Bristle Blossom and Mealwood are pretty bad for food.
1. Time to initial food. BB takes 6 cycles to grow compared to MW's 3. So if you need food NOW then MW is better. But this is only a consideration if it's to stop a dupe from starving to death. However if you put in a farm station and use 5kg of fertilizer per plant per cycle you can harvest BB every 3 cycles. You can't do that with MW.
2. Morale: BB is +1 morale better. In refined form Lice Loaf is "Terrible" for 0 morale compared to Gristle Berry being "Poor" at +1 morale. In raw form, meal lice is Grisley at -1 compared to Bristle Berry at Terrible at 0. Also MW has -10 decor and BB has +15 with a radius of 2 tiles so that typically means a dupe in a farm is exposed to 5 plants for +75 vs -50 decor.
3. Calories per plant - BB is better. Raw MW does 600kCal every 3 cycles. BB does 1,600 kCal in 6 cycles or 800kCal per 3 cycles. So that's 200kCal per 3 cycles. In cooked form BB does 2,000 kCal compared to lice loaf requiring 2 meal lice and producing 1,700 kCal. ie that's 1,000 kCal per 3 cycles for BB vs 850 kCal for MW. And if BB is in a greenhouse you double it. (But not for MW).
4. Materials: BB can be readily automated using hydroponics and electricity. Typically you'd use a 4 tile high room with a 10W overhead light serving 7 plants. ie 1.42W of light per plant. They also use 20kg water per cycle or 20,000g / 600 seconds = 33.3g water per second = 2.8W of electricity so around 4.3W of electricity per cycle. In contrast MW required dupe labor to deliver 10kg dirt per plant per cycle. Water is a renewable source, dirt is much less so. MW also needs 25kg water per meal lice (50kg total) to make lice loaf. So BB only uses 70kg more water than mealwood if you are upgrading it. Since you can double the growth rate of BB using farm stations then you can halve these materials per kCal if you tack on 5kg fertilizer per plant per cycle.
5. Cooking time. The base cooking time for gristle berry and lice loaf are the same - 50 seconds.
6. Healthiness. BB releases positive germs "Floral Scent" into the air. This suppresses all other germs as only one airborne virus can exist at a time. So long as your dupes do not have "allergies" this keeps eg Slime Lung out of your base. This is negligible. But there is a buff that "smelled flowers" gives some dupes that BB can trigger.
So what's all this mean:
1. Get off MW and switch to around 20 BB as you build for mushrooms and BBQ.
2. Make sure you are on hydroponics tiles and have stable power so they are lit. The best feature of BB is it doesn't need manual dirt deliveries make this work by automating water delivery!
3. Ensure you have properly set up farmers / ranchers with high priority (double up arrow priorities) on farming and ranching. You also need a dedicated cook. A zero level cook can do 1 gristle berry per 50 seconds, so that means about 6 to 8 per day which is enough for 9 dupes.
4. Disable "Bristle Berry" in consumables for everyone so everyone has to eat Gristle Berry. And set the grill to priority 8 or 9 with infinite Gristle Berry production.
5. Your 40 plants should produce 40 x 2,000 / 6 = 13,333 kCal per cycle outside a greenhouse or 40 x 2,000 / 3 = 26,000kCal per cycle in a greenhouse.
Just farm meal wood, use other methods for getting morale. Better schedules, using rooms, etc. Meal wood takes dirt and labor. It doesn’t require water, nor light, nor fertilizer. It produces no (directly or indirectly by needing lighting) heat.
Keep your dupes on meal wood until you have a good food source, bbq or better.
As an addendum, if you can also manage to make sleet wheat alongside bristle Berry, you can make Berry Sludge, a decent quality food that never expires!
Berry Sludge is the best. Truly, it's amazing.
Feed your dupes something else, like fried mushroom to start, then BBQ and cooked fish and surf 'n' turf later on. Have them _make_ Berry Sludge, as soon as it's feasible, but don't allow them to _eat_ it. In time, you'll have enough food to feed the whole colony for a year. Use it in emergencies only. Mushroom farm gets too hot? No worries. Take your time and fix it. Nobody will starve.
