Too much food farming required

[Trikki]

I'm taking a break from the game, have our own private server and overall love the game play. Just found I spend farrrrrrr too much time getting ingredients just to eat and food doesn't last long enough, a large percentage of time spent doing mundane crap instead of actually adventuring/building. Just my 2c

[sheap]

In your base > Just eat Honey
Meadows and Forest > Veggie Meal
Swamp > Veggie + 1 Meat of any kind
etc... according to your activities and threat level, let's say you're gonna picking fruit and mushroom in the meadows you just care about stamina so veggie is fine.

[jonnin]

Its all 2 things: getting established and resource management. I am playing solo, and I have a simple turnip farm (20 plant capacity) and a plains farm (flax and barley, about 40 plant capacity). I have 4 beehives.
Where does that leave me? I can spend all my time gathering blood bags, lox meat, sage, berries, and so on, and eat rich foods fit for a bigger boss than we even have in game yet.
Or, I can shoot any deer I see, kill any boar I happen across, and eat turnip stew and honey and cooked meat for 90% of my play time with approximately 0 effort involved (gather replant takes about 1 min every other game day) and save the rich stuff for difficult fights or bad days or corpse runs (yes, I use the best food and old armor for those, going naked after the dark forest is just asking to die again).

So most of my time is not spent gathering, but exploring and building. If I run of of something, its usually meat, and I can gather that very quickly if I need to do a dedicated run.

[Oswald]

Originally posted by gerald2:

Originally posted by Onnisaurus:

What food have you been eating for it to be 80% of the playtime. You just out at sea grinding serpent stew when you could just kill a like 10 Lox in a couple minutes and be set for like 8 hours.

sausages ,fishes ,turnip stew mostly ,while 2 first ar eno problem if u are stocked with enrails after swamp fishing is total pain ,you rarely catch full stack a day and you literally loose all that day by fishing you cannot do anything else,maybe nets or fish traps could change it .
Add to this thistle and other stuff needed to make meads and here you go ,yeh maybe i overshoot with 70-80% but half of game is just grind for food&mead.
I couldn't im not at plains stage yet.

late game the food grind gets smaller tho.

[gerald2]

Originally posted by sheap:

In your base > Just eat Honey
Meadows and Forest > Veggie Meal
Swamp > Veggie + 1 Meat of any kind
etc... according to your activities and threat level, let's say you're gonna picking fruit and mushroom in the meadows you just care about stamina so veggie is fine.

true, until u meet an raid w/o stam and health....going to fight "earth is trembling with 40 hp and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stamina is kinda not so wise ,so i usually keep me fed with two foods i have most,mostly sausages and stew

[ATOMIC]

Nah. This is just a case of poor time management. Playing solo I have several chests of food. Every once in a while, I dedicate a day to hunting/fishing and I dedicate a day to gathering mushrooms/berries/thistle just to top off my supplies. This includes ingredients for potions as well. Actual farming is a non-issue. You plant the stuff and go complete some goal for a few days and return to fields of food.

[Netaris]

My actual turnip farm have approximatly 80 plant capacity and I plan to expand it. If you want to take less time to farm food, make bigger farms and craft more food in one harvest. A 2 stars boar's meat farm is also an help. ;)

[Ewenomi]

1) Forget the mushrooms and berries. Brew Berries into Queens Jam as your Berry substitute. Neck in better than mushrooms.
2) Build a fire and Rest next to the altar before you start and make sure you use the altar in the morning. Being Cold will hurt your battle more than bad Food.
3) Having some Healing Potions on hand doesn't hurt either.

[sheap]

Originally posted by gerald2:

Originally posted by sheap:

In your base > Just eat Honey
Meadows and Forest > Veggie Meal
Swamp > Veggie + 1 Meat of any kind
etc... according to your activities and threat level, let's say you're gonna picking fruit and mushroom in the meadows you just care about stamina so veggie is fine.

true, until u meet an raid w/o stam and health....going to fight "earth is trembling with 40 hp and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stamina is kinda not so wise ,so i usually keep me fed with two foods i have most,mostly sausages and stew

You're right altough I am leaving on a little Island full of workbench, so no raid, and when it happens on some other base, I just tp to my quite island to eat and prepare the fight ;) I got caught pant down by drakes and portal is always near so it's never a problem !

