food??

[A..hole]

How do you get enough food? i lasted till day 27 but only the reading girl survieved that long, i tried killing everything that could be eatable and even had a cooking pot but not meat

[Kevini al Quadrato]

As far as I know, you can cook fish too.

[A..hole]

well the fishing pole needs so much material i cant afford to take it before the pot but maybe that is mistak

[Elegant Caveman]

I crafted things in the order I got them, and that seemed to work for me.

Day 30 now, holding steady. Last thing I built was the cooking pot. Though I'm starting to worry about sickness.

Making the fishing rod helped a lot with getting people fed, but I think it took me too long to get the cooking pot. Eating raw fish doesn't add much sickness each time, but it adds up pretty quickly.

Now that I've got hunger under control, I'm focusing on gathering medicinal herbs while I research and hope to get the medical tent soon. I don't think the medical herbs will be enough, especially since they got nerfed (-3% sickness instead of -5%) in the last patch.

Before getting the fishing rod, I was gathering all the fruit I could and eating most of it, using only the bare minimum each day for water.

By the time I researched and built the cooking pot, my hunger was often around 60-70%, so those fish were really helping a lot.

[Barthok]

So, don't pillage the airplane straight through, take a trip there once a day so you have food, gather wood and stone etc from the gathering spot as you go. By the time you get enough resources for the fishing pole, get it. The cooking pot does nothing for you unless you have fish or meat to use on it.

Now, what will likely happen is that you have to eat fish raw for a while until you can get enough resources for the cooking pot. Pay attention to your people's sickness levels as sickness will be the main concern for that stage of the game.

[Costanius]

The cooking pot transforms fish or meat into meals so You need either a fishing rod or a hunting bow first before building the cooking pot. I'm at day 32 as well and sickness is getting a serious problem now. They ate too many raw fish for too long I guess...

[Barthok]

Took me to my third game to get it right, the main thing to work against in the early game is sickness. delay eating raw food as long as possible as I outlined above, timing plane salvages, farming a lot of fruit etc but eventually you will need to eat raw fish, managing sickness is probably the hardest part of the first half of the game.

[Reaperface]

I'm surviving with 2 people fishing with skill 80+ and a cooking pot with one character with the skill 100. What's concerning me is the injury building in the team, trying to get some kind of medical station.

[Barthok]

Everytime you find abandoned clothes etc, scavenge fabric, its a key component that you cannot make for bandages. I think injury is the only thing that means you can't keep playing forever as you can run out of ways to get rid of injury.

[A..hole]

well now i tried to take them as i researched them and yeah that went better even got a infirmary but now they just want to be depressed since i forgot to help bob and he died and they wont loose much at the campfire arghh

[Arstra]

you can dive in the fishponds to lose depression. works good with high stealthers.

in the beginning it´s sometimes better to keep them starving than to poison them with fishes and meat. once you have rod and cooking pot Bob always fishes and someone cooks at the 2nd part of the day. don´t be afraid to use fruits and the dried food you´re finding...you don´t need those later, if you level at least one person in harvesting, (in average you need 2 fruits per day for water)

it´s not much, but it can keep you just below 100% hunger. until you got that cooking pot.

also if you kill Jakob (had him terminally sunburned on the hand) depression problems are almost completely ceasing.

[Xaw]

You can also quite nicely eat raw fish with character that have "never sick" feat. Also quite important to get that cooking up asap. And I think it's important to scavenge plane only with good scavenger when in decent shape, to get maximum amount of reward. I always did it with Yuri. Don't mess around with hunting, you can do nicely without it. Hunting just adds annoying injuries which can be treated only in late game and even then with limited supplies. Keep exploring like mad, there's plenty of safe resources out there for good stealth+scavenger fella.

[Reaperface]

I need help and I don't want to open a topic just for that silly question, so I'll ask here.
My crew is almost f*cked up because their sickness is building too fast and my doctor is also my crafter, so I'm wasting too many time scavenging herbs and I'm afraid someone will die soon because of that, if I get a character to 0 sickness it'll continue to build up or it'll go away? I guess it's building too fast because all my characters are >50 sick.

[Elegant Caveman]

Sickness won't go up if it's at 0%.

It's also worth noting that the lower the sickness, the less it'll go up by itself, as confirmed by a dev in this thread.