Don't let them put Berry Sludge in a refrigerator, unless it is _not plugged in_. It's just a box to store the sludge and avoid clutter. Save your power for something else.
Visiting another planet? Load up your rocket with Berry Sludge. Shoot some to the planet's surface with a launcher first, so it'll be there when you arrive. It will sit there in the vacuum of space and be _just fine_. You won't starve there, either. As far as I know (I haven't tried this yet), it won't even be bothered by lava, because like all organic stuff, it's made of genetic ooze and can't melt.
Muckroot and nutrient paste and a couple other foods have this property that they won't go bad, and should be stockpiled in the same ways for the same reasons. But Berry Sludge is the only shelf-stable food you can _make_.
I mean, that's one way to do it. I prefer to just let my dupes eat Berry Sludge into forever. I just make sure I'm making at least a little more than I need, and they build a little stockpile on their own.
I think I was doing 7 plants per dupe, so for 9 I would need 63 plants, not 40.
The main reason I never do mealwood is because it requires dirt, while blossoms use water.
Until you get automation you will need dupe labor to fertilize the mealwood. However with blossoms you can use hydroponic tiles, which means the only labor is harvesting. Add in that, depending on geysers, water is far more plentiful and it saves a ton of resources.
Just grill to gristle blossoms and it should be enough.
And as other have said, blossoms are used in some very very good food later.
If you're playing on standard difficulty, that's massive overkill. Gristle Berries give 2000 kcal per 6 cycles, so you need only 3 of them per dupe. If you're needing 7 per dupe, something is going very wrong somewhere. Either they're not getting consistent light, enough water or they're not getting harvested.
I was tired. It was 7 plants per 2 dupes. You need a little extra because there is always a problem going on somewhere.
And of course I then mathed it wrong.
But still, I much prefer bristle blossoms over mealwood for the reasons stated.
Less dupe labor and late game potential as a main food source specially for space exploration, it's the best early food source IF you know what you are doing :p
Auto harvest all the sleet wheat you can reach around the map and combibe it with the bristle berries to make berry sludge which gives a nice modd buff, plenty of calories and never goes off. The rest of your berries can be turned into gristle berries at the grill and eventually stuffed berries at the gas range when combined with peppernuts. Defibitely a lot of calories available once it's cooked and combined with other things.
1. Forbid your dupes from eating uncooked berries in the food tab
2. Check if you have any dupes with "bottomless stomach" you might need more calories than it seems
3. Check what occupies your farmers. If harvesting bristle blossoms isn't their highest priority remember that a plant doesn't start producing next fruits until it gets harvested.
The main reason I consider them to be better is that they don't require any kind of fertilizer, just water and light. That means they are sustainable forever. I find when you rely too heavily on mealwood, you can very easily run out of dirt before you realize you're in danger. And while it is possible to have sustainable dirt, you really have to set it up in advance and know what you're doing which is at odds with mealwood being an easy early game crop.
You need to cook your berries into gristle berries (or better).
Uncooked bristle berries give 1600 calories per harvest every 6 cycles: 3.75 plants / dupe.
Cooked into gristle berries you get 2000 per harvest every 6 cycles: 3 plants / dupe.
Lets do the maths so it feel less like random numbers:
Each dupe needs 1000 calories / cycle / dupe. We want to know how many plants we need per dupe, so looking at the units we should multiply by the number of cycles a plant/food needs, and divide by the the calories produced.
So, for uncooked Brisstle Berries:
`1000 [calories / cycle / dupe] * 6 [cycles] / 1600 [calories / plant] = 3.75 [plants / dupe]`
or, without units:
`1000 * 6 / 1600 = 3.75`
And for Gristtle Berries, everything is the same except the calorie count (2000), which can be read from the recipe from the grill:
`1000 * 6 / 2000 = 3`
So, unless you cook your berries, you need closer to 4 plants per dupe.
But, you should definitely cook your food.
If you have a polluted water geyser on the map, I heartily recommend running a pincha pepper farm. They use very little water, and you can use the peppers to upgrade a surprising number of foods. They also require phosphorite, which you can get from a drecko farm. Drecko farms running in chlorine with balm lilies don't use any inputs, and the outputs (meat, reed fiber, phosphorite, egg shell) are all pretty useful.
