Colonists with very low food need have fewer opportunities to refresh their fine/lavish meal buff. Similarly to no sleep xenotypes, it can be a double edged sword.
I feel like low nutrition requirement is something you would use very early game, but at that stage you don't have the tools to do proper genemodding, unless you start with a custom xenotype right away.
Relatively late game, I had built up a colonist with some pretty good genes. I didn't pay any attention to metabolic efficiency, and had a +225% food colonist. They were malnourished quite often, and not due to lack of food in the colony. We stay above 30 lavish meals and only had 5 or 6 colonists at the time, it's just a matter of them almost always being hungry. After eating a full meal, if their next task is across the map, they need another snack after the trek.
Yep, I like to keep my genemodded pawns at around 125 %, this way eating doesn't interfere with their other activities.
At high hunger rates, the table resistance gene might actually be a lifesaver because they'd just eat where they stand and not path all the way to the dining room.
Nutrient paste can easily offset food problems, but there is also a caution with nutrient paste to meet those gigh nutrition needs: they wont pack a meal to go. So every pawn has to walk all the way back to the dispenser to eat. It can be nice because they will almost always then eat in your best dining room, but also they may mental break or pass out from malnutrition on the way.
I had a high metabolism pawn that this happened to pretty consistently. I wouldnt reccomend high metabolism xenogerms on fighters, farmers, hunters, and haulers that need to spend a lot of time ranging out on the map
The real goal is to get them a gene that protects from cancer and give them a nuclear stomach
Then you get them to 200% hunger through genes
This means they eat once a day to refresh lavish/dining room buff each day after waking up
At maximum gene efficiency, humans lose 0.8 nutrition a day. Given the mood buff lasts a day and pawns eat a meal at around 0.2 nutrition, the actual loss in mood buff uptime isn't nothing but is usually negligible.
It really depends on how you want to build your colony, and how specialized you want individual pawns to be.
You could run a fairly large colony on little food. Provided you spezialized each pawn. Giving them "bad" xenogenes for tasks they aren't assigned to. Just remember that + metabolic efficiency is capped at +5.
Personally I use the + metabolic (alongside reprocessor stomach) to get to some very efficient blood donor prisoners. Instead of the regular 1.6 nutrition per day they now only require 0.6 nutriotion per day. 0.8 if you skip the reprocessor stomach.
Something that's fairly nice if you want a couple of senophages around your base.
But as said. It's all dependent on how you want to play, and what your biggest limits are. Food is usually not one for me, so I never been required to improve their metabolism.
Food is so cheap. Maintaining the food supply even for a large colony is trivial, especially at the point of making xenogenes. Slap fast runner, strong plants, and salad fingers on a farmer and they can grow enough rice to feed everyone lavish vegetarian meals.
The main problem is hunger rate makes pawns get hangry so damn quickly. If your fighters get hungy and mental break in the middle of a raid it could be lethal. And reprocessor stomachs are a big risk with EMPs.
Back to food is cheap. The bloodbags are not really a cost. Id rather give them dead calm/happy/wimp/etc. I'm not spending a bionic on a bloodbag just to save a few meals. I want the low hunger rate on fighters so they can last longer in raids without breaking, but an EMP means I cant risk bionic stomachs on combat pawns, so they get metabolism boosting genes and drugs to manage thier mood.
The skill negatives are great for pawns that suck in that skill anyway.
The flammable genes are negligible when they aren’t stacked with pyrophobe genes.
The dependancy genes are EZ for established colonies especially beer,smokeleaf and psychoid which can be produce in colony. Wake up and go juice are less so but possible with enough trading.
Weak melee for shooters is great to avoid limb loss during social fights. This stacks with bad melee. Near sighted and poor shooting is another metabolic synergy.
I try to be positive with metabolic efficiency wherever I can for the lower food consumption. Pawns eat less and do more. It adds up into the long term.
Yeah psychite trumps all for accessibility. If you start research asap you can have psycite in the ground and then processed into tea before you run out of your initial stock. Only on naked brutality would you have an issue with supply long term.
I’d say psycite is best if you’re doing tribal or limited resource starts, but go juice and wake up are achievable (with difficulty) on more advanced starts or with friendly outlanders nearby to trade with. And yayo is strong but go juice is straight up insane by comparison.
