Topic

Strategy question about food

I am trying to figure out what food is the most "bang for my buck", what is something that is either cheap to buy or cheap to make, in relation to how much energy you get from it? Is there a comprehensive list somewhere?

Posted 14 months ago by Kahmiel Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I thought I had seen something like this before... I searched the forums and found this: 
    http://www.glitch.com/groups/RA957GCEE082O3I/discuss/1590/
    Posted 14 months ago by Becky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The most interesting column on that chart would be not the net gain per item, but the ratio of cost to benefit.  Then, at a glance, you could determine the most efficient foods and drinks to make for a given purpose...

    ....aaaaand immediately draw the ire of everyone as the devs nerf the outliers!
    Posted 14 months ago by Biff Beefbat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I prefer making juicy carappacios (sp?)
    2 spice (salt n peppa)
    2 meat
    2 spinach
    1 oily dressing
    84 energy

    I farm my own spinach though its cheap to buy if you must.
    Posted 14 months ago by Prophet ð.ð Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If you're buying food, then compare the energy supplied vs the currant cost.  Food from the meal vendors is priced at 1 currant per energy unit.  You can do better than that at the auction.  Making your own food, a lot depends on whether you buy the ingredients or gather them yourself.  At the simple end you can squeeze chickens, nibble piggies, and mill salt from allspice and then make your own sammiches for 0 currants - just the energy expended in the process.  Generally the benefit increases as you gain more cooking skills and use the other cooking utensils to prepare more complex foods, but, even with Victoria's chart it can be hard to say just which is most efficient!
    Posted 14 months ago by Hawkwell Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's hard to determine what's the "best" food. The chart I made works only when you gather all resources the same day you cook them. And that you don't buy things you can make yourself. 

    Biff, I think someone made a version of my chart that does exactly that... Don't know where it is though...
    Posted 14 months ago by Victoria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My take on it is that it ends up kind of not mattering in the long run.

    I like figuring stuff like this out, so I made a spreadsheet of my own (not as good as Victoria's, which is awesome) and put in all the values, etc. Then, after playing for a while, I realized that I wasn't looking at that spreadsheet.

    At lower levels, it is all you can do to keep from starving, so you just eat what you can. Meat, eggs, random messy fry-ups, and anything you can buy for cheap.

    At the mid-levels, it's hard to beat just grabbing eggs from trees, because the yield is so good. You can get 6-24 eggs per tree (depending on skill level), and they stack at 5 energy x 250 eggs per slot.

    At higher levels, you usually have more food than you know what to do with. You probably have a house with a meat collector out back, supplying a fountain of meat. And if you don't like how much room meat takes up, you probably have enough money to buy stuff from auction whenever you're hungry.

    Or if you like to cook, you can whip up batches of whatever. But usually, the "best" food is either (a) stuff that you can sell on auction, or (b) stuff you can make easily using ingredients that are easy to get your hands on, as opposed to food that takes a ton of time to gather lots of different ingredients from all over the world.

    Summary: at low levels, you just eat whatever. At high levels, the energy in/out equation doesn't matter so much for different reasons.
    Posted 14 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I posted this in another topic yesterday:

    According to my math, Beer seems to be the most cost efficient source of energy and mood. For 10 Currents you get 35 energy and 18 mood from the buzzed buff, granted it is delivered over a period of 5 minutes and can only be placed in stacks of 24. Also I don't believe you can stack the buff, so you can only drink one every 5 minutes to get the full benefits. Not necessarily good for large energy needs. Best energy gain after that is "plastering" mustard, you gain 10 energy for only 4 Currents, but you lose 4 mood each time. Other than that, most food from vendors is a 1:1 ratio where energy gained is equal to price.
    Posted 14 months ago by TRB4 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Be careful with that table.  Some of the energy costs/outputs appear to have changed.  Still, very useful information.
    Posted 14 months ago by EternaTea Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It seems to me from leveling cooking that, for aspiring cooks, the meat-based recipes return the best value for energy and resale (whether to vendor or auction). 

    Juicy carpacios (or whatever they're called), deluxe sammiches, awesome stews, and so on.  Dairy seems to require too much energy making it to be worth making.  Super veggie kabobs (I think that's the name) are decent too.
    Posted 14 months ago by Merrilea Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Merrilea, cheese can become much more efficient at AKVI and VII, since you no longer have to massage butterflies, and you get two shots per fly per day.  Additionally, if you have a large house, you can have many butterflies wandering about, and use a milker to collect from them.  Finally, using no-no powder efficiently (at the end of a day) can allow you to make just gobs of cheese with no energy cost.

    It may seem like a lot of work, and it probably is, but making cheese late game can be done with a high degree of efficiency.  
    Posted 14 months ago by EternaTea Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Another question would be which food is best to make for sale. Is there a spreadsheet on energy cost versus currants received at vendors?

    The amount you can get at auction, of course, would vary over time.
    Posted 14 months ago by Josiah Thimblerig Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Cost to benefit ratio wouldn't just be in terms of materials or currants, though, but also in the investment of time. This makes it very difficult to determine what's the most efficient way to gain energy, produce items, etc... since the time to harvest changes with each skill rank, and also depends where you are harvesting. I love how complex this game is!
    Posted 14 months ago by Tegid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Planks! With my skills I get 70 at a time, so with 140 energy for the cost of a harvest it's a pretty good conversion ratio.

    The practicality of finding enough wood trees to keep going through a day is another matter, though... :)
    Posted 14 months ago by Ed Cetera Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There are other factors.  The XP earned from producing a food has to be factored in, which makes the full benefit of any choice hard to quantify.  Playing glitch is the total experience.  Being Here and all that.
    Posted 14 months ago by Parrow Gnolle Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Out of curosity I crunched some numbers in a spread sheet. I came up with the following;

    Using the numbers obtained here (http://www.glitch.com/groups/RA957GCEE082O3I/discuss/1590/) (Gardening V and Croppery II) and the values for energy and time to grow from Glitch Strategy, I get these results;

    Potato: harvest size 18, 7 energy per potato, 690 minutes to grow, energy per harvest (per plot) 126, energy per hour gained growing 10.9 (roughly)

    Spinach: harvest size 12, 3 energy per spinach, 45 minutes to grow, energy per harvest (per plot) 36, energy per hour gained growing 48

    I'll skip the other crops as these two seem to be the important ones. The results seem to mean that if you want the most energy fast, and plan to do a lot of planting/micromanaging your crops, spinach is the way to go, as you'll get the most out of your time. However, if you plan to be offline, or won't be around to manage your crops, potatos are the way to go, as they give the most bang for the buck for a single harvest.

    All this is just for growing crops and ignores cooking to produce secondary products. I also haven't taken into account the energy spent in the watering and harvesting which would reduce the effectiveness of the spinach, and hardly affect potatos. I don't have those numbers off hand to plug in, but at first glance my observasions on the short-term and long-term growing of the crops seems valid. I think.
    Posted 14 months ago by Ahye Subscriber! | Permalink