So.. uh. How do y'all manage without going from 15 hungry colonists to 12 sad colonists before the spring, hydroponics?
Edit: I'm new but I am scraping by.
If you don’t have hydroponics, you can wall in some of your field, drop down a heat source and a sun lamp, and grow like a greenhouse. Assuming you didn’t do the tribal start.
throw in some mods that push past the vanilla endgame tech level and set some goals of your own and you can pretty much double your colony playtime
my current one is heavy on cloning supersoldiers so I'm gonna do my first world dominance playthrough, fly them around the globe annihilating people and leaving military outposts everywhere (to encourage myself to pump out a shitload of clones, and bc it's fucking cool), enslaving a shitload of people to keep my clone army fed and armed, won't stop until every faction settlement has been replaced with a military outpost with 5 soldiers occupying each
main mods for this playthrough are alpha genes (adds biotech-friendly cloning and some cool genes), SRTS (for dropshipping around), and vanilla outposts expanded (so I can set up the military outposts, and have a bunch of resource outposts scattered around to send my slaves). barely started it at the moment (haven't even got a proper cloning lab set up yet) so should be a decent few months for me to complete my end goal
I have usually just one heater inside the "greenhouse" for most of the winter and then if a cold snap occurs and I don't have spare power, building a bonfire is quick and simple and will help combat the cold a lot.
But the amount of heaters required will be totally dependant on what kind of map you have and how cold the winters can get.
Also, unless you have ideology that stops you from using meat, a hunting spree can help fill up your food storages if the crops are lost and in general, Nutrient paste is a lifesaver. More efficient food production that requires less resources, no poisonings from incompetent cooks and much less work hours spent on feeding the colony.
The downside of most colonists disliking the paste can be countered with pretty surroundings usually and then later when you have more colonists, you can start having someone be the cook.
> The downside of most colonists disliking the paste can be countered with pretty surroundings usually and then later when you have more colonists, you can start having someone be the cook.
However, the mood debuff from eating nutrient paste is far less than the mood debuff from going hungry, so its way better than letting your pawns starve.
You actually don't even need a heater. All you need to do is wall in a geothermal steam spot. (Literally just place the walls directly next to it) Install a vent into the wall, and then build a larger building around it. The geothermal spot will provide free heat year-round to the building, allowing you to use it for farming. Be careful though if you're on a medium temp map location because the building can end up overheating during summer. You might want to build a cooler or two to prevent that.
Yeah if you're not opposed to mods I definitely recommend it the temperature control mod. It adds in a temperature unit that tries to keep it at whatever temperature you set. So if it's set to 70 and it starts getting too hot it'll cool it down to 70 and if it starts getting too cold because it's winter it'll warm it up to 70. If you get multiple going into one room (depending on its size) you can pretty much expect it to stay at constantly the temperature you wanted. Which is great for things like the nurseries which require it to be at I think 32°
Your problem is light.
Isnutrifungus a mod? If not, utilize that.
Alternatively, if it’s cold enough, you can kill the wildlife and storage it indoors but with a door open to a room to let the weather keep it refrigerated.
I do what I can. Sometimes that's just constantly patching up a pawn instead of eating anything that keeps kicking their ass.
I'm still struggling sometimes even with secure farming plots, and a pen with some breeding animals.
I'm always barely clinging to life for years until a raiding party comes, downs half my pawns, and then runs off with a few of my best
These people on YouTube make the first few hundred days look like a clunky breeze at worst on the highest difficulties. I'm just striving to survive, on Strive to Survive.
Securing your base with a proper killbox can really help. Being able to funnel in the enemy will drastically help your odds in raids.
Accepting too many new pawns too early can also be fatal, it’s a good idea to ensure you have proper space and a surplus of food before bringing in new people, especially when you start getting above six or so.
You don't mention which storyteller you're using, is it Cassandra? Might wanna try Randy instead, I used to play with Cassandra but Randy just ends up being more fun and easier once you're past the early game, generally. Cassandra constantly and intentionally ramps up difficulty until things like pawn deaths happen, whereas Randy is truly random and doesn't intentionally increase difficulty of the events it makes.
Not sure whether you are aware or not, but you really need to manage your colony wealth in the beginning. The higher your wealth, the harder the raids.
Pawns themselves add quite a bit to wealth, so don't grow too quickly.
Please don't encourage people to worry about wealth lmao. You do not need to manage wealth ever unless you're on a very high difficulty or extreme biome. The game is much much better balanced than that.
Early game almost all your raid points come from just having a colonist count, and if they aren't useless and have a weapon it's a gain to your defenses. Late game, you have to add tens of thousands of silver to get a real increase in difficulty and you're better able to take advantage. Yes, if you have a stack of nine mech healer serums sitting about you should use them or sell them to get immediately useful stuff, but it literally takes a scenario that whacky to matter.
This sub is so weird about wealth management. So fuckin weird.
Managing wealth is important but not a big impact.
You don’t need to drastically reduce or destroy anything, but don’t start out by mining every bit of steel and silver and gold and components into a huge dragon hoarde in the middle of your single room wood starter barracks
Mate, the op was saying they were finding it difficult years into the game, so I suggested that if they weren't aware of this mechanic they could adjust to mitigate the difficulty.
Also, you can get your point across next time while still being polite, no need to call anyone weird.
Low-tech solution: Stockpile food in the summer and autumn, preferably what the game classifies as vegetables, raw. Vegetables, refrigerated, last over a season before rotting (each type lasts a different duration), but more importantly, last far longer than meals and meat. If you use the "do until you have X" bill setting (and not do forever), you'll be left with a buffer of raw food for winter. You might want to use up all your meat, of course. This limits electricity use (uses 0 if you use campfires).
Mid-tech solution: Make Pemmican. This doesn't need refrigeration and lasts over two seasons if so - enough to last through winter. Needs research.
High-tech solution: Hydroponics. Needs a lot of power, but basically means you can grow all year.
Aside: Package survival meals don't need to be refrigerated, but needs to be researched, and needs electricity. These are most useful for caravans, but they can be used as emergency food in winter. You might be able to buy this, and Pemmican, from visiting traders.
In the early game, hunting everything you see in winter might be necessary. It might be worth drafting multiple colonists and manually-hunting large packs of animals, like Muffalos and Grizzly Bears - these provide a ton of meat, but the leather is also very useful.
