Alpha 47 Mechanics still very frustrating

I have 2: 7x14 Farms going fully staffed with 5 man+Overseer groups producing Maize and one 7x10 producing Cabbage with 2 Fully staffed kitchens, each with 5 ovens running full tilt producing just base level meals with 60 colonists in total... they are still starving to death. This seriously needs addressing ASAP.

Also really... 2 Full units of barracks trained rifle soldiers and my entire colony just got wiped out by 4 enemy soldiers? That is totally ludicrous.

Is this normal for this game, cause if so I think I'll be passing on playing any further developments I mean I know its still an alpha but these are pretty basic core mechanics for this type of game and one would think they are some of the first things the devs would address.

 

Those farms aren't fully productive or efficient. I'm using 2 14x14 farms on both wheat and it's producing somewhere like 70 to 80 wheat every day (and it does get wheat every day after the wait for first harvest)

Same with kitchens, I only need like 4 people in a kitchen to cover more than 50 cooked meals a day, so 5 should be good for 60+. How far is your kitchen pair from the raw food?

Mine is so and so close (farms are just below, you can see how close they are). Just one stockpile, 2 farms of food and 1 kitchen.

 

the Stockpile is 2 squares away from one exit door in the kitchen and the farms are both right up against the lower edge of the stockpile for raw foods and that is all that Stockpile is set to accept, The cooks are all at Jolly Good and the Farmers are all at Middlin So I am honestly not sure what I can tell you aside from that.

 

It's probably your farm size, I think 7x14** is too small for a 5-man wheat farm. Cabbage is the least efficient at producing, as well (Maize should be ok, I guess)

How much walking the cooks have to do also matter, not just if the edge of the door at the side is at the stockpile. My example has just 3 or so squares? What might yours look like? Jolly Good cook is pretty fast as well.

How many shifts a day do your people work, just realized that also matters.

**A 14x14 holds 7*13=91 plants, but a 7x14 would only hold 3*13=39 plants, I think? take a look anyway, it should be three long rows.

 

With how the row system works, I'm pretty sure there's absolutely no reason to use odd numbered values for farm plot sizes such as 7x14.

Anyway, my general routine if I want to focus on stability to poke a specific part of the game without arsing about with food, built up from just from pissing about and getting a general gut feel for what works well enough for me:

The main thing I'd say is just making sure colonists don't get too hungry... ever. Once they do it throws things all out of whack no matter your farm/kitchen distances.

But as long as you keep colonists always fed on prepared food it's relative straight forward to keep it all solid. once that fails once or twice though then your colonist will really go out of their way to make recovering hell for you without having to resort to something daft and overkill like 5 full sized farms churning out a metric shit ton of wheat or some nonsense.

Firstly the main thing to keep food producing is ultimately your overseers farming skill. The difference between "Inept" and "Jolly good" from what I have observed is close to the point where the time it takes the inept to tend one crop the jolly good will fully tend one crop, move on the 2nd and be half through through tending that one as well.

So, having more 'to do' and keeping your farmers always 'tending plots' which is what increases the skill progression (Not actually performing the task, but simply being in the state of doing it) is probably a very important detail to make sure is nailed down from day 1.

A helpful way to speed this up is to keep in mind that whilst crops might not grow at night, farmers can still plant and tend crop that need tending at night, just because the crop are taking a break doesn't mean your farmers don't have have something they could be doing. This gives more skill progression in a short space of time, and also allows fields to start each day of growth much closer to their peak condition.

Production wise a early colony on a 6x14 of maize or pumpkin will see you fine with a overseer and 1 worker, personally I prefer Pumpkin as they appear to have more stages which means longer 'tending' which means quicker skill progression for the overseer, but that's just a general observation that may not be entirely accurate... but if it is accurate than early skill progression outweighs output efficiency the first week every single time, as skill progression is what ultimately makes or breaks a colony without needing to turn it into some agricultural hicksville.... if you got lucky and started your colony with a skilled farmer, 6x14 will be too small to keep them occupied go larger. Inept will probably be fine with 8x14, Jolly good I'd say at least 10x14.

