Pawn daily food requirements

[AngleWyrm]

There's a Wiki page on the saturation mechanic [rimworldwiki.com] that says a pawn normally consumes 160 saturation/day. But food is measured in the Nutrition it provides, which is around 1 or less per meal.

How much saturation does consuming 1 nutrition provide?

[whatamidoing]

Hunger rate, shown in the info box for any creature, including pawns, is the nutrition needed per day.

[Red Earth]

Typical nutrition cost is 1.6 a day.

[AngleWyrm]

That means it takes about 30 rice plants to support a pawn.
spreadsheet[docs.google.com]

[Astasia]

Assuming for some reason you were feeding your colonists raw rice, yes about 30 plants per colonist.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Plants#Domesticated_plants

[AngleWyrm]

A simple meal made with rice could be called cooked rice. And since we know the nutritional value of a simple meal (0.9 nutrition) and the nutritional need of a pawn (1.6 nutrition/day) we can work out what that comes to in meals/day

1.6 nutrition/day / 0.9 nutrition/meal = 1.78 meals/day

Then how many meals is it until harvest?

1.78 meals/day x 5.54 days/harvest = 9.85 meals/harvest

How many plants will it take to cover 9.85 meals/harvest?
Each meal requires 10 rice/meal, and each plant produces 6 rice/harvest.

10 rice/meal x 9.85 meals/harvest = 98.5 rice/harvest
98.5 rice/harvest / 6 rice/plant = 16.42 plants/harvest to feed a pawn cooked rice.

[Astasia]

Colonists don't eat fractions of meals. They eat two meals a day, whether those meals are 0.8 nutrition each or 1.0 nutrition each. There is some waste.

5.54 is a perfect case scenario, but in most cases there is going to be some delay between when a plant is ready to harvest and when it's harvested, then another delay before the next plant is sown. I would say work with a 6 day cycle and create a buffer.

20 x 6 = 120 rice per 6 day period which is about 20 plants per colonist if you are using simple meals. Nutrient paste can obviously reduce that a lot, as can any hunting or manhunter packs you get to make fine meals with. Then you need a buffer for things like food poisoning, blights, and to factor in soil quality, heat waves, seasons etc. It can get very complicated.

I just start with a 10x10 for my initial 3 colonists on year-round maps which gives me a decent buffer which I sell off or turn into chemfuel. As I recruit more colonists and my stockpile of rice shrinks I just increase the size of the field or add another.

[Red Earth]

Personally, I plan for raw food to cover minimum nutrition needs, and let cooking (and hunting) create a buffer. I really wish the game would count the size of zones for you so I could more easily calculate the output. It's not hard with a small population and a square grow zone, but later it's an irregular shape and in separate parts and you cant just multiply two numbers.

[AngleWyrm]

I'm gonna work with a 4x4 plot of rice for each mouth to feed, it seems scalable.
There's a handy mod called Food Alert that puts an estimate of days of food left in the lower right corner of the screen,.

[Razor 2.3]

Consider corn. It's a lot less pawn work to do, and offers better harvests per plant.

[AngleWyrm]

For a simple meal made with corn instead of rice, the time until harvest is 20.87 days/harvest and yields 22 corn/plant. So it's a longer stretch to the harvest:

1.78 meals/day x 20.87 days/harvest = 37.1 meals/harvest. Each meal requires the same 10 ingredients/meal, but each plant produces 22 corn/harvest.

10 corn/meal x 37.1 meals/harvest = 371 corn/harvest
371 corn/harvest / 22 corn/plant = 16.87 plants/harvest to feed a pawn cooked corn.

So the plantation size per pawn is nearly identical, but with less planting & harvesting cycles.
5.54 days/harvest / 20.87 days/harvest = approximately 1/4 of the time spent farming.

The costs I see for freeing up that labor to do other things with it:
* Higher risk, the loss of a crop is more expensive
* Less responsive to change, requires better planning ahead to get the same level of accuracy

So if you dare to risk it and like playing the long game it's a great prize. As for me I'm what I like to think of as adverse to misadventure, but I do enjoy planning. Might try it next play through.

[Astasia]

The other cost is it's less labor. Which means less skill exp for your farmers, longer periods of time until new farmers can deal with high skill crops or stop botching, and slower workspeeds later. Assuming you don't have other farming tasks for them to do. Depends on how you look at it really. For me I've never been in a situation where I wanted to switch to corn, rice is across the board wins against corn in every single way, for my gameplay style.

[Dopamine Deficient]

The only time when I feel corn is a necessity is only full vanilla with very restrictive growing-time maps to stock up for two or more years in one go, and only in hot places. It's not the first time I'm in a hard-desert area with constant heat waves and a toxic fallout or similar screws up the next growing period. Wish corn would get a little love so it lands in a better spot, because otherwise rice just wipes the floor with it unless you don't want to bother harvesting much.