mlieUpdate of SomewhereOutInSpace’s mod.
The Meal Printer Mod adds a simple, balanced automated meal production for Rimworld’s mid-to-late game!
Meal Printers are the spacer-tech evolution of nutrient paste dispensers, using protein resequencing and primitive molecular printing to convert raw foodstuffs into filling, wholesome meals.
Meal Printer Mod features
- The meal printer building. Acting as an advanced drop-in upgrade to the nutrient paste dispenser, printers default to converting hoppered foodstuffs into simple meals. Say goodbye to the paste mood debuff without having to chain one of your colonists to a stove! Researchable upgrades can also unlock fine meals and high-efficiency nutrient paste for printing.
- NutriBars. A spacer-tech compromise between neolithic pemmican and industrial packaged survival meals, designed specifically to be mass-produced by meal printers. Lightweight, energy dense and inoffensively flavored, one NutriBar is just as filling as a traditional meal and lasts several seasons without refrigeration. Once unlocked via research project, your printers can produce these in bulk – great for emergency supplies or provisioning caravans.
Details
- Meal printers are unlocked through the Meal Printing research project, which requires Nutrient Paste and Fabrication research.
- A meal printer costs 75 plasteel, 25 steel and 3 advanced components. Once built, it requires 1000W of power, and functions as a drop-in paste dispenser upgrade.
- A printer’s desired output meal can be set on its toolbar. To start only simple meals are available; more options can be unlocked through research.
- Simple meals have no exceptional benefits or downsides. They print with identical nutrient efficiency to cooking them manually.
- Fine meals will give a mood buff, but have a disgustingly poor print efficiency, equivalent to lavish meals.
- High-efficiency nutrient paste will consume even less raw food per meal than a paste dispenser, but you’ll have to deal with the paste meal mood debuff.
- Colonists will not use a printer if its set meal type is forbidden by their food policy.
- Once researched, NutriBars can be printed in bulk from a printer’s toolbar. You can print up to 30 in one go, and each bar costs the same amount of nutrition as a simple meal – 0.5, or 10 units of most foodstuffs like rice. Bars last 75 days without refrigeration and are just as filling as a normal meal.
FAQ
Isn’t this a lot like Replimat?
Yes! I even used some code from Replimat to ease the process of patching the printer into the game’s existing nutrient paste workflow. However, Replimat is a great mod, but it’s balanced heavily towards the very “I don’t wanna leave the planet” end game of Rimworld. Meal Printer is a cheaper and simpler alternative for Rimworld’s mid-to-late game.
Why add NutriBars instead of just using packaged survival meals?
Primarily because PSMs have a market value of $24, meaning it’d be very easy to churn them out as silver fodder if you could just print them. I could have gone with pemmican, but I wanted something that was “one unit = one meal,” so I met in the middle and made NutriBars. (They have a market value of $5, if you were wondering.)
Compatibility notes
CURRENTLY NOT COMPATIBLE WITH Animal Controls. Nothing I can do about this AFAIK, only the author can fix his patch. When looking for a meal, colonists may rarely pick raw food over using the printer. This appears to either be a vanilla bug with food dispensers or a third-party mod conflict, since the same problem happens with regular paste dispensers w/o this mod installed. Forbidding raw food in your colonist’s food policies will prevent it, but there’s nothing I can do to fix it.
Other stuff:
Meal Printer should be safe to add to an existing save. You can also remove it mid-save, but deconstruct any printers and get rid of any NutriBars first.
Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you run into a bug, but PLEASE include any relevant information from the debug log if you do so.
Other supported languages:
Korean translation done by the wonderful isty2e on Github!
Simplified Chinese translation done by the wonderful IssacZhan on Github!
Attributions:
As required per license (CC BY-SA 4.0), Meal Printer uses Harmony and UI code from Replimat by Robin “sumghai” Chang and Dubwise. Your code made my life so much easier – thank you!