Crew size, same with kitchen, crew of 2 cooking will easily keep up with over 30 colonists to feed providing distances from Farm -> Stockpile -> Kitchen are controlled.. but again like farming, overseer skill does factor in to quite some degree. If you have a lower skill overseer, add workers to balance out.

All further sizes are based on starting with a inept or less skilled farmer and kitchen staff from the start. If your crews are better skilled, up sizes similar to like covered before.

Around 18-20 colonists to make sure you'll be ready, starting out on another 6x14 plot but this time wheat will see you through with safety net to fall back on ready before you hit the 30 colonist mark and will produce just under 40 wheat for a full field, turn immediately into bread making sure your kitchen is set up to maintain a minimum amount of bread equal to the number of colonists you have at the very least (But really there's no reason not to just set it to some crazy amount). Then set the kitchen to have a second minimum order for basic food as a lower priority of sufficient amount to produce a small buffer in between wheat field yields....

As a personal quirk I've now set my 2nd order to farmer stew rather than basic food to better suit my overseers and to get a 'gut feeling' on how mid-tier food production balances out in a live colony and tweaking the first farm size to suit, but if it's stability you want then don't do this, stick with basic cooked food.

To control manpower allocation some point after 30 colonists take the original pumpkin/maize 6x14 and up its size to around 10x14 or larger depending how your economic output in your colony is going (as output == Overseer immigration == Workcrew to work but more mouths sooner).

Keep the now enlarged field producing pumpkin or maize. Its main function is a filler between wheat and to stop colonists ever getting into a "There was no prepared food this evening" at the preset designated time each day, which is what triggers the snowballing down to hell behaviour typically.

Around 40 colonists either significantly upscale the existing wheat plot or if you lucked out with a 3rd overseer already skilled in farming establish a 3rd wheat plot, 6x14 will do but 8x14 or 10x14 if they're higher skilled will do you wonders.

From that point it's pretty much just a case of monitoring kitchen output vs raw food production, making sure your wheat plots don't end up synced up together as this leads to a lot of 'void' output space unless you just sheer volume over flood it which is significantly more manpower heavy, and keep laying on the wheat as needed... as wheat literally is the only real option to sustain a large colony... no other crop will do it unless you only want to be farming and have little else going on.

 

Thanks to the new science upgrades, it definitely is possible for a high skilled overseer, full group of 5 to use up a whole 14x14 on wheat.

I do like wheat since it uses a specific Make Bread, meaning the kitchen won't ever (unlike with sugarcane from another location) grab your pumpkins which you want for better food.

I was testing farmer output, but since you've done it, do the lower class people eat the special stew even if there is Bread for them?

Not as far as I can tell, "tend Crop" is just a generic job and the only thing it depends on in terms of length is overseer skill and (now) science.

What is critical is your farm has enough space that your farmers can always plant more if there's nothing to tend (eg: at night). Oh and adding workers, as their Tend Crop also helps, I'm fairly sure. So maxing our your first farm crew.


Pumpkin has very few stages, anyway. Wheat has like 9, while Pumpkin is at 3 (same with maize)

 

Started over, wasn't doing too badly then my entire colony got wiped out by 3 fish people... Crazy stupid combat system this thing has especially since I almost always build a small barracks and train my soldiers up at the earliest opportunity lol. Sad thing is (I've noticed) all they have to do is kill the Overseer (CO for Soldiers) once they do that it's pretty much game over cause the soldiers just scatter and shift to having the ? over their heads (They immidiately stop being soldiers at that point) and just run around aimlessly while the enemy guns them down.

 

When that happens, you have to free up an overseer from one of your shops, and set them to 'own' the barracks, and toss the soldiers under that person.
Then just cross your fingers you can kill the threat before you run out of overseers

 

Thankfully if it's fishpeople, you have a chance since their "gun" is short ranged like a pistol (14) or they might only have melee.

Bandits though, I "rush" a foreign office primarily because of them. But as you can't eliminate the Fishpeople Raider chance, you gotta get some guns. It seems that if you have say muskets, being able to shoot them a bit before they enter gun/melee range may mean their morale breaks and they just try to flee while being shot in the back.

I made muskets, had soldiers equip them, then later on started making carbines. Though alternatively you might just use pistols early on and then try to get carbines/rifles (or muskets) from dead bandits or from bandit tents.

