Fine meal

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

Acquisition[edit]

Fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. A fine meal requires 0.25 units of nutrition from vegan 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[edit]

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 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[edit]

If you are already producing both meat and vegetables, fine meals are an easy-to-implement mood buff. Fine meals consume the same total nutrition as a simple meal, meaning no food is wasted. Even if the meat : vegetable ratio is unbalanced, you can always cook fine meals until you run out of either ingredient (then switching to simple meals afterwards). This is as simple as queueing fine meals for cooking before any simple meals. The only downside is the minimum skill requirement and the 33% slower production rate.

Animals like chickens and cows can produce a continuous stream of edible products. Whether meat is easy to obtain is highly variable - hunting rats may not be 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. If you don't already have meat or animal products, making vegetarian fine meals might take less work than regular fine meals. See vegetarian meal's Analysis section for more details.

Note you can make fine meals that are ideologically vegetarian from the same amount of nutritional value using the regular fine meal recipe by replacing all meat with animal products. This will keep vegetarian pawns happy while avoiding the lower nutritional efficiency of the vegetarian fine meal.

If colonist mood is alright without fine 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. However this is only worth it for fine meals if:

The colony doesn't have a consistent supply of both nutrition types
Pawns are typically eating food with a higher nutritional efficiency that fine/simple meals; and/or
The pawns mood is consistently above 95.