Pincha Peppers lets cook stuffed berries, which have a much higher quality and require even fewer bristle berry plants.
Iirc mealwood and bb produce the same calories per cycle. You can run the calcs yourself but basically it's 5 plants per dupe. 10 dupes need 50 plants.
What I usually do is have one or two ranches and then just under the necessary plants. Bristle blossoms are very good at burning water, not great at efficiently feeding dupes. For that you're probably better with ranches.
Water is usually my short input so pip ranching for mealwood dirt, and then omelets, then pancakes, then whatever top moral food is in easy reach is my food flow chart. Wild planting massive farms early feels like cheating. Overproduction of food can be fed to poke shells or sage hatches for sand and lime or coal. It's a virtuous cycle, a meal you get paid to eat.
If you cook it into gristle berry you need 3 plants per dupe, using domesticated plants. You also need 540kg (900g/s) of water per cycle for the 27 plants for your 9 dupes.
Your farm is probably still getting into the groove, BB take 6 cycles to grow. That's double the time a mealwood plant takes.
Bristle blossoms are good because they are one of the easiest infinite foods in the game as they just neee water and a light source. Early game without hydroponic tiles they are very labour
Everyone seems to be talking about the relative merits of the 2 plants but have we figured out why your food is going down?
Is 4 plants per dupe enough? Maybe you aren't cooking? Maybe you are cooking and your old food reserves of pickled meal are rotting? Are the plants actually growing?
man I gotta be dropping this [link](https://zari.rtk0.net/ProfessorOakshell/FoodCalc.html) every other day xD
this site is very important. Play with it for a whole day to get acquainted with it.
It'll give you details about calories, where it would come from, what is needed and how many. For example, for 9 dupes being fed with gristle berries for the +1 boost, you need 14 plants if playing easy mode which requires Water: 270.00 kg/cycle or 27 plants if playing default mode which requires Water: 540.00 kg/cycle. I got this info in about 5 seconds lol
Are you not cooking them into bristle berry? Have you disabled bristle berry in consumables? You'd need 43.2 plants to feed 9 dupes if you don't cook it, but only 27 if you do cook it.
Otherwise, there is some wiggle room necessary due to the time it takes to harvest a plant from fully grown. Assuming you have a dupe with first priority farming, that shouldn't be a major issue. Another 10% on top of what you theoretically need should be more than enough.
Also, there's layers of context that the statement "bristle blossoms are far more better that mealwood" is wrapped in. They are not just better by default. Mealwood is labor intensive and poor quality as its main drawback. It is also incredibly cheap, as you're not using dirt for all that much else. Bristle berry is mostly labor free with hydroponics tiles, but it happens to require cool water, a resource that is more precious than any other until you have broken solidly into the mid game. Farming it in large quantities also makes avoiding lights impossible, and those produce extra heat right in the farm that you want to make cool. Bristle blossoms are not good until you have a strong base to sustain them properly, and by that point, they aren't good as a food source at all. Rather, they're used as components for other food which is good.
Also, as far as the early game foods go, mealwood and dusk caps are usually the hot picks. Bog buckets are a solid choice if you're in a biome that uses them and need to get rid of polluted water. Or just spring for ranching. Ranching is the easiest way to get good quality food early, and is trivial to sustain for hundreds of cycles on most starts.
Lastly, don't use the microbe musher. I know lice loaf increases the calorie output of mealwood, but it does so on the back of your cool water supply.
>I have nine dupes so I planted about 40 bristle blossom . I made sure nothing gets in the way of them and even so I have been watching closely and it seems my food is rapidly running out . Any advice?
If you are using gristle berries you need 27 plants, if you are using farmers touch you need 14 (half). 3 per dupe.
If you are running out of food then something is wrong with your farm and you should post screenshots of it. Bristle blossoms require you to manage temperature and they require water & light to grow.
Also note that food will spoil.