I'm considering trying a thing where I get the foreign office to turn off bandit aggro and then hurriedly loot their tents for any guns and just rely on whatever mix I get to hold off fishpeople.

 

Not that I noticed, but could have just been random luck.

What I mean is that how I've seen skill progression work is that whilst a colonist is 'doing the job' as a task they're gaining experience at it, even if they haven't actually got to the location/object yet to use initiate the action itself.

I've noticed a lot of times my colonists that have increased their rank are typically never actually performing the activity, instead they've claimed a job for that activity but are still on their way to perform it and during their walk there they've spontaneously got better at the job.

So a overseer that has undertaken the job to build a house but is still walking to the raw resources is still 'constructing building' and the entire time gets more experience at it construction.

A overseer working in a kitchen gets experience at cooking whilst walking to the stockpile to collect the raw ingredients because they're "Preparing xxxxx" as a job even though they're not actually performing the preparation/cooking activity yet.

And farmer overseers get experience at farming from 'Tending crop' as a task, even if they're not actually at the target crop and have initiated the tending activity yet. So the key thing to speed up skill progression isn't having them quickly empty the field and tending one crop after the next, but rather to keep the overseer holding a tending task for as long as possible.

This means not building farms too small, but also not over populating your workcrews too early are important things to make sure you don't do if you want your overseers to progress their skill nicely.

It also means two farmers with equal skill tending two farms of exact size and crop will see different growths in their skill progression by the time both fields are empty if one adopts the task already at their first crop, and the other adopts the task half way across the map. Because the second one will have a much longer progression time before the first crop is actually tended and so will have been 'working longer' for the same output... same general rule applies for a large workforce. Less travel time as a total labour is spread across more hands, faster clearance of the field, less time 'working'

If pumpkin and maize are exactly the same though, then guess it really doesn't matter which you plant for skill farming. (Pun not intended)

 

Ever since crops became more varied, the rule has been Don't Plant Cabbage.

Are you sure that isn't an overseer gaining skill while an underling is actively performing the task? If your conclusions are correct, I'd consider it a bug.

 

Its possible, though I've noticed a overseer skill up whilst carrying resources but 'building' on a new start yesterday and pretty sure their crew was empty.

 

Because the point in the job where it increments skill is after the sections where it says things like "put down the item at the workbench", which is after "walk to the item" -> "pick up the item" etc

For example:

Furthermore, gathering building materials shouldn't increment the skill level...

It could be that the discrete skill increase is only checked on a timer instead of continuously.


Ah found this, the number of you need to level up, a qualifying job gives you +1, I guess.

At 40 wheat per day average, my current wheat farm is requiring what 40*9/3=120 tend crop actions per day.

So uh yeah... 120 planks or 80 bricks? It might be that you have to sum it up though I would have to count my plank production and then see.

It does explain why my cook levels to expert so fast though.

A single Maize Chowder (1 point) needed a maize plant to be tended 3 times, but if you see for Jolly good, it's 400 vs 2000, so as my cook hits Jolly good, the maize farmer is only at 1200, and Middling.



If you really wanted to test, then set up a carpentry workshop put in a new overseer at Inept and have them make 9 planks, then wait for them to sleep and then give an order for 1 more plank and see what happens.

 

Right now it's the least efficient crop, and since Maize has a growth-time short enough to use even from day 1, yeah...

Maize vs Wheat/Sugarcane is another topic.

 

If you want to farm the ingredients for Quality Food that the Middle Class will like, in Sogwood you only have Chillies (ie: that area's version of cabbage) as it does not have the equivalent of Pumpkin.

Sadly, because cooking sugarcane into Stew involved the Cook Basic Food, your chillis are at risk of disappearing into Stew as well, whereas Wheat into Bread has no such problem.

I don't think anything about this changed since the mechanic came out: A Numerical Gastronomy. Fortunately with the science upgrades, it might be easier to sustain a max colony (so like 77 lower class and 23 middle-class) than it would otherwise be.

