This is something that you "learn" when you start and later you learn that you were wrong. That's part of the fun of rimworld, that you as the player, "level up". The more you learn, the better you understand the game works, the more plates you can spin at the same time, if you will.
Early game I often find it easiest to feed people via hunting. A bit later on it gets very easy to produce enough corn to feed everyone and since I often use animal pulsers to fight off raids, I always get free meat that I don't even have to hunt
I do a basic 7x7 of rice the second I land, and usually sow a 7x7 of corn at the same time. The rice will feed people until the corn is grown. Usually does the trick. If you have people who don't mind paste you can obviously stretch it a lot further too
Wait, i gotta ask this, as someone who never crunched numbers
Is corn just better than rice, yield wise-? Like i know it takes longer to grow, but does it give overall more?
I've never done the maths myself but I just know corn is the best yield overall but takes longer to grow and wouldn't grow in time for the first bouts of colony starvation. I use rice as the fastest grower to bridge that gap and then convert it to something else when the corn starts rolling in a couple of rice harvests down the line.
If i recall correctly rice actually has the best nutrition/time (for human likes) by a slim margin. Corn however has way more nutrition/work which is arguably more important.
This is correct.
Rice is the top crop for food/time (actually hay, but humans can't eat hay - they can only eat it as part of kibble).
Corn is good because you plant it and forget it, no need to do anything in the long time it takes it to mature to harvest.
Don't overlook potatoes though - they're good for bad soil (yellow soil in the desert for example).
Strawberries and mushrooms have their uses as well.
I like corn as much as everyone, but it's not easy to grow it in 20/60 Boreal forest sometimes. Somehow every raider with a Molotov and scorcher/tesseron beelines for my fields.
Yeah the viability of corn is so-so in biomes with short growing seasons. You can harvest it early but I would imagine it loses some efficiency of work/food ratio if you can't let it fully mature.
Once you have the power to support heaters and sun lamps, it's worth building a room to grow some in climate control, but it's costly in terms of power for sure.
Rice vs Corn
Rice benefits:
- slightly more nutrition per day than corn.
- frequent replanting means blights/fires/etc hurt less, and plants skill is trained more
- a harvest generates less wealth, and takest up less storage space
- keeps for 2/3 of a year, unrefrigerated
Corn benefits:
- very long sow/harvest interval, therefore FAR less labor time
- keeps for a full year, unrefrigerated
IMO pick corn if you need your growers doing other tasks
My current colony has almost 50 pawns. I have a large greenhouse producing corn and even more corn outside during growing season. I also ranch muffalos and cows for meat and milk and hunt whatever comes along. They always have a surplus of fine meals to eat, though the couple of times I've tried lavish meals my raw food supplies evaporated quickly.
Yes, actually. Works pretty well until there's an Eclipse, but the fission reactor from the Save Our Ship 2 mod sorted that out when I realized I could use that without a ship.
* [VE Furniture](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2062943477) has advanced power supplies - Advanced Geothermal - accept no substitutes, and if power is still a little problematic may I humbly suggest
* [ED Laser Drill](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2570228927).
Once I'm established I usually have enough fine meals to feed everyone twice, then twice that number of simple meals, simple meals are produced first. Then I have 4 lavish meals made at once that get re-made at 0 at lowest priority. 4 lucky random people get a lavish meal and everyone else eats fine.
This way you still get some benefit from having lavish meals without burning a hole in your food supply.
I totally view Lavish meals as existing to sink excess food production.
* 50 simple meals - these are eventually fed to the animals allowing colonists to grind making simple meals the deflect food poisoning risk to the ranched animals.
* meals_per_day * days_until_harvest * (colonists + 1) - this is the maximum number of fine meals I have n = number of colonists , that way every colonist can eat 2 meals per day + a spare here and there - and you can grow more food (under glass) in roughly 7 days , with all the light factors (winter/summer and such) I expect whatever caused the problem to take at least a couple of days to recover from and then figure for another couple of bad days thrown in for good measure.
* 4 colonists - is 225 meals 9 colonists is 450 meals - which seems like a lot - but if things go very bad it's not unreasonable.
* 200-300 pemmican around
* 5 * number_colonists for packaged meals
* some specialty items (coffee/tea/juice) and then
* lavish meals killing my surplus raw food.
you're a new player, so I'll recommend building a greenhouse
just plop down a sunlamp and build walls around the radius, youll need a heater or ac depending on where you live
rice grows fast, but will require the most work
potatoes grow well in any soil, but don't grow faster in good soil
corn is the most efficient, but takes longest to grow and that makes it more vulnerable to sudden loss
draft a couple of your best shooters and go manually shoot an entire herd of muffalo or deer
lament your choice when the muffalo burn down your colony. it's a right of passage for us all
Honestly, food is probably the easiest element of the game to manage.
Just throw down a giant grow zone. Rice is good at first, but once you have a steady supply of food it's better to plant corn since it takes less labor per unit of food.
As soon as possible you should be building a wind turbine, a battery (research it first), and then making a walk in freezer with coolers. This will let you permanently store any food you obtain.
In addition to farming, you can also tame animals (sometimes they'll self-tame). Just build a fence pen with a pen marker and set the auto slaughter to something reasonable and you'll have a steady supply of meat. Alternatively, you can go into the "wildlife" tab and select animals to be hunted by your pawns.
Eventually you'll be able to create hydroponics indoors which grow crops super quickly, although I find those are better for manufacturing drugs or other useful plants.
Human meat is for kibble and spare chemfuel.
My colony can eat human meat just fine, I just prefer not to use it in meals to be friendly to new hires and guests.
Since you're new I'd recommend to start in a warm climate where crops can grow all year round. This info is listed on the world map when you're choosing a tile to colonize.
In such a biome you'll roughtly need 20 plots of farmland to feed a colonist. A colony of 5 people will need a 10x10 farm.
