slaughter all animals except one or two breeding pairs at the start of winter
build greenhouses that grow all year long, if you are short on fields use hydroponics
a long range scanner is a game changer, it allows to easily enter other world tiles searching for metals there.
woodland has a ton of animals there, you can send small hunter parties there an slaughter all deers
also i reduced my lifestock to only dromedar (for riding and transporting) and cows.
allows a smaller number of minimal breeding pairs than having 5 different types of livestock
and i got rid of all my wolfes, are fucking useless anyways
during winter if its below freezing, the meat is frozen and doesnt spoil. alternatively i harvest berrys and bring rice and make it into kibble, which i then feed to livestock
greenhouse needs a heater/bonfire, a sunlamp with electricity and a roof, thats it.
This is something I wish would actually exist in vanilla, make it so plants can grow 75% of the time while sunlight is only 50% uptime so that sunlamps have a purpose without hydroponics but I hate that sunlamps are hard required for any year round growth
Sunlamps have a *slight* bonus to growth due to instantly toggling to 100% light when the plants’ “growth period” starts, vs ramping up with the sun at dawn.
I'd say 80%, but yeah. The glass and frame blocking some of the light, still having the ramp up and down at dusk and dawn, but not needing electricity or repairs would be a pretty decent balance.
Well sun lamps do have a purpose without hydroponics, you can't grow everything in hydros such as devilstrand. Growing all year because it has a greenhouse on fertile land is great.
The game has pretty clear balancing on this, skylights are a no-no. There are several intended ways to grow food during winter, a free way to just grow plants at 75% efficiency would be way overpowered.
There's some exploit-like mechanics where you can grow plants indoors without a Sunlamp by using a partially roofed room, which is just roofed enough to not instantly vent all the heater temperature outside. This will probably be patched *eventually.*
If you don't want to deal with winters, then just... don't settle on a tile that has a short growing season?
Several intended ways? Like what? Sunlamps indoors are the only intended one, unless you count ideo giving tunnelers mushrooms which ehhhh feels like a stretch given its specifically meant for the people that don't go out and want low light instead of a more generic colony
Well, a big room, only partly roofed. Because it's a room, it's warm. Because there's no roof, you can grow in part of the room.
Or, dandelions feed animals and you eat animals. Dandelions require only torchlight.
That's two ways off the top of my head, there are probably others, so sunlamps aren't the "only" intended one.
I'll give a pass to dandelions although I'd imagine that's not sustainable at all as any animals of decent size that could feed you would be better off just butchering at the start of winter if you know you'll be using that trick with intent of eating them, it does work as a means to feed the animals if youre trying to keep them alive all the way through and lessen the drain on the food you do have tho. However they specifically said that the roof trick was exploit like so I'd assume they wouldn't treat it as an intended method, the dandelion trick to me falls under similarly murkiness as I don't imagine it's intended to feed animals off growing crops as they all have the same nutrition value while if such method was intended there'd be more value on things like haygrass or foods that actually make sense.
Mind you animals eating growing crops is intended as that's the only way for wild animals to eat, but feeding domesticated animals via that method feels like it's pushing it, especially when you consider the pen is the method the devs intended for grazing animals to be fed like that.
For the greenhouse you can also build a big enough room with about 20-25% unroofed area, keep it warm and plant in the unroofed area. Not very efficient, but doesn't require electricity.
Build the t around a geothermal and heat is added by the geyser. Might have to supplement it but it'll be a lot of your heat need, and building a power plant on it does not lose the heat benefit
That's effectively just a free sunlamp. I understand that people like the concept of skylights, but know that it is *LITERALLY* just a free sunlamp and I consider that to be way overpowered.
Addition:
i noticed i can just send a caravan to any spot i want on the map, im just not sure if they can enter the tile.
So maybe the long range scanner isnt needed at all
It’s an option, but then I wouldn’t have someone always cutting stone blocks (even though my base is built and I have a stockpile which is 10x what I’d ever need) or sowing plant pots
Freeloaders can always be excellent bullet magnets. Even animals for that matter. Put them in the first line, have them as a token to exchange for time.
What do you mean? I try to plan, but I have to use my winter stock (animals) in summer so my colonists don’t die. Unless I had like 3 people sowing seeds I’m not sure how I could plant that much corn/potatos as to carry me through half the year
I think (could totally be wrong) that it's not desirable to have low skill pawns harvest because it is more likely to botch the harvest and get nothing from it.
Planting however is a totally fine task since the pawns will just retry til they get it right.