I'm guessing maybe 2 farms with max crew on jolly good overseers can cover 77 Bread a day (or you know, just be safe and have 3 farms with 4 farmers each).
And then something like 2 Pumpkin farms with 4 each for 46 pumpkin -> 23 Farmers' Stew daily

 

Related to the mechanics. This things of people constantly farming is a bit silly. The logic should be that farm land passes through three phases:
Step 1 - seeding
Step 2 - protection
Step 3 - cultivating

if you stick to this logic I think it would make things more realistic since the way things are they are frustrating and actually cause me and other people to stop playing.

This logic would allow for ginormous fields with fields only limited by number of people in the work crew.

 

I do recommend 14x14, which is as "ginormous" as you can make a farm, for wheat and pumpkin.

What happens if your pumpkin farms though only need like 3 farmers... which is amusing except it is less productive per area of space and per colonist work time compared to wheat. But good for Farmers' Stew.

 

just in general, why is it that different people report wildly different experiences in raw production and meal prep?

For example, I have 0 problems maintaining a happy population using nothing but raw maize which I can mass produce ridiculously easily, while creating non trivial amounts of meals seems dam near impossible.

 

The "hit" for raw food (or that matter, Basic Food for overseers) might not be all that large, I never checked.

Though in my guess, 5 kitchen crew with a "good setup" can probably make like 60-70 meals? I guess that 10 cooks can probably feed 100 people, of which 24 need the Quality food "Farmers' Stew"

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As to production, my guess is:
Farm: Too small, using less efficient foods (Maize is actually pretty ok, I guess)
Kitchen: Distance walked is too far. Alternatively, not enough "free hauling" so raw food is left in farms and not brought to the stockpile in timely manner.

 

It seems to me that playing 'catch up' is the hardest thing, and what stopped me from ever staying ahead on cooked food. If you can get steady food production going before your starting food is used up, it's possible but very challenging. If many of your colonists miss a meal, things get incredibly difficult.

I think the game doesn't communicate very well just how difficult it can be to keep your people fed. I only just managed to get ahead on cooked food for the first time in my latest colony, after some 12 hours played in the more recent patches (it used to be a lot easier in the old days I think).

I built a 12x14 farming patch first thing and set it for Wheat (tried for 14x14 as recommended but the starting terrain was too uneven), then started building the kitchen with two ovens right next to the farm, even before my carpentry shop was entirely finished. I assigned my first three workers to the farm and the fourth to the kitchen work crew. For the first few days there wasn't anything to cook but there were plenty of black mushrooms nearby, and with kitchen crew set to forage they would harvest the mushrooms and take them to be cooked into stew immediately, which managed to actually be fast enough for my starting population and a few more.

The mushrooms ran out just as wheat came online, and I switched to bread. So far it looks pretty good; I've managed to make about 18 cooked food in a day and only have 14 population, with plenty of raw wheat still ready to be cooked and another couple rows to be harvested over the next few days. I'm not sure how it's going to scale up, as I've had to dedicate 80% of my incoming workers to food production in order to just do this well.

Personally I think the margin between well-fed and barest subsistence is a little too thin, requiring complete dedication and high efficiency just to keep them fed on peasant food. Skill seems to make little difference-- all the way up to 'Jolly Good'-- so how you're ever supposed to get a stockpile of food started AND have any sort of advanced economy is beyond me. If I have to produce multi-ingredient food just to keep my overseers from rebelling as time goes on, then I'm still probably screwed.

I had a settlement in Alpha 45 or 46 that got up to 96 population and was able to produce the occasional musket, but they were constantly hovering near starvation, despite constantly calling in food drops and having multiple kitchens and many wheat farms. I didn't know to make the farms very large and I was growing a couple plots of corn and pumpkin too, so there was some inefficiency, but I felt quite hopeless when I finally called in a food drop before midnight and then another one after midnight (so food for half my people + food for the other half), and yet by the end of that day my colony still hadn't gotten ahead on cooked food. What I didn't realize was that very hungry colonists don't stay satisfied for long, so I was pretty much doomed from the instant my colonists ever had to eat raw food.

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective, but considering the severe loss of efficiency when food is eaten raw, I consider my colony a failure if I can't manage that basic aspect.. even though I've had colonies survive a pretty long time without ever successfully getting ahead on the cooked food aspect.