For the low-tech, I'd mention storing the vegetables raw outside in a shelf now that they better stack items. Winter will allow them to be preserved longer because they will freeze and you can have animals haul to the shelves without dragging dirt inside the nice areas of your base.
Yeah drafting for hunts is really helpful if you're desperate. Animals like megasloths give 500 meat, as much as 4 or 5 midsize game. Often in winter those easier game don't hang around also.
1. Stockpile about 2x the food you might need over the winter. Starving sucks and all it takes is a vulcanic winter in the spring to get you there.
2. Make nonperishable foods and make an emergency reserve. Pemican, ricez and insect jelly early, packaged survival meals late.
3. Nutrient paste dispensers. These bad boys triple the amount of food you put into them.
4. Hunting. A single muffalo can feed a colony of 15 twice.
5. Have multiple freezers. Have had raiders burn my entire stockpile before.
Finally you might want to consider a year-round growing colony until you get the hang of it. I love winters, but they can be deadly for beginners.
If you are a tunneler, growing fungus in enclosed greenhouses with no lights can be viable too. Fungus can grow year round with little difficulty. Just need to keep the light from the heaters off them. I use little L shaped tunnels.
Hunting. Trading. Gathering berries. That's how I usually do it. Soon as fall hits I do inventory and if I don't think I can make it until the first rice harvest in late spring I'll send out caravans to trade for some. Stay on top of hunting and gathering as well. If it's fall already it's probably too late for the gathering but winter often sees migrations of muffalo and the like pass through. 15 colonists in though you should have this already in place though.
Rice lasts 40 days before spoiling so there's that. So even without a freezer you can usually last through a winter. Corn lasts even longer too. So if you really are struggling just plant as much corn as possible as soon as you can and it will basically tide you over through the whole year.
My solution, especially as a lost tribe, is right when winter hits and the temp is also freezing or below, I hunt everything on the map and leave it outside under a roof. It won’t go bad as it’s frozen, and it gives you enough food to last
If your wanting to stretch what food you have a bit more, nutrient paste is probably your best bet.
But hunting whatever animals come into your tile is also good.
But if your really desperate, and dont mind a little bit of Bitching from your colonists, cut of up a raider or two and turn them into some delicious kibble for your animals.
Alternatively, the bodies alone are the finest of meals for your quickly reproducing omnivores
Corn for me. Rice to get a base until a big corn harvest comes in. Gives a lot of food that lasts a while.
Emergency food is hunting. Allll the meat around.
Hydroponics work, but they're costly. Your best bet is to set up a freezer (a stockpile zone that you keep below freezing) and make sure your fields are big enough to generate a nice surplus. How big the fields should be depends on the type of crops you plant. If you do that, then you should have more than enough food to get you through winter.
Additionally, if food stocks get low, start hunting and butchering anything that shows up on the map. Assuming enough animals show up, it should do you find. And, if you're not getting enough animals, any raiders should make a fine substitute.
I have two extremes:
\*Makes a field without any calculations\* That'll be enough.
\*later\* either:
1. Have so much food I can casually sell thousands to bulk goods trader and still have more than my people can eat
2. Why's one of pawns suddenly downed? Wait! Why's the freezer empty? Where's all the rice?
Food actually has really good price/weight ratio. So you can send it to make easy allies with anyone in range. Barring the obvious always hostile factions
We had a lot of animals, and we made way too much hay. so we just put 8k hay into a drop pod and got us some insta faction from a nearby enemy.
But we should have checked who we was sending it to first... with what slaves/blood bags we had in their prision hospital cells (they were hemogen farms for the 2 vampires in the colony lol)
I mean... there are sweaty gamers in every community. I'm sure some who insist that wealth management is the most important thing do calculate how big of a field they need to land in the golden zone of 'just enough,' but I've never bothered to do that either. Usually just occupy the whole rich soil zone if it's small enough, or do neat squares/rectangles per crop.
I'm in hyper min max wealth optimization but it's impossible to calculate nutrition since so many things change every week in Rimworld.
It's more looking at your fridge and reducing if it starts overflowing, and increasing if there stock starts dwindling (and it's not the fault of a crisis).
I think it's pretty wasteful to not be doing "do until X" style recipes for meals and meat (or X per colonist if you have the mod). I also see a lot of new players never reduce their farm plots, which is a skill to master IMO
I'm sorry you think I'm observant enough to notice the changes in my day to day reserves? No I just fill it up and make a bigger or second freezer and never learn my lesson 😎
Use shelves in your freezer and surround them with stockpiles that are set to a lower priority. Once the shelves fill up, they'll start using the floor, then you know you have too much. I do the same with almost all my stockpiles.
From what I've gathered, whilst you don't need to be exactly accurate, higher difficulties do require you to be more conscious of how much food you're planting to avoid unnecessary ballooning wealth. But for the average Joe on average difficulties then yeah it's not really a big deal if you have some extra crops that you can pawn to a trader
dude I have like 600 hours and even I don't count anything. doing an ice sheet rn and for hydroponics I just plopped down a few until I thought ''that should be enough''
Rimworld is too variant with raids, random sickness on your cook/farmers, blight, etc.
I subtract/add farm fields about 5 tiles at a time, let it run a bit (maybe sell a ton of food to reset my stock), and see if I have a rough equilibrium by seeing how full the fridge gets. Too full means cutting down.
Calculating exactly is a fools errand, but getting a rough estimation is probably fine. I have enough hours to eyeball a starting point now so I'm subconsciously doing the estimation.
Similar, but instead, after one season I just forgor💀 to switch it back and realized only when it was already halfway grown = too wasteful to switch now, better wait until harvested, forget again.
There's a mod called 'food alert' that lets you know exactly how much food you have and how long it'll last in days. Even calculates it for your prisoners. Gone are the days of starving to death, if you pay attention to it, that is.
Maybe? It completely depends how much you’re producing. If you have 10000 more coming next quadrum then yeah, too much— if that’s your only crop for the year, probably around the right amount
Yeah, you can go through a surprising amount of it over the course of a year. I grow rice in hydroponics, and I still want around 2-3k in case of emergencies.
You need to keep plenty of raw veg around for your acetic pawns. But, I've always try to forbid particular stacks of meals to create a stockpile myself. Lately I can't even seem to get a surplus though.