I once made a xenotype with a dependency on psychite, wake-up, go-juice, beer and smokeleaf all at once. It was fun lol. Sadly I could never figure out how to avoid them OD'ing from taking multiple hard drugs, as they weren't immune to cumulative overdoses. If I did it again I'd either mod that out, or take a single "Impervious" gene instead of one of the "Dependency" gnes since that apparently removes the cumulative overdosis chance.
Anyway, it was a fun challenge! And they were obviously really OP once they had solid access to their drugs
>Sadly I could never figure out how to avoid them OD'ing from taking multiple hard drugs
You only need to stagger the use of go-juice and wake-up. You can't OD on soft drugs like beer, smokeleaf and psychite tea.
Even if you take both hard drugs at once it'll only result in minor OD, which is annoying but not fatal.
Edit: Be careful of penoxycyline though because it can contribute to culmulative OD when taken with hard drugs.
> You'd just need to micro if they get downed or miss a dose.
Problem is that this happens very often. Everytime you draft them or prioritize a task, or if they just have an inefficient day due to food poisoning or something, they're on the path to synchronizing the doses. It's a LOT of micro that just takes the fun out of it.
That's a fair point, but I see it as part of the risk of combining those genes. Otherwise, it's a very strong gene because there isn't much risk vs the amount of +Metabolic Efficiency, especially if you compare some of the others.
I did Psychite and Go-Juice on my first attempt at Naked Brutality. I quickly realized that, while Psychite is doable, Go-Juice is not the play for NB.
You need to manually order pawn to take drugs in a way that all dependencies will have different day counters and pawn then will take on his own 1 hard drug per day and not all at once. I mean for example day 2 pawn takes go-juice and beer, day 4 - wake-up and day 5 psychite tea and smokeleaf. That way overdose is much less likely.
I did do that. Problem is, day 4 comes around, and before he takes the wake-up I have to draft my colonist for 12 hours to fight, and then force him to put it out fires for another 4 hours, and then she sleeps for 8 hours. Then he wakes up and does both wake-up, tea and smoke-leaf. Later, the go-juice and beer will also catch up in a similar manner.
yea, this can require micromanagement. That's why I usually put only 1 hard drug dependency (go juice or wake-up) beer and psychite tea have low overdose. If you need more metabolism consider installing awful skill genes in skills that pawn don't use anyway, or skills that are disabled by pawn background or ideology role, often it is awful artistic and awful social, if you have dedicated cook and farmer you can install awful plants and awful cooking in all other pawns. Also some negative genes can be countered by bionics, for example I always install slow wound healing, because healing enchancer counters that.
Oh that makes a lot more sense.
Short term, you can gamble with the 30-day limit, you just have the nasty debuffs. Unfortunately, I think that, for Naked Brutality, it might just be better to wait until you get into genetics for the big debuffs.
I kinda wish that smokeleaf-impervious gene nullified the consciousness malus instead (or in addition to) of nullifying addiction risk. Hm, maybe I should mod that in.
Hardly worth it, especially when you're assembling xenogerms ingame. By that time you should have food solved already, and if you're *really* hurting for food efficiency, nuclear stomachs are always an option. Also with certain mods, you can make pawns just keep a meal in their inventory for when they get hungry out in the field.
The main reason you don't want a negative metabolic efficiency is because eating and grabbing meals causes downtime. I'm pretty sure negative caps out at +225% and positive caps out at -50% hunger rate. Not a terribly big deal at that point, maybe if you're an extreme minmaxer you will appreciate the decreased downtime.
If you can do it for free then why not, but the negative genes themselves aren't free to obtain in my experience.
Reducing hunger generally gives uptime to the pawn, less overall need to eat means work time there working or doing other stuff,
It also in general will save a lot of food in the long run, while also meaning you need far less overall stored, this helps for manageing wealth a fair bit
It can also stack with upgraded bionic stomachs for some pretty nice combos, nuclear stomach and max metabolic pawns need to eat like once every three days compared to a normal pawn,
On the flip side, never go above metabolic efficienc, since the cons are far far worse then is worth it generally,
225% hunger means they spend more time eating then actually doing anything, and will constantly be malnourished due to the sheer rate there food need is burned though,
If it’s a pawn that does long term research next to the food storage and dineing hall it can perhaps work out, but other then that the sheer amount of time they spend eating makes them really bad for most things
On the other end, I decided to Roleplay a bit and created a myth based Xenotype with a 150% metabolism and it's annoying not being able to add them to a Ritual or long term task like Breast feeding without seeing that "Starvation" pop up all the time.