I said in that thread that I noticed it going up by 1% per night from 1-20%, but I made a mistake. Looking at my notes, it's 1% for 1-10%, 2% for 10-20% and 2-4% for 20%. I only kept an eye on it for a few nights, and I didn't have anyone higher than mid-20% at the time, so I'm not sure how it scales for higher values.

Point being, though, is that you might be better off focusing on a few people at a time, and that increments of 10% are meaningful. So if you have someone at 41-42%, it's worth using a herb on them to bring them down to 38-39%, as they'll gain less sickness that night. Probably. Maybe. I think. I'm not sure (it's true for the lower values, but I can't promise it's also true for the higher values; when I realized this, I focused on getting all my people below 20% and then 10%, and that helped a lot).

Since you mention your doctor, I assume you have the first aid tent? Just make someone else craft. Have your second and third best crafters making drugs while your doctor administers them.

[Reaperface]

Originally posted by Elegant Caveman:

Sickness won't go up if it's at 0%.

It's also worth noting that the lower the sickness, the less it'll go up by itself, as confirmed by a dev in this thread.

I said in that thread that I noticed it going up by 1% per night from 1-20%, but I made a mistake. Looking at my notes, it's 1% for 1-10%, 2% for 10-20% and 2-4% for 20%. I only kept an eye on it for a few nights, and I didn't have anyone higher than mid-20% at the time, so I'm not sure how it scales for higher values.

Point being, though, is that you might be better off focusing on a few people at a time, and that increments of 10% are meaningful. So if you have someone at 41-42%, it's worth using a herb on them to bring them down to 38-39%, as they'll gain less sickness that night. Probably. Maybe. I think. I'm not sure (it's true for the lower values, but I can't promise it's also true for the higher values; when I realized this, I focused on getting all my people below 20% and then 10%, and that helped a lot).

Since you mention your doctor, I assume you have the first aid tent? Just make someone else craft. Have your second and third best crafters making drugs while your doctor administers them.

Thanks for that, I was waiting for an answer from someone to play because I was scared to play it and kill somebody.
Well about my doctor/crafter it's a tough choice, everyone except her is with craft <50 and everyone as 2 jobs already (Except jacob and bob, they're fishermans for life, I might try them in the future after everyone is fine again) I really appreciate the tip tho

[Elegant Caveman]

I found that Bob & Yuri make a decent crafting pair, even without levelling up their crafting (I did give Bob a bit extra, but not much, and I don't think I gave Yuri any extra).

Not sure how this will work for you, depending on your stats, but maybe try something like this:

MORNING
Fishing x2
Craft drugs x2
Scavenge medicinal herbs x2
Healing x1
Free x1

AFTERNOON
Fishing x1
Craft drugs x2
Scavenge medicinal herbs x2
Cooking x1
Healing x1
Free x 1

The "free" person gets healed, and of course this is not taking into account anyone who needs to rest, but it should give you an idea. Don't worry about always using the "best" person for a task. Try to keep your crafters able to finish a drug in one session, and fishing is important for food, but don't worry about it too much.

Even if someone is not very good at a job, they can still do it a bit, and they'll gain skill (though very slowly).

If your sickness is so high with everyone, your priority is to lower it; everything else is secondary. Don't be scared to let fatigue, hunger and depression get up to ~50%, but don't let it get much higher than that if you can.

For the most part, I mostly boosted my people's intelligence for the first 3 levels or so, which didn't let me boost other skills very much. And when I did, it was mostly to boost their "natural" high skills (fishing for Bob, scavenging for Yuri, medicine for Winters, etc.). I believe starting stats are somewhat random, but I'm not sure by how much. If your survivors are anything like mine, these are some of the jobs I like to use them for:

Bob: Fishing, Crafting
Jacob: Fishing, Hunting
Yuri: Scavenging, Crafting, Cooking
Alejandro: Scavenging, Harvesting
Julia: Scavenging, Hunting, Exploring
Illyana: Research
Alice: Cooking, Harvesting, Exploring
Winters: Medicine, Crafting, Research

Exploring and Research aren't important in this case, but I'm listing them anyway. Illyana and Alejandro can go pretty much anywhere, because they're not especially good at anything. I focused all my skills for Illyana in Knowledge and Constitution mostly, and I kept Alejandro mostly spread out (started with a lot of skills at 30-something, brought them up to 40-something, except for scavenging which I focused him in).

For the others, though, the skills I list above are the ones they started decent at (~40-50+).

Good luck!