Issues with low food efficiency

[Mr. Frank]

My population is on the brink of starvation because i have low food production. my ceiling is 25 but i'm currently producing around 10 with 40% efficiency tops. how do i increase this number?

[Spite Sprite]

Originally posted by Mr. Frank:

My population is on the brink of starvation because i have low food production. my ceiling is 25 but i'm currently producing around 10 with 40% efficiency tops. how do i increase this number?

A couple of recommendations I have is to try and make sure you have enough chemicals and water to maintain production. You can also allocate a percentage of your chemicals and water to be used for food production by clicking on the resource on the bottom of the screen. (This guide has a screenshot of this in the "Take a deeper look at your colony's resources!") I also have good results when I set up food production relatively close to each other, to cut down on transit time!

[Mr. Frank]

my water and chemicals are high, above 200. guess i'll set a few hubs, with 3 or 4 food manufacturers, around my colonies

[Spite Sprite]

Originally posted by Mr. Frank:

my water and chemicals are high, above 200. guess i'll set a few hubs, with 3 or 4 food manufacturers, around my colonies

Hmm, another possibility may be too few drones or perhaps too many other prioritizations in place?

[Mr. Frank]

that may be it. i have aproximately 1 drone for every 10 buildings. but what i'm finding strange is that with my other resources i'm apparently fine. maybe i'm not and i'm just over-building in other areas, idk

[Crooked_Dave]

I would definitely have more than 1 drone for 10 buildings. If you click on the drone hub, you can see it's use percentage. If it's at 100% you definitely need more hubs.

[mreed2]

Yeah, you need far more than 1 drone : 10 buildings.

The consensus of the message board is that 1 : 4 is the minimum to get good performance. Personally, I always end up with a 1:1 ratio. It is more or less impossible to have too many drones, and the more drones you have the faster goods will be delivered to their destination. Everything just works better if there are more drones.

Note that the drone hubs need to be placed where the drones will actually be useful. Just adding more drone hubs to the map won't help at all -- you should place them in locations were the existing drone hubs are "busy" (as determined by visual inspection).

Keep in mind that goods in storehouses (vs goods that are sitting in mines or are in transit) are not as useful as you might have hoped. Simply having a large quantities of goods in storage has very, very little effect on your economy. This is far too complex of a subject to get into in a message board post, but I have a guide... :)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2319632408

This is a guide -- it explains how the game works and how to make it do what you wish. It has very little in the way of spoilers, so should be save to read even if you are generally trying to avoid spoilers.