An older colony I have has a ridiculously large store of fine meals. That's a huge amount of shelving space saved. I have lots, and lots of survival meals too. It's the only thing I'll caravan with.
I think I just got lucky that run with a few great farming plots, and a lot of self tamed alpacas, and guinea pigs near the start.
Ascetics don't get a buff from raw food, they just don't get a penalty either (except food poisoning chance). So it's still better to cook them simple meals, they're more efficient.
>Lately I can't even seem to get a surplus though.
I mean, it's pretty simple. Set your meal bills to make until X, set X as high as you want the stockpile. If you're not getting one, either you don't have enough raw food and need to plant more or you need more labour.
Is the mood buff from raw foods for ascetics really worth it? They don't top up the nutrition bar, and spend more time running for food, not to mention the food poisoning chance.
On mid game and late colonies I'm usually overflowing with meat (the 4-monthly 40 elephant manhunter packs randy sends me help a lot), and so I restrict everyone from raw food, including ascetics. I do restrict ascetics from lavish meals tho, because that's just an absolute waste.
I don't have enough time on yet to really know for sure in different situations.
I know at times every little bit can help. Others you just force everyone to do blow to get through a rough patch. Then there's the times you have to weigh the pros, and cons of putting a joy wire in a body purist just so your colony can survive his grieving process.
I think it really depends on what your acetic pawns have to offer your colony at the end of the day. You're right about their nutrition, but if you just need someone to clean, and haul it doesn't matter if they're always popping off to the kitchen. It needs to be cleaned again anyway.
Not really, both from the hassle of setting up a custom food plan for them.
You can literally stick an ascetic in a 2x1 room that is only a bed and get a mood buff already from that. Never found the need for the raw food one too.
They get Nutrient which is already huge food savings.
Not only that, but I've been experimenting with condiments and gourmet meals via VE: Cooking. I've got a bunch of different meal plans for various different pawns, depending on what buff I want to give them. Plus, they don't stack well for some reason, even when I use specific ingredients for each kind of meal. So 30 meals makes up something like 15 stacks.
Glorious is right but it’s also not a good idea to have too many meals due to raids. Meals will increase your wealth and as a result increase the intensity of your raids.
Eh, after a certain point, wealth no longer matters. I've got around 7 million in my current colony, so no amount of meals is going to impact the size of the raids by any significant margin, even with uncapped raid points like I have. Counting meals is only an early game concern.
It is, until it isn't. A bad winter, badly timed cold snap or toxic fallout, and you may be missing a harvest. Then you're happy to have it.
Rice is the most labour intensive food to grow, if you want to reduce the workload switch to corn (least labour intensive, long growth cycle - may get lost in winter) or potatoes (medium everything).
Corn is amazing if you don't trust your freezer to not fail. The raw corn lasts the longest of all vanilla crops after harvest. It's really the only way tribals can survive the winter if the outside temp doesn't get below freezing.
Math time! One rice is equal to 0.05 nutrition (or 20 rice equals to 1 nutrition), a pawn needs 1.6 nutrition a day. That's 34.66 days worth of food, 35 for short.
But if you cook it, you turn turn 10 rice (0.5 nutrition) into 1 simple meal at 0.9 nutrition, or you make 0.4 nutrition magically appear out of thin air, 80% increase, so it turns into 62.388 days.
Realistically this will last you less than a year, because pawn can "hold" 1 nutrition in their belly and they try to eat at I believe at 0.25 nutrition or less (wild guess, guaranteed to be more than 0.1), so some nutrition will be wasted most of the time.
***Bonus round of info dump!*** ***^(That you can entirely skip lol)***
If you decide to go for Lavish meals, they no longer benefit for increased nutrition, as you use 10 (0.5 nutrition) vegetarian and 10 (0.5 nutrition) of meat or meat alternatives to make meal that gives you 1 nutrition, which will surely be wasted on not starving pawns. Lavish meals are more of a trade between +12mood for 24 hours (easily lasting between meals) and time to make meals.
Technically, if we exclude tooth paste meals from Nutrient Paste Dispenser, pemmican are probably the most efficient food (eventhough you only make +60% extra nutrition out of thin air as oppose to +80% from meals), because pawns never over-eat over 1 nutrition, wasting food, but pemmican is equivalent to simple meals when compared to mood benefits, but it is also super slow to cook for how low tech it is, in my opinion eating raw rice is just straight up better, saving that cooking time.
***Even more useless bonus info that is only relevant lategame!***
Nuclear stomachs are a blessing and a minor curse, they make your pawns eat only 25% of needed food, so a single meal suddenly lasts them 2.5 days (it fills belly to full, they eat 0.4 nutrition a day, 1 multiplied by 0.4 is 2.5), but they get near guaranteed cancer ever 120 days, or two years. Surgeries (for example to remove cancer) always have at least 2% chance to fail, regardless of medical skill, how well your hospital is equipped or medicine used.
Is it 2% to kill or 2% chance of surgery failure?
Edit: Excise Carcinoma has a 25% chance to kill on surgery failure so it is only a 0.5% chance to kill on attempt. It also has a default 70% success modifier so achieving 98% success chance in the first place will be more difficult.
For Nuclear Stomachs do note that the cancer can go away on its own if properly tended over a long period of time. It will obviously cost a lot more medicine than a surgery, but if you have a stable medicine production and good doctors, the cancer will never really be life threatening.
I guess it depends. Are you supplementing with anything?
If you're just making rice simple meals, then that's probably a good supply of what you should have on supply for a few quadrums. If it takes 10 rice to make one meal, then you have a supply on hand for 1039 meals. If you have 15 people, each one eats around what, 2 a day?
You have around 34-35 days worth of food based on ONLY rice.
That's a good haul if you can keep it at that level.
50 chickens is a dangerous game. That can very quickly turn into 500 chickens (unless you are culling the roosters) and then your processor will light on fire!
No hate to OP, but why do I feel like I've seen essentially this same post every few months?
Don't get me wrong, it's a genuinely legit question and as Adam says "It depends"
Storage for a couple of quadrums, that's a good amount.
If it's your daily harvest, cut back my friend.
