sruggling for food and the beginning

[agentgingerman]

i have an issue where i run out of food easily despite keeping it in a fridge, i also find the start to be frankly har for me...tips other than build giant farm?

[TotallyAverageGamer]

harvest berries and freeze everything, like -20F

[Serina]

What biome do you normally play? What scenario? My tips for tundra (since it's the biome I have most of my hours in) would be to hunt everything on the map, especially in the beginning. The maps I prefer usually only has 10 growing or none at all, so growing food is limited for me until I can get an indoor farm going.

If you play NB, stick to the snowhares/hares until you can make a short bow to hunt the lone animals or stragglers from the pack. Never hunt a large pack with a short bow, even if your hunting is high since you'll most likely trigger a manhunter.

Do you cook your food? If you're able to, cook the raw ingredients into fine meals (requires 5 veggies and 5 meat), or simple meals (10 meat or veggies). Even in the very beginning, cooking into simple meals is still better than eating raw ingredients since the meals require less and fills the pawn's hunger for more than if they just ate raw. Plus, you don't get the ate raw food debuff.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1521272721
This is my current stockpile for the winter. My current map has 10 days of growing so I planted potatoes on rich soil scattered all around my map. This is also the most animal corpses I've had since I started this save. I got hit by volcanic winter and then toxic fallout (yay randy!) the first two years.

Sorry for the massive wall of text. lol. I'm not sure what else to include so if you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I will try to help.

[kevinshow]

Different maps and biomes affect the difficulty of the game, as well as early part of the game.

Until you get a handle on job priorities, skills to pick for your workers, etc, you might want to start in a biome that has plenty of food/animals available all year long.

For example, that would be a biome that has lots of animals all the time, or a biome where plants do not die off for the winter, or at least, not for weeks at a time (there could always be cold snaps).

But if you like the maps you currently play, then the next choice is to make more food when food is available. Since you have a fridge, hunt a lot.

Make several farms worth of food to harvest them to hold you over for the bad growing seasons.

Have colonists working just on farming and 1 or 2 other skills.

Keep colony size down for the first couple of years until you get a handle on the food situation. More people help the colony, but not if you don't have a food supply in place to feed everyone.

[dengeist]

There are a lot of factors that go into food production. What are you growing? Rice is ok early on, but you want to graduate to potatoes and corn soon as soon as you can. The end game is just corn, with small amounts of other crops for better meals.

Are you hunting larger animals? If not, give it a try. A little micromanaged combat can bring in a big haul of meat. Which causes your cook to use less produce.

What’s your cooking queue look like? Are you just making simple meals? Are you using make X meals or until you have X meals?

Are you planting in fertile soil? Fertile soil can multiply your output.

What biome are you playing in? Try a game in an arid biome to get a feel of how much you should be planting. Arid and Tropical pretty much have a year round growing season and a large margin of error. Temperate a little less. Cold you got one shot to get it right, with a short growing season.

Once you get a good feel for it, you’ll have food running from your ears.

[Blick Flair]

Rainfall affects not only the chance of rain it also adds in more forageables (Berries, Agave, most of the VG mod)