pawn dispensing the meal be interupted between dispensing and eating the meal, it can be retreived and stored. This behavior can be exploited to stockpile meals, however their short shelf life of only 0.75 days means they should be immediatly frozen. See Nutrient paste dispenser for a more in-depth strategy.
Version History
- 0.3.410 - Pawns now try to eat nice meals when they have the choice over nutrient meals.