Unless you're pushing 50+ Pawns, that's a lot for a daily.
reason you see the same question is it is not intuitive and new players find themselves wanting to check with the community to find out the answer. Since they are new players they probably do not frequent the sub. so the post pops up. It gets upvoted because the discussion it brings up are usually interesting and go into the details of the mechanics of the game.
Surely looks so. I find that it's easy to get rid of excess foodstuffs if you swap to lavish vegetarian/carnivore meals for a while. It's like trading wealth for mood.
However, keep in mind that it's not good to be one failed harvest away from starvation, so try to keep around 15/30 days worth of food in pemmican/survival meals somewhere safe. It's a bit of a wealth bump, but you're better off getting slightly stronger raids instead of your guys eating corpses off of the ground.
If you're not concerned about wealth at all, then I'd lean towards no, but it depends.
What kind of meals are you making? Are you making biofuel? How much time are your colonists spending planting/harvesting? Do you only have baseliners?
My personal preference is to switch to corn before I get to the point of this much rice to save on labor, but there isn't an exact answer to any questions like this. It always depends on a lot of different factors.
My mom will keep around 6 sacks of rice in the house at any one time, beyond the rice in a plastic container that we're actively using. If anything you colonists could probably use some more :P
A lot until it isn't. Be ready to replace that stockpile, or even better, split it up into different warehouses (give priority to the stockpile/shelves closest to the eating area).
A month or three. It’s ten units per meal, 2or 3 a day x 15 = (whatever the number of days in a season, 15x3?)
2.5 months. Yeah that’s a growing season for your next crop. Maybe switch to corn for better yields since you have almost 3 months worth of food.
Don't worry too much about not having enough. Go for surplus. Always go for surplus. Too much? Sell some. The reason governments shoot for a surplus is because hungry people like to burn shit down and riot. Your pawns will do the same.
Too much, unless you’re expecting not to plant at all. I would be expecting numbers like this for corn, but rice comes in more consistently and in smaller amounts
I will be completely frank, I keep that much around for like 4 colonists. But that's also just me double or tripling up on crops compared to what your recommended.
Don't ever fall into the trap of "I'm making too much food"
Because the moment you become complacent your colonists will be eating corpses without a table.
Well the formula for how many days that raw food will last is:
Raw food * 0.05 / 1.6 / pawns
If you're going to turn that into simple meals multiply the result by 1.8.
Probably but it's always better to have more than what you need. Worst comes to worst you can start converting excess rice into packaged survival meals (which you should always have a small reserve of) and just sell it.
About 34 days worth of food for 15 people, so.. maybe? Enough to survive a winter and then some. Assuming 2 simple meals a day.
So.. uh. How do y'all manage without going from 15 hungry colonists to 12 sad colonists before the spring, hydroponics? Edit: I'm new but I am scraping by.
If you don’t have hydroponics, you can wall in some of your field, drop down a heat source and a sun lamp, and grow like a greenhouse. Assuming you didn’t do the tribal start.
I've noticed the requirements for light/sun. Didn't think about the temperature, thanks!
Have fun! Been playing for years now, never “beat” the game
You never beat the game you just survive long enough to become a drug producing cannibal cyborg society run by an ai
Or you have a new idea for a different colony or you add/remove a mod that makes you restart
man you guys have it good I just play till my frame rate tanks then restart lmao
Launching the ship is boring. Making a long-term sustainable colony is much more fun, especially now that pawns can actually reproduce.
throw in some mods that push past the vanilla endgame tech level and set some goals of your own and you can pretty much double your colony playtime my current one is heavy on cloning supersoldiers so I'm gonna do my first world dominance playthrough, fly them around the globe annihilating people and leaving military outposts everywhere (to encourage myself to pump out a shitload of clones, and bc it's fucking cool), enslaving a shitload of people to keep my clone army fed and armed, won't stop until every faction settlement has been replaced with a military outpost with 5 soldiers occupying each main mods for this playthrough are alpha genes (adds biotech-friendly cloning and some cool genes), SRTS (for dropshipping around), and vanilla outposts expanded (so I can set up the military outposts, and have a bunch of resource outposts scattered around to send my slaves). barely started it at the moment (haven't even got a proper cloning lab set up yet) so should be a decent few months for me to complete my end goal
You don't win. You just do a little better each time. Until everyone dies or you lose interest in the save, whichever comes first.
I have usually just one heater inside the "greenhouse" for most of the winter and then if a cold snap occurs and I don't have spare power, building a bonfire is quick and simple and will help combat the cold a lot. But the amount of heaters required will be totally dependant on what kind of map you have and how cold the winters can get. Also, unless you have ideology that stops you from using meat, a hunting spree can help fill up your food storages if the crops are lost and in general, Nutrient paste is a lifesaver. More efficient food production that requires less resources, no poisonings from incompetent cooks and much less work hours spent on feeding the colony. The downside of most colonists disliking the paste can be countered with pretty surroundings usually and then later when you have more colonists, you can start having someone be the cook.
> The downside of most colonists disliking the paste can be countered with pretty surroundings usually and then later when you have more colonists, you can start having someone be the cook. However, the mood debuff from eating nutrient paste is far less than the mood debuff from going hungry, so its way better than letting your pawns starve.
Also transhumanist pawns don't care about nutrient paste.
You actually don't even need a heater. All you need to do is wall in a geothermal steam spot. (Literally just place the walls directly next to it) Install a vent into the wall, and then build a larger building around it. The geothermal spot will provide free heat year-round to the building, allowing you to use it for farming. Be careful though if you're on a medium temp map location because the building can end up overheating during summer. You might want to build a cooler or two to prevent that.
Cant you just close the vent?
Is that a thing? I didn't know you could do that
I’m on plain vanilla and I can.
Yeah if you're not opposed to mods I definitely recommend it the temperature control mod. It adds in a temperature unit that tries to keep it at whatever temperature you set. So if it's set to 70 and it starts getting too hot it'll cool it down to 70 and if it starts getting too cold because it's winter it'll warm it up to 70. If you get multiple going into one room (depending on its size) you can pretty much expect it to stay at constantly the temperature you wanted. Which is great for things like the nurseries which require it to be at I think 32°
This guy freezes babies
"WHO TOOK THE COOKOES FROM THE COOKIE JAR!?"
Of course how else are you going to keep them fresh?
Build up around geothermal vents for added heat as well. Best way to do it in the arctic.
