RimWorld – Tips for Getting/Sustaining Food on Bigger Colony

Food Tips for Bigger Colony

General Tips

Overproduce food instead of waiting for it to be a problem. Once you can freeze it, no reason to not go ham on the production, and if you’re worried about wealth, just stop planting for a while waiting for your stock to dwindle a bit. If you have a big colony, you can spare 2 or 3 colonists on 24/7 growing/harvesting/hauling duty anyway.

In the very first days of a very high difficulty run you may want to keep your food stock low, but in any other situation just plant a lot and harvest a lot. Some events can make you skip a harvest entirely, so to be safe you kinda want to have food for several seasons at all times, especially on maps that have winter.

I don’t really have experience with oasis, I’m guessing there isn’t a lot of planting ground available, and if that’s the case you can always rely on hydroponics.

If you’re on the brink of dying already and can’t afford to wait, just kill everything in your map on sight to get meat, and if it’s not enough you’ll have to buy food from traders. If traders don’t come to you, send a caravan and buy food in a nearby settlement.

If you have a lot of animals, you could always kill them too for a nice amount in a crisis.

Yep. Always overproduce when possible. Excess food can be sold/donated to some caravans or hauled to a nearby settlement to either sell or gift for faction rep. I usually like to have a stock of 1000-2000 spare corn sitting around for bad times, even on smaller colonies.

Summary

• If you need food fast, grow rice.
• Once you have food grow corn.
• Definitely start with planting too much and dial it back as you see your way over producing. But dial it back slowly.

A nutrient paste dispenser is nice to have as back up Incase your cooks are hospitalized. Iv had too many situations where my people resort to raw food because my cook was killed or hospitalized or even sometimes just on a caravan trip.