Calorie/kg chart that Accounts for Hydration

[MLParkOfficer]

While reading TheEldritchGod's excellent guide on weight management, I noticed that he suggested Crackers as a top tier food because of its high calorie to kg ratio. Crackers are definitely strong for a big calorie dose and their long shelf life, but I always wondered how to evaluate the hydration cost in eating the Crackers.

Since my general strategy is to try to eat as much meat as I can when not traveling to conserve high-value and non-smelly food for important trips, I try to mostly hydrate with water and have therefore assigned bonuses or maluses to each food's weight based on how much water (i) you can avoid carrying because of food hydration or (ii) you have to carry to make up for the hydration loss.

So the results in the rightmost column might not hold if you're using other, more compact sources of hydration, like soda or tea, and in that case, overall calorie density becomes more important than calorie+water density as your hydration sources become more concentrated.

INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS:

Condensed Milk is actually extremely dense nutrition if you can handle the can

Soda proves once again that it is OP

Peaches, Soup and Peanut Butter reaffirmed as low-value foods and Tin of Sardines is surprisingly dense if you find a good condition one

Most food hydration is a "good deal" compared to water

**Green means heatable, orange means canned food

***Tea and Coffee is too light to work using this framework, left the entry in as a curiosity

Edited July 25, 2020 by MLParkOfficer
font color? am I supposed to use white or black?

[gotmilkanot]

Best time to eat salty crackers is when you're completely dehydrated so probably when you just wake up from a 10-12 hours of sleep. Cattails, salty crackers and sodas are good for stashing as emergency food at bases if you tend to lead a nomadic lifestyle. Cattails and crackers don't decay at all and don't give you food poisoning. Sodas decay pretty quick even if you store inside but you get 0% chance of food poisoning even when it's ruined so I like to keep them at bases. Or you could just drink them on the go to lighten your weight if you have too many.

I'm very skeptical about eating chocolate bars, granola bars, peanut butter, sardines in the morning/during the day if they're below 75% condition since they have a small chance of giving you food poisoning which could pretty much ruin your whole day. I usually eat them at night, right when I'm about to sleep so even if I get food poisoning I just take antibiotics and sleep the 10 hours away.

Eventually if you live long enough, you won't have to worry about food poisoning and you'll end up with stockpiles of meat at your bases so you can just stuff your face before going on your trip.

[odizzido]

Tea and pop(it's pop in TLD despite what the devs say) are equivalent at cooking level 1. As soon as you get cooking 2 tea is better than pop. At cooking 3 for example, 250g of tea will give you 325 calories. At cooking 5 tea gives 375. Significantly more than pop.

That being said, while I do like to carry tea when I am going long distances I also carry an empty can or two. Water you can make pretty much anywhere anytime so you never really have to carry it. The tea I carry is more for higher need situations which may or may not happen.