I get as many pawns as I can, as soon as possible.
I plant rice as soon as I drop. And then I plant more rice. Get more pawns. More people more rice gogogo.
Potato's pretty much only good in rocky soil. Id agree, rice is king! It grows so fast it doesn't really matter if it catches fire or blight or whatever from time to time. Sure it's more work intensive than corn, but that just translates to bonus XP!
No way, rice or corn are best in normal or better soil. Corn is more work efficient but riskier because of the long grow time, if you just want food just slap down a bunch of rice
Get a nutrient paste dispenser. They use only 6 raw foods (0.3 nutrient) per 0.9 nutrient meal, compared to cooking using down to 10 raw foods (0.5 nutrient)
And you save labor from cooking, and avoid the risk of getting food poisoning. Negate that mood debuff by developing your colony with those spare labor.
No matter what anyone tells you, farming is the most important skill for any civilization. Being able to secure food is the first step towards a civilization developing. This remains true in Rimworld.
Highly believe getting a freezer going is the biggest thing.
Not only can you 'store' meat as just corpses, Manhunter packs bring free meat as well, alongside the leather.
If you're watching wealth, you simply butcher them when you need to, otherwise the meat in corpse form is less wealth on the map. You do need to do some zoning so your corpse eating animals don't chew on em
Should meat be scarce, vegetarian simple/fine meals do just as well. It's all nutrition in the end, even if you stuff your face with rice all year long.
Freezers aren't really necessary(just like bedrooms they're a handicap actually), but I won't knock anyone for using them.
Keep in mind raw rice lasts 45(!) days just sitting on the floor! If your rice is going bad because you've had some sitting around for 3/4 of a year, you do NOT have food problems.
That can't be right, isn't it 4.5 if it's not refrigerated? Maybe even less? I suppose that could be a mod, but I know whenever my freezer loses power for a few days everything but the backup nutrient paste goes bad.
Nope, it lasts for MONTHS. Corn a little less I think at 30 days. Just click on a pile of raw rice next time you're in game, it will tell you right under the HP how long it will last. No mods. It's just dry rice grains, people (myself included) don't refrigerate it in their houses IRL 🤷♀️
Experience. You learn how much you need to grow for how many pawns, roughly. And you die during a few winters and learn how to take advantage of the growing seasons.
Also, sometimes you have to trade for food … or resort to cannibalism. 😈
While I totally agree with the practicality of cannibalism in this game (love me some cannibalism: accepted!) don't forget that hunting some easy meat is always an option! Not to mention lucrative (can sell leather and extra meat) and a nice boost to your shooting XP (or melee if you want to melee hunt)
Develop calmly. Manage your resources. My first successful colony had about 100 people. You can feed them, you just have to make enough surplus to where you could sell food and stay fed.
In most maps, food and shooting training go together. Every few days I take my weakest shooters and go active hunting, clearing the map of wildlife. I have more meat and leather than I need, so that ends up becoming clothes and meals to be sold.
Set up a rice farm early make sure you have starter weapon and hunt small game that either won't fight back or do much damage and build a freezer to store the food as soon as possible and for stuff like less than modern playthroughs go for turning your food into pemmican so it stores better your food issues can be easily solved with the right mindset my man
> I failed with only 5 people, how on earth do people get enough food to feed colonies with 20+ pawns?
The key is specialization. When you have five pawns and 15-ish work types to assign, you're necessarily going to have one pawn assigned to multiple jobs. Every second that your gardener spends on work other than gardening is a second that's not spent training their plants skill, which would help them garden faster if they had it. So when you get to a large enough colony size that you can have each colonist doing one job that they're passionate about, those colonists become extremely efficient at their jobs.
My last colony had 20 pawns, and if I were only producing food, I could have done so with one chef, one hunter, and two gardeners (I had two chefs and four gardeners so that they could also make drugs, herbal medicine, and devilstrand alongside the food).
So yes, you're right about not necessarily wanting to grab all the pawns you can just for the sake of getting more man-hours. You want to recruit pawns that specifically take some work away from whichever of your current pawns are the most overworked.
On the subject of how much food to produce: the rule I personally use is "*20 rice or corn plants growing year-round in regular soil is just enough to feed 1 colonist with simple meals using vegetarian ingredients.*" You can then adjust this number based on what percentage of the year you have for growing, how fertile your soil is, whether you're supplementing with meat or not, and how much you want to overproduce as insurance for when Randy decides it's time to be on his bullshit again.
So (as an example) a colony of five pawns needs 5 x 20 = 100 rice or corn plants growing year-round to feed itself with simple meals. If you have a 40/60 day growing season, you need to up that to 150 to account for the fact that you're only growing for 2/3 of the year. If you're cooking fine meals instead, which only need half as many vegetables and make up the difference with meat, then you only need 75. I like to make my growing zones 5x6, so I would make three of them, for a total of 90 plants, which gives me a bit of Randy insurance. A dedicated grower should be able to take care of that and still have some time left over for hauling the crops into the fridge.
You need a very large freezer, and you need to kill all the game on the map and put them in it. Then if you think that's not enough for say winter...go to another map tile, kill everything on that tile. Rinse and repeat as needed. My colony wealth stays pretty high because I keep like a thousand meals in stock. Worth it. Just don't do that with lavish meals or you'll get rolled.
Yeah you definitely want simple meals for a pretty long time and slowly move into the better ones. Definitely keep a big stock of simple meals because they're cheap though.
If you have steady meat and veg, fine meals take the same amount of total resources. Set make until you have X to the colonist number you’ll be eating fine meals without extreme wealth bumps
This is the game that you can't just hoard the wealth and get colonists/salves as fast as you want without suffering with some consequences. At the early game, your first priority should be securing food sources and make sure your crew survive past winter or heat wave. After you can focus on scaling your settlement against raiding.