I agree but based on what he said he doesn’t have the pawns to spare so imo something is better than nothing. I don’t take in low skill pawns to my colony at all.
focus on planting at the beginning of summer, pausing all other projects. once the seeds are in the ground, then let everyone resume other tasks. in the fall, focus everyone on hauling grain, then you got the whole winter for other tasks.
remember you do NOT need to refrigerate corn, as it will last a full year just sitting on a shelf, so build as many cheap sheds as you need.
with a little math, you can calculate the bare minimum required amount of corn to last the year, and plant that much.
each corn plant is worth 22 corn, give or take, modified by blights, food poisoning, animals eating, early cold snaps, etc. that’s enough to sustain one pawn for one day. if you use nutrient paste, that’s 1.5 days. there are 60 days in a year, so you need 60 corn plants per person, per year, or 40 if you are using nutrient paste. 13 people makes 780 plants, or 520 with paste. that’s a 28x28 field, or 23x23 for paste. that’s the BARE MINIMUM and does not account for animals. that’s also assuming only one harvest a year.
your fall harvest will be at bare minimum, 17000 corn, or 11500 for paste. you will need 38 or 26 double shelves just to stockpile it all
if you instead switch to hydroponics year round, you only need about 1.5 basins per person, or approximately 20. you can fit 24 basins under a single grow light. however this costs far more planting labor, a significant startup cost of 2000 steel and 20 components, plus a robust power grid that can operate year round and keep it warm.
Genuinly what is more important that food, your colony dies without food. What tasks are more important for your 12 other colonist?
Hauling rocks, smelting slag, crafting blocks, research, mining and building can all be paused for a little bit just to get your colonist to prioritize growing
You can have people grow and do other work too. Growing in my experience is more like a part time job for pawns since it’s only planting and harvesting when they are busy
Have your pawns take a few days out of their schedule to prioritize food. It’s that simple. And build a massive freezer
? How do you plant that much? I struggle to get my small in base + 1 large out of base farms sowed more than 2 times per season (with corn) with my 1 plant and animal pawn, and even they’re letting construction fall behind when they’re doing that so I can’t spare any more
If you eat paste, each hydroponic basin is enough to just barely feed one person (assuming you perfectly cycle rice). With 13 people you don't even need a full hydroponics room. It's less than half of one.
That can’t be right, hydroponics only grows 1 per tile right? A sun lamp only covers about 8 basins (I forget if I’m using a VE basin, but if I am it’s just like 5 basins in one long strip) which is only 120 squares of corn/potato, hardly enough for a day or two
Vanilla hydroponics is 1x4 tiles, and a good hydroponics layout can fit 24 basins in the effected region of a sunlamp. That's a LOT of growing potential given then growth bonus of the basins. That should adequately feed a colony of 13 with your dirt farms growing haygrass to bale for winter.
[Hydroponics layouts](https://dotesports.com/general/news/best-efficient-hydroponics-layouts-in-rimworld)
The idea is that you grow most of your crops outside during summer, and then keep a large enough stockpile for winter.
Make a freezer and store the food there, you should be able to get thousands of rice and corn with not much effort as long as you have at least one dedicated planter. Get your less plant-skilled colonists to also help out with the sowing, this should be #1 priority after you start a run. You *first* make a growing zone of like 12x12 with Rice and then you start doing the rest of your stuff. Rush batteries and power generation research and you will be able to build a freezer room with 2 coolers set to -5C (or about 23F) before the first winter.
You may need to focus more than one pawn on the job, then. Early game, before your base is all built, food is a major demand. Throw your non-specialized pawns in, squeeze those useless pawns for another 6-8 squares of planting. Sow and farm like you're gonna open a corn syrup factory for export. Once you're reliably selling excess food for money, then you can spin up a different economy.
(For now, though, forage like mad, hunt whatever comes your way, sell whatever you have that's worth selling, and buy out food from traders. Or just, y'know, give in to madness and start cannibalizing. Always an option.)
Do the math on how many meals are ate in a day and set the bill to maintain 3-4 months of that in a freezer. That much is probably overkill, but it's what I do and I don't remember the last time I've had a colony starve. With 13 colonists having a dedicated cook shouldn't be that hard to accomplish.
I have a dedicated cook, but they’d have to cook like 50 meals a day to feed the whole colony for the day and also put a days worth of food into storage and afaik that just isn’t possible (and I’d have to have that many resources) at the moment I have to put my sanguine pawn to work in the middle of the night so my pawns have breakfast, I just can’t keep up nor can I spare another pawn to be a chef
You can make 4x simples meals at once, you know this right? I have only one cook and she can keep up with my 14 colonists' needs and still have a little time to herself. I understand you have a supply problem too but one cook should be enough.
