No food?

[Dragonfly]

So... is the game really so badly balanced? I'm playing on normal, I'm two weeks in, I haven't found any food at all yet, I can't upgrade my crafting table due to missing materials, and I need a lot of those, and I need to have it upgraded to get lockpicks for food and a storage for a freezer. Also, my pet died from malnutrition and I can't even eat the pet because of a lack of freezer, which needs updrade 3 of the crafting table, which I can't get because I lack food and materials. What the heck?

//edit
So now I created a freezer, but it's not working and I can't right click it to assemble it. What the heck do I do???

[Pawnstar]

Locations respawn stuff after about 5-10 days. Dont just keep going back to the same three spots around your shelter.

[Dragonfly]

Yes, I didn't do that either. I didn't have materials to make any more water tanks and I couldn't come further to where I could find food. It never spawned when I went back to all the places I had visited. It even said food rations, but they never spawned. My freezer was also buggy, so I couldn't assemble it. I ended up deleting the game and starting over, then food began to spawn.
In my opinion this game is very unbalanced. No matter how many times you start over, you'll always miss out on one material. It won't spawn anywhere near where you have water enough to go. I once managed to create four water butts and I still only found farms, houses and clearings, nothing else. Only in my newest game I also started finding lumber yars and sheds.

[Pawnstar]

Everyone says that at first. I took numerous restarts until I got the hang of the game. Here's a tip for you: there's something else in your shelter you probably haven't touched yet. Click around and you might see.

[Dragonfly]

Hmm... I'll try it. I don't really seem to find anything? I think I've clicked everywhere now. Is it something that highlights or something that doesn't?

[Pawnstar]

The radio allows you to call in traders who will bring materials you probably need

Regarding the popup list on each building, that list only states what you can find there, it does not tell you what has spawned there.

For your freezer, select a survivor who has a free task slot (each person can only have two tasks assigned at a time), right click on the workbench, look for the Freezer you wanna build and left click it. A shadow of that Freezer will appear. Place the shadow on an open area and when it appears green in color, left click it to build it there. For any reason, if you stop the work halfway, select another survivor, right click the half-built freezer and continue from there.

[RequiemsRose]

Food can be hard when you are first starting out. It may even be worth starting with easier settings to get the hang of things if normal is getting more frustrating than enjoyable currently. I've always had the absolute best luck finding food at restaurants, but those aren't always easy to find early on. Second best, and far more common, is the houses.

Part of the difficulty in getting started is simply not knowing what your priorities are intended to be beyond "don't die". As in, you start looking around and see that you need a lot of different resources for a lot of different things, but you don't always know where to get those resources or which ones you should try to hoard first, especially when you have such limited space on your expeditions and in your storage.

Even if you can't find food at the houses, look for high value items you don't need right this moment but can sell to traders for food. My personal favorites are the entertainment/training items: books, stuffed animals, and records. You wont be able to use those until you build their respective base item (shelf, toy box, and jukebox respectively) but they sell for a decent price. The price will range from 25-50, but not really. 25 is the base price, a food ration has a base price of 10. The value will remain the same even when the price changes (so a trader who pays 50 for a record, will also sell food for 20 rather than 10 so either way a record, book, or bear is 2.5 times the value of a ration of food).

I almost always have someone on the radio broadcasting for traders, though keep in mind it will increase the general traffic around your shelter, including the annoying potential recruits who love to sabotage your filters when they get rejected so keep an eye on maintenance.

[Dragonfly]

@[弾幕の伝説]Mobius that was one of the first things I did, actually. I'm one of those people who orient themselves with everything before playing for real. Thank you for telling me, tho. I appreciate it. And the freezer I'm pretty sure was a bug. I couldn't right click it for my life to continue work. It was just stuck there, unassembled, and I couldn't order people to fix it. It sucked, so I started over ):

@RequiemsRose I haven't found a restaurant yet! Good to know. I also didn't check much up on values of things, so it's good to know that, too. It's very rare someone comes by with food rations, tho, so I try to make a trap, freezer and stove as fast as I can.
And I did actually start it on the easy difficulty, but I still had an extremely hard time finding food and plastic and my two grown ups died. I get swarmed with any other item, tho. I've got plenty of everything, just not food and plastic, so I decided to save up for a recycler. That did the job for the plastic at least. And traps for meat, so now everything got easier.

Thank you both for your explanations and help. I really appreciate it (:

[RequiemsRose]

If you manage to survive long enough to get a recycler, resources become much less of an issue. Once resources are less of an issue you can also change your food strategy. There are planters you can make to grow your own food, they are just somewhat resource intensive to get started. You'll need seeds and a decently stable supply of water to grow food, and you can grow slightly more if you also find fertilizer. (restaurants are also a great place to find seeds).

At base, you will pretty much constantly need wood, metal, and pipes. Clearings and lumberyard usually have a decent amount of logs to recycle into wood. Reservoirs pretty much only feature pipes, valves, and water. scrapyards are a recyclers best friend, especially for metal scrap piles. Electronic bits like wires, transistors, switches, circuit boards etc, come from electric scrap like the radios and laptop (the tv isn't worth taking in most cases but also falls under this category). For your plastic problem, the most obvious is all those empty gas cans you've accumulated, as well as those empty water bottles and mannequin bits you can find. The scrap bits of cloth can also be recycled, iirc correctly it gives both nylon and rope but I might be wrong about the rope.

[Pawnstar]

Trapping for Meat is a reliable strategy, you can even use the Meat to trade instead once you secured an ample amount of rations or planters. Survive long enough (about 50 or 100 days) and blueprints for cheat-level stuff start appearing. Keep an eye out for auto water butt and auto pantries.

[Aurelian]

I ran out of food and water the first time too. Second run i'm at day 100 and have pretty have much everything I need (100+ food, 200+ storage, and ~240 water storage. just working on upgrading everything to the max, getting the camper van up and running and getting achievements). What I figured out was that the first things you wanna do is. Build a trap (Rope is a rare commodity in the first few days so don't waste it on other upgrades), get lvl 2 workbench to build the small freezer (scroll down), and get people scavenging the first opportunity you have (make some plastic bags for more space. it's lvl 1 workbench and costs near nothing). Some other stuff you want to prioritize is upgrading water filter efficiency/water storage, and getting the recycler.

[Dragonfly]

@RequiemsRose Thank you! That is extremely valuable information. Now I know where and what to search for, that helps a lot.

@[弾幕の伝説]Mobius Thank you! I haven't got far enough for automatic butts and pantries, so that sounds pretty neat. I'm looking forward to the blueprints, too. It sounds like it's going to be really helpful.

@Гитле® Yeah, I'm working on upgrading things, too. I usually upgrade the workbench as the very first thing, so I'm able to get a reliable food source. I also finally managed to get the poor recycler, so that helps a lot, too, as you have mentioned. I'm impressed you reached day 100 on your second run, that's impressive! I had to start over 4 times before I've come far enough to really start playing (:

[Pawnstar]

Feel free to refer to my guides if you need some more tips. The game just gets easier as it progresses

[Dragonfly]

That sounds really good! Didn't know you made guides, but I'll totally take a look. Thank you for helping me so much (:

[Unbearable]

Cheat ;). build another water tank off the bat. 2 out scouting for a bit, 5-10 locations is a good goal to stretch those vital starting gas masks. lvl 2 workbench is a real lifesaver for you as is the small freezer and a meat locker. Then I went and built more water tanks and traded constantly for more stuff which made life so much better.

[Dragonfly]

@unbearable That sounds really good! Doesn't sound much like cheating, tho xD But I will definitely try out your strategy with the water, workbench and scouting. Thank you!