food question

[TioWawy]

apart from hunting and farming. is there another way to get food?

[starbabylon]

buying from traders, hives (infestations) drop royal jelly, and I guess you know that:
farming = growing plants + milk + eggs

If you want a reliable source of food for your colony, your pawns will have to farm and hunt.
If you need more meat, you can also set number of settlements to 2 in the options, send a hunting party to a nearby hexagon and settle temporarily, while you hunt everything, before you abandon that second settlement and bring all the meat back to your colony.

Ah, and the cannibal population of this forum will teach you their specialty for sure below...

[TioWawy]

Thank you :)

[Ewell]

There's also taming animals for livestock, which gives you a steady supply of meat that you don't have to hunt for.

[adobo]

Personally, I find animals to be a burden. About 6 animal haulers is good enough for me. About 80% of farming has been dedicated to just feeding them hay grass to livestock every time I keep them around.

[HunterSilver]

starbabylon was fairly thorough but there are a couple more source of food (aside from the cannibalism): foraging and raiding.

Colonists with farming skills will gather fruits and berries while moving along the world map. They'll consume most of what they gather but if the game indicates that they're producing over 1 colonist worth of food per day, they will gather extra and bring it back with them. This can be a great way to reduce food scarcity problems early on if you're running low on food and need to reduce the current burden to avoid starvation.

Raider camps, faction cities, and random encounters also carry food. Provoking encounters on the world map with high visibility caravans can actually give you quite a bit. I ran into a couple of empire soldiers yesterday with a total of 18 meals on them (8 simple, 10 packaged survival), a free set of power armor (Recon power armor to boot!), and some scrap metal (biocoded weapon). So if you enjoy the nomadic lifestyle it is very doable.

Edit: Oh yeah, caravans on the world map also carry tons of loot. Raiding them can be great. I find myself doing this out of greed whenever I meet one with archotech bionics that I can't afford.

[Kasa]

If you are near fertile soil (140% growth rate) grow corn, else grow potatos, if you research hydroponic grow rice.
If you do grow corn also grow rice to tied you over till first harvest.

Dont worry about over hunting animals they will eventually respawn. Its also more effecint to manually hunt them with drafted pawns in groups.

If you raise and slaughter animals you tamed and raised you apparently get 50% more meat.
If you do tame animals you can feed them easily by growing large patches of daisies they have a nutrition of .18 and a grow rate of 2.5 days, more then enough for most grazing animals and a excellent way to train you pawns in the planting skill.

Farming and hunting is the only way to get a stable source of food, though ive never tried just gathering alone.

[starbabylon]

Ah lol yes, thanks guys, I guess I forgot some stuff, was pretty late/early anyway when I typed!
And I had completely forgotten about foraging and slaughtering! (Because I don't use them a lot)

This community rocks!