Comments on food production

Reading the announcement thread for 44B I'd like to collect your impressions if the state of the food production. To make it easy: is it easy to keep 50+ colonists fed with produced food or is it hard? Any why is it so?

For my part i tried 3 fields with 15 colonists in farming teams farming cabbage and 2x wheat. only a tiny fraction of the food was cooked. Everything else was eaten raw directly from the fields.
I have played on 44A with at least two full work crews doing the hauling. The distances from the fields to the kitchen were: 2, 5 and 8 squares.

Edit: I play with "dauntless dare"

 

Never had any issues with food production in 44A, over several games getting to 100+ population in New Antipodia. I guess it's because I just tended to brute force farming, with a relatively large corn farm at the start (6 x14 or so?) and putting all new workers in that group. Then I focused on having a fully staffed kitchen with 5 ovens.

I supplemented a little with foraging and hunting, but sometimes didn't even bother. As the population grew I just kept pouring human resources into bigger farms as needed. I usually have 4 at the end, the last being wheat. Both farms and kitchen were just a few tiles away from the main stockpile--well the newer farms were a bit further of course.

I deleted all my 44A saves but I'll post some of B here when get the chance.

 

Here's a save from my latest game at day 20, pop 36. This is after losing a few colonists to a beetle raid at day 10:

 

And you drive those farms with a single max work group?

 

No, I have a max group dedicated to each, which I'm sure is overkill, but then I don't have to worry about food... ever. I find that I get plenty of overseers and workers for other things anyway.

 

Then your usage falls in line with what people are saying... Assuming a max kitchen group, you have 20 of your 36 population tied up in food production. Which looks like overkill at the current state of your colony. How does it scale over time? At a population of 70, do you have two full kitchens and 6 farms?

 

At 70 I'm not sure, but at 80 to 100+ I definitely have two full kitchens, but only four farms.

 

That doesn't sound as bad... 30 percent for food production still feels high, but is a far cry from 50+...

 

Yeah, I know I could have gotten away with one less farm on the save above, but I like to have a massive cushion in case of emergencies. Sure it takes away an overseer from other things, but for things like mines I'll occasionally spend some prestige on temporary ones. And workers just constantly flow in.

 

Here's a save from the same colony as above at pop 100:
Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have let that first kitchen crew help look for artifacts...

 

Looking at that screenshot and not having loaded the save yet... just how much of the colony is getting fed by produced food, and how many are "Just getting fed"? (E.G. Just eating raw food)

I notice you have a large volume of raw food all coming out of your farms at once, your stockpiles are absolutely empty near the kitchens and there's no way your kitchens are going to be able to deal with that much volume suddenly thrown at them in one go.... so how much of that raw food are you finding actually makes it to the kitchen, and how much just gets eaten as is?

 

Yeah, the funny thing is I wasn't paying close enough attention at the end there. I got a bit cocky and started giving out new jobs like candy.

Everything was humming along just fine and nobody was eating any uncooked food at all until that save, but it looks like that's about to change.

 

Here's one of my endgame saves for 44B, population 100. Farms and kitchen both are able to make more than enough to feed 100.

2 kitchens: 10 workers
4 food farms: 20 workers

That means that almost a third of my population needs to be devoted to food.


Note: For some reason, I can't get that save to open anymore. It keeps crashing when I try to load it. Anyone else have that issue with my save?

 

Same, I tried to open it and everything froze.

 

Not noticed much change with my food/kitchen situation in relation to the hauling fixes, mainly as my normal layout was already seeing kitchens output to the nearest stockpile at their door anyway.

I have been tinkering with farm work schedules though, and have noticed that by having farm crews work during the evenings/night it can help spread when farms dump their bulk volume and slightly helps stop farms overwhelming your kitchen(s).

Because crops appear to still not do any growth during the evening and night, farmers can still perform any tending/planting jobs that need to be done and that then sets up the next growth phase to start once the morning period hits rather than sitting there frozen and waiting to be tended once your farmers wake up.

Which seems to help spread out crop growth in a single plot so parts of the field provide yield at one time of the day, and other parts provide yield at another part of the day, so kitchens are better able to maintain a continuous output rather than the typical sudden bulk flood cycle that normally establishes itself where kitchens have little to do in the early periods of the day but then get over flooded midday/evenings as farms dump all their output in one massive chunk.

Only in early testing with schedule tinkering so haven't seen how it plays out in-game across larger colonies, and will also need to give it time to set into a routine once population reaches the problem area (45-50+).

As it's very easy to flood the colony with produced food early on and build up a large reserve, it can take a while to get a larger colony to settle down and actually get a feel for how it's able to provide for itself without that old reserve interfering with observations.

 

Another thing noticed is the implementation of wheat flour into the kitchen behaviour seems very problematic for keeping kitchens going.

Wheat flour is either not being included as part of the 'Cook basic food' order, or the weight of Wheat flour as something to use is vastly lower than any other raw food as part of the cook basic food order.

To give a current example I'm experiencing now, I have 84 wheat flour that has amassed in the stockpile right outside the kitchen, and various foraging jobs that slowly dropping the odd unit of raw food that is promptly left in the wilderness miles away, the kitchen will always pick the berries/fungi out in the wilderness and ignore the wheat flour as a viable option.

Not sure if wheat flour has been given special 'magic' rules and excluded from cook basic food but the only way I can force my kitchen to use the nearest wheat flour in such cases is to issue a 'bake bread' order and then shift it up to top priority, then once there are non-wheat options back in the stockpile, move the cook basic food back to the top of the list. Then keep repeating this micromanagement step everytime my raw food reserves fluctuate.

 

I personally stopped bothering with kitchens, other than one to supply the bar, as the mood penalty from eating raw doesn't justify the loss of a whole work crew imo. I personally think the food output of cooking food needs to be larger. Say you take 2 ingredients and get out 3 servings or something like that, then it would be more meaningful.

As for the issue with colonists "rush eating" raw food each harvest, that sounds like the latest produced food is prioritized instead of oldest. It could probably also be solved by making a check for available cooked food when a colonist decide to eat something. Though I can't really say much about this since I don't experience this myself due to my colonies boycott of chefs.