Farming tips?

[Blian]

So I built a nice little outpost with stone and stuff and my only problem is that I have to import food. I have a medium wheat farm and the largest cactus farm. The wheat farm sucks cause the output is only around 50% but the other has 90% output (I'm on arid-ish land) but it's still not enough to feed my people. I can only make 3-4 chewsticks/harvest currently. Any suggestions?

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

build more farms.

[Mr. Bear]

Originally posted by HaTsUnE_NeKo:

build more farms.

Pretty cut and dry, but it's actually the solution.

The more detailed explanation is that one farm, no matter if its XL, will never ever be sufficient for anything, so if you are lacking on something or a resource for food then... well...

Originally posted by HaTsUnE_NeKo:

build more farms.

[GrumpyDave73]

fishing will save you. i try to build on/or near fruitful water.
assign a guy to man the fishing pole and a guy to man the drying racks and food barrel.
with 2 or 3 poles in the water you can pile-up hundreds of fish and dried fish.
you can make a killing at your shop counter selling fish to passing travelers. and be more than flush with food.

[yippeekiay]

Isn't fishing a mod?

As for farming, make sure you use the same people as they will build up their skill & farm quicker & harvest more as they won't fail so much. One fairly well skilled person can farm numerous farms at once with ease.

[GrumpyDave73]

Originally posted by yippeekiay:

Isn't fishing a mod?

As for farming, make sure you use the same people as they will build up their skill & farm quicker & harvest more as they won't fail so much. One fairly well skilled person can farm numerous farms at once with ease.

yes fishing is indeed a mod... mods are good...

[Beserker]

Definitely get multiple farms going for food production until you start generating a surpplus so if you ever run into toruble you have something to fall back on. Yea you should get Adys mod for fishing if you want to never worry about food and make a profit as the mod works beautifully. There is a bug lantern mod you can get that allows you to buy a lantern in the hive villages for gathering bugs as a quick road snack which is great for small groups in a pinch. Last resort get a hive prince or scorchlander with some decent stealth skill and go rob some stores for food items.

[Nemund]

1 farmer with good skills can keep 4 farms harvested with some spare time while they grow. 2 farmers makes for more yield because they don't start growing again till the last plant is harvested. But that can certainly keep up with 4 XL farms.

[Gozer]

go for overkill and then scale down as necessary. Wheat/greenfruit/cactus/etc are very cheap to buy even in early game so set up bunch of farms, use the early harvests to upgrade the farms up to XL, assign bunch of people to the farms (with something else as secondary job for them to do when they are waiting for next harvest) and let the food production roll in ... make (unreasonably) big stockpile of food just to be sure, then scale down production as necessary if you need to move people to other jobs in the base.

4 wheat farms + 3 greenfruit farms (going for foodcube production) can take care for all your food needs, with 2-3 people manning them and still having time to spare for secondary jobs. Or just build all cactus/greenfruit farms (depending on biome) and go straight for chewsticks / vegetables production. Faster to get production going as you don't need to mill the wheat and make bread first, but way less efective when it comes to storage space

[Catopia Rex]

Yeup, i agree with the above, wheat is harder because of the mill.
When i started i put 2 guys on mining copper, then used that to buy food. Then 2 guys on farming, water duty. Put all the crops back into bigger/more farms. does not take long to build up.
Build crop/ore storage and then have the miners do the crop auto haul 1st, mining second.
You will soon have a more food than you need.
I tend to look for places with better fertility with stone, electric wells and windmills are cheap, so low water is not an issue.
I also use the build menu to find the best spot, zoom right out, pick farm/mine/well and move it around. I find quite a few small areas at +80%.

[Papasaurus Rex]

Originally posted by David Badger:

Originally posted by yippeekiay:

Isn't fishing a mod?

As for farming, make sure you use the same people as they will build up their skill & farm quicker & harvest more as they won't fail so much. One fairly well skilled person can farm numerous farms at once with ease.

yes fishing is indeed a mod... mods are good...

I find most mods create an imbalance so i am very picky with what mods I use so to answer I will say some mods are good.

[Erei]

Originally posted by David Badger:

yes fishing is indeed a mod... mods are good...

You absolutely don't need a fishing mod to survive. I have more than 30people in my outpost, and I'm overproducing food by a large margin. I think I can go to 40 perhaps 50 people with what I have, and still not starve.



I think the main issue you have is producing low nutrition food. You need to make the good ones ASAP, like goohan and foodcube. They eat much less of it, and as such, use less food overall.
Also, if you can, vary the food. Having several food sources will increase your overall production.
I like to make gohan (rice + vegetables) and foodcube (bread + greenfruit). Dustwich (bread + cactus) is also good.

I think those good food are locked behind tech, so you might want to reach them ASAP, and not expand too fast early on.

[Bored Peon]

This is based upon the SLOWEST production values you can have...

One XL wheat farm in arid terrain will make 5-6 loaves of bread.
One XL wheat farm in green terrain will make 10-12 loaves of bread.
(basically fertility x1 for crops, then dividived by 10 for flour = loaves)

Combine the bread with someone else to make higher nutrition value foods (raw meat for meatwraps or cactus for dustwich.) Which basically give you "extra food" because of the higher NU values.

You also only need 1 farmer for every 2-3 feilds, which also can easily be combined with well operator/grain silo/cook, etc.)

[MarQan]

Getting Skeletons or Hive Workers as farmers helps.
Also not having too many Shek and animals.
1 farm is definitely not enough though.

I don't understand why others say wheat is bad because of the grain silo though?

Making bread doesn't require Power first of all. The Bread Oven works automatically, so the only difference is that you process the raw plant at the Silo and not at a Cooking Stove.

[Nemund]

Space for the equipment and the fact grain silo's have to go outside is why people don't like the bread.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by nevyn0ad:

Space for the equipment and the fact grain silo's have to go outside is why people don't like the bread.

People dont liek bread because the production chain seems to jam on its own for some reason quite often.

You can easily put liek 2-3 ovens in one small shack.