Why aren't beans or wheat a vanilla crop?

[KalkiKrosah]

In this game we got potatoes, rice, corn and berries. In the real world rice is a staple food in Asia and Latin America. Corn is a staple food in the northern part of the Americas. Potatoes came from the Americas but became real popular in Ireland and Russia. And berries are able to be eaten raw. I think beans and wheat are major food sources in the real world that could be represented accurately in a RimWorld game.

Beans can be a crop you grow that can be used as a meat substitute. Rice and beans is a popular dish in Latin America where the beans were used in place of meat because meat was expensive or simply unavailable and beans gave those people a nutritional equivalent to meat. The downside is that beans contain lectins (just like potatoes) and will make you sick if you eat enough of them raw.

And wheat makes bread and bread is a staple in nearly every European country. There's probably thousands of different bread types but all use the same core ingredients essentially: wheat, flour & water. RimWorld could introduce a wheat crop and give wheat a unique recipe of bread. Making bread is time consuming and tedious but the shelf life on bread at room temperature is about a week, which would come in handy should your freezers go out during a heat wave. There already is a long shelf life food option in pemmican, but pemmican requires meat to make while bread is just one ingredient. Bread can be a kind of vegan substitute for a longer shelf life meal. Maybe give it a mood buff like with a fine meal because who doesn't like bread? The downside could be a long growing period similar to or equivalent with corn.

And yes, I know mods probably add this but think it should be a vanilla feature just for a bit more variety in the crop fields and food freezer.

[Security Cam #7]

Same question can be asked about thousands of different things that exist in the real world but they don't in rimworld. That is why we have mods.

[whatamidoing]

Bloat and balancing. What niches would they fill? Corn's the slow-growing high-yield, rice is fast-growing low-yield, and potatoes grow better than the others in poor soil. Being able to use beans as meat would trivialize the whole meat system and raw plants last for 40-60 days at room temp.

[brian_va]

Vgp mod add all those mentioned and alot more. As suggested , it's almost certainly bloat prevention. There are many real world things that can fill in gaps in vanilla items, but at some point its adding stuff just to be adding stuff

[glass zebra]

With the 4 main plantable nutrient sources available people are already using pretty much only rice. Every other would either replace that or bloat. Food in Rimworld is to feed pawns and not the main focus of the game. If you want that or extensive food chains, you need to use a mod that adds more focus to that like VGP garden or the vanilla expanded stuff. Animals have already been bloated in the past, but at least those options don't bloat a player menu. Vegetarian fine meals from nothing but plants have also been added.

[Raymond]

idk about beans but don't wheat take extra steps to prepare? Rice pretty much come out upon harvest.
Tynan probably didnt want to add wheat because
1/No obvious gameplay improvement
2/He already been very supportive of modding community. So if anything you feel missing from the game, he expect you to get them from the workshop.

[The Blind One]

I think most people plant rice at the start since it grows fastest. Then a mix of potatoes and corn to replace rice as you build up and have stocks to see those crops mature without going through starvation. Then you go right back to rice again as you go full fircle once you build a hydroponics farm lol. Economically speaking, going corn is the best non hydroponics strategy, it has good return on work time and has long shelf life.

Wheat would have honestly been a nice addition since it is such a staple food but the other 3 foods already fill all the niches so you'd essentially just be introducing a reskinned version of the other 3 with a tiny variation in stats.

I think the developer purposefully tries to keep everything as simple and basic as possible. There's 3 types of medicines for example, herbal, industrial and glitter. Only 2 components, industrial and advanced. The clothing is quite limited as well and you're basically left to choose between parkas (cold), dusters (hot) and jacket (nobody uses those except for fun as dusters are superior lol). You're usually given 3 options to deal with a situation that fit along the range of possibilities. Personally I do like more options, the game can be somewhat limiting but luckily there's mods for everything in this game.

[Hoki]

Originally posted by The Blind One:

I think most people plant rice at the start since it grows fastest. Then a mix of potatoes and corn to replace rice as you build up and have stocks to see those crops mature without going through starvation. Then you go right back to rice again as you go full fircle once you build a hydroponics farm lol. Economically speaking, going corn is the best non hydroponics strategy, it has good return on work time and has long shelf life.

by pure growth performance rice is the best crop in the game. its short growth cycle also makes it the safest food to plant.
Corn nets you about the same return rice does but its long growth cycle make growing it somewhat of a gamble.
potatoes are pretty much only for when you have no good soil available or have to fill some bad spots.

wheat as well as beans take multiple steps to process and therefore made no sense to include if simplicity was the main factor.