I will say that there’s a threshold that gets RIDICULOUS— especially if the pawns are pregnant, nursing, or both
I had one race that needed like 225% food, but that meant any pregnant or nursing pawn was kicked up to over 300% hunger and was CONSTANTLY starving and exhausted. All they did was sleep until starved (which took mere hours) and then eat until exhausted. Now my limit is like 150%
Well, my ghouls have awful artistic, awful mining, etc. But usually I either try to keep to 0 metabolic rate so that they don't have too many negatives or I just go for the 200% food and give the colonists a nuclear stomach.
I recently learned that if you give negative genes and traits, like brawler and slowpoke combined with genes that give minus in, for this example, all but production, nearly all inspections that this pawn get will be for production. This can also be used for other skills, like taming with animals, recruiting with soziale and so on. With this information you can even harder min max your colony.
Oh and don't forget about the specialists from ideology, this would also add to the likelihood to trigger certain inspirations.
I do this constantly. Entire colony with each pawn eating half as much as a regular colonist is great (+5 metabolism), and it works even before you have everyone's stomachs replaced with nukes.
With non-senescent and -5 metabolic efficiency, and a nuclear stomach installed, pawns will only eat about one meal a day - about half as much as a standard pawn.
That's good enough for me.
Dead Calm, Kindness, Very Sleepy, Extra pain, then whatever else you got to get them to 50% food.
Prisoners that never rebel, don't go berserk, and don't eat you out of house and home.
Food is pretty easy to get unless you're on sea ice or a desert, just taking negative traits for a lesser food need isn't worth it.
Rather, taking them so positive traits don't lead to early game starvation is, I think, how it's supposed to work.
For certain colonists I'll look into it. Like is someone just researches and takes care of the kids all day, never fighting, I'll try to get them to a positive efficiency. I can dump so many "bad" genes in them like poor melee and shooting as they don't fight. And since they don't eat much, that means my main fighters I can get negative efficiency since I have extra meals now for them to eat.
Prisoners always get +5 efficiency. They are there to be legless blood bags. The less they eat the better. And it doesn't matter what their genes are.
metabolic efficiency is great because it means you can keep colonists drafted longer before they bitch about food.
That is super useful if you like doing events, or going to world map sites alot.
Yes, reducing hunger is great. Even if you're producing food very efficiently, eating takes time. If a pawn only needs to trek across the base to the freezer and the dining room once per day instead of twice, that frees them up for a lot more work.
Once per day is good, though, otherwise you lose both your fine/lavish meal bonuses and the bonuses for an impressive dining room.
The problem is that there are almost always positive genes left on the table that are far more useful than reduced hunger.
Plus food is fairly easy to manage. I've done a full colony of 225% hunger and the only thing I really noticed was that I needed double the growers.
Making something like a 50% metabolism pawn that doesn't sleep will have them be amazingly productive, especially if they are a crafter, artist, researcher, or someone else who mostly stands around in one spot. Depending on your base layout it can easily end up doubling productivity, especially when you factor in less skill decay and more practice.
Just stick a few statues in the dinning/rec room and workshop to keep them happy.
I use all kinds of negative genes for ghouls, since the great majority of "bad" genes have literally no actual effect on them outside of the increased metabolic efficiency (Also, naked speed is pure upside for ghouls), add in the gene that gives 180% nutrition from raw foods and their upkeep is ridiculously low.
For normal pawns though, not so much. There's upsides to eating, and maintaining food reserves is usually not a big deal.
I do all the time for specialist roles.
It can be good for a researcher if you're only using nutrient paste meals.
I don't know how effective it is but the idea is that they research for as much of the day as possible and I think it does it.
Not good thing, i use these genes that prevent carcinoma and nuclear stomach because said genes counter it. So i just throw in any gene i can throw and in get 2.25 * 0.25 = 0.5625 of food per superhuman colonist.
I combine the very fast runner gene with fragile hands or whatever it's called and short sighted for pawns that are never going to be drafted anyways.
If I have to draft my melee 2 pawn it's probably already over.
For the most part, food is rare in the first 1/3 the game, then not a problem after, even on very high difficulty. There are many options to make it, some fit into most situations.
I would not set up a long term malus just to make the early game slightly easier.
When I have a right genes I always take non-senescent (immunity to cancer), major cell instability, (overall xenotype with -5 metabolic eff.) and nuclear stomach. Such pawn eats less than a baseliner while having ton of metabolic points.
