Vertical irrigation!
Fish ponds and water filters that look like serving dishes for some reason!
I have a sinking feeling this whole water thing would be quite complicated if we implemented it, so I am glad Nate is a systems guy, and I trust him to not get in over his head.
We were talking about how cooking might work, like how much food is cooked at one time, how it's stored and consumed, etc. I mentioned that despite whatever the optimal game design is, I did not want to keep track of colonists' food likes and dislikes.
As a person who makes meals for three picky children in real life, turns out my ultimate gameplay fantasy is "everyone eats the same thing for dinner and likes it." Go figure.
I jokingly added, "AND ALSO whoever cooked the food is highly regarded."
Nate said that hey actually, there was something to that.
Maybe the person who cooked the stew does get a little social bump from the people who ate it. And maybe the person who harvested the potatoes gets a social bump from the cook. Maybe the doctor gets appreciated by their patients. Maybe the wall-builder appreciates the person who helped them haul stone. All that would be on top of the normal social bumps that people would get from interaction "events" (advising, teaching, complimenting, gift-giving, etc). You could have a world where not only are the colonists doing work, but they're appreciating each other's work, driving a chunk of that organic under-the-hood growth of relationships over time.
It's hard to think through whether that would create weird game incentives, but I bet we could get around them and try to keep the "appreciation" economy relatively balanced.