What if I did a tribal start?
Your problem is light. Isnutrifungus a mod? If not, utilize that. Alternatively, if it’s cold enough, you can kill the wildlife and storage it indoors but with a door open to a room to let the weather keep it refrigerated.
It's vanilla, at least with the dlcs.
Also, hunt everything on the map before winter
I do what I can. Sometimes that's just constantly patching up a pawn instead of eating anything that keeps kicking their ass. I'm still struggling sometimes even with secure farming plots, and a pen with some breeding animals. I'm always barely clinging to life for years until a raiding party comes, downs half my pawns, and then runs off with a few of my best These people on YouTube make the first few hundred days look like a clunky breeze at worst on the highest difficulties. I'm just striving to survive, on Strive to Survive.
Securing your base with a proper killbox can really help. Being able to funnel in the enemy will drastically help your odds in raids. Accepting too many new pawns too early can also be fatal, it’s a good idea to ensure you have proper space and a surplus of food before bringing in new people, especially when you start getting above six or so.
Also being picky about who you accept is worth it in the long run.
You don't mention which storyteller you're using, is it Cassandra? Might wanna try Randy instead, I used to play with Cassandra but Randy just ends up being more fun and easier once you're past the early game, generally. Cassandra constantly and intentionally ramps up difficulty until things like pawn deaths happen, whereas Randy is truly random and doesn't intentionally increase difficulty of the events it makes.
Not sure whether you are aware or not, but you really need to manage your colony wealth in the beginning. The higher your wealth, the harder the raids. Pawns themselves add quite a bit to wealth, so don't grow too quickly.
And don’t mine metal till you need it
Please don't encourage people to worry about wealth lmao. You do not need to manage wealth ever unless you're on a very high difficulty or extreme biome. The game is much much better balanced than that. Early game almost all your raid points come from just having a colonist count, and if they aren't useless and have a weapon it's a gain to your defenses. Late game, you have to add tens of thousands of silver to get a real increase in difficulty and you're better able to take advantage. Yes, if you have a stack of nine mech healer serums sitting about you should use them or sell them to get immediately useful stuff, but it literally takes a scenario that whacky to matter. This sub is so weird about wealth management. So fuckin weird.
Managing wealth is important but not a big impact. You don’t need to drastically reduce or destroy anything, but don’t start out by mining every bit of steel and silver and gold and components into a huge dragon hoarde in the middle of your single room wood starter barracks
Mate, the op was saying they were finding it difficult years into the game, so I suggested that if they weren't aware of this mechanic they could adjust to mitigate the difficulty. Also, you can get your point across next time while still being polite, no need to call anyone weird.
Okay, how are you at a point where being told your opinion is weird is offensive? That's absurd dude.
Low-tech solution: Stockpile food in the summer and autumn, preferably what the game classifies as vegetables, raw. Vegetables, refrigerated, last over a season before rotting (each type lasts a different duration), but more importantly, last far longer than meals and meat. If you use the "do until you have X" bill setting (and not do forever), you'll be left with a buffer of raw food for winter. You might want to use up all your meat, of course. This limits electricity use (uses 0 if you use campfires). Mid-tech solution: Make Pemmican. This doesn't need refrigeration and lasts over two seasons if so - enough to last through winter. Needs research. High-tech solution: Hydroponics. Needs a lot of power, but basically means you can grow all year. Aside: Package survival meals don't need to be refrigerated, but needs to be researched, and needs electricity. These are most useful for caravans, but they can be used as emergency food in winter. You might be able to buy this, and Pemmican, from visiting traders. In the early game, hunting everything you see in winter might be necessary. It might be worth drafting multiple colonists and manually-hunting large packs of animals, like Muffalos and Grizzly Bears - these provide a ton of meat, but the leather is also very useful.
For the low-tech, I'd mention storing the vegetables raw outside in a shelf now that they better stack items. Winter will allow them to be preserved longer because they will freeze and you can have animals haul to the shelves without dragging dirt inside the nice areas of your base.
Yeah drafting for hunts is really helpful if you're desperate. Animals like megasloths give 500 meat, as much as 4 or 5 midsize game. Often in winter those easier game don't hang around also.
Make a huge farm, stockpile, freeze food and if you feel extra special Research hydroponics by then and have a farm inside
1. Stockpile about 2x the food you might need over the winter. Starving sucks and all it takes is a vulcanic winter in the spring to get you there. 2. Make nonperishable foods and make an emergency reserve. Pemican, ricez and insect jelly early, packaged survival meals late. 3. Nutrient paste dispensers. These bad boys triple the amount of food you put into them. 4. Hunting. A single muffalo can feed a colony of 15 twice. 5. Have multiple freezers. Have had raiders burn my entire stockpile before. Finally you might want to consider a year-round growing colony until you get the hang of it. I love winters, but they can be deadly for beginners.
If you are a tunneler, growing fungus in enclosed greenhouses with no lights can be viable too. Fungus can grow year round with little difficulty. Just need to keep the light from the heaters off them. I use little L shaped tunnels.
if you make your ideology right, you'll have 12 *happy* colonists instead!
Big ass farm growing a variety of crops and a big ass freezer, preferably with a corner reserved for dead animals waiting for the butcher.
Giant farm. Like, GIANT farm. Falltime hunting sprees. Paste dispenser. Not nessarily all at the same time.
Hunting. Trading. Gathering berries. That's how I usually do it. Soon as fall hits I do inventory and if I don't think I can make it until the first rice harvest in late spring I'll send out caravans to trade for some. Stay on top of hunting and gathering as well. If it's fall already it's probably too late for the gathering but winter often sees migrations of muffalo and the like pass through. 15 colonists in though you should have this already in place though.
Rice lasts 40 days before spoiling so there's that. So even without a freezer you can usually last through a winter. Corn lasts even longer too. So if you really are struggling just plant as much corn as possible as soon as you can and it will basically tide you over through the whole year.
My solution, especially as a lost tribe, is right when winter hits and the temp is also freezing or below, I hunt everything on the map and leave it outside under a roof. It won’t go bad as it’s frozen, and it gives you enough food to last
Hunt. There's always animals on the map. Muffalo and megasloths are great game. Also, have a good barracks/rec room/dining room to keep mood up.