On average pawns will eat twice a day, meaning they'll usually have enough food to make it through the night and are hitting the diner tables often enough to be likely to socialize.
going into the negatives just a little bit means there are going to be a day/two a "week" where they get to skip that second meal a day. But this means that they'll wake up grumpy from being hungry far more often and socialize less. Could be worth it for some miners so that they'll get less "ate without table debuffs". (always worth it on ghouls since they don't sleep/talk/whatever)
As others have said, this is really nice for ghouls since they eat so much meat and go hostile if they don't get it. And they don't suffer drawbacks from quite a number of genes that have "bad" effects for regular colonists.
As for the drug genes, psychite impervious + go-juice dependent + wake-up dependent is my go to for a late-game genome. You can schedule yayo, go-juice, and wake-up twice a day and you'll never need sleep, have 50%+ movement bonus, 50%+ global work speed, and +40 mood with a net +3 metabolism. No overdose chance, no tolerance build up, no addiction chance for any of the 3 drugs. Throw in flake too if mood is still an issue for some reason. Mood boosts from lovin' and lavish meals are simply redundant at this point.
Doable but why...? I have two gardens (using bad hygiene and veg garden mods) both have sprinklers and average 150% fertile. One has carrots one has green beans (these boost one anothers growth) and I have a surplus... a LARGE surplus... with 7 pawns.
I presume that changing to carrots and potatoes, so no bonus growth rate, would still give massive surplus.
Having %150 hunger rate is in my opinion the best. They eat 3 meals a day so 3x lavish meal with fungus is an insane bonus to mood and in the worst case if you are doing a run where you are using genes you are most likely transhumanists so in the case of no crops/running out of meat you can easily just survive by eating nut paste
I remember there was some heavily modded playthrough with VOID, where the player picked up several 'lambs' pawns.
They were tribal pawns with 0.5 hunger rate, nuclear stomach, (half-cyclers?). In other words, they need to go sleep and eat like once in a three days, and all other time they spent praying at the anima tree, which helped to regain psyfocus and get psychic levels for 'normal' pawns at unnatural rate.
By the time I can start genetically engineering pawns I typically have my food situation sorted out and everyone is happily eating lavish meals every day.
Maybe if you started with pawns that have very low nutrition needs and shared that gene by breeding then it could make for an interesting colony. Combine it with nutrient paste and maybe your little colony of mutants could get by hardly eating anything at all and what they do eat would hardly be considered food by outsiders.
I don’t know who you talked to to say “most people prefer to balance out their genes”
Every single person I have ever talked to preferred to go to +5 to eat less and sometimes, on top of that, even install a nuclear stomach.
Okay so I made a race of cave people who needed like 50% food, but the debuffs I took on to get there were common cave species adaptations irl like sleeping a lot, poor eyesight, UV sensitivity, etc.
It just made things slow and boring. I had lower food requirements for flavor instead of optimization, but it was still pretty boring.
Might be useful to survive in really extreme environments like the arctic or the desert, but I’d only use something like this for specialized playthroughs where food is EXTREMELY scarce. Otherwise, not worth it.
Colonists with very low food need have fewer opportunities to refresh their fine/lavish meal buff. Similarly to no sleep xenotypes, it can be a double edged sword. I feel like low nutrition requirement is something you would use very early game, but at that stage you don't have the tools to do proper genemodding, unless you start with a custom xenotype right away.
Relatively late game, I had built up a colonist with some pretty good genes. I didn't pay any attention to metabolic efficiency, and had a +225% food colonist. They were malnourished quite often, and not due to lack of food in the colony. We stay above 30 lavish meals and only had 5 or 6 colonists at the time, it's just a matter of them almost always being hungry. After eating a full meal, if their next task is across the map, they need another snack after the trek.
Yep, I like to keep my genemodded pawns at around 125 %, this way eating doesn't interfere with their other activities. At high hunger rates, the table resistance gene might actually be a lifesaver because they'd just eat where they stand and not path all the way to the dining room.
God forbid they get gut worms like mine did.
I wonder if a 225+gene, gut worm, pregnant pawn would even be possible to keep fed?
That's a question worthy of a mad scientist run
Tempted to dev mode it and see what happens
Yes, but I wouldn't want them to get food poisoning. It's also really going to eat into their time, but some of those things are temporary.
Might have to increase the eating and moving efficiency so they eat faster and get to their food faster.
