[RDY] Replaces vacuum sealer requirements on sealed glass jar recipes with canning pot, to simulate water bath method

[Regilith]

Summary

SUMMARY: Balance "Removes the vac_sealer requirement from sealed glass jar recipes, adds canning pot, updates recipes."

Purpose of change

Removes unrealistic vacuum sealer requirement for canned jar recipes.

The requirement was added with the introduction of sealed soups and such in #11040 without justification for it. You can vacuum seal jars of food, but it is unnecessary for boiled liquids because the act of boiling and canning automatically makes it self seal while also sterilizing it. It isn't necessary.

Source: https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html

Or just google how to can. You pour the stuff in the jar, put water in the pot, put the jar in the pot and boil for 15 min, which seals anything which has any liquid in it.

Describe the solution

Remove the vacuum sealer requirements from the recipes. Adds canning pot, makes recipes use canning pot instead, modify recipes to emulate canning via water bath method.

[kevingranade]

See #22526 for some discussion of this.

Tl;dr

There is no requirement in these recipes to have a sufficiently large pot to do waterbath canning canning, e.g. http://www.freshpreserving.com/waterbath-canning.html

If you want to make it that kind of recipe, you need to adjust the recipe to match how that kind of recipe works, not just make arbitrary adjustments. i.e. it needs a pot that is at least 2x the volume of the jar to be sealed, and require water to be used as part of the recipe. This complexity is part of the reason that this much simpler recipe was used.

Your source supports this, it calls for (optional) pre-cooking and (mandatory) water-bath sterilization.

[Regilith]

It seems kind of silly to require a massive pot to make a single .5L jar (though I concur that, if you want to kill 100% of all microbes in a jar, it needs to be fully submerged). For the 3L jar, yeah I could definitely see having a large-sized pot required.

It seems sillier to have a vacuum sealer as part of the recipe, though, and not have the capability of canning a .5L jar with a half-gallon pot, open kettle style. The pots you are referencing are used to boil 6+ mason jars at once.

Open kettle canning is just cook the food in a bot, pour it into a sterilized jar, screw the lid on, and flip it over. There's no bath required. There is a real issue of food spoilage with the method, but considering the sources of food that your average survivor eats aren't exactly the safest, I think it can be handwaved aside for the sake of simplicity.

If we wanted to have it perfectly realistic, I would add a "large pot" or "canning pot" item into the game, add ~15 water to the recipe requirements, and drastically reduce the time spent when you batch craft. The item would probably drop in restaurants and kitchens.

In either case, it would be more realistic than having the vacuum sealer as part of it.

Do you want me to implement the traditional, open kettle style for .5L jars, and just have it require a pot, or should I add the canning pot?

[kevingranade]

Do you want me to implement the traditional, open kettle style for .5L jars, and just have it require a pot, or should I add the canning pot?

Add the canning pot.
That's going to be simpler anyway, open-kettle also requires tools to sterilize the jars.

[nexusmrsep]

Bucket (steel version) can be a fine option for this feature.

[hameleona]

@kevingranade You do not need to sterilize jars to seal them. Otherwise we should do it before we pour anything in them. It's not a sealing effort, it's a hygienic one.

[kevingranade]

You do not need to sterilize jars to seal them.

It depends on the process, with water-bath canning, the jar is sterilized along with the food in the water bath. With open kettle packing, the jar must be sterilized before use. Since we dont have a way to track sterilization state of a jar, that Means sterilization needs to happen in the same recipe.

[hameleona]

Well, water-bath canning is what we were talking about. Currently I don't really see anything suggested here that would require the other method in-game (at least I think most stuff in here is doable with a water bath). Would be nice if they both get fleshed out, tho,

[Regilith]

I've created the 25L canning pot, and now have to decide on how to handle the canning recipes. After talking in Discord, Kevin wants to either have the recipe consume and have water as a byproduct, or change the .5L jar recipes to create the canned jars in batches of multiples. I am entertaining the idea of creating a "prepped" canning pot by combining water and the canning pot, and use that in the recipe instead.

You would combine 80 water and the canning pot to make the prepped version, which would be just a simple copy-from

Consume / have water as a byproduct:

Pros:

• Simplest and least intrusive
• Doesn't rely on making an intermediate item
• Allows crafting of individual canned jars

Cons:

• Realistically, you would need 20L, or 80 water, to fully submerge a single jar in the canning pot. If you wanted to batch craft 20 jars of V8, it would consume 1600 water initially, which is insane. That's 8 beer kegs worth of water.
• Because of the above, this is very batch craft - unfriendly
• If you wanted to make the water usage sane, you'd need to abstract the water usage and have it only consume 10 water or less per jar, which defeats the purpose of making the recipe realistic
• Because we are trying to make canning "realistic", it seems silly to make the portions of water required either be inadequate, or insanely high, not to mention the power required to boil 80L of water.
• If this method was implemented, there would be major pushback against the water usage from the playerbase

Change recipes to create multiples of sealed jars, 4 or 6:

Pros:

• Normalizes the water requirement somewhat
• Is realistic in that these types of pots are normally used to can 6+ jars of food at a time
• Drastically reduces time spent on crafting multiples of an item

Cons:

• The player is unable to can individual jars (It causes recipe bloat to have multiple listings of creating items for a process which should be handled by batch crafting)
• The player needs multiple glass jars in order to can
• The player needs 4x to 6x the ingredients to can
• Still runs into the issue of unrealistic water usage when batch crafting

Create a "filled" or "prepped" variant of the canning pot, and use that for canning:

Pros:

• Has the most realistic water usage
• Is very batch-craft friendly
• Has the most realistic power usage
• Can be used for individual jars

Cons:

• Unintuitive, would need to have proper instructions in the description
• Is kind of a hack, but until the game allows using containers with a specific amount of liquid in them as a tool, it works

The last option is to make canning a use action, which would probably work the best, but I don't know how to code. If you want to do it that way instead of any of the options above, or some variant of them, just close the PR.

