Food Fundamentals: How to avoid starvation

Just like in real life, getting a food supply is fundamental in Unclaimed World and this guide will explain the gameplay basics about food and list a number of strategies.
The guide assumes that you have learned the very basics of the game by playing through the first tutorial 'The Castaways' and, at the minimum, tried the second tutorial 'The Clay Pit'.

INTRODUCTION

First, we answer the question: What Can Be Eaten On This Planet?
Most food types needs to be prepared before they can be eaten (raw tubers and meat is not edible for example).
As a general rule*, your colonists can only eat items that are in the Prepared Food category.
Open the Production Manager and you will see that some food items are listed in the Prepared Food section and some are listed in the Ingredients section. (Click the 'Attainable' or the 'Encyclopedia' button at the top right to learn more about items you don't currently own.)

It is your job to order preparation of food! Once there is Prepared Food available, your colonists will automatically go and eat it if they are hungry and have access/time to get to the food.

*) Some rarer ingredients can be eaten without preparation, for example Water cane seeds. Click on the item's data sheet - it'll say either EDIBLE TO HUMANS or INEDIBLE TO HUMANS IN THIS CONDITION.

GENERAL HINTS

Smoking/salting/pickling

Many ingredients can be turned into different types of Prepared food with different shelf life. Don't cook more food than your colony can eat before it expires. Food which only requires the campfire and/or pot will typically expire quickly. In the primitive world where the game takes place, there is typically no refrigeration and to build up a stockpile, you need to use preservation methods such as smoking, salting, pickling or fermenting.
The recipes you'll use the most are Smoked carbon tail and Smoked thunder chicken.
Open a food item's DATA sheet to see how many days it lasts.

High Prio

In the Task Manager, set all food production to HIGH, either by
-using the Asterisk * button found next to a cooking task
OR
-by finding 'Cooking' in the task type dropdown menu at the top and set it to HIGH
That way they will prioritize cooking tasks above other tasks. See image:

Starving

If a person has not had enough to eat, a red 'starving' icon (knife and fork) will appear. The red 'starving' icon will linger some time even after a person eats again. This is because the effects of starvation take a while to disappear, just like in real life.
Look at the nutrition bars under the 'starving' characters to see if all their nutrition needs have been met. When all 3 nutrition types (Calories, Protein and Micronutrients) are in green, the overall NUTRITION bar above them will also start to fill up, turn green and the 'starving' icon will disappear after a while - see image:

Too many tasks

Make sure that you don't order too many tasks at a time because this can cause inefficiency. Look in the Task Manager and see if there is a balance between the number of tasks and the number of colony members/tools available. Finding this balance helps to keep all kinds of production efficient. It takes some experimenting and is a main part of the game.

STRATEGIES (EASY)

These are some easy, fundamental strategies for getting a food supply set up. Note that we're mainly talking about the 'Fields of Tau Ceti' maps.

At the beginning of the game you want to look for quick ways to start building up a food stockpile. This will prevent starvation (and should also delay the quitting of camp members who have higher food principles.)

Gathering Food (Quick Start)

This method will quickly get you some food but does not give a steady food supply:

-Build a fireplace and gather some firewood (2-5 items).
-Use EXAMINE and then GATHER any Ingredients you find in the vicinity. Use the Resource window next to the minimap to get an overview of ingredient resources that have been found (see image)
By clicking the checkboxes (A1), the resources will light up on the minimap (A2). When the SCAN button is activated (B1) those same resources will also light up on the game area (B2). If the resource grows on a plant, the plant will be glowing, if the resource is on the ground or in the water, it will light up as icons.



-When you've gathered some food, cook it on the campfire.

This is not a long-term strategy because the ingredients you find in the vicinity will get exhausted and take some time to regrow/reappear and also the food you make on the campfire is not preserved so you cannot build up a big stockpile before the food rots.
NOTE: Some food resources such as fish will reappear rather quickly and you COULD place a standing GATHER order on an area with many fish.

Fish trap + Smoked carbon tail

This method is probably the easiest way to provide food in the long term - fish spots give a steady output and smoked fish last long, allowing you to build up a big stockpile.

-Use EXAMINE and find any fresh water / fish weir locations in the vicinity (Marked with a tag that says Freshwater fish location / Fish weir location )
-Click on the prod. Info button and see what it requires to place a fish trap on the location.
-Get those materials and place the fish trap(s)
-Build smoke ovens.

Camp members will automatically go and check the fish traps and bring back any 'carbon tail' that has been caught. But you need to cook the fish before it spoils:
-Make a standing order of up to 99 Smoked carbon tail (use the 'padlock' button next to the order slider)

Fuel: Firewood
You also need to make sure that there is always fuel in stock. Use a standing order like this (see image):

-Make a 15X15 tile zone around an area with trees, click GATHER and see if there is 30+ firewood in the zone, if not make a bigger zone or find another location.
-Then click the padlock icon (The order control turns yellow) and place a standing order of 5 firewood.
Your camp members will then automatically top up your firewood reserves whenever they drop below 5.



NOTE:
The saltwater fish spots require more expensive materials for a fish trap before those spots can be exploited.

Favorbread farming

This is a quick way to set up vegetable production in forest areas:

By using EXAMINE you can find dead Sanctuary trees where you can build a so-called Favorbread farm.
-Build the Favorbread farm
You need to have a supply of blackpulp to keep this going, so
-EXAMINE the surroundings, make a GATHER zone around a patch of blackpulp and place a standing order (padlock button) of app. 3 blackpulp. The blackpulp will regrow several times a year.
-Make a standing order of around 10 favorbread.