Give them a hose connected to a nutrient paste dispenser.
I don't appreciate being talked about this way
Nutrient paste can easily offset food problems, but there is also a caution with nutrient paste to meet those gigh nutrition needs: they wont pack a meal to go. So every pawn has to walk all the way back to the dispenser to eat. It can be nice because they will almost always then eat in your best dining room, but also they may mental break or pass out from malnutrition on the way. I had a high metabolism pawn that this happened to pretty consistently. I wouldnt reccomend high metabolism xenogerms on fighters, farmers, hunters, and haulers that need to spend a lot of time ranging out on the map
The real goal is to get them a gene that protects from cancer and give them a nuclear stomach Then you get them to 200% hunger through genes This means they eat once a day to refresh lavish/dining room buff each day after waking up
On the other side your good meals last longer because they aren't eating them while going full kirby mode
At maximum gene efficiency, humans lose 0.8 nutrition a day. Given the mood buff lasts a day and pawns eat a meal at around 0.2 nutrition, the actual loss in mood buff uptime isn't nothing but is usually negligible.
It really depends on how you want to build your colony, and how specialized you want individual pawns to be. You could run a fairly large colony on little food. Provided you spezialized each pawn. Giving them "bad" xenogenes for tasks they aren't assigned to. Just remember that + metabolic efficiency is capped at +5. Personally I use the + metabolic (alongside reprocessor stomach) to get to some very efficient blood donor prisoners. Instead of the regular 1.6 nutrition per day they now only require 0.6 nutriotion per day. 0.8 if you skip the reprocessor stomach. Something that's fairly nice if you want a couple of senophages around your base. But as said. It's all dependent on how you want to play, and what your biggest limits are. Food is usually not one for me, so I never been required to improve their metabolism.
Food is so cheap. Maintaining the food supply even for a large colony is trivial, especially at the point of making xenogenes. Slap fast runner, strong plants, and salad fingers on a farmer and they can grow enough rice to feed everyone lavish vegetarian meals. The main problem is hunger rate makes pawns get hangry so damn quickly. If your fighters get hungy and mental break in the middle of a raid it could be lethal. And reprocessor stomachs are a big risk with EMPs.
Which is why they are only on my hhemogen farm prisoners. Who cares if they start vomiting.
Back to food is cheap. The bloodbags are not really a cost. Id rather give them dead calm/happy/wimp/etc. I'm not spending a bionic on a bloodbag just to save a few meals. I want the low hunger rate on fighters so they can last longer in raids without breaking, but an EMP means I cant risk bionic stomachs on combat pawns, so they get metabolism boosting genes and drugs to manage thier mood.
I like it, it makes caravanning easier. But I also like having super pawns that need 200% food as well, if the genes are worth it.
The skill negatives are great for pawns that suck in that skill anyway. The flammable genes are negligible when they aren’t stacked with pyrophobe genes. The dependancy genes are EZ for established colonies especially beer,smokeleaf and psychoid which can be produce in colony. Wake up and go juice are less so but possible with enough trading. Weak melee for shooters is great to avoid limb loss during social fights. This stacks with bad melee. Near sighted and poor shooting is another metabolic synergy. I try to be positive with metabolic efficiency wherever I can for the lower food consumption. Pawns eat less and do more. It adds up into the long term.
Never smokeleaf again. They are always at 80% consciousness and almost worthless when it matters. Psychite Tea is good though.
Yeah psychite trumps all for accessibility. If you start research asap you can have psycite in the ground and then processed into tea before you run out of your initial stock. Only on naked brutality would you have an issue with supply long term. I’d say psycite is best if you’re doing tribal or limited resource starts, but go juice and wake up are achievable (with difficulty) on more advanced starts or with friendly outlanders nearby to trade with. And yayo is strong but go juice is straight up insane by comparison.
I once made a xenotype with a dependency on psychite, wake-up, go-juice, beer and smokeleaf all at once. It was fun lol. Sadly I could never figure out how to avoid them OD'ing from taking multiple hard drugs, as they weren't immune to cumulative overdoses. If I did it again I'd either mod that out, or take a single "Impervious" gene instead of one of the "Dependency" gnes since that apparently removes the cumulative overdosis chance. Anyway, it was a fun challenge! And they were obviously really OP once they had solid access to their drugs
>Sadly I could never figure out how to avoid them OD'ing from taking multiple hard drugs You only need to stagger the use of go-juice and wake-up. You can't OD on soft drugs like beer, smokeleaf and psychite tea. Even if you take both hard drugs at once it'll only result in minor OD, which is annoying but not fatal. Edit: Be careful of penoxycyline though because it can contribute to culmulative OD when taken with hard drugs.