Get a 2nd cook, I tend to aim for 1 per 10 colonists. Don’t spare other pawns to do it, get more pawns. Grab a 2nd cook from a raid, and 1-2 more planters
> I have a dedicated cook, but they’d have to cook like 50 meals a day to feed the whole colony for the day and also put a days worth of food into storage and afaik that just isn’t possible
So you have 20 colonists or so? By that time you really should be good on food and have 1 or 2 dedicated cooks. It takes me literal ingame years to get to 20 colonists.
If this is too much you can always consider nutrient paste.
I try to have 2 large fields at least. One for rice for non stop quick harvests and another for corn to actually fill the storerooms. Having enough farmers can be rough but they’ll skill up fast with the rice.
You aren’t growing enough food. You need surplus for the winter
For your animals, grow the herd for faster reproduction or cull it for immediate food.
For meat eating animals, freeze raider corpses and prevent the animals access to your normal food
Paste dispensers are efficient to stretch food further
I can’t grow enough food, I can barely sow my fields with a dedicated pawn + one borrowed from another job, my herd is starving but I’m only at like 10 animals (I’ve got a pretty big pen, too, imo). Will do the frozen corpse thing, and I can’t tank the paste debuff. Right now I’m feeding my happiest pawns 1 time a day so the sad fuckers can get breakfast and dinner
Just ditch the save at this point and learn from your mistakes. I lost my first 10-15 colonies before I figured things out.
Failing colonies tend to snowball.
I really should because it’s so terrible and I want to download some mods like rim war, but it’s crawling along, like I’m barely surviving and I’ve got 80 hours in it
In another post you said you need a cook to cook like 50 meals a day to keep up with demand. That means you have 20 colonists or so. HOW do you not have at least 3 colonists that are at least decent at planting, out of all those 20?
Are you per chance playing with custom premade xenotypes from Biotech that have a lot more nutrition demand and less metabolic efficiency?
Most animals aren't that efficient for the amount of nutrition consumed versus what you get back. If you've got a lot of unneeded land to grow haygrass then you can use that to feed them but you may as well just use the land to grow rice, potato or corn and forget the animals in the first place.
Pigs or boar are really good though because you can always feed them inedible meat, like insect or humanoid meat that your colonists might not eat anyway and use it as a way of converting it into edible meat.
i lock horses in a room connected to a nutrient paste dispenser and freezer
if you feed the horses paste made from horses, they will eat less food than they generate
just add more horses as needed
it's a bit micro heavy feeding them every couple days, but it works
bonus if you get a fleshmass nucleus. just lock it in the freezer and it will keep the hoppers full. you might even be able to skip having a freezer altogether
Tynan used to do the math for this, way back before release.
For instance, plants were deliberately designed so that their output would have to be less than an amount that could be processed into chemfuel needed to run generators that would support the grow light. No escaping thermodynamics
But then he realized it's a game and that's dumb. So now you just feed a boomalope and it will fuel a couple gens easy
too much feature bloat and i've been advised that everything VE is a performance problem
i just use Nutrient Paste Dispenser Command
or AutoNutrientPasteDispenser
scout more useful pawns and either banish the useless pawns or get them killed in combat.
if you're too emotionally attached to the freeloaders consider working with gene modification from the biotech dlc to make them more useful
the greater food problem can perhaps be solved through hydroponics, expanding your farms and storing food for winter, expanding your max livestock or trade if you cannot set up something self sufficient.
Bro is running a coke grow op and yet complains that his one farmer can't feed 13 people! Priorities, man...
Ditch the drugs or get more farmers! The drugs can grow outside. No space police are doing inspections. They're a far lower priority than stable continuous food supply during the winter.
Using Set Up Camp (preferably the one included in ReBuild/ReGrowth) you can send out your colonists on little hunting trips. Because wildlife spawns whenever you enter the tile, you can just head 2 tiles over (since you can't have it right next to your base), hunt them to extinction, leave the camp, then do it all over again. Wealth is only included when the camp is active - plus it's a small map so it's negligible.
Combined with Vehicles and you can just have an animal-drawn cart back and forth with your goodies.
Edit: reading the rest of the comments.. what is your job makeup for the 13 colonists? You should have more than enough food at this point - in theory.
If you're struggling, make ALL of your pawns do growing/harvest for the warmer months. They can do the rest in winter. Once you're more established and you have surplus food, they can work on their preferred jobs.
