Alpha 47 Mechanics still very frustrating

Besides the issue of needing some buffer (which you ran into), wheat is somewhat finicky as when you add people, their contribution starts to show up only later. Wheat takes 4 days, so if you have 1 farmer and get your first wheat output, you can't cram in 4 more and expect the next day's to be larger.

Start with maize**, and later on make a second farm to wheat. Then later on switch your first to wheat. The trick that I use is indeed like overloading, the (starting) maize farm goes to about 25/day with 5 people, so usually a little before 25 I have my wheat farm started and then really cram it full of all my lower-class. Then you continue a few days until your first wheat shows up. Then continue a couple more days then switch farm#1 from maize to wheat.

**I recommend a fairly specific strategy in Crop Post (link is to the specific post) and it worked just fine in 47A.

Yes, I realize it doesn't actually detail how to switch from Maize to 100% wheat. Huh, I'll have to do something about that.

Well, complete dedication not so much for Basic Food (eg: bread). High efficiency I don't know, I only have one setting.

I think with Jolly Good farmers and the 47A science upgrades, I was getting from 10 farmers 80, 90+ raw wheat a day average. And you probably need only about 7 or 8 cooks (I was using 4 for about 60-70 production, maybe more, it wasn't set up to make measuring this).

So if it was about 100 people on just Bread, I would estimate no more than about 12+ farmers (spread evenly over 3 farms) and say 10 cooks.

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Oh yes, I realize I do use a rather fast switchover to wheat which just hammers the farms, eg: at 20-25 people I have 10 farmers going full tilt due to the switchover. You can however really do this later on, eg: at 40 people, you have 8 (or so) maize farmers and then add 5 wheat farmers. Then wait for first wheat harvest and switch one maize field over. Wait for that's first harvest and switch the second.

Actually I think I will do this next colony. As I am taking to a "3 wheat, 2 pumpkin" setup for a Quality Food (24 overseers) & 100 total colonists target.

 

These past several colonies I've made, I just subsisted on food drops and foraging 'till I could be bothered to make farms

 

That's great since you got it to work for you.

Apparently it doesn't quite work out for other people. Fortunately farming is flexible and a constant so that's probably the easiest to recommend with useful details.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it to most people either, as it takes a lot of micromanagement. Well, not a "lot", but you need to know when and why to micromanage certain things.