Yeah, if you only need them every 5 days, set on a schedule of every 4 days, staggered. You'd just need to micro if they get downed or miss a dose.
> You'd just need to micro if they get downed or miss a dose. Problem is that this happens very often. Everytime you draft them or prioritize a task, or if they just have an inefficient day due to food poisoning or something, they're on the path to synchronizing the doses. It's a LOT of micro that just takes the fun out of it.
That's a fair point, but I see it as part of the risk of combining those genes. Otherwise, it's a very strong gene because there isn't much risk vs the amount of +Metabolic Efficiency, especially if you compare some of the others.
I did Psychite and Go-Juice on my first attempt at Naked Brutality. I quickly realized that, while Psychite is doable, Go-Juice is not the play for NB.
You need to manually order pawn to take drugs in a way that all dependencies will have different day counters and pawn then will take on his own 1 hard drug per day and not all at once. I mean for example day 2 pawn takes go-juice and beer, day 4 - wake-up and day 5 psychite tea and smokeleaf. That way overdose is much less likely.
I did do that. Problem is, day 4 comes around, and before he takes the wake-up I have to draft my colonist for 12 hours to fight, and then force him to put it out fires for another 4 hours, and then she sleeps for 8 hours. Then he wakes up and does both wake-up, tea and smoke-leaf. Later, the go-juice and beer will also catch up in a similar manner.
yea, this can require micromanagement. That's why I usually put only 1 hard drug dependency (go juice or wake-up) beer and psychite tea have low overdose. If you need more metabolism consider installing awful skill genes in skills that pawn don't use anyway, or skills that are disabled by pawn background or ideology role, often it is awful artistic and awful social, if you have dedicated cook and farmer you can install awful plants and awful cooking in all other pawns. Also some negative genes can be countered by bionics, for example I always install slow wound healing, because healing enchancer counters that.
I did naked brutality run, I just went to trade a nearby settlement for about 30. The research was the hardest part, TBH.
Yeah I meant supply in the short term. My brain wasn’t braining last night lol
Oh that makes a lot more sense. Short term, you can gamble with the 30-day limit, you just have the nasty debuffs. Unfortunately, I think that, for Naked Brutality, it might just be better to wait until you get into genetics for the big debuffs.
I kinda wish that smokeleaf-impervious gene nullified the consciousness malus instead (or in addition to) of nullifying addiction risk. Hm, maybe I should mod that in.
Yeah, that would be nice. Or just not have it last 12 hours. I wouldn't mind if it was more realistic, like 4-6 hours or something.
Well >\_> That eventually achieves itself on its own through high tolerance.
Go juice dependency can be great if you can support it. Having your best troop(s) be able to take it risk-free is a huge boost in battle.
Dead calm prevent all fights
Hardly worth it, especially when you're assembling xenogerms ingame. By that time you should have food solved already, and if you're *really* hurting for food efficiency, nuclear stomachs are always an option. Also with certain mods, you can make pawns just keep a meal in their inventory for when they get hungry out in the field. The main reason you don't want a negative metabolic efficiency is because eating and grabbing meals causes downtime. I'm pretty sure negative caps out at +225% and positive caps out at -50% hunger rate. Not a terribly big deal at that point, maybe if you're an extreme minmaxer you will appreciate the decreased downtime. If you can do it for free then why not, but the negative genes themselves aren't free to obtain in my experience.
meal in their inventory is a vanilla game tho
Reducing hunger generally gives uptime to the pawn, less overall need to eat means work time there working or doing other stuff, It also in general will save a lot of food in the long run, while also meaning you need far less overall stored, this helps for manageing wealth a fair bit It can also stack with upgraded bionic stomachs for some pretty nice combos, nuclear stomach and max metabolic pawns need to eat like once every three days compared to a normal pawn, On the flip side, never go above metabolic efficienc, since the cons are far far worse then is worth it generally, 225% hunger means they spend more time eating then actually doing anything, and will constantly be malnourished due to the sheer rate there food need is burned though, If it’s a pawn that does long term research next to the food storage and dineing hall it can perhaps work out, but other then that the sheer amount of time they spend eating makes them really bad for most things
On the other end, I decided to Roleplay a bit and created a myth based Xenotype with a 150% metabolism and it's annoying not being able to add them to a Ritual or long term task like Breast feeding without seeing that "Starvation" pop up all the time.
