How do you make food?

[thebuckets]

I have about 20 hours into the game, and I can't figure out how to make food. I've had farms, greenhouses, and mills, but my food supply never increases. I've tried making a colony where I have 7 upgraded greenhouses that claim to be producing ~20 xeno sage an hour with a population of 50 people, but everyone slowly starves. What am I doing wrong? I set the mill to produce everything it can. Is there another structure I need?

[Sticky Wicket]

Can you post some screenshots. It might help to work out whats going on.

You also need wheat of course to make xeno bread (I'm guessing you already know that?).

[Palandus]

Xeno sage is inedible. It has to be processed for people to eat it, usually into xeno bread which also requires flour.

If you up click the checkbox in crops, those few are edible when grown.

[MTB-Fritz]

You can build farms or greenhouses in order to produce food. Farms will stop producing in winter, greenhouses have a lower yield but produce all year long. You gonna need water to run farms/greenhouses as well as people to work in em. If your farms are too far from any housing they wont attract workers.

When you select the type of stuff to grow you have the choice between edible and non-edible produce. I would always start out with edible food. Its not very complex but it gets the work done so brokkoli, rice and barley.

If you dont habe any storage room your farm/greenhouse output has nowhere to go so make sure you have enough space available.

Thats pretty much all I can think of

[Palandus]

Farms are a good early game option, as they can make a lot more food (for fewer nanites) than Greenhouses. Max out their employment and you can easily make 2x+ more food than a maxxed Greenhouse during the summer. Then during winter, drop employment to 0, and then redistribute the workforce to work on other things when you can't grow anyway... like mining or nanite production.

If you have problems with people not getting to work, build the hover car stations near the major workplaces and the residences.

You want to grow what is best for the soil for your first edible crop. Some maps it is Broccoli. Others are Melons and the final map type I think is Barley / Rice. Whichever crop it is that has mostly bright green "fertile tiles".

Processed foods, like Bread, do provide more overall food per unit of production. But as bread requires you to Mill Floor, then Bake Bread, and Mills are costly to build (in Nanites, Power and Workforce) its only really an option for a mid-tier colony. I believe the alien foods provide the most food, but require you to first research it and then you must farm it and then mill it.

With farms too, if you build on a tile with a farm tile on it, the farm will automatically place a new farm tile nearby. That way if you need to place some structure near the farm, such as a hover car station, you can do so.

[kschang77]

You can't make xenosage edible. You need to add flour (which requires wheat and mill) to make xeno spice bread.

You can make the enhancer Xenoglow from xenosage, but that just increases happiness, but doesn't do anything for hunger. You can add xenosage to the other alien stuff to make the other enhancers.

None of the alien stuff is edible without mixing it with something Terran, usually flour.

[Palandus]

Well there are two "bean" products that only require the one alien plant, but again you need a Mill and the research completed to do so. In general, feeding a population with alien plants is much harder to do and you have to plan out base expansion slower.

[kschang77]

Can you serve those beans by themselves? Hmmm... Have to double check the wiki. But yes, requires a lot more processing than Terran native food.

The thing that tickles me is... somehow potash works on alien plants too. :D

[Palandus]

The thing that tickles me is: Why you can't generate potash yourself. Or a potash equivalent, called compost or make your own fertilizer.

[MTB-Fritz]

Originally posted by Bonegrinder:

The thing that tickles me is: Why you can't generate potash yourself. Or a potash equivalent, called compost or make your own fertilizer.

probably a balancing decision rather than capability ^^

[mystikmind2005]

Originally posted by Bonegrinder:

Farms are a good early game option, as they can make a lot more food (for fewer nanites) than Greenhouses. Max out their employment and you can easily make 2x+ more food than a maxxed Greenhouse during the summer. Then during winter, drop employment to 0, and then redistribute the workforce to work on other things when you can't grow anyway... like mining or nanite production.

That's a good suggestion, but, it is probably too much work. Might be handy for a faster getting started though!

I normally try to farm every different type of crop fairly fast. The higher yield gets the greenhouse, the low yield gets the tier 1 farm.

There is really only 2 useful Alien crops, which i usually try to research fairly fast. All the rest are hamstrung by needing flour, so they wont get researched until much later on.

Then i will have 1 mill specialised on primary foods - Flour, groji beans and the other one (i forget) and a second mill doing everything else, + flour, that is usually enough.