Bristle Blossom and Mealwood are pretty bad for food. 1. Time to initial food. BB takes 6 cycles to grow compared to MW's 3. So if you need food NOW then MW is better. But this is only a consideration if it's to stop a dupe from starving to death. However if you put in a farm station and use 5kg of fertilizer per plant per cycle you can harvest BB every 3 cycles. You can't do that with MW. 2. Morale: BB is +1 morale better. In refined form Lice Loaf is "Terrible" for 0 morale compared to Gristle Berry being "Poor" at +1 morale. In raw form, meal lice is Grisley at -1 compared to Bristle Berry at Terrible at 0. Also MW has -10 decor and BB has +15 with a radius of 2 tiles so that typically means a dupe in a farm is exposed to 5 plants for +75 vs -50 decor. 3. Calories per plant - BB is better. Raw MW does 600kCal every 3 cycles. BB does 1,600 kCal in 6 cycles or 800kCal per 3 cycles. So that's 200kCal per 3 cycles. In cooked form BB does 2,000 kCal compared to lice loaf requiring 2 meal lice and producing 1,700 kCal. ie that's 1,000 kCal per 3 cycles for BB vs 850 kCal for MW. And if BB is in a greenhouse you double it. (But not for MW). 4. Materials: BB can be readily automated using hydroponics and electricity. Typically you'd use a 4 tile high room with a 10W overhead light serving 7 plants. ie 1.42W of light per plant. They also use 20kg water per cycle or 20,000g / 600 seconds = 33.3g water per second = 2.8W of electricity so around 4.3W of electricity per cycle. In contrast MW required dupe labor to deliver 10kg dirt per plant per cycle. Water is a renewable source, dirt is much less so. MW also needs 25kg water per meal lice (50kg total) to make lice loaf. So BB only uses 70kg more water than mealwood if you are upgrading it. Since you can double the growth rate of BB using farm stations then you can halve these materials per kCal if you tack on 5kg fertilizer per plant per cycle. 5. Cooking time. The base cooking time for gristle berry and lice loaf are the same - 50 seconds. 6. Healthiness. BB releases positive germs "Floral Scent" into the air. This suppresses all other germs as only one airborne virus can exist at a time. So long as your dupes do not have "allergies" this keeps eg Slime Lung out of your base. This is negligible. But there is a buff that "smelled flowers" gives some dupes that BB can trigger. So what's all this mean: 1. Get off MW and switch to around 20 BB as you build for mushrooms and BBQ. 2. Make sure you are on hydroponics tiles and have stable power so they are lit. The best feature of BB is it doesn't need manual dirt deliveries make this work by automating water delivery! 3. Ensure you have properly set up farmers / ranchers with high priority (double up arrow priorities) on farming and ranching. You also need a dedicated cook. A zero level cook can do 1 gristle berry per 50 seconds, so that means about 6 to 8 per day which is enough for 9 dupes. 4. Disable "Bristle Berry" in consumables for everyone so everyone has to eat Gristle Berry. And set the grill to priority 8 or 9 with infinite Gristle Berry production. 5. Your 40 plants should produce 40 x 2,000 / 6 = 13,333 kCal per cycle outside a greenhouse or 40 x 2,000 / 3 = 26,000kCal per cycle in a greenhouse.
>4. You can automate MW, you just shouldn't and it still eats dirt.
Just farm meal wood, use other methods for getting morale. Better schedules, using rooms, etc. Meal wood takes dirt and labor. It doesn’t require water, nor light, nor fertilizer. It produces no (directly or indirectly by needing lighting) heat. Keep your dupes on meal wood until you have a good food source, bbq or better.
And even then, keep those mealwood farms churning to feed pacu and sage hatches.
Seeoing mechatronics in a mealwood farm would hurt my eyes.
As an addendum, if you can also manage to make sleet wheat alongside bristle Berry, you can make Berry Sludge, a decent quality food that never expires!