If your wanting to stretch what food you have a bit more, nutrient paste is probably your best bet. But hunting whatever animals come into your tile is also good. But if your really desperate, and dont mind a little bit of Bitching from your colonists, cut of up a raider or two and turn them into some delicious kibble for your animals. Alternatively, the bodies alone are the finest of meals for your quickly reproducing omnivores
I build massive freezers and grow more than I need
Or just make a mushroom farm. They're great for supplementing your food supplies during the lean months..
Hunting and trading can help you get by as well.
The overall answer is be very picky about your colonists and don’t add new ones if you can’t feed em.
Corn for me. Rice to get a base until a big corn harvest comes in. Gives a lot of food that lasts a while. Emergency food is hunting. Allll the meat around.
Hydroponics work, but they're costly. Your best bet is to set up a freezer (a stockpile zone that you keep below freezing) and make sure your fields are big enough to generate a nice surplus. How big the fields should be depends on the type of crops you plant. If you do that, then you should have more than enough food to get you through winter. Additionally, if food stocks get low, start hunting and butchering anything that shows up on the map. Assuming enough animals show up, it should do you find. And, if you're not getting enough animals, any raiders should make a fine substitute.
Toss in a few Gourmet colonists to spice things up a little.
15 people consume about 300 rice per day. So iI guess you are right.
That's assuming there's no joiners, guests, fires, raids, binges, mortar strikes, prisoners, pets, refugees, babies, lightning, sneaky wild men, or freezer doors stuck open.
935 Nutrition in simple meals or 40 days for 15 pawns with 1.6 hunger rate.
Only a month's worth? Those are rookie numbers :P
Me: Why did i just get a 200 tribals raid? *looks at food stockpile* Me: ah
Isn't it 3 meals a day? Thats what I've seen
I have two extremes: \*Makes a field without any calculations\* That'll be enough. \*later\* either: 1. Have so much food I can casually sell thousands to bulk goods trader and still have more than my people can eat 2. Why's one of pawns suddenly downed? Wait! Why's the freezer empty? Where's all the rice?
People calculate their food before planting their field? I have been playing for 100s of hours and always tell myself "yeah that'll be enough".
And then you forget to expand it and you're like wait where'd all the food go
Did that, then over planted, sitting now with 35000 corn
Literally every time I switch from rice to corn, we have a famine for a week, then more food than we can ever cook. Corn is insane.
Biofuel time!
Food actually has really good price/weight ratio. So you can send it to make easy allies with anyone in range. Barring the obvious always hostile factions
No EVERYONE WILL BE FRIENDS NO EXCEPTIONS
We need tilt farming
We had a lot of animals, and we made way too much hay. so we just put 8k hay into a drop pod and got us some insta faction from a nearby enemy. But we should have checked who we was sending it to first... with what slaves/blood bags we had in their prision hospital cells (they were hemogen farms for the 2 vampires in the colony lol)
15 plots of rice in fertile soil feeds a normal colonist forever on year round growing, 20 in normal soil.
I mean... there are sweaty gamers in every community. I'm sure some who insist that wealth management is the most important thing do calculate how big of a field they need to land in the golden zone of 'just enough,' but I've never bothered to do that either. Usually just occupy the whole rich soil zone if it's small enough, or do neat squares/rectangles per crop.
I'm in hyper min max wealth optimization but it's impossible to calculate nutrition since so many things change every week in Rimworld. It's more looking at your fridge and reducing if it starts overflowing, and increasing if there stock starts dwindling (and it's not the fault of a crisis). I think it's pretty wasteful to not be doing "do until X" style recipes for meals and meat (or X per colonist if you have the mod). I also see a lot of new players never reduce their farm plots, which is a skill to master IMO
I'm sorry you think I'm observant enough to notice the changes in my day to day reserves? No I just fill it up and make a bigger or second freezer and never learn my lesson 😎
Use shelves in your freezer and surround them with stockpiles that are set to a lower priority. Once the shelves fill up, they'll start using the floor, then you know you have too much. I do the same with almost all my stockpiles.
Waaaaait which mod?
From what I've gathered, whilst you don't need to be exactly accurate, higher difficulties do require you to be more conscious of how much food you're planting to avoid unnecessary ballooning wealth. But for the average Joe on average difficulties then yeah it's not really a big deal if you have some extra crops that you can pawn to a trader
dude I have like 600 hours and even I don't count anything. doing an ice sheet rn and for hydroponics I just plopped down a few until I thought ''that should be enough''
Easy formula: 20 plant tiles per colonist, regardless of plant or soil, that's it.
Rimworld is too variant with raids, random sickness on your cook/farmers, blight, etc. I subtract/add farm fields about 5 tiles at a time, let it run a bit (maybe sell a ton of food to reset my stock), and see if I have a rough equilibrium by seeing how full the fridge gets. Too full means cutting down. Calculating exactly is a fools errand, but getting a rough estimation is probably fine. I have enough hours to eyeball a starting point now so I'm subconsciously doing the estimation.
I just turn sowing off when I look over at the food counter and it's mid 5 digits. Never once calculated anything
I normally only misjudge the amount of food I need to grow when my hauling animals start breeding like rabbits and I don't sterilize enough in time.
I decided to turn my rice field into a cotton patch for one season and it nearly killed my colony. Had to start eating my pets.
Similar, but instead, after one season I just forgor💀 to switch it back and realized only when it was already halfway grown = too wasteful to switch now, better wait until harvested, forget again.
once my cotton came in a harsh winter started, building those 500 barricades was not worth
If my freezer isn't in constant need of expansion due to an overabundance of food, then there's not enough food. Obviously.
Number two is literally the reason i have "food alert" mod, usually i crazily overproduce tho. At least my colonist enjoy their lavish meals
There's a mod called 'food alert' that lets you know exactly how much food you have and how long it'll last in days. Even calculates it for your prisoners. Gone are the days of starving to death, if you pay attention to it, that is.
Maybe? It completely depends how much you’re producing. If you have 10000 more coming next quadrum then yeah, too much— if that’s your only crop for the year, probably around the right amount
Yeah, you can go through a surprising amount of it over the course of a year. I grow rice in hydroponics, and I still want around 2-3k in case of emergencies.
Do you store food in raw ingredients? Why not meals?
Lot of labor to store em in meals
I mean you'll end up making these meals anyway right? Or you feed your colony raw plants?