You have to be careful farming too much alien crops though, because some of them love to pile up in your storage, and it can be a freaking pain!

Food can also run out if your morale is low... because building efficiency is so freakishly sensitive to morale in this game, once morale gets too low, your colony will experience a morale cascade failure from which there is no recovery.

[Palandus]

Oh it is quite a bit of tedious work, I can assure you. There isn't an easy way to idle all the t3 farms, so I only go through the trouble of doing this in the early to mid game. Once I get to late game, I bulldoze all the farms and replace them with Greenhouses.

Mind you, not using t3 farms is a mistake. Because with the same 5 people, you can work the plots of land equal to two t2 greenhouses in terms of raw production. And, a single T3 farm will cost you about 15 nanites, whereas a T2 greenhouse will cost 35 nanites (or so; haven't played in a while). Add potash on top, and you get tons of production during the summer. But again, idling and reactivating is extremely tedious, so I don't bother with it the full length of a campaign session.

And the 2 useful alien crops includes the one that can be turned into Nanites, right (Keiko Sludge)? I generally avoid creating alien crops until mid-late game, unless it is a map that only really supports alien crops.

I'm assuming two mills at mid-game right? By late game I have usually 6-7 mills running.

If you have a huge excess of alien crops, use the chemical plant to create drugs, and then send those drugs to dispensaries. Get rid of excess storage wastage and get a huge morale boost by dispensing drugs.

Typically with morale, you have plenty of warnings, before you do reach a cascade failure. It is true, once you enter into the cascade, it is virtually impossible to escape it (I think out of the 40 some times it happened to me, I avoided it 1 or 2 times). But like most things, being observant, routinely pausing the game, and trying to be proactive, helps to avoid them.

[Sasheria]

Be careful of the drug type. Some make people lose health so make sure you have hospitals nearby :)

[mystikmind2005]

Originally posted by Bonegrinder:

Oh it is quite a bit of tedious work, I can assure you. There isn't an easy way to idle all the t3 farms, so I only go through the trouble of doing this in the early to mid game. Once I get to late game, I bulldoze all the farms and replace them with Greenhouses.

Mind you, not using t3 farms is a mistake. Because with the same 5 people, you can work the plots of land equal to two t2 greenhouses in terms of raw production. And, a single T3 farm will cost you about 15 nanites, whereas a T2 greenhouse will cost 35 nanites (or so; haven't played in a while). Add potash on top, and you get tons of production during the summer. But again, idling and reactivating is extremely tedious, so I don't bother with it the full length of a campaign session.

And the 2 useful alien crops includes the one that can be turned into Nanites, right (Keiko Sludge)? I generally avoid creating alien crops until mid-late game, unless it is a map that only really supports alien crops.

I'm assuming two mills at mid-game right? By late game I have usually 6-7 mills running.

If you have a huge excess of alien crops, use the chemical plant to create drugs, and then send those drugs to dispensaries. Get rid of excess storage wastage and get a huge morale boost by dispensing drugs.

Typically with morale, you have plenty of warnings, before you do reach a cascade failure. It is true, once you enter into the cascade, it is virtually impossible to escape it (I think out of the 40 some times it happened to me, I avoided it 1 or 2 times). But like most things, being observant, routinely pausing the game, and trying to be proactive, helps to avoid them.

Interesting, thanks.

Kelko sludge? Hell no, never use it except for challenge maps. Because it lays out your chemical plants something shocking, and that is allot of labour to waylay.
I usually have no issue getting a remote settlements/factories before my mines run out, that solves the nanite issue.

Like i said, there are two and only two Alien food types that you can directly produce from the 2 Alien crops with a mill. Then there are another 3 or 4 Alien food types that are blocked behind the firewall of needing flour, so that makes them exceedingly useless until mid to late game and by then you don't need them at all, same with drugs, but they are there, so, why not eh?

I only ever had 1 cascade failure, and it was on a challenge map.
I noticed some perplexing shortfalls in food and power and simply tried building more food and power structures without understanding how freakishly sensitive production is to morale .... i mean, who would anticipate that when you have a 'logical' mind and not the Alice in wonderland mad hatters mind?? lol

But this is the type of game where problems need to be anticipated and dealt with 'before' they become problems, but i like that style of game - a bit chess like, you gotta be thinking ahead, responding will never work.