You can spike a ration up to 3 times actually. So eating a single ration on day 1 could actually be a day 1 full conversion, since the Mush can get up to four spores and do as many kitchen plants as they want.
Also, ugh, my ship. I'm glad there were a couple non-terrible people on it, but even if we'd 100% identified the Mush we couldn't have done anything about it. 5 days of dedicated planet scanning by not just Frieda but two others, with Frieda benefitting from my logistics skill, and we didn't find a single planet with o2.
We had a good-as-inactive Chao, a good-as-inactive Eleesha, an Ian who ragequit because we tried mush-hunting through conversation, a Hua who flipped her shit over the whole spore-sucker mechanical attempt at mush-hunting and attempted to undermine every attempt at organization the crew made, (what the fuck DID they want us to do? Who knows.) an inactive Raluca, a Finola who logged on once a day for 10 minutes (still better than the as-good-as-inactives) and a Chun who said maybe 10 lines the entire game and made mistakes with half of them, a Giole who didn't speak any English (I actually enjoyed having him aboard though, it was clear he was google translating and reading absolutely everything, but communication was sometimes difficult).
Just... ugh. What a miserable experience. That was the highest numbers of worthless or easily butthurt players I have ever seen in this game.
At least I had a great Roland, Terrence, and a decent Jin Su and Giole on board. Had some fun times, regardless.
I am definitely not interested in doing another MMM ship though, seriously encountered the highest number of just miserable people to play with ever on this run ever.
I'd be up for another Bay12 attempt this weekend though. If there's two others who are interested, I know we can /at least/ all get on the same ship with three of us, if we have patience.