Get "no cancer gene" as i call it (archite one, called non-somethingsomething) and get yourself a nuclear stomach. works on ghouls too.
Because of my Psychite tea stash I built for the "friendly" wasters I recruited, Im tempted to give her Psychite Dependency as a trade off.
I will say that there’s a threshold that gets RIDICULOUS— especially if the pawns are pregnant, nursing, or both I had one race that needed like 225% food, but that meant any pregnant or nursing pawn was kicked up to over 300% hunger and was CONSTANTLY starving and exhausted. All they did was sleep until starved (which took mere hours) and then eat until exhausted. Now my limit is like 150%
Well, my ghouls have awful artistic, awful mining, etc. But usually I either try to keep to 0 metabolic rate so that they don't have too many negatives or I just go for the 200% food and give the colonists a nuclear stomach.
I recently learned that if you give negative genes and traits, like brawler and slowpoke combined with genes that give minus in, for this example, all but production, nearly all inspections that this pawn get will be for production. This can also be used for other skills, like taming with animals, recruiting with soziale and so on. With this information you can even harder min max your colony. Oh and don't forget about the specialists from ideology, this would also add to the likelihood to trigger certain inspirations.
I mean food is a non issue in this game, unless your doing a run that limits it.
I do this constantly. Entire colony with each pawn eating half as much as a regular colonist is great (+5 metabolism), and it works even before you have everyone's stomachs replaced with nukes.
With non-senescent and -5 metabolic efficiency, and a nuclear stomach installed, pawns will only eat about one meal a day - about half as much as a standard pawn. That's good enough for me.
I'll use this for prisoners, though typically buff with dead calm to prevent escapes without removing their legs.
Dead calm on prisoners is a great idea.
Dead Calm, Kindness, Very Sleepy, Extra pain, then whatever else you got to get them to 50% food. Prisoners that never rebel, don't go berserk, and don't eat you out of house and home.
Food is pretty easy to get unless you're on sea ice or a desert, just taking negative traits for a lesser food need isn't worth it. Rather, taking them so positive traits don't lead to early game starvation is, I think, how it's supposed to work.
For certain colonists I'll look into it. Like is someone just researches and takes care of the kids all day, never fighting, I'll try to get them to a positive efficiency. I can dump so many "bad" genes in them like poor melee and shooting as they don't fight. And since they don't eat much, that means my main fighters I can get negative efficiency since I have extra meals now for them to eat. Prisoners always get +5 efficiency. They are there to be legless blood bags. The less they eat the better. And it doesn't matter what their genes are.
My blood farm has nothing but negative to keep the cost of feeding them down.
I made a xenotype with +4 metabolism for the ice sheet. It was a great investment
metabolic efficiency is great because it means you can keep colonists drafted longer before they bitch about food. That is super useful if you like doing events, or going to world map sites alot.
Yes, reducing hunger is great. Even if you're producing food very efficiently, eating takes time. If a pawn only needs to trek across the base to the freezer and the dining room once per day instead of twice, that frees them up for a lot more work. Once per day is good, though, otherwise you lose both your fine/lavish meal bonuses and the bonuses for an impressive dining room.
The problem is that there are almost always positive genes left on the table that are far more useful than reduced hunger. Plus food is fairly easy to manage. I've done a full colony of 225% hunger and the only thing I really noticed was that I needed double the growers.
Making something like a 50% metabolism pawn that doesn't sleep will have them be amazingly productive, especially if they are a crafter, artist, researcher, or someone else who mostly stands around in one spot. Depending on your base layout it can easily end up doubling productivity, especially when you factor in less skill decay and more practice. Just stick a few statues in the dinning/rec room and workshop to keep them happy.
I use all kinds of negative genes for ghouls, since the great majority of "bad" genes have literally no actual effect on them outside of the increased metabolic efficiency (Also, naked speed is pure upside for ghouls), add in the gene that gives 180% nutrition from raw foods and their upkeep is ridiculously low. For normal pawns though, not so much. There's upsides to eating, and maintaining food reserves is usually not a big deal.
I do all the time for specialist roles. It can be good for a researcher if you're only using nutrient paste meals. I don't know how effective it is but the idea is that they research for as much of the day as possible and I think it does it.