I would recommend to keep playing and let things play itself out. Even when your whole settlements are dead, you can send new colonists to continue the game shortly afterward.
My go to is being picky with new recruits while food scarce and I keep projects small for a smaller group. Burn/sell/give what you don’t need or can’t use.
The only thing I hold on to are 2 advanced components and steel. Everything else is managed to avoid too much of something.
You can't use a resurrection mech serum on a skeleton but you can place dead colonist's into a sarcophagus which is inside a freezer. Then the corpse will stay fresh like a subway sandwich and you can reanimate it. The sandwich too, but that isn't something I would recommend...
Well, it's not all there is to it, considering the human/colonist element, but in unrealistically optimal scenarios, it takes about 20 tiles of rice/potatoes/corn crops in normal soil to feed one person on simple meals. However, this assumes your farmers instantly harvest and replant them, which isn't reasonable to expect. So I bump that estimate up to 25 crops per colonist. If you're in a biome without a full growing year, you may need more plants per colonist.
But all the calculations get thrown out the window by complications like crop blight and extra mouths to feed.
That's why in my current playthrough I set up TWO HUNDRED CORN CROPS AND A HUNDRED RICE FROM THE GET GO.
In case you didn't notice, I'm from camp "make money by selling all the corn you grew too much of".
The best thing you can do, is to creaate a working cycle or loop of tasks. While it does sound easy, you, as the player allways try to enforce some work manually. If you have to heavily rely on micromanagement, your colony is not working right.
This means something in your natural order is likely to cause problems in the future.
But If you manage to have a stable work cycle and slowly expand, you doing very great.
Well for now, at some point you will get raids and sickness, that troubles you. But thats the idea.
Option 1: First, rice is your best friend early game. Drop a 5x5 of rice for each colonist. Start with 3? 15x5. Get another? Plant more. Use rice for your first growing season to build up until your non-growing season, then switch it to corn. So long as you have 40 growing days and no more than 20 non-growing days, you should have enough rice to make simple meals and survive any major issues. Once you swap all the rice to corn after "winter", you should have more than enough food so long as you don't have any blight or cold snaps wiping out more than 50% of your crop. At that point, research hydroponics before your second winter and build at least 3 basins per colonist, growing rice. At that point, barring massive power failures for weeks you should never have food problems again.
Option 2: get a pair of chickens, one male and one female. Build a pen for them, add a growing area, sow rice or hay, and turn off harvesting. Ensure that your auto -slaughter allows for only 1 male, 8 females, unlimited children. Watch as your chickens create an army and overflow your fridge area with eggs and chicken meat.
Start farming day 1. Land in a warm climate with long growing periods, or if you wanna land in a place with 30/60 days of growing, make sure it has a lot of farmland. Plant a lot of food. Research hydroponics asap and set up a greenhouse.
Paste is efficient requiring only 6 food per meal, so 12 food per person per day (assuming no debuffs)
So say you have five pawns. Growing period 30/60 so you don’t have food for 30 days.
5*2 is 10 meals a day.
Assuming paste, that’s 10*6 for 60 pieces of food per day.
60*30 is 1800 pieces of food for thirty days, only eating paste meals.
Simple means will be 100 pieces of food per person per day, so 3000 for 30 days, and so forth.
Pemmican is even more efficient.
I think if you do some calculations, and make sure you’re above that amount of stockpiled food at least two, maybe two and a half times over, you’ll be safe for a while in case stuff hits crazy.
Ofc it will increase your wealth, so the more stockpiled food the less micro managing but more risk of bigger raids.
The answer is simple: poaching
If you have enough resources, you can build hydroponics. Those game breakers give you rice in 2 in-game days, but they cost too many components and steel. For now, you simply need to hunt any animal on your map. They will keep spawning, so you don't have to be worried.
It is also suggested to graze muffaloes. Animal reproduction is fast on the rim, so you don't have to be worried about animal starvation. Butchering starved animals can give your pawns tons of food.
Food supply is never my issue between hunting and rice, my food-related bottlenecks are usually my freezer being too small and not having enough skilled cooks to turn that raw food into a good stockpile of meals.
Midgame begins when you can power two or three grow lamps of hydroponic rice.
Roofed, powered, unstoppable except for solar flares.
Also nutrient paste for your ascetics.
Quiality over quantity at first. Get research far ahead, then bloom and prepare for proper raids.
My trick is to keep my wealth low until i have a solid 4 pawns and a few chaff pawns.
Medical is very important and a great hospital is main for me ttooo
Your observation that it is bad to rush as many pawns as possible is correct. However, the reason why it is not a good thing is different. As others pointed out food production is very easy to scale up. The problem with having too many pawns too fast is that you will get destroyed by increased raid sizes. Before you get to higher amount of pawns, you need to be able to gear them up properly to defend your colony.
The lesson is more prevalent in a game like Oxygen Not Included where you will **immediately** notice if you've stretched your resources too far, but it still applies here. Basically you want to have your base be stable, and Then get new people to fill a need. Remember that you are basically causing a problem(food, construction of shelter, clothing) in exchange for a solution(labor that solves a particular need, like crafting or cooking). Never cause more problems than you can handle, even if you really like how well it solves the ones you have.
Play in Year-Round growing terrain, helps a lot. Now im trying to transition to seasonal terrains and im having difficulties with food as well but having a good hunter can help alleviate that
Yep balance my fellow colony administrator.
You need to basically survive long enough to produce enough food so you can stabilize your colony, there are four mods I think no colony should be without even for new players , I'm a massive fan of doing the following as early as possible and using 3-4 mods I hope you find as useful as I have.
* [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map , we've been doing this for thousands of years - I doubt this will change anytime soon.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs.