The favorbread can be eaten without preparation.

Farm plots

Unless you start out specially equipped for this, wait with farming until you have a big stockpile or a steady supply of food. Farming requires quite a bit of work in tending the fields and if you start to farm without enough food stockpiled, you can face starvation before the crop is ready.

-Farm spots are easily found by using EXAMINE.
-Click the farm spot and Establish farm plot.
-Once done, click the farm plot and click BEGIN to plant a crop type that you have seeds for. (look in the production tooltip on the farm plot menu to see how many seeds are needed).
NOTE: Even though you DO NOT have the needed seeds, you are still able to click BEGIN. Therefore, check the Task Manager to see if the task starts or if you are missing seeds.
-Your colonists will tend to the farm on their own and automatically harvest and then replant when the time comes. Make sure that you have some left over seeds for replanting.
-After each crop cycle, soil quality will go down and output will diminish. Make sure that you have fertilizer available, so the plot can be automatically fertilized. (Requires 'Medium' Tech tier.)

STRATEGIES (INTERMEDIATE)

These are food strategies that are a bit more difficult to pull off or require specialized starting equipment.

Greenhouses

The advantage of these is that they can be set up anywhere. Also, it is the only way to grow the Finger fruit.

Thunder chicken hunting/trapping

In some areas, thunderchickens are so plentiful that they can be a steady source of food. As a bonus, you will get hides which you can use for trade.
-Setup a HUNT zone in the area where you've spotted them and place a standing order (padlock button) of no more than 3.
-Place standing orders on around 6 thunderchicken meat and a standing order of either Thunder chicken skewers or Smoked thunder chicken, depending on how many chickens are coming in. Also use the guts: Set a standing order of around 10 Thunder chicken stew.

-Combine hunting with traps: Either simple bushcraft traps or iron traps can be set up near choke points or places where the animals regularly appear.

NOTE: Only carcasses that are the result of hunting or trapping will automatically be added to the inventory. Any other carcasses you have to select CLAIM before you can butcher them.

-On some maps, there are periodically migrations of bajingan - a type of thunder chicken which eats your food but is itself a food source. When you know their migration route, you can set up traps in preparation for the next migration event (which will be announced by one of the camp members).

Turnip hunting

The turnip animal yields a lot of food but special tools are required to open its shell - examine the production tool tips to determine if you have one of these tools before you waste ammo shooting one.
-To kill it, you need at least a blackpowder rifle and many rounds of ammo - but with a bolt action or coil rifle you spend fewer rounds.
-Once killed, you order meat from the Production Manager. Make sure that you have smoke ovens up soon, because you will need to smoke a lot of meat quickly before it rots.
-Consider having a simple kitchen so that you can make sausages/salami from the guts.
-Its guts can also be used for making transparent sheets for a simple greenhouse.

CLOSING REMARK

There are many more ways to acquire food and cook food. We haven't talked about methods for food storage in order to protect the food from scavengers and extend its shelf life. Or the Ledger panel which shows exactly how much food has been produced, eaten and lost. Or the Nutrition Graph panel.
This guide is just a starting point. You'll learn much more from playing and if anything is unclear, visit the forums or leave a comment on this guide so we can keep it up to date!
Thanks for reading.

[Refactored Games]

@Unreal_Gam3er : In short, the SECURITY rating goes up with the number and quality of weapons in your colony and goes down if colony members are hurt or killed by wildlife. The COMFORT rating goes up with the quality of houses and stimulants. You'll find out more by checking out the tooltips on your Colony rating display and on the data sheets for the various weapons/houses/stimulants.

[Good Old Gamer]

i know its old bbut thank you for this (just came back to the game) and i was having massive issues with the *rubber parts* tutorial because of this!... as an addded note, if your still about i would like to know how to increase the *sec* and *comfort* ratings please?

[Refactored Games]

@HumanGarbage could be that you have production bottlenecks. Make sure you have enough tools/fuel available. If they have to share a single cookpot or a single fireplace for lots of tasks, that's a bottleneck, time to get more pots or reduce the orders.
Look in your task manager and make sure that the number of tasks is not too high...it has to be balanced with the resources available. If you're unsure how to see the production requirements, look at this screenie here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=897908288

[HumanGarbage]

My issue is that I'll have plenty of raw food stockpiled, and like 30 orders for cooking, set at high priority - and yet 90% of the time NOBODY is cooking anything.

[AirFlow]

Thanks for this.

[JagarKlato]

Thanks a lot for guide. I had tons of oil tubbers, but I was unable to cook effectively (Clay Pit scenario) it was kinda frustrating a lot of people left. Looks like, I need better management

[guardianru]

Thanks for that, yes. But the situation is so-so. Its not a complaint, because its your game, well, but for now i can't feel normally about my supplies and storages for even little time perspective, and that isn't good.

[Refactored Games]

@guardianru Have you looked at the food ledger panel, which you open from one of the buttons on the right side of the screen ? It has a quite a lot of information. I looks like this: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/284100/ss_cb7567cf0b5390a0cd11121004faa6a85bdbf351.jpg?t=1475681524
From the dropdown menu at the top of that panel you can also choose 'nutrition' and see how many days you can provide nutrition. (doesn't take into account spoilage, though)

Just want to make sure that you've seen that panel.

[guardianru]

just for now its too supermicromanaged. Disliked that a lot because of great disadvantage - no refregerators. Diginng hole and freezing there or clay granary - are good? well... when i can't analize how much food is prodused/rott and keep just 5-10 days supply just for freeing colonists from food-work tasks - its greatly annoying. Looking for each dish when it would rott is just idiotic in the UI of the game. Not usable.