The only ones you shouldn't force to grow is your scientists, anyone with a religion against it (unless you can negate the debuff), or your cooks.
I'm also curious about your climate. It sounds like your warmer months are comparatively quite short to your colder months; diminishing the time you CAN grow.
I would not suggest throwing mods into the mix before OP gets further along in the learning curve, there are harsh lessons to learn and the mods will muddy the waters a bit
That's fair - I put in mods after my very first colony and went from there, but that's just my play style with most things. I still think the second half of my comment is valuable though given that's pure vanilla.
Yeah, I'd actually rephrase that, I'd suggest a few QOL mods. Construct carefully, the improved interface one, and honestly after a few runs just use character editor or something of the like, and I use the mod that lets me preview the topography of where I'm landing. I plan after I get bored to challenge myself with more blind landing spots and rolling for pawns but 600 hours in and I can get stunlocked for half an evening rerolling pawns and trying to find a map I like for base building.
I’ve got 13 pawns more or less doing each job, problem is, people on unskilled labour (3) either get into mental break territory or take 3 quadrums to build a wall
That's where the problem initially lies. One pawn can't feed 12. You'll have to assign more growers. Stonecutting, mining - all of that can wait. It won't get done if they're starving!
Also, do you know why they're breaking so often? Starvation does lead to tricky situations, but it shouldn't be all of the time (unless you're unlucky).
Your pawns shouldn't be taking multiple quadrums to do /anything/. That makes me think there's a problem with the game itself. Even a pawn with 0 in Construction can build a wall in about a day and a half.
They break often probably due to the bodies littered around (I started picking them up after raids, but I still miss some which are forbidden) or because I torture my prisoners… or because they’re in pain (especially my hunter) or because they’ve gotten no sleep due to prioritised work
I don't mean any disrespect, and I hope you can sort out these issues. Hear me out.
It seems like the question you're trying to get a positive answer to is "How can I fix this problem I have without changing anything about how I play the game?" The answer is, you can't.
You need to feed your people. Plain and simple.
Either you need to reduce the number of mouths to feed, or increase the amount of growing you're doing, or procure food elsewhere via raiding, commerce, etc. While I get that this may be a rough transition, and you'll need to change or abandon some of the things you're doing in the game, ultimately it sounds like that's going to happen to you anyway. Either via fixing your problems, or by way of colony collapse and restart.
I sincerely hope you can work out the problems plaguing your colony. If not, then rest assured, you will improve at this if you continue playing. It does get better. Chin up, you've got this.
Hold a trial and find the 90-year-olds guilty of being old. Then either execute them or sentence them to be old someplace else.
If you don’t have any of the DLCs, then I guess you can do pretty much the same thing via dev mode.
You say that half your colonists aren't working, and you also say that you aren't making enough food. May I suggest getting your colonists to make more food?
Whenever I get a mass of free loaders, I usually just massively boost my corn intake in the summer, like
I make sure that I have enough that I still have corn leftover by the time spring ends
Mechanitor is free labor
Break the Mech
You get 6 Bandwith, 2 Lifters, 2 Agrihands, 2 Cleansweepers, and all your early game QoL is handled
Animals menu has this nifty slaughter button and do you NEED the 90 yo old? Just put a joy wire in him and start training medical by removing and adding peg legs
Is easy, some people call it a cheat. I call it Nutrifungus.
Your outdoor farms will grow walls and a roof, and with 2 heaters you're set for a infinite supply.
Howdya grow it? And does it have mood debuffs? Half my colony has a yayo addiction because they’re all horribly depressed, I’ve got a tortured artist who’s also a cave dweller so loves mining, but hates being outside with the deep drill, she’s been through so much coke man
Try setting up a "Art Studio". Get a deep mine drill and just have it setup to mine chunks, then build both a stone cutting table and an art bench nearby. Now your useless pawns can making art from an infinite resource. Have your most capable pawns trade the art to other settlements for food as needed. Plus as a bonus you'll end up with a ton of statues that you can use to make rooms more beautiful.
Dude i read everything and your issue is clear.
Dont take in useless meat pawns. Throw the bitches in cryosleep and forget about them, they’re dead weight.
Also, not everything is going to get done exactly at your bidding. If you queue up some bricks, it’s okay if they take a couple days to get done, you LITERALLY have forever to get them done, i promise it’s not worth the extra food.
