Fine meal

A fine meal is a higher quality meal that requires both meat and vegetables to create.

Acquisition

Fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. A fine meal requires 0.25 units of nutrition from vegan items, 0.25 units of nutrition from meat or animal products -- this is equal to 5 units of raw vegetables and 5 units of meat or an equivalent nutritional yield of animal products. They require 450 ticks (7.5 secs) of work to make, and a Cooking skill of 6.

Summary

A fine meal can be eaten by humans or animals for 0.9 nutrition, or 90% of a human's hunger meter. As it takes 0.5 nutrition of raw food to create, fine meals provide 180% nutrition efficiency, equal to simple meals.

Eating a fine meal or its variants gives the +5 Ate fine meal moodlet for 24 hours. This moodlet stacks with the +12 Ate lavish meal from lavish meals. If the meal was made out of insect meat or human meat, their respective moodlets will be applied. If Ideology DLC is active and the meal was made out of raw fungus, its normal moodlet will also be applied.

Analysis

The vast majority of colonies produce both meat and vegetables, making fine meals an easy-to-implement mood buff for most players. As fine meals consume the same total nutrition as a simple meal, even if the production of meat and vegetables is not balanced, some portion of the total can be converted into fine meals while the remainder can be converted into simple meals with no loss. This is is as simple as queueing fine meals for cooking before any simple meals. The only downside is the minimum skill requirement and the 33% slower production rate.

Animals like chickens and cows can produce a continuous stream of edible products. Whether meat is easy to obtain is highly variable - hunting rats may not be worth it, but a ranching economy could be.

Insect meat only gives a −3 moodlet when cooked, which results in a net +2 mood when used for fine meals. If a colonist's ideoligion prefers insect meat, then fine meals of insect meat provide a great mood buff. If ideoligion permits cannibalism, then human meat can be used to the same effect.

Vegetarian fine meals give the same fine meal moodlet without using meat, at the cost of using +50% more food. Many colonies can afford to grow 50% more food; just 1 hour of a grower's time can "upgrade" multiple colonists from simple to vegetarian fine. Using vegetarian meals might take less work than regular fine meals. See vegetarian meal's Analysis section for more details.

Note you can make (vegetarian) fine meals fron the same amount of nutritional value using the regular fine meal recipe without meat see Vegetarian fine meal.

If colonist mood is alright with just simple meals, even during the worst draft conditions (hungry and tired), then fine and lavish meals can be saved for when a colonist is on verge of a mental break.