How food works? Starving for some answers

[DrakenKin]

It's my second summer. I have 7 guys, and just captured an 8th.

My rice and potatoes never seems to be enough (about 55 tiles worth). The only reason i am surviving is killing all the animals in my area, and i even had to buy food a couple of times.

So i am kinda living on the edge food wise, and i need to figure out exactly how much everybody needs to eat. Possibly optimize enough to make food reserves for the winter.

1. Anyone knows how many tiles of rice/potatoes do we need to feed a person?
2. Why is there 2 different stats for nutrition? Corn for example says 0.4 nutrition when you plant it, but if you click an actual corn piece it says 0.05 nutrition. In fact everything seems to say 0.05 nutrition and i am not sure what is the difference between nutrition on the planting description and nutrition on the actual vegetable.
3. Any extra tips to get food under control would be appreciated

[Limdood]

2. Each plant yields multiple pieces raw food, and different plants have higher or lower yield (rice is low yield, but fast growth, corn is high yield and slow growth, potatoes are medium-low yield and medium growth but aren't significantly impacted by soil quality). All raw food has the same nutrition.

3a. don't eat raw food. simple or fine meals have the same nutrition as 18 raw food (and take only 10 to cook). For even better effect, Nutrient paste meals have the same nutrition as 18 raw food and take only 6 to make.

3b. Make bigger fields. You want to be producing more food than you'll eat. You also want a buffer. If you make too much food, you can sell it or store it. If you consistently make too much food, you can repurpose some of the growing tiles for non-food crops to sell or use. You don't want your fields producing "just enough" because a blight or raid can ruin significant portions of your food supply.

3c. Make sure that as your colony grows, your food supply grows with it. Also make sure that as your colony grows, each person is actually contributing. If you already have a great crafter, getting a new pawn who's pretty good at crafting, but won't do other jobs looks ok at first...hey, 2 crafters, make stuff twice as fast. But your first crafter probably wasn't crafting 24/7 anyways, so the second one won't actually bring anything to your colony except another drain on your resources.

Mostly 3b.

[DrakenKin]

Yes I have cooks and i never eat anything raw, be it meat or vegetables. It's all cooked first.

Nice point about the corn vs potato sensitivity, i had a lot of potatoes on rich soil (140% fertility) now i see it was a mistake, should have planted the potatoes on normal soil and focused the corn on the rich soil.

Any explanation on why "corn plant" has .40 nutrition while "corn" has 0.05? You answered but i don't think i get it, because the yield and growth speed are entirely different stats from nutrition, so i don't understand how that clarifies the disconnect between .4 and .05

[ZS Maeklos]

Originally posted by Limdood:

3c. Make sure that as your colony grows, your food supply grows with it. Also make sure that as your colony grows, each person is actually contributing. If you already have a great crafter, getting a new pawn who's pretty good at crafting, but won't do other jobs looks ok at first...hey, 2 crafters, make stuff twice as fast. But your first crafter probably wasn't crafting 24/7 anyways, so the second one won't actually bring anything to your colony except another drain on your resources.

3c(1). Don't be afraid to add a night shift. Night owls get mood debuffs for being active during the day, but normal pawns do not get those for being active at night. I've found it so much easier to have my cook working the night shift so that he/she can clean the kitchen and then get meals prepared for the coming day without interruption. Setting a person to sleep from 10am to 6pm (1000 - 1800 hours), the same sleep cycle as a typical Night Owl, is best.

3c(2). Setting up two shifts of crafters is great if you're mass-producing a product. Growing that sweet smokeleaf and winding up with too much to conveniently process quickly? Set up two Make Smokeleaf Joint bills on your drug lab, and assign one of those bills to your day crafter and another to your night crafter. This works even better with mass-produced items that take a while to make, like components and advanced components. With two bills, both shifts can work equally well. With only one bill, if a component is half-completed, then no one will start to make another one until that first component is completed.

[Cat®]

I mean your problem seems pretty simple: You need more tiles to grow food. Grow some more. Like real life having "just enough" food is a recipe for disaster because the day "just enough" is "too little" all hell breaks loose.

That said if you are determined to live on a knife's edge you can just look up how much nutrition a pawn needs per day, look up the nutritional value of your food item of choice, and do the math. If your colony needs 580 nutrition a day and a potato is 0.05 then you know how many tiles you'll need soon enough.

[trmcdougle]

PS the nutrition you see on a PLANT is what an animal eating the plant gets not what the harvest will be

[DrakenKin]

>>> so the second one won't actually bring anything to your colony except another drain on your resources.

Small note. I think even talentless pawns can be useful. You can disable everything on them except moving things and cleaning and flipping switches etc, and disable those tasks on your useful pawns. That will free up the talented ones to do more essential work. There's so much hauling in this game it can definitely quickly become a full time job.

[DrakenKin]

Originally posted by trmcdougle:

PS the nutrition you see on a PLANT is what an animal eating the plant gets not what the harvest will be

I think this answer is right! It would make sens.

The 0.4 on the corn plant is what animals get from it, since they can eat it off the ground. The 0.05 nutrition we see on the actual corn is how much nutrition for a human if eaten raw. Since it makes 22 units, then each plant gives 1.1 nutrition for a human (raw), or only 0.4 for an animal since the animal eats the plant whole and not the individual units.