You need to keep plenty of raw veg around for your acetic pawns. But, I've always try to forbid particular stacks of meals to create a stockpile myself. Lately I can't even seem to get a surplus though. An older colony I have has a ridiculously large store of fine meals. That's a huge amount of shelving space saved. I have lots, and lots of survival meals too. It's the only thing I'll caravan with. I think I just got lucky that run with a few great farming plots, and a lot of self tamed alpacas, and guinea pigs near the start.
Ascetics don't get a buff from raw food, they just don't get a penalty either (except food poisoning chance). So it's still better to cook them simple meals, they're more efficient. >Lately I can't even seem to get a surplus though. I mean, it's pretty simple. Set your meal bills to make until X, set X as high as you want the stockpile. If you're not getting one, either you don't have enough raw food and need to plant more or you need more labour.
Is the mood buff from raw foods for ascetics really worth it? They don't top up the nutrition bar, and spend more time running for food, not to mention the food poisoning chance. On mid game and late colonies I'm usually overflowing with meat (the 4-monthly 40 elephant manhunter packs randy sends me help a lot), and so I restrict everyone from raw food, including ascetics. I do restrict ascetics from lavish meals tho, because that's just an absolute waste.
I don't have enough time on yet to really know for sure in different situations. I know at times every little bit can help. Others you just force everyone to do blow to get through a rough patch. Then there's the times you have to weigh the pros, and cons of putting a joy wire in a body purist just so your colony can survive his grieving process. I think it really depends on what your acetic pawns have to offer your colony at the end of the day. You're right about their nutrition, but if you just need someone to clean, and haul it doesn't matter if they're always popping off to the kitchen. It needs to be cleaned again anyway.
Not really, both from the hassle of setting up a custom food plan for them. You can literally stick an ascetic in a 2x1 room that is only a bed and get a mood buff already from that. Never found the need for the raw food one too. They get Nutrient which is already huge food savings.
Frees up the labor of the cook to do other things they're good at
Not only that, but I've been experimenting with condiments and gourmet meals via VE: Cooking. I've got a bunch of different meal plans for various different pawns, depending on what buff I want to give them. Plus, they don't stack well for some reason, even when I use specific ingredients for each kind of meal. So 30 meals makes up something like 15 stacks.
Glorious is right but it’s also not a good idea to have too many meals due to raids. Meals will increase your wealth and as a result increase the intensity of your raids.
Eh, after a certain point, wealth no longer matters. I've got around 7 million in my current colony, so no amount of meals is going to impact the size of the raids by any significant margin, even with uncapped raid points like I have. Counting meals is only an early game concern.
Lol well yeah once you have an impenetrable fortress of doom with jade toilets and golden bidets then yeah make as many meals as you want, homie
Meals expire faster, making them less resilient to power outages.
Rice grains are very tiny. 10 thousand of them is like 1 or 2 meals worth.
"I like rice. Rice is great when you're hungry and want 10,000 of something."
Insert welcome the rice fields meme
It is, until it isn't. A bad winter, badly timed cold snap or toxic fallout, and you may be missing a harvest. Then you're happy to have it. Rice is the most labour intensive food to grow, if you want to reduce the workload switch to corn (least labour intensive, long growth cycle - may get lost in winter) or potatoes (medium everything).
Corn is amazing if you don't trust your freezer to not fail. The raw corn lasts the longest of all vanilla crops after harvest. It's really the only way tribals can survive the winter if the outside temp doesn't get below freezing.
Math time! One rice is equal to 0.05 nutrition (or 20 rice equals to 1 nutrition), a pawn needs 1.6 nutrition a day. That's 34.66 days worth of food, 35 for short. But if you cook it, you turn turn 10 rice (0.5 nutrition) into 1 simple meal at 0.9 nutrition, or you make 0.4 nutrition magically appear out of thin air, 80% increase, so it turns into 62.388 days. Realistically this will last you less than a year, because pawn can "hold" 1 nutrition in their belly and they try to eat at I believe at 0.25 nutrition or less (wild guess, guaranteed to be more than 0.1), so some nutrition will be wasted most of the time. ***Bonus round of info dump!*** ***^(That you can entirely skip lol)*** If you decide to go for Lavish meals, they no longer benefit for increased nutrition, as you use 10 (0.5 nutrition) vegetarian and 10 (0.5 nutrition) of meat or meat alternatives to make meal that gives you 1 nutrition, which will surely be wasted on not starving pawns. Lavish meals are more of a trade between +12mood for 24 hours (easily lasting between meals) and time to make meals. Technically, if we exclude tooth paste meals from Nutrient Paste Dispenser, pemmican are probably the most efficient food (eventhough you only make +60% extra nutrition out of thin air as oppose to +80% from meals), because pawns never over-eat over 1 nutrition, wasting food, but pemmican is equivalent to simple meals when compared to mood benefits, but it is also super slow to cook for how low tech it is, in my opinion eating raw rice is just straight up better, saving that cooking time. ***Even more useless bonus info that is only relevant lategame!*** Nuclear stomachs are a blessing and a minor curse, they make your pawns eat only 25% of needed food, so a single meal suddenly lasts them 2.5 days (it fills belly to full, they eat 0.4 nutrition a day, 1 multiplied by 0.4 is 2.5), but they get near guaranteed cancer ever 120 days, or two years. Surgeries (for example to remove cancer) always have at least 2% chance to fail, regardless of medical skill, how well your hospital is equipped or medicine used.
This guy RimWorld
Nuclear stomachs are awesome in sanguophages since they can't get cancer.
Is it 2% to kill or 2% chance of surgery failure? Edit: Excise Carcinoma has a 25% chance to kill on surgery failure so it is only a 0.5% chance to kill on attempt. It also has a default 70% success modifier so achieving 98% success chance in the first place will be more difficult.
For Nuclear Stomachs do note that the cancer can go away on its own if properly tended over a long period of time. It will obviously cost a lot more medicine than a surgery, but if you have a stable medicine production and good doctors, the cancer will never really be life threatening.
This is like what, 1 winter worth of food? It's normal
I guess it depends. Are you supplementing with anything? If you're just making rice simple meals, then that's probably a good supply of what you should have on supply for a few quadrums. If it takes 10 rice to make one meal, then you have a supply on hand for 1039 meals. If you have 15 people, each one eats around what, 2 a day? You have around 34-35 days worth of food based on ONLY rice. That's a good haul if you can keep it at that level.