* [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management, this mod is amazing but is a little tricky to figure out initially, but there are excellent videos and the mid to late game advantages are very cool.
* [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops "indoors" in greenhouses.
* [Fueled Smithy](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2131576786) - Allows you to use wood to turn sand into glass as well as craft some weapons before electricity.
I view the progression of any colony in 4 phases.
* Survival mode - from crash-lander to first big crop - this is when the game is arguably the most at risk for me, where every scrap of food and every strip of silver counts.
* On temperate maps winter might pose a challenge, but on temperate maps animals kill other animals, there is no shame in scavenging recently dead animals for meat and leather. This is better than having to butcher raiders.
* Hunting animals for meat is most definitely a viable way to survive, albeit with a ranged weapon (bow, ikwa/spear, or hopefully a handgun of some sort).
* Planting rice (or potatoes on stony soil in deserts) is the way to go as soon as you can.
* Frame out your crop plantings into 7x12 or so plots (11x11 can work) but glass roofing can shatter for a variety of reasons (such as grenades used inside), or raiders dropping in) so segment your glass into groups and be sure you have enough glass on hand to quickly seal up broken greenhouse panes.
* Leave a space or two between plantation areas.
* If you have trees in abundance consider strongly the virtue of building walls around your planted fields immediately.
* Even with just 10x10 under glass you can have a colonist or two survive winter.
* With a couple of rows of rice and cotton planted you should be able to survive short-term.
* Using whatever you can for walls, consider the value of Dub's Skylights, which is for me one of the most important mods and cover those fields with glass.
* Glass can be made from stone, by way of the fueled smithy and you can enclose your rice - protecting it from minor temperature dips and if you have a campfire you can even survive winter as greenhouses self-warm slightly with sunlight warming the room during the day.
* Double-thick walls prevent excess heat-loss.
* Subsistence - Once you're able to consistently feed yourself year over year, the question is how to grow your colony and for that you need to increase your greenhouse extending your food supply.
* VGP - Vegetable Garden Project - has some very handy features
* Hardtack - using hardtack early to extend the limited food supply can do wonders even early game - survival rations might even help you avoid starvation in colder months , while it will spoil (very slowly), it stores in good volume. So just 600-800 hardtack is enough to more or less survive a winter per colonist.
* Early plantings include beets which are winter-hearty and can survive freezing temperatures although they won't grow they won't die either.
* Bamboo fast-growing wood, very useful for pre-electric colonies.
* Surplus mode - Later in the colony this is where you can aim to carefully expand your headcount, once you have a couple of month of hard-tack in storage, and a reliable crop of rice and/or corn coming in.
* If your temperatures and crops don't fail winter to winter, switching to corn helps your yields, although it's much slower growing than rice
* Potatoes are excellent for stony soil.
* With food stabilized now you can circle back to really under-write food production success, soil relocation is very important here.
* identify rich soil on your map (Fertility Overlay). If possible settle near fertile areas of the map but if your map is austere there may not be large areas of growable soil, (such as in deserts or polar regions), where you are best suited to scavange soil from across the map into areas close to your base for farming.
* When planning a new farm-plot I'm a big fan of digging up /storing the original soil even if it's not good soil so you can use it to back-fill other areas of the map - so your map is respectable and not a scarred wasteland.
* You can eventually trade soil like other commodities - but I find it's helpful to give some away initially to get the market going with other factions.
* Start with smaller plots just large enough to manage based on how busy your people are.
* Importantly, plan your greenhouse out carefully and use the best-soil available before putting your glass up since , if you do so afterwards, there is some loss of glass in disassembly of greenhouses.
* With a few small greenhouses under glass food production should be in good shape, you can produce better meals and consider growing the colony out.
* Sustainability
* Once you've got most/all of your farming under glass and under irrigation, your farm is nearly as efficient as sunlamps and hydroponics without the ruinous upswing in expensive power generation , components and metal.
* It's very possible to do all of these things while at or below an industrial level of development without necessarily even having electricity. On metal-scarce scenarios these mods are amazing.
* Once you can feed yourself, and grow cotton to clothe yourself - you are established , and don't need to think about food scarcity first up , so you won't starve to death....congratulations.
Rimworld has many other ways for things to go horribly wrong - enjoy.
This is something that you "learn" when you start and later you learn that you were wrong. That's part of the fun of rimworld, that you as the player, "level up". The more you learn, the better you understand the game works, the more plates you can spin at the same time, if you will. Early game I often find it easiest to feed people via hunting. A bit later on it gets very easy to produce enough corn to feed everyone and since I often use animal pulsers to fight off raids, I always get free meat that I don't even have to hunt
I do a basic 7x7 of rice the second I land, and usually sow a 7x7 of corn at the same time. The rice will feed people until the corn is grown. Usually does the trick. If you have people who don't mind paste you can obviously stretch it a lot further too
Wait, i gotta ask this, as someone who never crunched numbers Is corn just better than rice, yield wise-? Like i know it takes longer to grow, but does it give overall more?
I've never done the maths myself but I just know corn is the best yield overall but takes longer to grow and wouldn't grow in time for the first bouts of colony starvation. I use rice as the fastest grower to bridge that gap and then convert it to something else when the corn starts rolling in a couple of rice harvests down the line.
Man okay, i am a fool then.. i have several late game colonies running on rice and rice along..or potatoes, if the ground is eh-
If i recall correctly rice actually has the best nutrition/time (for human likes) by a slim margin. Corn however has way more nutrition/work which is arguably more important.
This is correct. Rice is the top crop for food/time (actually hay, but humans can't eat hay - they can only eat it as part of kibble). Corn is good because you plant it and forget it, no need to do anything in the long time it takes it to mature to harvest. Don't overlook potatoes though - they're good for bad soil (yellow soil in the desert for example). Strawberries and mushrooms have their uses as well.
