Food gain is 4x the consumption but I cannot stockpile and people are hungry?!

[POBmaestro]

I completed A New Home on Normal just fine so moved up to Hard. It was all going well until I had to stockpile 3336 rations for my 639 colonists for the final storm. I cannot seem to feed the hungry let alone build up the required stockpiles. I have the following:

20 x Hunters Hangers
5 x Industrial Hothouses
4 x Hunters Huts
7 x Cookhouses (all soup)

I have all the upgrades for the above. Total ration gain is +3201 and consumption is -629 per day.

I was doing fine on food until the masses of survives came. I took them all and they are all now healed, but the rations get turned into dozens of food rations and yet 100+ remain hungry and overnight all the rations deplete and I cannot build the stockpile. I don't know what else to do?! I can't really commit much else more to food...

Here is a graph showing the food, which has basically been the same no matter how many more Hunters Hangers I pump out. Why does the food ration usage follow the food output: on the right side the usage is shown as -629?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2215787005

[Paraleo]

I have one question where do you want to keep 3000 rations if you have 900 units storage for raw food and 900 for food.
I bet your cookhouses are spending a big chunk of the day not working actually.

[POBmaestro]

Originally posted by Paraleo:

I have one question where do you want to keep 3000 rations if you have 900 units storage for raw food and 900 for food.
I bet your cookhouses are spending a big chunk of the day not working actually.

Thanks for the reply. I have built lots of resource depots but not set them to food yet since I never get close to capacity. Raw food builds up to about 600 when the hunters start returning but the 7 cookhouses turn this to rations pretty quick so it's almost immediately back to <10 again once it's just the Hothouses producing. I could set the depots to food in advance but I normally only do it when they are close to capping...

edit: I changed my resource depots to raw food and rations to triple the capacity. I sped the game up for a day and 50 more people went hungry and 10 people died from starving..

[amordron]

Not sure exactly what is happening as that production should cover it. That being said I will make a note that hungry people use 2 rations to get to full starving 3. So if you have hungry will need more but at that production even if everyone was starving should cover it.

You should need 3 cookhouses thou but you got that.

My question is what’s the massive drop in food use on 36 to the 37 was there mass deaths or did some reason everyone stop eating as shouldent be a massive drop otherwise unless buged.

[POBmaestro]

Originally posted by amordron:

Not sure exactly what is happening as that production should cover it. That being said I will make a note that hungry people use 2 rations to get to full starving 3. So if you have hungry will need more but at that production even if everyone was starving should cover it.

You should need 3 cookhouses thou but you got that.

My question is what’s the massive drop in food use on 36 to the 37 was there mass deaths or did some reason everyone stop eating as shouldent be a massive drop otherwise unless buged.

Hi thanks for the reply and info. I had about 30 hungry initially, but each day this is going up by about 30. So I am not producing enough it seems. This screenshot was taken on day 36, so day 37 is showing the graph dropping the usage from 3305 to 629. But it does this each day, so it never drops to 629 but stays at whatever I am producing.

My only thought is I need to stockpile 3336 for a weeks worth of food for the storm. I am producing 3305 a day and about 30 were going hungry a day. Is it possible the game is taking the weekly figure now instead of the daily figure? 3336 - 3305 = 31 hungry a day so works out about right. I am working my Hothouses on 24hr shifts now but still not enough :(

[amordron]

With 639 people should need only 639 rations per day. X2 if all hungry x3 If all starving. So your production as soup should be more than enough production. Thou people won’t eat when at work they will wait till the end of shift so you seeing hungry people is normal as they will be that way at end of day. If there getting to starving that is not normal assuming you have rations.

Not being able to stockpile is the issue to me as at that production level 1400 raw that’s over 3000 rations a day more than enough to feed the entire pop even if everyone is starving.

We are talking about pre storm I assume thou as food production stops once storm starts and would explain not being able to stockpile:

[khumak]

If I remember right your population caps out somewhere around 700 on New Home so the max possible food usage you will need to consume will be around 1400 a day. 3 cookhouses should be fine to keep everyone fed but don't forget they need to be heated to work and make sure to actually enable enough storage to stockpile.

If people aren't eating for some reason you might try waiting til end of shift and manually removing ALL of your workers from ALL worksites to make sure they all know they're in freetime mode and they can go eat. At max tech level, all you really need is 2 industrial hothouses to permanently keep everyone fed. Stockpiling could require more depending on how much time you have and whether you're using a food outpost or not.

One further caveat is that if people are starving, they will eat raw food the instant it appears so if you're in that situation you may want to put 5 workers in a cookhouse and put them on a 24 hour shift long enough to guarantee that you have enough rations to feed people so they aren't eating raw food.

[amordron]

As a note they will only eat raw food if you don’t have a cookhouse staffed. So long as you have a cookhouse staffed they can’t eat raw food even if it’s not open unless they are about to die (a few hours off just being at starving won’t trigger them to eat raw if a cookhouse is staffed)

[POBmaestro]

Thanks for all the replies and info. I tried various things over the week before the storm hit but no matter what I tried my 3300+ rations produced were consumed daily. Initially on around day 35-ish only 30 were hungry, but every night this increased, so by the time the storm hit about 180 were hungry and 20 or so were starving and I had no food stockpiled. So it was game over basically.

Unfortunately Outposts are 100% bugged (judging by the bug threads on it), so each time I got 100 food from the Outpost the team disappears. So I had to dismantle the Outpost and rebuild it after each trip so it didn't really add much extra. Every time I built up raw food it got converted to food rations and just disappeared every day.

After my "Normal" difficulty play-through where I stockpiled 3000 food, I realise what I had built on "Hard" should have been sufficient to quickly stockpile the required food. But it never seemed enough. I assumed it was something to do with the difficulty since each colonist seems to eat 5-6 rations a day even when 95% weren't even hungry. I guess my colonists were greedy that led to their ultimate doom!

I've submitted a report and supporting information to the developer bug report email address to see if that helps for the future. Not that I really fancy trying again after that untimely failure :(

[amordron]

Speaking of which I do remember a old bug that was one person becoming a “whale” and eating all your rations dailly that was fixed via reloading or starting a new game that used to pop up quite rarely for some people. Might of been the same bug if it was it’s unlikly to happen in your next game as from what I remember it was a vary rare thing to pop up.

[POBmaestro]

Originally posted by amordron:

Speaking of which I do remember a old bug that was one person becoming a “whale” and eating all your rations dailly that was fixed via reloading or starting a new game that used to pop up quite rarely for some people. Might of been the same bug if it was it’s unlikly to happen in your next game as from what I remember it was a vary rare thing to pop up.

Good to know. From what I can tell the Outpost bug was fixed 2 years ago but has come back since the latest DLC release. I'm finding Frostpunk very addictive but the Outpost bug alone is quite frustrating. Perhaps it's time to move on to the next scenario. Thanks for the help :)

[amordron]

Do arcs or refugess both outposts don’t factor into really so better to do them till fix

[POBmaestro]

Having searched the forums more thoroughly I found about a dozen examples of the same food bug happening to other people, one a few weeks ago but mostly 2 years ago.

So it's possible like the Outpost bug this was fixed 2 years ago but reintroduced in the recent DLC. The devs asked for my save files and will look into it with all the information provided. Thanks for the help and suggestions. Hopefully this will get fixed, but I have at least learnt a bit more about the normal food mechanics in the process!