Food problem

[Androuw]

Hey,

After 13 hours on the game and half of them looking for solutions, I can't seem to be efficient on my food production.

I have 6 people and 6 greenhouses and 3 composters, everything is optimal for growing but I always run out of seeds, organic and food. Impossible to have a positive profitability.
Do I have too many people or has the game changed since the 2020 tutorials? I am close to giving up with this game...

If anyone can help me
Thank you!

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

I've got 6 on my crew and I'm using 6 double grow beds. I haven't quite found the right balance for fruit and veggies and nuts, but things appear to be mostly stable with an over abundance of fruit. Hard to find the balance because I'm not really keep track, plus I'm looting ships and taking food.

I've got a single composter set to continuously decompose biomatter. On second glance, I may be finally running out of fertilizer... Currently only on day 81.

5 veggies
4 artificial meat
2 fruit
1 nuts

1 Co2 facillity
1 temp control
1 regular door with vent set to off

[thinkinTom]

It takes a while to figiure out what combination works best, you also might want to check your work priorities on the grow beds, the default is always set at lowest priority level, so you may want to pump that up a bit and see if it helps to speed up production speed a bit.

[Shadesishere]

for people that are having issues with food : in the growbed, where you can see what you have growing, there is a infinity symbol, click that and set it to only produce if under a set amount, it will grow until that number is reached : so if you have 3 5x size growbeds, and you had the IF rule set to 50, and you had 49 before harvesting those three, once it's over 50 your crew will stop planting seeds, but will still harvest the remaining crops first, so you will have a slight surplus, planting will resume once it drops below 50 again.

saves a lot of water and fertiliser (and crew spend less time with crops, also prevents storage filling up if you overproduce 1 type of food) and it also allows you to more easily monitor which foods you need to grow more or less of.

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

Originally posted by Shades:

for people that are having issues with food : in the growbed, where you can see what you have growing, there is a infinity symbol, click that and set it to only produce if under a set amount, it will grow until that number is reached : so if you have 3 5x size growbeds, and you had the IF rule set to 50, and you had 49 before harvesting those three, once it's over 50 your crew will stop planting seeds, but will still harvest the remaining crops first, so you will have a slight surplus, planting will resume once it drops below 50 again.

saves a lot of water and fertiliser (and crew spend less time with crops, also prevents storage filling up if you overproduce 1 type of food) and it also allows you to more easily monitor which foods you need to grow more or less of.

Setting limits is a really great tip, particularly in terms of limiting fertilizer consumption, and I'll definitely use it now that I've expanded my food grow room.

Regarding fertilizer, I only now just realized that you should be making this in the chemical refinery. The composter just doesn't produce enough of the stuff to make for stable food production. Failing that, trading seems to be the way to keep your stores up to the job.

[Shadesishere]

My general rule of thumb for producing anything is : IF <10 for main resource producers, and IF <50 for scrap refining, this means that your metal refinery will idle unless you drop under 10, allowing you to stockpile raw resources, and the scrap refinery will be constantly working until the number hits 50+, just creates a healthy buffer for production resources.

water and raw chemicals are always going to be the 2 resources that screw you over, BUT if you have your ship set up right, and your crew can survive the damage, head to a siren world, and let some crew members have breakdowns and start fires, the smoke will easily fill up your ship, and if you have a good number of scrubbers ready, will be dealt with quickly and make raw chemicals and carbon.

combine that with killing aliens and people (In my last run, had 8 composters going continuously), several of the vital resources will always be in surplus.

(also forgot to mention on last post, don't forget to change storage setting so crew don't eat the actual resource before turning it into a meal)

[Wisedude]

Originally posted by Shades:

(also forgot to mention on last post, don't forget to change storage setting so crew don't eat the actual resource before turning it into a meal)

How to do this?