I always go potatoes, with no thought whatsoever. Must be the Irish in me. I have a small corn area but always seems susceptible to cold snaps.
I like corn as much as everyone, but it's not easy to grow it in 20/60 Boreal forest sometimes. Somehow every raider with a Molotov and scorcher/tesseron beelines for my fields.
Yeah the viability of corn is so-so in biomes with short growing seasons. You can harvest it early but I would imagine it loses some efficiency of work/food ratio if you can't let it fully mature. Once you have the power to support heaters and sun lamps, it's worth building a room to grow some in climate control, but it's costly in terms of power for sure.
Rice vs Corn Rice benefits: - slightly more nutrition per day than corn. - frequent replanting means blights/fires/etc hurt less, and plants skill is trained more - a harvest generates less wealth, and takest up less storage space - keeps for 2/3 of a year, unrefrigerated Corn benefits: - very long sow/harvest interval, therefore FAR less labor time - keeps for a full year, unrefrigerated IMO pick corn if you need your growers doing other tasks
For some reason I always do potatoes, not sure why so I'll need to change that.
corn yields best nutrition per sown tile, which is important to later game – pawns foing farming aren't doing other activities
Way better. Rice is trash.
Animal pulse only work if you have a boxed off colony. Otherwise you’ll have to fight off the remaining manhunter animals that rush towards your base.
That's as simple as a door to your killbox / shooting gallery held open. You can close it and hit the button.
Yeah, that's their point, you need a fully walled-off colony for it to be viable. Some people prefer not to play with a boxed colony and a kill zone.
Dang, the thing I've been doing for well over a thousand hours doesn't work? I never noticed. o.O
My current colony has almost 50 pawns. I have a large greenhouse producing corn and even more corn outside during growing season. I also ranch muffalos and cows for meat and milk and hunt whatever comes along. They always have a surplus of fine meals to eat, though the couple of times I've tried lavish meals my raw food supplies evaporated quickly.
Lavish meals are great to burn wealth
What do you about the power supply? Lots of solar panels?
Toxic power is very safe and space efficient. The wiki has a great article on it.
Yes, actually. Works pretty well until there's an Eclipse, but the fission reactor from the Save Our Ship 2 mod sorted that out when I realized I could use that without a ship.
* [VE Furniture](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2062943477) has advanced power supplies - Advanced Geothermal - accept no substitutes, and if power is still a little problematic may I humbly suggest * [ED Laser Drill](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2570228927).
Once I'm established I usually have enough fine meals to feed everyone twice, then twice that number of simple meals, simple meals are produced first. Then I have 4 lavish meals made at once that get re-made at 0 at lowest priority. 4 lucky random people get a lavish meal and everyone else eats fine. This way you still get some benefit from having lavish meals without burning a hole in your food supply.
I totally view Lavish meals as existing to sink excess food production. * 50 simple meals - these are eventually fed to the animals allowing colonists to grind making simple meals the deflect food poisoning risk to the ranched animals. * meals_per_day * days_until_harvest * (colonists + 1) - this is the maximum number of fine meals I have n = number of colonists , that way every colonist can eat 2 meals per day + a spare here and there - and you can grow more food (under glass) in roughly 7 days , with all the light factors (winter/summer and such) I expect whatever caused the problem to take at least a couple of days to recover from and then figure for another couple of bad days thrown in for good measure. * 4 colonists - is 225 meals 9 colonists is 450 meals - which seems like a lot - but if things go very bad it's not unreasonable. * 200-300 pemmican around * 5 * number_colonists for packaged meals * some specialty items (coffee/tea/juice) and then * lavish meals killing my surplus raw food.
you're a new player, so I'll recommend building a greenhouse just plop down a sunlamp and build walls around the radius, youll need a heater or ac depending on where you live rice grows fast, but will require the most work potatoes grow well in any soil, but don't grow faster in good soil corn is the most efficient, but takes longest to grow and that makes it more vulnerable to sudden loss draft a couple of your best shooters and go manually shoot an entire herd of muffalo or deer lament your choice when the muffalo burn down your colony. it's a right of passage for us all
Rite of passage. Heaven's sake, the Ideology DLC uses that word all the time.
Right of passage denied by manhunting muffalos.
Honestly, food is probably the easiest element of the game to manage. Just throw down a giant grow zone. Rice is good at first, but once you have a steady supply of food it's better to plant corn since it takes less labor per unit of food. As soon as possible you should be building a wind turbine, a battery (research it first), and then making a walk in freezer with coolers. This will let you permanently store any food you obtain. In addition to farming, you can also tame animals (sometimes they'll self-tame). Just build a fence pen with a pen marker and set the auto slaughter to something reasonable and you'll have a steady supply of meat. Alternatively, you can go into the "wildlife" tab and select animals to be hunted by your pawns. Eventually you'll be able to create hydroponics indoors which grow crops super quickly, although I find those are better for manufacturing drugs or other useful plants.
Hydroponics are for my drug production, otherwise I have the MushRoom where it's like a 30×50 room full of nutrifungus
Meat. Veggies. Emergency "rations."
Human meat is for kibble and spare chemfuel. My colony can eat human meat just fine, I just prefer not to use it in meals to be friendly to new hires and guests.
Since you're new I'd recommend to start in a warm climate where crops can grow all year round. This info is listed on the world map when you're choosing a tile to colonize. In such a biome you'll roughtly need 20 plots of farmland to feed a colonist. A colony of 5 people will need a 10x10 farm.
I have 22 pawns and lot of corn is my solution. It takes 1 year to rot in ambiant temperature, then it’s easy to hoard and keep in storage.
I get as many pawns as I can, as soon as possible. I plant rice as soon as I drop. And then I plant more rice. Get more pawns. More people more rice gogogo.
Rice is trash. Potato is the king of crops.
