Menu Makeover: Rationalizing RAT

Feedback
,
1

The order for RAT recipes in game can be confusing as it feels out of order. This can be seen when applying colors to the ordering of RAT. Red Orange Yellow for the protein components, Blue Cyan for the glyceride, and Pink Purple for the grain.

Production menu
Production menu1008×1300 250 KB

In the production menu, this is a little scrambled. The BEA based recepies (which are likely the most used) are near the bottom and disjoint. The other columns likewise have no order to them. The most used two are at the bottom, not grouped, and not adjance to each other.

This is even more difficult with MAT RAT which looks like:

MAT RAT
MAT RAT640×1058 163 KB

This is not only in a different order, but the columns no longer remain consistent across food groups with GRN appearing in all three columns.

It would be nice if these could be reordered so that they were grouped together. Proteins only in the first column, and grouped, glycerides in the second and fibers in the third. The 2nd and third columns can be flipped, though I believe it would be less confusing this way as there is less variability in the choices made for the fibers than for the glycerides (BEA | GRN | ??? being more common than BEA | MAI | ???) Each section is alphabetically ordered and grouped.

ALG | GRN | NUT
ALG | GRN | VEG
ALG | MAI | NUT
ALG | MAI | VEG

BEA | GRN | NUT
BEA | GRN | VEG
BEA | MAI | NUT
BEA | MAI | VEG

MUS | GRN | NUT
MUS | GRN | VEG
MUS | MAI | NUT
MUS | MAI | VEG

(Tangent: it would be itneresting to see if my belief that BEA | GRN | ??? is more common than either BEA | MAI | ??? or BEA | ??? | NUT or BEA | ??? | VEG - I suspect that ??? | MAI | VEG may have have a signficant blip on the frequency though when taking into account ALG and MUS)

8 Likes
2

Well in the written! I completely agree. It was and still is very confusing for me.

1 Like
3

I remember starting out and trying to figure out the RAT recipes. I actually had to transcribe them into my spreadsheet to figure out the pattern. Until you know what you’re looking for, it’s really hard to figure out what’s going on there. The ordering Shagie proposed would be a big help.

It was especially tricky to figure out that you need BEA to make RATs when you only have FRM access from the MAT RAT page.

4

And it directly runs into the new player introduction too - I bet a few frustrations have been had trying to figure out which one you need to use and trying to match the symbols.

Maybe some system which visually highlights the recipes that you can build with the resources in your inventory. It would make finding the right RAT recipes much easier and give a visual hint to new players. And this works for any recipe, so it’s very quick to see which ones are applicable to that base!