ALPHA 49 1.5 Years later, and Food Death Spiral *still* an issue.

I was last here about a year and a half ago. Thought I'd check up on the game and see how it's progressing, but it seems one of the biggest problems back then is still a problem. What is the trick to getting your food into an oven before the colonists descend like locusts and eat it?

I've tried 3 different starts in 49B, the last one throwing everything I had at food production with 4 stone ovens and 6 active fields (2 wheat, 2 corn, 2 cabbage) and every available colonist manning either an oven or a farm very early on, and I *still* cannot even get the colonists to take the food out of the field to a storeroom before they eat it. A field is harvested and they eat it right there on the spot.

They're not even *starving*. There's plenty of forage. What the hell?

So of course this leads to the death spiral where theyre all eating crappy food, so they have to eat more of it, so there's less and less, and game over. Seriously, why do colonists even eat raw resources? What does this add to the game? You're telling me they can't wait 20 minutes to boil a cabbage? I had always assumed it was just alpha issues in need of tuning, but it's almost 2 years later. It's starting to seem deliberate. If it turns out this is some intentional nonsense to inflate the difficulty of the game, just tell me now so we don't waste any more of each others time.

[Edit] Sorry if my tone is too frustrated. I like a lot of the new features I see, but this issue has been a pain from the start for me, and I really thought it would be better by now.

 

That's odd, I haven't had any problems getting colonists to cook food. Since the revamp especially, food has been pretty much just "set it and forget it". You shouldn't really need that many fields either.

Something funky must be going on... do you mind sharing a save?

 

Thanks for the offer, but I don't have one with a colony that hasn't been basically destroyed long past the point of no return. In other words, you couldnt see the problem in the early stages. My last attempt blew up when I threw everything into food production at the expense of building trained armies, and I got hit by a 6 man bandit squad really early that wiped everyone out. My previous game everyone had already starved from the death spiral, so it was just a ghost town by the time I ragequit.

Just tell me what the trick is. There must be one. Evidently it just isnt as intuitive as "spam farms and ovens". The farms take too long to turn over crops. Do I need more farms? Fewer? Does focusing a single work team on a single farm make it produce faster? A second Kitchen? Do I need to not add any colonists *at all* until I have a massive food surplus? I had picked up maybe ten workers altogether last game before the death spiral started and I couldn't get food into my ovens fast enough.

 

What day did your kitchen start working? And how much raw food was there when the kitchen first became operational?

Did you click the button to fight with only 1 nco?

They do not have to reach "starving", their hunger leads to raw food eating after 3 days (from being full). The real trick is getting ahead of it, eg: if your cooked food production starts on day 2 this helps. Once falling into it, though it is very hard to get out. Especially since the farms now operate on a system of full harvests, if you have lots of single overseers it will take too long to get food.

Day 1&2 have one overseer just forage everything nearby.

By early/mid day 2 have the kitchen with 1 oven ready.
Put overseer with a massive Cook Basic Food order.

On day 3 or so, when you get lowerclass immigration, have 1 overseer grab all the lower-class and start a maize farm. Start overproducing.

Afterwards, I follow the usual:
1 farmer for 5 people, AND
1 cook&oven for 15 people.

I avoid cabbage. Early on you can do jut fine with having your overseers solo build and manufacture, while all lowerclass are directed into farming (and cooking). A full farm (5 people) and 2 cooks will support 25 people...

 

FYI for version 48 the food was super easy.

But the new farming system basically nerfed farmers (making it about as hard or worse thanks to happiness-workshifts) than it was in say version 47?

• Earlier: 3 farmers (18 raw good) + 2 cooks (18 raw -> 18 cooked)
• Then we had : 2 farmers (10 raw food) + 1 cook (10 raw -> 20 cooked)
• Now: 4 farmers (10 raw food) + 1-1.25 cook (10 raw -> 20 cooked)

Hilariously it seems the big buff from "double cooking output" was about cancelled out by the farmer productivity reduction and to some extent the happiness-workshifts (I used to run 7shifts, though many did use 6. Right now 5 is standard, 6 can be hit in some cases...)

 

Well past the the third day. I usually build a carpentry shop and small housing first. But there were still tons of bags of harvested mushrooms and raw meats lying around everywhere. They still refuse to carry harvested crops to the storeroom before eating them.

In my last game after I was growing really frustrated with the issue, a cabbage and wheat farm were literally the first things I built before a storeroom even, and I built a farm *second*, but I got a bad start location and a rock shortage slowed the construction of ovens. It still wasnt enough to stop the spiral.

Hell yes. I will die before I let bandit scum walk off with my hard earned wood planks. This is not something Im complaining about. I expect challenge from intruder events and usually I have a much better army up by this time. I just mentioned it to show that I ran my colony into the ground defensive wise just to focus on food production, and the spiral still started.

This is ...frustrating. I realize that this is a game, not a realistic simulation, but I'm not aware of any human who couldnt wait for a cooked steak after just a few days. Certainly no one who would wolf down a bag of dry, unprocessed grain. This aspect of the game is simply not intuitive to me.

Thanks for this. This degree of focus wasn't necessary in earlier builds, so it seems I have some re-learning to do. For what it's worth, I had that farmer/cook to people ratio well exceeded in each of my games, so it must simply be a matter of not getting the food production chain off the ground soon enough. IT seems like if you don't get it happening within a few days of starting the colony, you might as well quit and start over.

