Gas Range

The Gas Range is a late-game food building used to prepare luxury meals from a wide range of advanced ingredients. It is the higher-end cooking station for recipes that would otherwise be made in the Electric Grill or through intermediate processing, and it is one of the main ways to turn complex crops, meats, and refined ingredients into meals that raise morale and help keep Duplicants from becoming stressed.

Once a recipe is queued at a Gas Range, a Duplicant or an Auto-Sweeper can deliver the required ingredients to it. As soon as the ingredients are available, the meal can be cooked. Items stored inside the Gas Range do not spoil, making it useful as a temporary holding point for prepared ingredients while waiting for the final cook. Operating the building is a cooking task and consumes 240 W of power and 100 g/s of Natural Gas during use, while producing 25 g/s of Carbon Dioxide. Every Gas Range recipe has a base cooking time of 50 s, but the actual time depends mainly on the cook’s Cooking skill; higher skill shortens the job and reduces resource consumption.

The Gas Range also sterilizes its ingredients during cooking, destroying all germs present in the inputs. This makes it useful when working with contaminated food or ingredients gathered from less sanitary sources.

Luxury meals prepared at the Gas Range provide strong morale benefits. Among the recipes listed for the building are Stuffed Berry, Mushroom Wrap, Surf'n'Turf, Pepper Bread, Mushroom Quiche, Spicy Tofu, Frost Burger, Curried Beans, and Mixed Berry Pie. Several of these require ingredients that must first be prepared elsewhere, especially in the Electric Grill or Microbe Musher, so the Gas Range often sits near the top of a food-production chain rather than serving as the first cooking step.

A few practical notes:

• The building is best used with a high-skill cook, since skill lowers the real cooking time.
• Auto-Sweepers can keep the machine supplied automatically if ingredients are within reach.
• Because stored ingredients do not spoil, it can be used to buffer food production without immediate waste.
• The output meals are intended for morale management, so the Gas Range becomes especially valuable once a colony can support luxury dining rather than basic survival food.