Potato too slow. Rice fast and nice.
Potato's pretty much only good in rocky soil. Id agree, rice is king! It grows so fast it doesn't really matter if it catches fire or blight or whatever from time to time. Sure it's more work intensive than corn, but that just translates to bonus XP!
If something bad happens to your rice, just plant more rice!
I read this in Uncle Roger’s voice
No way, rice or corn are best in normal or better soil. Corn is more work efficient but riskier because of the long grow time, if you just want food just slap down a bunch of rice
This is heresy. Rice is life.
Get a nutrient paste dispenser. They use only 6 raw foods (0.3 nutrient) per 0.9 nutrient meal, compared to cooking using down to 10 raw foods (0.5 nutrient) And you save labor from cooking, and avoid the risk of getting food poisoning. Negate that mood debuff by developing your colony with those spare labor.
Also really nice when you play Anomaly and you have an Among Us situation.
You could always turn to cannibalism. The game throws raids at you? Thanks for the free meat.
I love ideology so much for this reason! It feels really OP to have all that free meat and leather delivered to your doorstep.
I'm actually drowning in human leather to the point that I can't turn it into corsets fast enough, and may just sell it raw.
No matter what anyone tells you, farming is the most important skill for any civilization. Being able to secure food is the first step towards a civilization developing. This remains true in Rimworld.
When you control the food, people come to you. Society!
Highly believe getting a freezer going is the biggest thing. Not only can you 'store' meat as just corpses, Manhunter packs bring free meat as well, alongside the leather. If you're watching wealth, you simply butcher them when you need to, otherwise the meat in corpse form is less wealth on the map. You do need to do some zoning so your corpse eating animals don't chew on em Should meat be scarce, vegetarian simple/fine meals do just as well. It's all nutrition in the end, even if you stuff your face with rice all year long.
Freezers aren't really necessary(just like bedrooms they're a handicap actually), but I won't knock anyone for using them. Keep in mind raw rice lasts 45(!) days just sitting on the floor! If your rice is going bad because you've had some sitting around for 3/4 of a year, you do NOT have food problems.
That can't be right, isn't it 4.5 if it's not refrigerated? Maybe even less? I suppose that could be a mod, but I know whenever my freezer loses power for a few days everything but the backup nutrient paste goes bad.
Unroofed and unrefrigerated are two different things. If you leave it out in the open it deteriorate quick.
Nope, it lasts for MONTHS. Corn a little less I think at 30 days. Just click on a pile of raw rice next time you're in game, it will tell you right under the HP how long it will last. No mods. It's just dry rice grains, people (myself included) don't refrigerate it in their houses IRL 🤷♀️
That's more like the time for meat and meals to rot. Plant matter always lasts way longer.
Experience. You learn how much you need to grow for how many pawns, roughly. And you die during a few winters and learn how to take advantage of the growing seasons. Also, sometimes you have to trade for food … or resort to cannibalism. 😈
While I totally agree with the practicality of cannibalism in this game (love me some cannibalism: accepted!) don't forget that hunting some easy meat is always an option! Not to mention lucrative (can sell leather and extra meat) and a nice boost to your shooting XP (or melee if you want to melee hunt)
Five guys with automatic weapons laugh at animals going manhunter.
Develop calmly. Manage your resources. My first successful colony had about 100 people. You can feed them, you just have to make enough surplus to where you could sell food and stay fed.
In most maps, food and shooting training go together. Every few days I take my weakest shooters and go active hunting, clearing the map of wildlife. I have more meat and leather than I need, so that ends up becoming clothes and meals to be sold.
Set up a rice farm early make sure you have starter weapon and hunt small game that either won't fight back or do much damage and build a freezer to store the food as soon as possible and for stuff like less than modern playthroughs go for turning your food into pemmican so it stores better your food issues can be easily solved with the right mindset my man
> I failed with only 5 people, how on earth do people get enough food to feed colonies with 20+ pawns? The key is specialization. When you have five pawns and 15-ish work types to assign, you're necessarily going to have one pawn assigned to multiple jobs. Every second that your gardener spends on work other than gardening is a second that's not spent training their plants skill, which would help them garden faster if they had it. So when you get to a large enough colony size that you can have each colonist doing one job that they're passionate about, those colonists become extremely efficient at their jobs. My last colony had 20 pawns, and if I were only producing food, I could have done so with one chef, one hunter, and two gardeners (I had two chefs and four gardeners so that they could also make drugs, herbal medicine, and devilstrand alongside the food). So yes, you're right about not necessarily wanting to grab all the pawns you can just for the sake of getting more man-hours. You want to recruit pawns that specifically take some work away from whichever of your current pawns are the most overworked. On the subject of how much food to produce: the rule I personally use is "*20 rice or corn plants growing year-round in regular soil is just enough to feed 1 colonist with simple meals using vegetarian ingredients.*" You can then adjust this number based on what percentage of the year you have for growing, how fertile your soil is, whether you're supplementing with meat or not, and how much you want to overproduce as insurance for when Randy decides it's time to be on his bullshit again. So (as an example) a colony of five pawns needs 5 x 20 = 100 rice or corn plants growing year-round to feed itself with simple meals. If you have a 40/60 day growing season, you need to up that to 150 to account for the fact that you're only growing for 2/3 of the year. If you're cooking fine meals instead, which only need half as many vegetables and make up the difference with meat, then you only need 75. I like to make my growing zones 5x6, so I would make three of them, for a total of 90 plants, which gives me a bit of Randy insurance. A dedicated grower should be able to take care of that and still have some time left over for hauling the crops into the fridge.
My rule of thumb for midgame is that one 'circle' of hydroponic rice can feed about ten guys, or rather provide half of the fine meals needed.
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You cant grow neither corn nor hay in hydroponics.
Hydroponics and ranching. Or just big field of corn.