So still only honey if I am doing base work :)
Playing only solo btw

[Netaris]

I like carrot soup in home, lot of stam without that much ingredients. It's a good use of mushrooms and I have way too much carrots anyway. I tend to stock my honey for potions and serpent stew when I have the opportunity to craft it.

[[ Col ] Chamberlain]

I know, the Foodsystem is a Part of this nice Game but realy.. how many our Char must eating its abnormal. You can better have 5 Pigs instead of our Char. They need lower Food like him

[Buntkreuz]

Honestly my first playthrough i didnt use any farming whatsoever.
No taming, no farming.
The only time i had to spend some thought on farming was when i had to get flax for my endgame equipment.
But after getting that, i didnt use any farming at all.
You get the best food through meat. Sausages, Serpent Stew and Lox Meat provide one of the best combinations in the game, and none of those require farming.

The problem rather seems, that people are stuck in their comfort zone instead of just doing things.
In other words, me just going in without a plan somehow succeeding without problems, while all the tryhards going at the game with a fixed plan open threads on the forum about how this game isnt good.

Which means, while people open thread about Deathsquitos or food or whatever, i just go out and deal with it by trying and experimenting.
And somehow i was able to enter the plains with stone age and leather gear while others complain they cant deal with them while being in Iron Age.
Or that they need tons of farming for food while i just go out killing a Serpent, cook some stew and dont need any more food for the following 3 hours.

So, it seems to me that some people are going at the game with a wrong expectation and fail, while others seem to succeed.

[Bobucles]

The planting part is easy and kinda fun. Picking the finish crops is hard. Carrots and turnips have thin leaves and tiny hit boxes, making it difficult to actually lock on. It can get pretty frustrating with a large field of crops. The carrot/turnip seeds are much larger and easier to harvest.

Life changes after discovering barley. The ategir AoE attack will scythe down a big area of crops. So it's fun to plant AND fun to harvest. Bread still takes a crazy amount of barley, but that's a different issue.

[Buntkreuz]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

The planting part is easy and kinda fun. Picking the finish crops is hard. Carrots and turnips have thin leaves and tiny hit boxes, making it difficult to actually lock on. It can get pretty frustrating with a large field of crops. The carrot/turnip seeds are much larger and easier to harvest.

Life changes after discovering barley. The ategir AoE attack will scythe down a big area of crops. So it's fun to plant AND fun to harvest. Bread still takes a crazy amount of barley, but that's a different issue.

Why the heck would you waste barley for bread anyway?

[Jaxx]

Yes you are right. This game does required lot of time foraging for food and prepping. Even when we have food it doesn't last very long. Here is how I gather my food source. I tame 2 wolves, put them in a cage, throw them raw meat and watch them pop baby wolf. My cage is so full of wolves i let all out but kept two. They ran around my base killing deer/boars/neck and kept on breeding. I never had to feed them. (this might change if dev even review our post) My base is over run by them. They provide security and also food. I collected queen bee, and turnips seeds. My main food sources are turnipstew/cooked meat/queensjam/sausages.

[steveman0]

I think it's really down to efficiency. If you only make an effort to get food when you need it by going out of your way, then it might seem grindy. If you take the food that is given to you in terms of the deer, boar, neck, and other food granting enemies that you run across, you'll likely come home with more food than you left with.

Combine that with farming, you've got a number of recipes available to you and likely many more coming in the first big content update. I built a farm that's actually probably far bigger than I needed, but in a few rotations I've got half a chest of turnip seeds, a chest of turnips, and already a half chest of turnip stew. I basically will never need to plant turnip seed plants again and can probably use them as the primary food for feeding my boars.

There's definitely some room for improvement. Managing boar breeding is a bit of a pain right now without a feeding trough or other easy way to recognize when they need feeding and culling is a pain to manage with the spawn limits they have unless you build one of those crazy towers. We also could definitely benefit from having more farmable items since stuff like thistle is highly demanded and foraging for this stops being remotely challenging once you've got iron.

It's all a compromise though. Some foods require a lot of effort, but there are many that you can stockpile in large quantities without too much difficulty. Meat and turnip stew are quite good and 100% sustainable just from farming and breeding which can both be ramped up to large scale with minimal additional effort once in place. I'm sure we'll see other sustainable options added in the future too so best consider setting up a farm now if you haven't already.

Also, honey is virtually free and available in unlimited supply once you've got a few hives up. It's not a great food, nor long lasting, but it's a good boost when doing mundane tasks in low difficulty environments.