[Regilith]

I decided to go with Kevin's suggestion and just have it consume a flat amount of water, and abstract the water usage to keep the requirements sane in batch crafting. I modified the description of the pot to give a justification for it, where the survivor would fill the pot up with rocks or something to displace the water above the lid(s).

I'm open to suggestions on the description for the canning pot to make it simpler.

Another question, should I remove the "food cooking 3 or more" requirement, because one of the requirements for these recipes is the canning pot, which already has that cooking level?

I decided to leave cooking times the same, but I can slap on ~20 minutes if necessary.

Also wondering how much to reduce time to batch craft by.

[Regilith]

Batch crafting seems to be good. It takes 2.5 hours to make 20 canned soup of all the recipes save bone soup, which takes longer. This pot would hold 6-7 jars at a time, You cook 20 soup in ~1 hour, and spend the next 1.5 canning it in 30 min intervals.

Sticking with the current description for the canning pot unless someone complains.

Gonna leave the cooking times unchanged, unless someone complains.

Gonna leave the cooking 3 requirement, as it kind of signifies that you are first cooking the soup in a pot, and then sealing it up with the canning pot.

[Regilith]

Canning leaves clean water as a byproduct, because 1) If you do it properly, you aren't going to have food mix with the water, and 2) The player expects that boiling any source of water, be it from a river, a puddle, a toilet, etc will make it purify it. It also avoids the problem of using clean water to can, have unpurified water as a byproduct, then the player boils it again to purify it again, which would be nonsensical.

[Regilith]

The timings might be in question, but this should be good to go.

[Mecares]

A regular bucket can contain 20 litres of water is there any reason it could not be used as container for those recipes? If not other items might be usable as well.

Dissambly of the pot could be into small metal sheet instead of steel lumps.

Did you miss the components in the recipe to craft the pot? All i see in the recipe are the tools used.

[Regilith]

A bucket contains 5L, not 20L.

Water bath canning requires a bit more specialized tools and setup than just submerging the jars in boiling water. Technically the jars need to be elevated ~1 inch above the bottom of the container to allow water to circulate beneath, so you would need to find some kind of rack to use with the bucket. The jars also need to be covered by at least 2 inches of water. You would normally also put a lid on top of the pot while it's cooking, which a bucket probably wouldn't have.

I could see it being handwaved, but then there would be no reason to get the canning pot, which is much more cumbersome, making the bucket strictly better.

The components are called using [ "steel_standard", 6 ], which is 6 steel lumps, 24 chunks of steel, or 120 scrap metal.

It would be 20 small metal sheets, or 6 lumps of steel. I'm ambivalent towards either.

[cake-pie]

I did the rationalization of sheet metal sizes #25210, so if I may offer some advice: depending on thickness, one sheet metal is roughly in the range of 70cm × 70cm × 1.53mm to 1m × 1m × 0.75mm ; small sheet metal is roughly 15 × 15cm to 20 × 20cm dimensions. This offers some room for variation / handwavium.

For your canning pot, a 25L vessel, you're looking at something like a cylinder with diameter 30cm, height 36cm which has surface area approx 0.41m² (0.48m² with lid).

The most appropriate input for constructing it is probably a single sheet metal, cut and welded -- instead of solid pieces, which is what steel_standard represents.

Deconstruction should not return an intact sheet, so consider yielding a combination of small sheets for the pieces that you managed to cut out nicely, maybe a couple chunks of steel for the parts that ended up crumpled, and some scrap to cover the balance.

HTH.

[Regilith]

I was basing my numbers off the steel keg recipe, which takes

13x lump of steel OR 52x chunk of steel OR 260x scrap metal

to fabricate, and is twice the capacity.

I'm fine with replacing it with your suggestion, though finding an intact steel sheet would be a lot harder than just smashing a car for the necessary metal. It would probably be best to use that method though.

[Regilith]

Removed the forging requirements, as what is essentially happening is the player is cutting the sheet metal into squares and welding them together into a box. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to function.

[cake-pie]

the steel keg recipe

Yeah, #25210 only dealt with rationalizing recipes that were already using sheet metal, and did not include other recipes that were using solid steel in lieu of sheets. I really ought to get around to checking and updating those.

finding an intact steel sheet would be a lot harder than just smashing a car for the necessary metal

Not really; instead of smashing (a lossy process that yields lumps, chunks, scrap) you can remove parts via the vehicle construction screen and thus reclaim the item they were constructed from. e.g. sawing off a quarterpanel will net you an intact steel sheet.

Removed the forging requirements

You forgot the anvil and tongs.

[Regilith]

Updated