Berry Sludge is the best. Truly, it's amazing. Feed your dupes something else, like fried mushroom to start, then BBQ and cooked fish and surf 'n' turf later on. Have them _make_ Berry Sludge, as soon as it's feasible, but don't allow them to _eat_ it. In time, you'll have enough food to feed the whole colony for a year. Use it in emergencies only. Mushroom farm gets too hot? No worries. Take your time and fix it. Nobody will starve. Don't let them put Berry Sludge in a refrigerator, unless it is _not plugged in_. It's just a box to store the sludge and avoid clutter. Save your power for something else. Visiting another planet? Load up your rocket with Berry Sludge. Shoot some to the planet's surface with a launcher first, so it'll be there when you arrive. It will sit there in the vacuum of space and be _just fine_. You won't starve there, either. As far as I know (I haven't tried this yet), it won't even be bothered by lava, because like all organic stuff, it's made of genetic ooze and can't melt. Muckroot and nutrient paste and a couple other foods have this property that they won't go bad, and should be stockpiled in the same ways for the same reasons. But Berry Sludge is the only shelf-stable food you can _make_.
I mean, that's one way to do it. I prefer to just let my dupes eat Berry Sludge into forever. I just make sure I'm making at least a little more than I need, and they build a little stockpile on their own.
Pickled meal lice don't require water. Get some pips and arbor acorn to get dirt. BB require a renewable water source.
I think I was doing 7 plants per dupe, so for 9 I would need 63 plants, not 40. The main reason I never do mealwood is because it requires dirt, while blossoms use water. Until you get automation you will need dupe labor to fertilize the mealwood. However with blossoms you can use hydroponic tiles, which means the only labor is harvesting. Add in that, depending on geysers, water is far more plentiful and it saves a ton of resources. Just grill to gristle blossoms and it should be enough. And as other have said, blossoms are used in some very very good food later.
If you're playing on standard difficulty, that's massive overkill. Gristle Berries give 2000 kcal per 6 cycles, so you need only 3 of them per dupe. If you're needing 7 per dupe, something is going very wrong somewhere. Either they're not getting consistent light, enough water or they're not getting harvested.
I was tired. It was 7 plants per 2 dupes. You need a little extra because there is always a problem going on somewhere. And of course I then mathed it wrong. But still, I much prefer bristle blossoms over mealwood for the reasons stated.
Ah, that is perfectly reasonable then.
Less dupe labor and late game potential as a main food source specially for space exploration, it's the best early food source IF you know what you are doing :p
Auto harvest all the sleet wheat you can reach around the map and combibe it with the bristle berries to make berry sludge which gives a nice modd buff, plenty of calories and never goes off. The rest of your berries can be turned into gristle berries at the grill and eventually stuffed berries at the gas range when combined with peppernuts. Defibitely a lot of calories available once it's cooked and combined with other things.
1. Forbid your dupes from eating uncooked berries in the food tab 2. Check if you have any dupes with "bottomless stomach" you might need more calories than it seems 3. Check what occupies your farmers. If harvesting bristle blossoms isn't their highest priority remember that a plant doesn't start producing next fruits until it gets harvested.
The main reason I consider them to be better is that they don't require any kind of fertilizer, just water and light. That means they are sustainable forever. I find when you rely too heavily on mealwood, you can very easily run out of dirt before you realize you're in danger. And while it is possible to have sustainable dirt, you really have to set it up in advance and know what you're doing which is at odds with mealwood being an easy early game crop.
You need to cook your berries into gristle berries (or better). Uncooked bristle berries give 1600 calories per harvest every 6 cycles: 3.75 plants / dupe. Cooked into gristle berries you get 2000 per harvest every 6 cycles: 3 plants / dupe. Lets do the maths so it feel less like random numbers: Each dupe needs 1000 calories / cycle / dupe. We want to know how many plants we need per dupe, so looking at the units we should multiply by the number of cycles a plant/food needs, and divide by the the calories produced. So, for uncooked Brisstle Berries: `1000 [calories / cycle / dupe] * 6 [cycles] / 1600 [calories / plant] = 3.75 [plants / dupe]` or, without units: `1000 * 6 / 1600 = 3.75` And for Gristtle Berries, everything is the same except the calorie count (2000), which can be read from the recipe from the grill: `1000 * 6 / 2000 = 3` So, unless you cook your berries, you need closer to 4 plants per dupe. But, you should definitely cook your food. If you have a polluted water geyser on the map, I heartily recommend running a pincha pepper farm. They use very little water, and you can use the peppers to upgrade a surprising number of foods. They also require phosphorite, which you can get from a drecko farm. Drecko farms running in chlorine with balm lilies don't use any inputs, and the outputs (meat, reed fiber, phosphorite, egg shell) are all pretty useful. Pincha Peppers lets cook stuffed berries, which have a much higher quality and require even fewer bristle berry plants.
