Nutrient Bar

Nutrient Bar is a basic, packaged food item that provides 800 kcal per unit. It is one of the foods that can be found at the start of a colony and can also be obtained from ruined Vending Machines and from Printing Pod care packages. At world start, the Ration Box beside the Printing Pod contains 20 Nutrient Bars for a total of 16,000 kcal.

As a Duplicant food, Nutrient Bar can be eaten by anything that accepts calorie-based foods, and it is also valid fuel for the tree. Because the tree consumes food based on mass rather than calories directly, Nutrient Bar sits in the middle of the pack in terms of resin output efficiency: with its 800 kcal/kg density, the tree consumes about 26 kg per cycle and produces about 106 kg of Liquid Resin per cycle before venting losses are taken into account. Higher-calorie foods improve per-cycle output more effectively, so Nutrient Bar is useful, but not ideal, as a resin-production input compared with denser late-game meals.

A few practical notes apply when using it for the tree:

• The tree only grabs food from the center-bottom block beneath it, so Nutrient Bar must be placed there.
• The tree is hostile and will damage nearby Duplicants, so feeding it safely requires keeping workers out of reach.
• It is immune to Food Poisoning, so spoiled-food concerns do not apply to it.
• Since Nutrient Bar is relatively calorie-dense compared with early raw foods, it produces more resin per unit of food than lower-density options such as Meal Lice or Grubfruit, but less than advanced meals like Surf'n'Turf or Frost Burger.

Nutrient Bar was previously called Field Ration.