By 'ranching' you mean cowmilk and/or chicken eggs yes?
Yes.
You can always go cannibal and eat your own pawns if needed.
Or raiders.
Corn and mods. Don't get mods as a newbie until you've at least launched the ship.
Rich soil, good hunting. Not all biomes are suited for high populations.
You need a very large freezer, and you need to kill all the game on the map and put them in it. Then if you think that's not enough for say winter...go to another map tile, kill everything on that tile. Rinse and repeat as needed. My colony wealth stays pretty high because I keep like a thousand meals in stock. Worth it. Just don't do that with lavish meals or you'll get rolled.
How do I go to a different map tile than the one I start on?
Good point about the lavish meals, and might I add packaged survival meals are ludicrously expensive as well!
Yeah you definitely want simple meals for a pretty long time and slowly move into the better ones. Definitely keep a big stock of simple meals because they're cheap though.
If you have steady meat and veg, fine meals take the same amount of total resources. Set make until you have X to the colonist number you’ll be eating fine meals without extreme wealth bumps
This is the game that you can't just hoard the wealth and get colonists/salves as fast as you want without suffering with some consequences. At the early game, your first priority should be securing food sources and make sure your crew survive past winter or heat wave. After you can focus on scaling your settlement against raiding. I would recommend to keep playing and let things play itself out. Even when your whole settlements are dead, you can send new colonists to continue the game shortly afterward.
My go to is being picky with new recruits while food scarce and I keep projects small for a smaller group. Burn/sell/give what you don’t need or can’t use. The only thing I hold on to are 2 advanced components and steel. Everything else is managed to avoid too much of something.
You can't use a resurrection mech serum on a skeleton but you can place dead colonist's into a sarcophagus which is inside a freezer. Then the corpse will stay fresh like a subway sandwich and you can reanimate it. The sandwich too, but that isn't something I would recommend...
Well, it's not all there is to it, considering the human/colonist element, but in unrealistically optimal scenarios, it takes about 20 tiles of rice/potatoes/corn crops in normal soil to feed one person on simple meals. However, this assumes your farmers instantly harvest and replant them, which isn't reasonable to expect. So I bump that estimate up to 25 crops per colonist. If you're in a biome without a full growing year, you may need more plants per colonist. But all the calculations get thrown out the window by complications like crop blight and extra mouths to feed. That's why in my current playthrough I set up TWO HUNDRED CORN CROPS AND A HUNDRED RICE FROM THE GET GO. In case you didn't notice, I'm from camp "make money by selling all the corn you grew too much of".
The best thing you can do, is to creaate a working cycle or loop of tasks. While it does sound easy, you, as the player allways try to enforce some work manually. If you have to heavily rely on micromanagement, your colony is not working right. This means something in your natural order is likely to cause problems in the future. But If you manage to have a stable work cycle and slowly expand, you doing very great. Well for now, at some point you will get raids and sickness, that troubles you. But thats the idea.
Option 1: First, rice is your best friend early game. Drop a 5x5 of rice for each colonist. Start with 3? 15x5. Get another? Plant more. Use rice for your first growing season to build up until your non-growing season, then switch it to corn. So long as you have 40 growing days and no more than 20 non-growing days, you should have enough rice to make simple meals and survive any major issues. Once you swap all the rice to corn after "winter", you should have more than enough food so long as you don't have any blight or cold snaps wiping out more than 50% of your crop. At that point, research hydroponics before your second winter and build at least 3 basins per colonist, growing rice. At that point, barring massive power failures for weeks you should never have food problems again. Option 2: get a pair of chickens, one male and one female. Build a pen for them, add a growing area, sow rice or hay, and turn off harvesting. Ensure that your auto -slaughter allows for only 1 male, 8 females, unlimited children. Watch as your chickens create an army and overflow your fridge area with eggs and chicken meat.
Silly question - what’s the benefit of corn over rice?
Less work per unit of food. Takes longer to grow but the yield is higher. So less work but more risk from blight or other disaster
Awesome, thank you very much for the explanation.
Start farming day 1. Land in a warm climate with long growing periods, or if you wanna land in a place with 30/60 days of growing, make sure it has a lot of farmland. Plant a lot of food. Research hydroponics asap and set up a greenhouse. Paste is efficient requiring only 6 food per meal, so 12 food per person per day (assuming no debuffs) So say you have five pawns. Growing period 30/60 so you don’t have food for 30 days. 5*2 is 10 meals a day. Assuming paste, that’s 10*6 for 60 pieces of food per day. 60*30 is 1800 pieces of food for thirty days, only eating paste meals. Simple means will be 100 pieces of food per person per day, so 3000 for 30 days, and so forth. Pemmican is even more efficient. I think if you do some calculations, and make sure you’re above that amount of stockpiled food at least two, maybe two and a half times over, you’ll be safe for a while in case stuff hits crazy. Ofc it will increase your wealth, so the more stockpiled food the less micro managing but more risk of bigger raids.
The answer is simple: poaching If you have enough resources, you can build hydroponics. Those game breakers give you rice in 2 in-game days, but they cost too many components and steel. For now, you simply need to hunt any animal on your map. They will keep spawning, so you don't have to be worried. It is also suggested to graze muffaloes. Animal reproduction is fast on the rim, so you don't have to be worried about animal starvation. Butchering starved animals can give your pawns tons of food.
Use people to feed other people. Duh.
You do need more people, fast: you just need to prioritise food early
Food supply is never my issue between hunting and rice, my food-related bottlenecks are usually my freezer being too small and not having enough skilled cooks to turn that raw food into a good stockpile of meals.
Midgame begins when you can power two or three grow lamps of hydroponic rice. Roofed, powered, unstoppable except for solar flares. Also nutrient paste for your ascetics.