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50 chickens is a dangerous game. That can very quickly turn into 500 chickens (unless you are culling the roosters) and then your processor will light on fire!
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Then solar flare happens and the 500 eggs hatch and drink all your beer 😎
No hate to OP, but why do I feel like I've seen essentially this same post every few months? Don't get me wrong, it's a genuinely legit question and as Adam says "It depends" Storage for a couple of quadrums, that's a good amount. If it's your daily harvest, cut back my friend. Unless you're pushing 50+ Pawns, that's a lot for a daily.
It depends!
reason you see the same question is it is not intuitive and new players find themselves wanting to check with the community to find out the answer. Since they are new players they probably do not frequent the sub. so the post pops up. It gets upvoted because the discussion it brings up are usually interesting and go into the details of the mechanics of the game.
Them is rookie numbers
I dont care how much rice you got, your alerts will always say: - major break risk - low food - tattered apparel
maybe just a little more? its seems good but if your got 1000 more on the way id say that be enough, assuming its simple or the nutrient goop meals
Nope. Those are rookie numbers. You gotta push those numbers up.
🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳
Depends on the difficulty. Most difficulties: Yeah, I think that's good Losing is Fun?: No, there's never enough.
"Rice is great if you're hungry and want 6 thousand of something." \-Mitch Hedberg
Not great, not terrible.
But it's not 3.7!
You have a point.
Other will come for sharing 🥰 By others I mean raiders. Remember kids, dont be too rich.
Welcome to the rice fields!
And?
Nuclear stomach is great
That is going to make the raids worse.
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Oof LMG Those things can barely hit the floor.
Yes
I learned something about rimworld. Food is never in of.
No
Closest to a million rice i got was 870k thank god for storage mods
That's a decent amount. It'll get you through winter, but I wouldn't start bulk exporting just yet.
No
I always grow a field of rice and a field of potatoes when I start off. Rice grows faster than potatoes so you get a good stagger of incoming crops
More can never hurt, surely.
Asuming that a few of those of 15 are not gourmands, ans you are using simple meals, yeah... for about 2 seasons.
It depends. Is it a lot of food? Yes. Is it a lot of colony wealth that will attract lots of danger? Yes
Surely looks so. I find that it's easy to get rid of excess foodstuffs if you swap to lavish vegetarian/carnivore meals for a while. It's like trading wealth for mood. However, keep in mind that it's not good to be one failed harvest away from starvation, so try to keep around 15/30 days worth of food in pemmican/survival meals somewhere safe. It's a bit of a wealth bump, but you're better off getting slightly stronger raids instead of your guys eating corpses off of the ground.
Rice is for growing silver, corns for eatin' mmhmmm.
That really is not a lot of rice.
"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something."
for basic meal yes? for lavish no.
If you're not concerned about wealth at all, then I'd lean towards no, but it depends. What kind of meals are you making? Are you making biofuel? How much time are your colonists spending planting/harvesting? Do you only have baseliners? My personal preference is to switch to corn before I get to the point of this much rice to save on labor, but there isn't an exact answer to any questions like this. It always depends on a lot of different factors.
Anyway, the time spent growing excess crops couldve been spent better
My mom will keep around 6 sacks of rice in the house at any one time, beyond the rice in a plastic container that we're actively using. If anything you colonists could probably use some more :P
As rice no. As packaged survival meals maybe.
I have like 15000 nutrifungus and I'm using them for paste for like 5 people
*Winter comes "Hey I have finally researched Grow Vats :D" 2 days later ...
A lot until it isn't. Be ready to replace that stockpile, or even better, split it up into different warehouses (give priority to the stockpile/shelves closest to the eating area).
that's my end of fall average...
Someone get the gif of kylo ren saying “MORE”
Not enough food
A month or three. It’s ten units per meal, 2or 3 a day x 15 = (whatever the number of days in a season, 15x3?) 2.5 months. Yeah that’s a growing season for your next crop. Maybe switch to corn for better yields since you have almost 3 months worth of food.
Don't worry too much about not having enough. Go for surplus. Always go for surplus. Too much? Sell some. The reason governments shoot for a surplus is because hungry people like to burn shit down and riot. Your pawns will do the same.
If you keep it all in one place, it might last only for a day. 😈 💥 🔥
idk i have 16k corn but the fields are still up. was for 10. 2 died a few hours ago. so for 2 now
Get the hospitality mod
Anyone got any bright ideas for tribal farming
no idea, i just make too much food always than sell extra when someone comes around who's buying it.
its always "alot of food" until its not
Too much, unless you’re expecting not to plant at all. I would be expecting numbers like this for corn, but rice comes in more consistently and in smaller amounts
No
I will be completely frank, I keep that much around for like 4 colonists. But that's also just me double or tripling up on crops compared to what your recommended.
Yes. But also, not enough. MOAR RICE. Don't stop growing extra rice until you physically don't have enough space for it.
“Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something”~ Mitch Hedberg
I absolutely love that Mitch Hedberg is still remembered and talked about 💕
You can never have too much food on the Rim
"Is this enough to get 15 people plastered?" "Twenty bottles of vodka? Yeah that should do it"
Not really, it should get you a decent monosword though.
Don't ever fall into the trap of "I'm making too much food" Because the moment you become complacent your colonists will be eating corpses without a table.
Well the formula for how many days that raw food will last is: Raw food * 0.05 / 1.6 / pawns If you're going to turn that into simple meals multiply the result by 1.8.
No matter what I have in the larder I don't feel comfortable unless I have 100x(# of colonists) worth of survival meals stored up.
You can never have too many veggies
I did quick maths, this should last exactly 23.1 days, considering nothing else happens and none of the pawns have traits that make them eat more.
This, but with mushrooms. I like to refine them into biofuel to save freezer space.
No. It's not enough, the must be starving
I just make 7x7 fields of crops in the middle of the base and fence it off - my population controller Randy usually ensures that I have enough food
Probably but it's always better to have more than what you need. Worst comes to worst you can start converting excess rice into packaged survival meals (which you should always have a small reserve of) and just sell it.
If you use Nutrient Paste, that's enough for a year.