hey so events in a recent run of mine made me have a small realization
so like. got hit by a skullcrusher because i was distracted. broke my neck. started running low on food because the area i was in didn't have a lot of sap and i couldn't really move a whole lot to find more. went into a life pod hoping i could get some food in there and wait for my neck to heal a bit, and technically i was right but the food it gave me was just a bar of chocolate. but thankfully item hoarding tendencies paid off because what i DID have was fifty million helluces sitting in a few of my bags. so while i was stuck in there for a bit, i would just alternate taking a bite of the chocolate, then downing an herb or two.
and as i'm doing this i make a connection.
consider.
post-casualties unknown the expies sorta reinvent mexican hot chocolate as a way to actually eat the chocolate from the supply pods without poisoning themselves.
unfortunately probably a temporary thing since chocolate's not exactly a renewable resource on the grey planet once things stop getting thrown at it, but honestly what that probably just means is that they'd try and find some other sweet food to combine it with. i feel like this would be a popular enough thing that people would try and find replacements once the chocolate supply ran out.
i think way too much about the food on this planet. like, after the mission's done and everyone left can just kinda live their own lives on the planet without the pressure of having to find the cargo, what would they make? because we're only like five layers in and there's already a pretty good variety of food sources. there's the stuff from the first layer obviously, that's pretty safe, but also like. you could probably find a way to grow bananas. the cavendish bananas you typically find commercially are genetically modified to be seedless, as far as i know they're propagated via cuttings like seedless grapes, but like. even with seedless fruit varieties you can occasionally still find a couple of tiny immature seeds. they're extremely unlikely to be fertile seeds and the alien climate and expies' lack of prior knowledge on how to actually grow these things would make this even harder, with with some luck and experimentation i imagine they could still probably figure something out. plus who knows, maybe in the future there's some new banana variety that overtakes cavendish bananas as the popular commercial type that actually does produce proper mature seeds.
like there's so much food in this game. and the part of my brain that grew up on neopets and cooking shows is extremely interested in how these weird alien foods actually work. what the hell is going on with leadbushes? because if you can figure that out then those are likely an extremely easy source of farmable meat. if adding snow strider dna to milkies resulted in rozas having boobs, does that mean snow striders produce milk? can you milk the angry snow tarantulas? and with the new in-progress stuff added in 7.0, you could DEFINITELY farm those things from the crystalline hollow. it'd be dangerous, but (as they exist currently, who knows if this'll change later) that is an extremely obvious source of infinite food. whoever's butchering those would just have to be EXTREMELY kitted out in armor or something to avoid being shredded, like a metal beekeeper's outfit. like there's so many things you could DO. the POSSIBILITIES.
also yes part of why i think of this so much is because i once had the thought of "could you make a good burger using ONLY stuff found on the grey planet". keyword being good. because yeah, you could easily just follow the ingame recipe and just get some meat and bread (the expies would probably invent their own sauce for burgers once ketchup started running out, similar to the chocolate thing), but like. that's too easy. and also kinda sad, even for me who doesn't tend to go too crazy with burger fillings. yes the "too easy" thought is partially fueled by the desire to try and make a real world equivalent of that theoretical burger. which i am likely never going to actually do partially because ingredients cost money and partially because every enemy in this game being spiders would probably mean i would have to figure out how to make a burger out of spiders. which can definitely be done, people do eat spiders, but i do not think i would have the stomach to make ground spider. no. just no. but the logistical challenge of figuring out what the closest real world equivalent to all the ingame plants and stuff would be is compelling enough that the idea's stuck in my head anyway even if i don't think it's possible using the very limited amount of information we get by nature of these just being video game items.