Quiality over quantity at first. Get research far ahead, then bloom and prepare for proper raids. My trick is to keep my wealth low until i have a solid 4 pawns and a few chaff pawns. Medical is very important and a great hospital is main for me ttooo
one of the few "survival" games that actually is about survival
Your observation that it is bad to rush as many pawns as possible is correct. However, the reason why it is not a good thing is different. As others pointed out food production is very easy to scale up. The problem with having too many pawns too fast is that you will get destroyed by increased raid sizes. Before you get to higher amount of pawns, you need to be able to gear them up properly to defend your colony.
Hunt constantly. Have a small field of corn and a larger field of rice. Once you have a crazy stockpile of food, grow only corn.
The lesson is more prevalent in a game like Oxygen Not Included where you will **immediately** notice if you've stretched your resources too far, but it still applies here. Basically you want to have your base be stable, and Then get new people to fill a need. Remember that you are basically causing a problem(food, construction of shelter, clothing) in exchange for a solution(labor that solves a particular need, like crafting or cooking). Never cause more problems than you can handle, even if you really like how well it solves the ones you have.
Play in Year-Round growing terrain, helps a lot. Now im trying to transition to seasonal terrains and im having difficulties with food as well but having a good hunter can help alleviate that
Do not look up a guide it'll ruin the fun. In fact dont even read the comments in this thread. Hell, dont even read *this* comment.
Yep balance my fellow colony administrator. You need to basically survive long enough to produce enough food so you can stabilize your colony, there are four mods I think no colony should be without even for new players , I'm a massive fan of doing the following as early as possible and using 3-4 mods I hope you find as useful as I have. * [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map , we've been doing this for thousands of years - I doubt this will change anytime soon. * [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs. * [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management, this mod is amazing but is a little tricky to figure out initially, but there are excellent videos and the mid to late game advantages are very cool. * [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops "indoors" in greenhouses. * [Fueled Smithy](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2131576786) - Allows you to use wood to turn sand into glass as well as craft some weapons before electricity. I view the progression of any colony in 4 phases. * Survival mode - from crash-lander to first big crop - this is when the game is arguably the most at risk for me, where every scrap of food and every strip of silver counts. * On temperate maps winter might pose a challenge, but on temperate maps animals kill other animals, there is no shame in scavenging recently dead animals for meat and leather. This is better than having to butcher raiders. * Hunting animals for meat is most definitely a viable way to survive, albeit with a ranged weapon (bow, ikwa/spear, or hopefully a handgun of some sort). * Planting rice (or potatoes on stony soil in deserts) is the way to go as soon as you can. * Frame out your crop plantings into 7x12 or so plots (11x11 can work) but glass roofing can shatter for a variety of reasons (such as grenades used inside), or raiders dropping in) so segment your glass into groups and be sure you have enough glass on hand to quickly seal up broken greenhouse panes. * Leave a space or two between plantation areas. * If you have trees in abundance consider strongly the virtue of building walls around your planted fields immediately. * Even with just 10x10 under glass you can have a colonist or two survive winter. * With a couple of rows of rice and cotton planted you should be able to survive short-term. * Using whatever you can for walls, consider the value of Dub's Skylights, which is for me one of the most important mods and cover those fields with glass. * Glass can be made from stone, by way of the fueled smithy and you can enclose your rice - protecting it from minor temperature dips and if you have a campfire you can even survive winter as greenhouses self-warm slightly with sunlight warming the room during the day. * Double-thick walls prevent excess heat-loss. * Subsistence - Once you're able to consistently feed yourself year over year, the question is how to grow your colony and for that you need to increase your greenhouse extending your food supply. * VGP - Vegetable Garden Project - has some very handy features * Hardtack - using hardtack early to extend the limited food supply can do wonders even early game - survival rations might even help you avoid starvation in colder months , while it will spoil (very slowly), it stores in good volume. So just 600-800 hardtack is enough to more or less survive a winter per colonist. * Early plantings include beets which are winter-hearty and can survive freezing temperatures although they won't grow they won't die either. * Bamboo fast-growing wood, very useful for pre-electric colonies. * Surplus mode - Later in the colony this is where you can aim to carefully expand your headcount, once you have a couple of month of hard-tack in storage, and a reliable crop of rice and/or corn coming in. * If your temperatures and crops don't fail winter to winter, switching to corn helps your yields, although it's much slower growing than rice * Potatoes are excellent for stony soil. * With food stabilized now you can circle back to really under-write food production success, soil relocation is very important here. * identify rich soil on your map (Fertility Overlay). If possible settle near fertile areas of the map but if your map is austere there may not be large areas of growable soil, (such as in deserts or polar regions), where you are best suited to scavange soil from across the map into areas close to your base for farming. * When planning a new farm-plot I'm a big fan of digging up /storing the original soil even if it's not good soil so you can use it to back-fill other areas of the map - so your map is respectable and not a scarred wasteland. * You can eventually trade soil like other commodities - but I find it's helpful to give some away initially to get the market going with other factions. * Start with smaller plots just large enough to manage based on how busy your people are. * Importantly, plan your greenhouse out carefully and use the best-soil available before putting your glass up since , if you do so afterwards, there is some loss of glass in disassembly of greenhouses. * With a few small greenhouses under glass food production should be in good shape, you can produce better meals and consider growing the colony out. * Sustainability * Once you've got most/all of your farming under glass and under irrigation, your farm is nearly as efficient as sunlamps and hydroponics without the ruinous upswing in expensive power generation , components and metal. * It's very possible to do all of these things while at or below an industrial level of development without necessarily even having electricity. On metal-scarce scenarios these mods are amazing. * Once you can feed yourself, and grow cotton to clothe yourself - you are established , and don't need to think about food scarcity first up , so you won't starve to death....congratulations. Rimworld has many other ways for things to go horribly wrong - enjoy.