Cabbage is just another habit I had from earlier builds when cabbage was all there was.

The game doesn't have a "save as" function, but if you tell me where the saves are stored, I'll back one up from much earlier in my next game. All you'd be able to glean from any of my present saves are a dead/dying colony that are no longer representative of the staffing situations that lead to it.

Alright. Maybe I just stepped in at another rough patch. I still dont understand why non-starving colonists eating raw crops right out of the field is a thing, though. It seems a very artificial way to complicate food production. I'd rather the challenge of the game came more from events in the hostile gameworld, instead of colonists having the IQ of a cockroach.

Thanks for your help.

.

 

Yep, it basically sounds like your colonists are sitting between the "eat raw food" and the "starving" points by the time your first harvest occurs, so they eat it. Sadly, as cooking doubles 1 raw food into 2 cooked, having that is very important, thus one must be producing cooked food before people pass the "eat raw food" stage.

I don't know when exactly that kicks in as I never experimented.


It seems that after eating your meal (resets you to 0) the colonist will not eat until the next sunrise (cooked), the second sunrise (raw). So depending on your starting food, (for me it's none) if there's only raw food on day 3 sunrise, then problem.

If you had 1 day of cooked food starting, then that would be day 4 sunrise, and so on...

 

Also, I'll just squeeze this in here, but until we get some sort of livestock system, It seems to me that hunting should be a bigger factor. A deer or a wild cow would feed quite a few people between cuts of meat and broth potential. The yield from big game seems like it should be much larger.

 

That was actually upped from 2 to 4 (or even 6) raw meat recently, I think. Depending on size of animal hunted.

Small things will of course give small amounts (dodo is 1 raw bird?)

 

Ah, maybe it's been stacked and I haven't noticed it. I rarely see what appears to be more than a single meat lying on the ground from them. Or maybe my hunters, like the farmers are simply eating the raw ingredients on the spot.

 

I'm watching the food production in my newest game very closely. Something that Im noticing is that the cooks are placing cooked food in the stockpile, and that another colonist is wasting an action coming along and not eating, but picking up that food item, and re-stacking it with other items of the same type.

This seems inefficient to me. Wouldn't it be better if the cooks simply placed the item in the correct stack to begin with?

 

Actually, you touch on an important aspect there. I've notice the same with not only the cook, but all other producers as well (mine, carpentry...). I want them to produce, not carry. So wouldn't there be a possibility of telling them to "drop item" in the building they are in instead of walking for 15 minutes before dropping it and then move back to keep producing? I'd rather have a dedicated hauler team hauling the food from the kitchen floor to the stockpile instead of having the cooks themselves move about wasting cooking time That should free up more time to feed the plebs.

 

@Viion

Well, I put the food stockpile right next to the kitchen anyway, so cook transit time is minimal. It's the separate "organize" task that another colonist performs that bothers me, rather than transporting another food item to the stockpile in easy reach of the cooks.

But yeah, maybe that would be better. As far as I know it's not a simple matter to have the cook recognize the correct stack to place the item in. As long as a colonist is going to waste time to come and organize the item anyway, more sophisticated filters on the stockpiles allowing designated drop off and pick up options would probably be more broadly useful.

 

By way of an update, in my new game I finally got ahead of the food production curve. I designated a whole crew for forage only duty, built a single farm immediately with a designated crew, rather than splitting a couple farms between a crew, and pushed housing way down the priority list. Started with carpentry, then got a couple ovens up. I even built a couple barracks before housing, as that seems to be a priority now. They were tired, but their bellies were full. The switch to corn as a primary crop was also key (Thanks Alavaria). The turn around on wheat is just too long, and the yield on cabbage is just too small.

And you're right. It's like a completely different game with a much more manageable food supply chain--at least until the colony numbers swell beyond control, but that's a separate and more welcome challenge.

It seems there is a very small window to get ahead on food production, and if you miss it it's pretty much game over. It seems almost impossible to recover once that spiral effect starts.

 

I find wheat is completely viable; one stone miner, one tree cutter, one carpentry builder -> carpenter, one kitchen builder -> cook, one wheat farmer, one hunter (NCO + careful hunt order designation). The lower class worker gets bounced between them as necessary, be it to get a bit more stone, a couple more planks or speed farming. All lower class migrants go on the farm or plank/spice rack production, with one of the migrant overseers (first or second, depending on any resource bottleneck) set to haul-only. When the kitchen is up, it does bread, sausages and berry medley, with the cooking crew set on job filters to only forage, so their fallback work is to get more ingredients if they run short.

The key here however is the starting loadout: Nature's Bounty. With that one, the reserves (topped up by sausages) just run out as the first wheat harvest comes in, even if I lose a couple of days flattening terrain before starting building construction. Bandits are yielded to... at first, then the foreign office, traders and fishpeople handle them later. This approach has tradeoffs, but hunger hasn't been a problem in my colonies for some time now...

 

Considering it's possible to do just fine even with 0 starting resources/food (Wheat does not have much of an advantage than maize currently, see Crop Post), if one was going to pick a specific thing to solve with Loadout, it would probably be Guns.

Guns are significantly harder to get quickly and the Guns loadout would do more for you. Specifically the fact that it's very annoying if the game sends a bunch of Fishpeople Raiders at you on day 6 or something. Not only does it give you a lot of pistols, but also should give you a musket which you can put on your NCO so make things a lot safer for them.

 

Well hopefully I remember this, or it is in the changelog so I double-check and update the post.