[Zalzany]

55 tiles is kind of meh. I mean I do multiple 8x8s or 10x10 plots. Some grow rice, some smokeweed, one devilstrand etc etc. Also are you not hunting or doing live stock? I mean growing crops is one thing but unless they are against meat you mix in some meat and reduces the amount of veggies you consume. And a lot of critters give a good amount of meat if you can store it in freezer wich I assume you got, you only need to flag like herd of gazelle or something every now and then let them hunt them over time.

Heck a horse produces a ton of meat if you up for that. Also now you can be a cannibal via religion or just set it so they accept human meat as any other form of meat.

I mean the crops are only a pain when its harvest time they spend a day picking a feild clean and replanting then days where at best they put out a fire if lighting strikes near it.

[Astasia]

1. You need about 20 rice or potato plants per colonist (on 100% fertility soil) if you are feeding them simple meals made from those ingredients. You are going to want significantly more than that though so you can keep a buffer in case you get a blight, or if you are on a map with winter you need to stockpile for. I usually do about 25 plants per colonist on year-round growing maps. If you have a winter that lasts 30 days you'd probably want to double that.

[HunterSilver]

Plants and animals have been adjusted substantially in the 1.3 patch, so I can't give you hard numbers for anything anymore, but the rough estimate should be around 17 tiles of rice on 100% quality soil, or 12 tiles of rice on 140% quality rich soil per colonist, if you are cooking them into simple meals.

Rice remains the most efficient source of nutrients on 100% or better fertility soil. Each tile of rice planted used to yield ~0.06nu per day on average on 100%, and 0.08nu per day on average on 140%. This is going to be slightly reduced now.

[Diarmuhnd]

Yarp, having a few pawns who just haul and clean can really keep a colony grinding away at the important stuff. Back in 1.2 tamed animals trained to haul was great for that. To bad they couldn't be trained to only poop outside.

[Sasparillafizz]

Nutrition is different from the actual quantity of the crop in storage. Think of nutrition as the calorie count of the food.

I don't have the numbers handy so I'm just gonna make up some simple numbers for easy calculation. You need a total of 2 nutrition per day to prevent going hungry.

Well rice, raw, has .25 nutrition. So you need 8 rice to eat for a day per person.

Potatoes have .33 nutrition, so you can also alternatively eat 6 potatoes.

Corn has .5 nutrition so you only need 4 corn to avoid going hungry.

The nutrition is how many of that crop you need to satisfy your hunger, which is independent of how many are yielded when you pick one from the field. So if you subsist entirely on rice you will go through 500 rice a whole lot faster than going through 500 corn.

The catch is the low nutrition foods also grow faster. You can get 2.5 to 3 harvests of rice in by the time that first harvest of corn finishes, it's just much more labor intensive harvesting and planting over and over; and takes up more storage space.

Cooking meals is also more efficient for nutrition vs resources. You get more nutrition for the same input, meaning you'll go through your stored food faster if you make sure to cook it all first rather than eat it raw.

IIRC the math showed potatoes as the optimal crop if you are looking for the most nutrition in the shortest growing time. Corn has more nutrition per crop, but is offset by the additional time it takes to grow it. No idea if that's been rebalanced though.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Sasparillafizz:

....

Just going to be blunt, no offense meant, but none of what you said is accurate. All raw food (other than eggs) has the same nutrition value, 0.05. The difference in plants is pretty subtle, rice is the best nutrition per day by a small amount, but is the most work, corn is almost as good but takes a long time to grow which also means it's less work, potatoes are worse than rice and corn slightly but grows better in gravel, berries are the worst by a small amount but can be eaten raw without a mood debuff.

[Zalzany]

Yeah what Astasia said the meals don't care if its rice or corn and end up the same in the end. Unless its a fancy meal or you got mods requiring fancy stuff, Like I think advanced meals need like a milk or egg tossed in can't recall if that was a mod or vanilla though lol.

Actually cooking a meal doesn't seem to make a diffrence if its rice or corn in it. They still eat same amount of meals a day, and it takes same amount of plat and meat to make them. Like what Astasia said you get more rice faster, but corn is slower to grow and makes about same amount of meals. Issue is more about work load rice is best in hurry, but means you got harvest and replant way more often, corn you get about same amount of food but you harvest and replant less.

[Makeithappen]

Originally posted by Zalzany:

Yeah what Astasia said the meals don't care if its rice or corn and end up the same in the end. Unless its a fancy meal or you got mods requiring fancy stuff, Like I think advanced meals need like a milk or egg tossed in can't recall if that was a mod or vanilla though lol.

Actually cooking a meal doesn't seem to make a diffrence if its rice or corn in it. They still eat same amount of meals a day, and it takes same amount of plat and meat to make them. Like what Astasia said you get more rice faster, but corn is slower to grow and makes about same amount of meals. Issue is more about work load rice is best in hurry, but means you got harvest and replant way more often, corn you get about same amount of food but you harvest and replant less.

having corn fields that harvest one or two times a year and that is your entire food supply, you'd be making a lot of corn fields for that. Dangerous way to play though since blight can hit and random events during a year. but the huge benefit is labor cost.