Oxygen Not Included Tutorial: Food Basics

Intro: 0:00
Growing Food (Mealwood): 1:13
Growing Food (Bristle Blossoms): 5:34
Controlling Plant Temperature: 9:57
Obtaining Meat from Ranching: 12:03
Cooking Food: 13:25
Great Halls (a place to eat): 17:15
Food Storage: 20:45
Shipping Food: 28:24
Greenhouses: 29:25

[jjgonwa]

I think when you cook food and you gain "free" calories, the game is just simulating that in the real world cooked food is easier to diegest(your body spending less calories to get the caloies in your food). I could be wrong but I think it would make the most sense.

[MUSTASCHO]

Building consistent power usage for a fridge in the early game is far easier than providing a sterile, cold room near the mess hall. This gives time in the day to focus on more important tasks until you have proper HVAC.

[NewBootMedia]

Magnet this was an excellent video! I have been playing maybe thirty hours, I'm like obsessed with this game right now lol after watching about 4 hours of other players videos I had not figured out at least 5 of these concepts until this video! you have made my world so much better already haha please keep it up! you are so good at explaining this game! cant wait for your future content :)

[lulabyte]

I was looking for a straight-forward food guide and you really delivered. Thank you for making this so digestible! (see what I did there?)

[Scott_Burton]

Fun fact on food storage
2 refrigerators occupy the same 2 high, 2 wide space as one ration box. The ration box holds 150 kilograms of food. Each refrigerator holds 100 kilograms, so 2 refrigerators (not connected to power) allow 200 kilograms of food to be stored in the same space as a single ration box which can only hold 150 kilograms. If stored in a sterile atmosphere, they are handled the same, if the area is kept cold by other means, plugging them in is not needed. True, refrigerators cost more to make. But there are times when having more food storage without extra space is more valuable than the cost of the materials.

[P_OFFICIAL]

I personally prefer to grow bristle blossoms, because when I tried to grow mealwood, it was a really bad

[derinedala]

Interesting. I've never bothered with bristle blossoms because lighting is such a pain. I usually subsist on mealwood until I can get fungal spores, and then just plant dusk caps. It takes 3 dusk cap plots to sustain a duplicant, they're very low maintenance, and building a CO2 pit for them has the added bonus of creating a free place to preserve food without needing to power refrigerators (put them in the CO2). I've never bothered ranching anything for meat, I should give it a try.

[saeklin]

Some plants are worth leaving alone to be harvested wild, like the peppernuts. Farming them is a real pain because of their requirements so I just seal up the biome and dig around them. Also, it doesn't really hurt to set up greenhouses to make use of the fertilizer found on the map and received as care packages, but you're right that making it from scratch is probably not worth it.

[brianjones]

Berry sludge is very noob friendly since it doesn't ever go bad so refrigeration isn't even necessary. I have 500, 000kcal of +8 berry sludge just sitting on the floor in the kitchen next to the door to my great hall. All i did was plant the sleet wheat in the nearest ice biome. My dupes will still be fed for the next 50 cycles even if all my power, ranches, and farms go to complete shit from some kind of massive fuckup. Can literally just make hundreds of thousands of kcal and forget about food or food storage for a very very long time. Doesn't take any micromanaging. Put the musher on infinite for berry sludge and you're good to go. It's like pemmican from RimWorld except it lasts literally forever and gives a morale bonus

[blufakenotreal]

I've been binging your guides after I bought the game, very helpful!

[ScottKrehbiel]

A friend of mine says "You can either win wars, or use the metric system." I still see some benefits of the non-metric measurements for some things, especially temperature.

[UlyssesK]

Even if barbeque is the "final boss" of practical food, here's something that I believe is worth considering.

Berry sludge is incapable of spoiling, can be produced by duplicants in the microbe musher, and has the same food quality as barbeque. Although it may not be as easy to produce as barbeque, as it requires bristle berries and sleet wheat, it can still be useful as an emergency food source if stockpiled ahead of time. If at some point in the future, you're unable to make food, a vaults worth of berry sludge could make the difference between life and death, while making sure that your duplicants don't go mad from the terrible taste of mush bars. Consider building up large numbers of berry sludge, as you don't know when you'll need an emergency food source, and you certainly don't want to feed mud to your duplicants.

[LucyTheBox]

Ah, I remember how my first colony died.

I had germy water, so my instinct was: cook the water and catch the steam in another tank.

I failed to get the water to boiling temprature, but it was still hot enough go increase the rate of germ death.

Suddenly, my blossems stopped growing. It was too hot.

I tried to fix it with ice disperse machines, but that didn't fix it.

Took me a while to realise it was the hot water in my pipes that caused my base to drastically heat up.

Didn't manage to fix the problem in time, not to mention that my base was a mess, so I started over

[UlyssesK]

Here's a simple trick for those that want the benefits of both the sterile atmosphere AND the refrigeration. It may be a bit of a power tax, but then again it's probably more efficient than a more complicated alternative.
1. Make a three tile deep depression. You will need to put ladders or "stair" tiles on the sides of the depression. As such, it will need to be wide enough to theoretically fit two more refrigerators than you plan on putting in, but those spaces will have to be occupied by a ladder or tile. Only accommodate as many fridges as you are comfortable with (or less).
2. Place in the amount of refrigerators that you intended to place. You may want to place the blueprints ahead of time if you are planning to place more than three fridges so that you know how wide to make the depression. Should the walls of the depression not be coming out of the ground, cancel the fridges once the deconstruction errands are set.
3. Hook up the fridges to power.
The carbon dioxide will come in over time once the depression is made. After that, you'll have the sterile atmosphere halting food decay and the refrigeration killing germs. Again though, it will be a power tax. There are some other things you could try, but this is a simple solution to the issue that I actually used in my last run as of writing this comment. The food in storage never decayed and was always clean. I think I'll use less fridges next time though...

[ferndorx]

Thanks, still learning the game. I did not know about the zero power food storage solution. That was a great help.

[WilliamRVela]

The whole freedom units thing is why is subscribed

[ASciencePotato]

you forgot to mention the main reason to use fertilizer in the greenhouse that makes it amazing...which is the fact that the printing pod has a chance to give you 3000kg of fertilizer. that 3000kg will last a very long time, long enough that you are likely to get another 3000kg from the printing pod before the first batch wears out. i use a greenhouse in every game i play because you are very likely to get that 3000kg gift of it. never having to actually make it yourself.

[DaveHonkles]

Freedom units: 0=cold, 100=hot. Commie units: 0=cold, 100=ded.

[RubyCIoud]

Just got into the game recently, this channel is real helpful!!

[SpartanLink]

Thank you for the guides. Recently got into the game with the winter sale and I'm actually surviving in my games for longer than usual. 🤟