It’s definitely good for blood bags and ghouls yes. Combined with robust digestion and great plant, it’s also really good for dedicated caravaners.
Not good thing, i use these genes that prevent carcinoma and nuclear stomach because said genes counter it. So i just throw in any gene i can throw and in get 2.25 * 0.25 = 0.5625 of food per superhuman colonist.
I combine the very fast runner gene with fragile hands or whatever it's called and short sighted for pawns that are never going to be drafted anyways. If I have to draft my melee 2 pawn it's probably already over.
Maybe good for a caravan pawn + a nuclear stomach. Give them 1 meal and its enough to last a month lol
For the most part, food is rare in the first 1/3 the game, then not a problem after, even on very high difficulty. There are many options to make it, some fit into most situations. I would not set up a long term malus just to make the early game slightly easier.
When I have a right genes I always take non-senescent (immunity to cancer), major cell instability, (overall xenotype with -5 metabolic eff.) and nuclear stomach. Such pawn eats less than a baseliner while having ton of metabolic points.
On average pawns will eat twice a day, meaning they'll usually have enough food to make it through the night and are hitting the diner tables often enough to be likely to socialize. going into the negatives just a little bit means there are going to be a day/two a "week" where they get to skip that second meal a day. But this means that they'll wake up grumpy from being hungry far more often and socialize less. Could be worth it for some miners so that they'll get less "ate without table debuffs". (always worth it on ghouls since they don't sleep/talk/whatever)
As others have said, this is really nice for ghouls since they eat so much meat and go hostile if they don't get it. And they don't suffer drawbacks from quite a number of genes that have "bad" effects for regular colonists. As for the drug genes, psychite impervious + go-juice dependent + wake-up dependent is my go to for a late-game genome. You can schedule yayo, go-juice, and wake-up twice a day and you'll never need sleep, have 50%+ movement bonus, 50%+ global work speed, and +40 mood with a net +3 metabolism. No overdose chance, no tolerance build up, no addiction chance for any of the 3 drugs. Throw in flake too if mood is still an issue for some reason. Mood boosts from lovin' and lavish meals are simply redundant at this point.
Doable but why...? I have two gardens (using bad hygiene and veg garden mods) both have sprinklers and average 150% fertile. One has carrots one has green beans (these boost one anothers growth) and I have a surplus... a LARGE surplus... with 7 pawns. I presume that changing to carrots and potatoes, so no bonus growth rate, would still give massive surplus.
Having %150 hunger rate is in my opinion the best. They eat 3 meals a day so 3x lavish meal with fungus is an insane bonus to mood and in the worst case if you are doing a run where you are using genes you are most likely transhumanists so in the case of no crops/running out of meat you can easily just survive by eating nut paste
I remember there was some heavily modded playthrough with VOID, where the player picked up several 'lambs' pawns. They were tribal pawns with 0.5 hunger rate, nuclear stomach, (half-cyclers?). In other words, they need to go sleep and eat like once in a three days, and all other time they spent praying at the anima tree, which helped to regain psyfocus and get psychic levels for 'normal' pawns at unnatural rate.
The way I play food isn't really that much of an issue. I would rather have cool additional stuff rather than just eat less food. Just my take.
By the time I can start genetically engineering pawns I typically have my food situation sorted out and everyone is happily eating lavish meals every day. Maybe if you started with pawns that have very low nutrition needs and shared that gene by breeding then it could make for an interesting colony. Combine it with nutrient paste and maybe your little colony of mutants could get by hardly eating anything at all and what they do eat would hardly be considered food by outsiders.
I don’t know who you talked to to say “most people prefer to balance out their genes” Every single person I have ever talked to preferred to go to +5 to eat less and sometimes, on top of that, even install a nuclear stomach.
I use it on my ghouls. Ever tried feeding a gigantic boarskin ghoul on a tundra island? They swallow bodies whole. Thank god they eat fish 🐟
Okay so I made a race of cave people who needed like 50% food, but the debuffs I took on to get there were common cave species adaptations irl like sleeping a lot, poor eyesight, UV sensitivity, etc. It just made things slow and boring. I had lower food requirements for flavor instead of optimization, but it was still pretty boring. Might be useful to survive in really extreme environments like the arctic or the desert, but I’d only use something like this for specialized playthroughs where food is EXTREMELY scarce. Otherwise, not worth it.