[Playzr 🐵]

That's a good tip setting the limits and growing what you're low on. You need so many vegetables, a lot more than the rest of the ingredients. I eventually managed to produce more food than I consume after adding more and more farms. Also having lots of people to work on the farms helps too. You may have to buy fertiliser, the waste plant matter, chemicals, monster meat to ensure you have enough fertiliser. More farms means more waste plant matter produced. Also I assume you're putting any human corpses and aliens you find in derelicts into the composter. If you keep trading for compost ingredients and fertiliser you'll build up a surplus and it stops being an issue.
You can afford fertiliser if you sell certain things such as the hyper fuel you make from hyper crystals at a profit so you can buy the crystals to turn into hyper fuel and make a profit from it.

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]

Originally posted by Wisedude:

Originally posted by Shades:

(also forgot to mention on last post, don't forget to change storage setting so crew don't eat the actual resource before turning it into a meal)

How to do this?

Is this still a feature in the game? I seem to recall this from long ago but I haven't been able to find these settings in recent sessions.

[db48x]

Originally posted by Cake for Mumm-Ra:

Originally posted by Wisedude:

How to do this?

Is this still a feature in the game? I seem to recall this from long ago but I haven't been able to find these settings in recent sessions.

It’s a setting on the storage bays which prevents people from eating any food that they have stored. I set that on every single bay just in case it ever happens to be holding a food item. Then I make a single small storage bay that requests prepared meals and space food where I haven’t set that. This allows them to eat meals that are found while scavenging, but doesn’t allow them to eat raw food directly; they have to go to a kitchen and get a meal. They end up eating less food overall, and getting a balanced diet.

I just wish that there was a way to include a small percentage of alien meat without them noticing.

[Playzr 🐵]

Originally posted by db48x:

Originally posted by Cake for Mumm-Ra:

Is this still a feature in the game? I seem to recall this from long ago but I haven't been able to find these settings in recent sessions.

It’s a setting on the storage bays which prevents people from eating any food that they have stored. I set that on every single bay just in case it ever happens to be holding a food item. Then I make a single small storage bay that requests prepared meals and space food where I haven’t set that. This allows them to eat meals that are found while scavenging, but doesn’t allow them to eat raw food directly; they have to go to a kitchen and get a meal. They end up eating less food overall, and getting a balanced diet.

I just wish that there was a way to include a small percentage of alien meat without them noticing.

Good tip!

[Bobucles]

Early in the game is all about eating algae. Get those algae makers going and stagger crew meals, because the internal goo storage only holds meals for 2-3 people at a time. The toxicity builds up after a couple weeks or so, so switch to a few days of healthy kitchen meals to clear out the poison.

Just keep bouncing between a week of algae and a day of real food, and your food supply can last for a very long time. Keep both machines built and simply disable one or the other depending on needs.

For bonus points, use algae makers for regular ship duty and real meals before boarding a derelict. Algae can cause puking, which is harmless on the main ship, but pretty stressful when they're starving in another ship.

A full farming diet requires high botany skill and lots of farming bays. Plants lose grow time while they're waiting for the next botanist upkeep. Make sure all the botanists work separate shifts so they can quickly respond to moody plants.

[repertoire]

If you want to be self-sufficient, download this mod and install it: *Vulby's Balance Changes*

You can configure it as you wish, add and remove the number of fruit and biomatter.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by repertoire:

If you want to be self-sufficient, download this mod and install it: *Vulby's Balance Changes*

You can configure it as you wish, add and remove the number of fruit and biomatter.

Or just learn how to play instead of commenting on some post from 2 years ago...

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Originally posted by I blame Earthshaker:

Originally posted by repertoire:

If you want to be self-sufficient, download this mod and install it: *Vulby's Balance Changes*

You can configure it as you wish, add and remove the number of fruit and biomatter.

Or just learn how to play instead of commenting on some post from 2 years ago...

Plus, several aspects of that mod do not work correctly (or at all). It's a large part of why I made my own.

However, it's not like you can expect necromancers to understand that sort of thing.

[Cake for Mumm-Ra]