#alterra

What even is this thing? What does it do?

According to the in-game description, fabricators have the power to rearrange matter at the atomic level. They are used for everything from constructing everyday implements to cooking dinner. Cooking is a process that often involves a lot of chemistry. However, you can't extract pure water from seawater with just a fabricator, you need a specialized machine which requires much more power. That means that fabricators have difficulty undoing chemical bonds which would be needed to remove dissolved salt from water. Therefore fabricators should have at least the following functions:

Construct: Mold a material into a preprogrammed shape. (Example: Air tank)

Copy: Creates a precise physical copy of an existing object using scan data. (Example: Purple Tablet)

Extract / Refine: Extract a substance of a known chemical composition from material. (Example: Silicone, Benzene) Source material must have high concentrations of desired substance, and will undergo significant texture changes.

Desiccate: Remove all liquid from material. (Example: Cured Fish)

Hydrate / Reconstitute: Add water to a material. (Source: According to the abandoned PDA entry in the canteen of the Aurora called "Today's Menu" you can reconstitute nutrient blocks at a fabricator.)

Synthesize / Composite: Add two or more substances together to create a material of a different chemical composition. (Example: Polyaniline)

Interlace: Add a substance evenly throughout a different substance without significantly changing its chemical composition. (Example: Cured Fish)

Cook / Sterilize: Heat material evenly to a specific temperature. (Example: Cooked Fish)

Salt Preserve: Remove all liquid from material and add salt evenly throughout (using the desiccate and interlace functions.) (Example: Cured Fish)

Dress: Gut and de-bone a fish (or any small animal.) (Source: The PDA tells you that’s what it’s doing the first time you cook a fish in the original subnautica game.)

Potential Additional Cooking Functions:

Dice / Chop: Divide a material into even pieces.

Purée: The extreme version of chopping.

Cool / Chill: The inverse of heating. At least a little bit of this would be required to make sure you don’t burn yourself on freshly fabricated things that involve heat. (Imagine touching a freshly cooked fish, or worse, something that involved melting metal. The lawsuits would be huge.)

Mix / Homogenize: Create an even mixture out of a material. (This is basically interlacing taken to an extreme.)

Pasteurize: Sterilize a substance without cooking it. (If you can cook it, you can pasteurize it. It’s just a matter of controlling the temperature precisely.)

Candy Preserve: Remove all liquid from material and add sugar evenly throughout (similar to salt preservation.)

Vacuum Pack: Put a substance into a vacuum sealed container. (Example: Spicy fruit salad.)

Canning / Jarring: Put a substance into a sealed container and sterilize it. (Similar to vacuum packing but with additional sterilization.)

Emulsify: Mix water and oil using an emulsifying agent which is able to chemically bond to both water and oil to create a stable mixture. Mayonnaise is an example of a substance that has been emulsified. Some natural emulsifying agents are things like garlic, eggs, honey, fruit pectin, and gelatin. Emulsification is similar to the synthesize/composite function of the fabricator, since it creates chemical bonds.

The Mercury II had a guy who was able to jailbreak fabricators, and he successfully made falafel with it. So how would cooking with a jailbroken fabricator work?

Falafel with a fabricator:

Rehydrate chickpeas.

Finely chop and mix together chickpeas and seasonings.

Chill the chickpea mixture.

Mix in baking powder and form into balls.

Traditionally the next step involves deep frying the chickpea balls in oil, but the fabricator could probably do this by interlacing small amounts of oil only on the surface of the balls and then cooking them.

Totally doable with the above fabricator functions. And once you had results you liked, you could input the settings into the fabricator as a recipe and have it do it all in one go instead of doing it one step at a time.

I like them a lot and this is only a few (472+ i havent updated it in ages tho)

Хочу как райли поджопинсон попасть на необитаемую планету с разными тварями чтобы меня сожрали

THIS IS NOT CANON. THIS IS NOT CANON. THIS IS NOT CANON. THIS IS NOT CANON. THIS IS NOT CANON.

Considerations below the cut 💙