Due to the increased hunger from using neural superchargers and sleep accelerators, a paste dispenser may be preferred. Transhumanist ideoligions can eat these meals without penalty, but still miss out on +5 mood from fine meals. In contrast, Ascetics can eat paste without worry. Because pawns prefer normal meals over nutrient paste, you can set restrictions to prevent normal pawns from consuming all of the good meals and leaving none to the volatile ones. It is advised to not give nutrient paste to pawns with a trait that gives a negative modifier to mental break threshold, because they can push a pawn over the edge. However, nutrient paste meals give a −4 mood debuff, which ends up being -9 net mood compared to fine meals. Overall, a nutrient paste dispenser can accelerate the development of a colony, and may be necessary in an extreme biome like ice sheet. There's no risk of food poisoning, and it can save a lot of time off a cook's hands - cooking is often a full time job in large colonies. This makes nutrient paste useful in a famine, even if you don't plan to use it indefinitely. Compared to the next best method, simple and fine meals with 180% efficiency, paste gives 66.67% more food. Hopper mouse indicator will turn from red to green for correct placement and colonists will pick NP meals from the dispenserĪt 300% nutritional efficiency, Nutrient paste is the most efficient way to prepare a meal. Use of human meat, insect meat, or, if the Ideology DLC is enabled, raw fungus, in a nutrient paste meal will still apply their regular moodlets, on top of the one for nutrient paste. The mood penalty is negated if the colonist eating it has the Ascetic trait, or the Eating Nutrient Paste: Don't mind precept in their ideoligion. Pawns will always prefer a more tasty food, so unless their Food Restriction is specifically assigned to "Paste" (located at the top of a colonist's Health tab), they will only use the dispenser if no better option is available. This is at least better than eating raw food. But when consumed, nutrient paste gives a −4 mood penalty (" Ate awful meal"). Nutrient paste converts 0.3 nutrition of raw food to a 0.9 nutrition meal, tripling your food. In order to produce meals for storage or animals, you must manually manipulate a pawn - see below for details. Animals cannot operate the dispenser but will eat meals if provided. Doctors can use prison-designated dispensers to feed prisoner patients. Wardens can also deliver nutrient paste from an external machine to prisoners, and Doctors will do the same for patients. No work bills or tasks can be performed at the machine, and no skills are necessary to use it.
This may be considered an exploit.Ĭolonists or prisoners will automatically use the dispenser any time they would otherwise look for a meal to pick up and eat, assuming it is powered, accessible, has enough food, the pawn is allowed to eat nutrient paste meals per their food restrictions and there are no preferable unrestricted meals available. It is possible to force other foods on top of a hopper by taking it to a pawn's inventory and then manually dropping it in front of the hopper. Any food except hay will be used, including corpses, but colonists will only load it with raw food. Only one type of food can be placed into each hopper. Make sure to set the Priority of the hoppers to be higher than other stockpiles. If there is insufficient food to make a meal in all of the attached hoppers, no food will be consumed and no meal will be produced.Ĭolonists will deliver food as both Hauling and Cooking tasks. If insufficient food is present in this hopper, then it will be emptied of any food inside, and then the process is repeated on each hopper proceeding counterclockwise around the dispenser until sufficient food has been collected to make a meal or all hoppers have been checked. The dispenser will attempt to draw food from the southwesternmost hopper first, regardless of dispenser orientation. Hoppers can be placed in any cardinally adjacent tile, except for the interaction spot. The dispenser creates 1 nutrient paste meal for 0.3 nutrition worth of food placed in an adjacent hopper. Chunks placed there after construction will prevent use until they are hauled away. You cannot build objects on the interaction spot, nor can you build the dispenser with it blocked. If this spot is inside a prison cell, then the machine will change color to orange and only prisoners will be allowed to use it. Pawns will dispense meals from the interaction spot, the front-center tile indicated by the circle during placement. The nutrient paste dispenser is an impassible object, acting like a wall for room and temperature mechanics. An orange dispenser marked for prisoner use.