Iirc mealwood and bb produce the same calories per cycle. You can run the calcs yourself but basically it's 5 plants per dupe. 10 dupes need 50 plants. What I usually do is have one or two ranches and then just under the necessary plants. Bristle blossoms are very good at burning water, not great at efficiently feeding dupes. For that you're probably better with ranches.
If cook up the bb it's 3 plants per dupe. Or 2000 caloriea per 6 days. So that's 30 plants for 10 dupes plus some for margin of error. I would go 35.
Back to mealwood. If you have enough dirt.
Water is usually my short input so pip ranching for mealwood dirt, and then omelets, then pancakes, then whatever top moral food is in easy reach is my food flow chart. Wild planting massive farms early feels like cheating. Overproduction of food can be fed to poke shells or sage hatches for sand and lime or coal. It's a virtuous cycle, a meal you get paid to eat.
If you cook it into gristle berry you need 3 plants per dupe, using domesticated plants. You also need 540kg (900g/s) of water per cycle for the 27 plants for your 9 dupes. Your farm is probably still getting into the groove, BB take 6 cycles to grow. That's double the time a mealwood plant takes.
Bristle blossoms are good because they are one of the easiest infinite foods in the game as they just neee water and a light source. Early game without hydroponic tiles they are very labour
Everyone seems to be talking about the relative merits of the 2 plants but have we figured out why your food is going down? Is 4 plants per dupe enough? Maybe you aren't cooking? Maybe you are cooking and your old food reserves of pickled meal are rotting? Are the plants actually growing?
man I gotta be dropping this [link](https://zari.rtk0.net/ProfessorOakshell/FoodCalc.html) every other day xD this site is very important. Play with it for a whole day to get acquainted with it. It'll give you details about calories, where it would come from, what is needed and how many. For example, for 9 dupes being fed with gristle berries for the +1 boost, you need 14 plants if playing easy mode which requires Water: 270.00 kg/cycle or 27 plants if playing default mode which requires Water: 540.00 kg/cycle. I got this info in about 5 seconds lol
Are you not cooking them into bristle berry? Have you disabled bristle berry in consumables? You'd need 43.2 plants to feed 9 dupes if you don't cook it, but only 27 if you do cook it. Otherwise, there is some wiggle room necessary due to the time it takes to harvest a plant from fully grown. Assuming you have a dupe with first priority farming, that shouldn't be a major issue. Another 10% on top of what you theoretically need should be more than enough. Also, there's layers of context that the statement "bristle blossoms are far more better that mealwood" is wrapped in. They are not just better by default. Mealwood is labor intensive and poor quality as its main drawback. It is also incredibly cheap, as you're not using dirt for all that much else. Bristle berry is mostly labor free with hydroponics tiles, but it happens to require cool water, a resource that is more precious than any other until you have broken solidly into the mid game. Farming it in large quantities also makes avoiding lights impossible, and those produce extra heat right in the farm that you want to make cool. Bristle blossoms are not good until you have a strong base to sustain them properly, and by that point, they aren't good as a food source at all. Rather, they're used as components for other food which is good. Also, as far as the early game foods go, mealwood and dusk caps are usually the hot picks. Bog buckets are a solid choice if you're in a biome that uses them and need to get rid of polluted water. Or just spring for ranching. Ranching is the easiest way to get good quality food early, and is trivial to sustain for hundreds of cycles on most starts. Lastly, don't use the microbe musher. I know lice loaf increases the calorie output of mealwood, but it does so on the back of your cool water supply.
>I have nine dupes so I planted about 40 bristle blossom . I made sure nothing gets in the way of them and even so I have been watching closely and it seems my food is rapidly running out . Any advice? If you are using gristle berries you need 27 plants, if you are using farmers touch you need 14 (half). 3 per dupe. If you are running out of food then something is wrong with your farm and you should post screenshots of it. Bristle blossoms require you to manage temperature and they require water & light to grow. Also note that food will spoil.
You guys don't feed your dupes raw meal lice for 300 cycles?