[absent1]

The role of corn is labor reduction =) As other said, adding stuff just to add stuff doesn't make the game better, it's either going to be unbalanced or pointless (mechanically speaking) If you do go looking for mods i generally find them to either be unbalanced or just add a ton of menu items for little gain, unless it's an actual hole in the game play (limited medieval or spacer weaponry for instance) It's good the devs avoid that type of work imo.

[The Blind One]

I like the mod variety matters and then the idea of using vanilla expanded plants or VGP to increase plant diversity so my colonists have a different foods to eat. If you're not running a mod like that then it really doesn't matter at all except for roleplay purposes but I prefer my roleplay with mechanics lol. Though even if I play vanilla, there's just something interesting about having SOME crop variety in my playthroughs even though I usually end up with corn anyway.

Corn is just superior.

You may think that planting rice is better, but it's really not (except maybe hydro). You can plant 2 corn fields for the same work time as 1 rice field and ensure that even if one of them is ruined by plague, raiders or otherwise, you still have the other. If you properly overproduce a good amount each time, you will have plenty of stocked food supplies as well since corn lasts a year (if without a freezer).

[Doom Sayer]

Originally posted by The Blind One:

I think most people plant rice at the start since it grows fastest. Then a mix of potatoes and corn to replace rice as you build up and have stocks to see those crops mature without going through starvation. Then you go right back to rice again as you go full fircle once you build a hydroponics farm lol. Economically speaking, going corn is the best non hydroponics strategy, it has good return on work time and has long shelf life.

Wheat would have honestly been a nice addition since it is such a staple food but the other 3 foods already fill all the niches so you'd essentially just be introducing a reskinned version of the other 3 with a tiny variation in stats.

I think the developer purposefully tries to keep everything as simple and basic as possible. There's 3 types of medicines for example, herbal, industrial and glitter. Only 2 components, industrial and advanced. The clothing is quite limited as well and you're basically left to choose between parkas (cold), dusters (hot) and jacket (nobody uses those except for fun as dusters are superior lol). You're usually given 3 options to deal with a situation that fit along the range of possibilities. Personally I do like more options, the game can be somewhat limiting but luckily there's mods for everything in this game.

Personally i just build up base and defenses then start potatoes then if food goes low kill animals.

[Astasia]

A mechanic where colonists had tastes, like favorite and hated vegetable, might add some reason to have more crops. I think I would enjoy that extra challenge and requirement for growing a variety of things, assuming it kicked in at higher wealth levels and early game colonists weren't picky. Until something like that is added it's kind of pointless as all crops except mushrooms instantly lose their identity when turned into any meal, and as mentioned as far as growing mechanics go the game is pretty set.

Vanilla Plants Expanded adds a bunch of variety and "attempts" to make their growing conditions interesting, like beets that don't die in winter, eggplants that grow faster in the heat, cabbage that don't die to fallout, etc. Many of them are kind of contrived and highly situational though, meaning even with the mod installed I still end up just growing rice or nutrifungus most of the time.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Astasia:

A mechanic where colonists had tastes, like favorite and hated vegetable, might add some reason to have more crops. I think I would enjoy that extra challenge and requirement for growing a variety of things, assuming it kicked in at higher wealth levels and early game colonists weren't picky.

Unfortunately, to do even that requires some extra mechanics being added regarding food bills and differentiating between meals, so that you can actually make the meals you need.

An obviously nice addition that would be helpful now though would be making it so the NPD would let pawns choose which hopper they take the food from, so your cannibals get the good stuff, the carnivores get the other good stuff, and the whiny vegetarians get their rabbit food.

[XelNigma]

I really thought for a moment there you was going to pull the "Rimworld is racist because it doesnt have food from X country" crap.
Glad you didnt.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

I really thought for a moment there you was going to pull the "Rimworld is racist because it doesnt have food from X country" crap.
Glad you didnt.

RimWorld is a game where the community takes glee in who can commit the most atrocious war crimes. Pulling the race card would be ineffective to say the least. I just want greater immersion in my games is all. More crop variety just seemed like a simple way to go about doing this and give the food dynamic of the game a little bit more complexity and nuance to it.

[Jigain]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2353847457

It's by no means a perfect mod, but it does give incentive to grow more than one type of crop. I use it myself for that exact porpoise.