The math on Chip with Salsa

BladeWoods · 2019-03-31 05:17:30

Chip with Salsa,
A bit of a nightmare in steps and calculation

Each chip with salsa is 10 food, a bowl of salsa and a bowl of chips both have 5 uses, so you get 50 food at a time.

A bowl of salsa is the easy part
To make the salsa you need the new onion, tomato, and hot pepper plant
Each new plant grows very normally, taking one tilled soil and one watering
A tomato plant provides 6 tomatos, an onion row provides 5 onions, and a hot pepper plant provides 4 hot peppers
It costs 1 tomato to make 5 tomato seeds, so you're only getting 5.8 tomatos per farm.
It costs 1 pepper to get 1 pepper seed, so you're netting 3 peppers.
Onion is a little weird, you must plant and grow a blooming onion to get the seeds for a new row.
So it costs 1 onion and 1 farming, to get get the seeds for a new onion row.
So 4 onions costs 2 farming. Or you net only 2 onions per farm.

So the cost of the salsa is 1/5.8 + 1/2 + 1/3 = 1.005 units of farming
The cost of 4 bowls of salsa is 4.02 farming

Now the chips
We need our dreaded corn tortilla to make a bowl of chips. The same corn tortilla used to make pork tacos.
1 bowl of masa dough makes 4 corn tortillas. So 4 is made at a time.
1 bowl of masa dough takes 1 corn or 0.25 farming (since each corn stalk gives 4 corn), 1 limestone (a limited resource you must gather (terrible)), 1 heating in the freaking forge, 2 bowls of water, 1 cooking on hot coals, and 1 cooking on a hot flat rock.
Each of these cooking steps should be done with many tortillas or other food items at once to minimize the cost of the kindling used. So it only costs 1 'fraction' of a kindling to cook on hot coals. You also should be using the same hot coals to make the hot flat rock, saving on a kindling.

Using the forge takes charcoal which only takes 1 kindling to make, but a firing forge only lasts 30 seconds compared to the 2 minutes of hot coals and a hot flat rock. So the forge step is in a sense 4 times more expensive than a normal cooking on hot coals or hot flat rock. So the total cost is 0.25 farming + 1 limestone + 2 bowls of water + 5 'fractions' of kindling per 4 tortillas

But you also need to cook in simmering palm oil to finish the tortilla chips. This is the same palm oil used to make rubber tires.
The oil takes palm kernels which is renewable and costs practically nothing if you're by a jungle, 1 bowl of water, and 2 cookings in the oven.
A hot oven only lasts 1 minute, so using hot coals as a basis, 2 cookings in the oven will cost 4 'fractions' of kindling.
Then the oil must be put on hot coals to get simmering oil. The simmering oil lasts 2 minutes and can be used repeatedly. So it only takes a 'fraction' of oil to make 1 bowl of chips
We're making 4 at a time from our masa dough so that's 4 'fractions'.

So in total, to get 20 chips with salsa or 200 food, it costs 4.27 farming, 1 limestone, 2 bowls of water, 5 'fractions' of kindling, and 4 'fractions' of (1 palm kernels, 1 bowl of water, 1 kindling, and 4 'fractions' of kindling). Fractions in fractions are fun.

So, it seems like chips with salsa are really awful. How awful depends on how optimal you are. But even if you're super optimal it's still awful. However since we are talking about chips with salsa it feels natural for it to be a yum food only and not a serious staple food. Would be silly otherwise.

Edit: Updated to include 4 uses of masa and seed costs

Last edited by BladeWoods (2019-03-31 16:56:41)

DestinyCall · 2019-03-31 06:02:38

I wish slack lime could be made byusing the bucket instead of using a bowl. One bowl of plaster into a full bucket gives you a bucket of slacked lime - 10 bowls per limstone.

It would make mass producing corn tortillas much more feasible.

Starknight_One · 2019-03-31 12:57:25

While I appreciate the effort, your math seems to imply that you only get a single bowl of corn chips from an ear of corn. Since a bowl of masa dough has 4 uses, this is incorrect.

So, for one bowl of corn chips, it would be 1/16 of a unit of farming, not 1/4. Similarly, 1/4 of the limestone and materials to slake it and 1/2 a bowl of water. The heatings on the coals and hot rocks don't change, though.

I realize this doesn't make the math any easier. But it's important to be accurate.

Anandamide · 2019-03-31 14:20:56

Also, another thing is this assumes wild seed. If you are reseeding the math gets much hairier with an infinite series. This series likely converges though so if someone feels like working it out (Ferna cough cough). Maybe we could model the farming system as a differential equation, or a system of differential equations, and then we could get a better picture of the best strategies depending on if you wanna optimize for labor/soil/water/iron and go from there.

BladeWoods · 2019-03-31 16:34:35

Starknight_One wrote:

While I appreciate the effort, your math seems to imply that you only get a single bowl of corn chips from an ear of corn. Since a bowl of masa dough has 4 uses, this is incorrect.
So, for one bowl of corn chips, it would be 1/16 of a unit of farming, not 1/4. Similarly, 1/4 of the limestone and materials to slake it and 1/2 a bowl of water. The heatings on the coals and hot rocks don't change, though.
I realize this doesn't make the math any easier. But it's important to be accurate.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out. I missed that.
Tried to correct for that and added the seed costs so we're no longer using wild tomato, onion, and pepper seeds which makes a huge difference in the cost of the salsa.

Last edited by BladeWoods (2019-03-31 16:58:44)

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-03-31 05:17:30

The math on Chip with Salsa

#2 2019-03-31 06:02:38

Re: The math on Chip with Salsa

#3 2019-03-31 12:57:25

Re: The math on Chip with Salsa

#4 2019-03-31 14:20:56

Re: The math on Chip with Salsa

#5 2019-03-31 16:34:35

Re: The math on Chip with Salsa

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