Unless his entire colony is literally incapable of planting / hauling for some reason, this is on OP for just not planting enough crops and using the labor he *has* properly, not the pawns' fault for "freeloading". Dude said he has a single farmer for 13 pawns and is using his only sunlamp to grow psychite.
Swapping that one grow zone over to rice and assigning another 2 pawns to help plant would instantly solve his problem.
Harvest should probably still just be done by the most experienced pawns if you can handle the micro, but there are no downsides to the others helping sow crops, or dedicating them to hauling so the plants specialist can skip that labor.
Rice grows fastest. rice also can be stored anywhere and wont rot for like a few months/years— when i grow fields of rice I make vegetarian lavish meals because I just have like a 6k stack of rice after one yield and it keeps their hunger down longer and mood up
Edit: tomato part, tomatoes are modded
Rice has the best *per tile* output, but corn is the best output per-labor.
But you could waste a *lot* of that labor if you have a short growing season that cuts off your last harvest at a bad time.
Rice is a good default pick.
Build a greenhouse around any nearby rich soil. Unroof it during summer seasons, then re-roof it during the winter so you can still grow from it year round
Nutrient paste, bigger farms / freezers, and a few roofed over grow zones with sun lamps.
Also, 5 chickens is nothing. Gotta up those numbers if you want to be swimming in eggs!
Give the free loaders basic weapons and send them raiding. If they did they no longer cost you and if they win they will pay for themselves. The 90 year old can also be restricted to certain areas so travel time isn't as important. Or harvest them all for parts.
Lol I didn't say feed 'em.
But for real, it usually depends on how far the raid is for me. If it is close enough I don't send them with food; if there aren't close raids I send them as caravans to trade for food instead under the same idea that if something happens to it they are disposable.
Or butcher one to feed the others, then send them.
start a second colony. send out the useless and have them make it self sustaining or die in the attempt. Reclaim wall maria energy. You solve your food issues either way
If they're not pulling their weight it's time to exile them. Less mouths to feed should take a lot of your pressure off.
And next time, don't recruit useless colonists, and make sure you have a decent amount of colonists that can plant, a decent amount that can cook, a decent amount of doctors, and if you're playing on a non-easy difficulty, get a few good shooters. One pawn can often fill multiple of these roles.
If you're attached to them put them in Cryptosleep.
Cannibalism. Get your wealth up and then eat the people who try to raid you. You will have so much meat after a couple raids.
Rice. It's the fastest growing and most efficient crop. Better than corn.
Grow hay and convert only insect meat into kibble. Store the kibble on shelves in a closed room and only open the door for your livestock during the harshest winters when your animals are starving. Otherwise during warmer times let them eat plants outside until they start starving. You can even open up the doors and let them go outside the base to eat wild plants, then round them up later once their bellies are full.
I personally think farming animals for meat is pointless. Never felt worth it compared to just hunting wild ones. It is just far too inefficient.
I don't play with mods and I'm currently settled in an extreme desert, and my "food problem" is that my freezer gets too full after enemy raids.
Simply put, you need more growers and cooks, maybe more hunters and ranchers.
Make sure that your kitchen is set up properly—there are bills to make 4× meals at once, and the meals should "drop on floor", and there should be a shelf in the kitchen marked Important or Critical for vegetables in order to have your "freeloaders" haul ingredients for the skilled chef to spend more time actually cooking instead of running their little feet.
The way this game works, your current colony will self-balance. Some people will die of starvation. Some will fail during a raid and be killed or kidnapped. Steel your heart and implement these changes for the survivors.
That's on you for keeping more freeloaders than you can feed. Either put the worthless pawns on a fungus paste diet, or sacrifice them in the next raid. On top of draining your foodstocks, they also add to your raid score.
It's advisable have a fungus paste (or bug paste, raider paste, whatever) dispenser anyway, to feed prisoners and animals in winter.
A) pick the worst of the freeloaders. Make an example of them (TL's note: example means hat). The others will shape up or you'll be able to provide new hats as rewards for more productive pawns.
B) Meat beacons.
slaughter all animals except one or two breeding pairs at the start of winter build greenhouses that grow all year long, if you are short on fields use hydroponics a long range scanner is a game changer, it allows to easily enter other world tiles searching for metals there. woodland has a ton of animals there, you can send small hunter parties there an slaughter all deers also i reduced my lifestock to only dromedar (for riding and transporting) and cows. allows a smaller number of minimal breeding pairs than having 5 different types of livestock and i got rid of all my wolfes, are fucking useless anyways
How do you build a greenhouse? And doesn’t the meat just spoil on the way back to base?
during winter if its below freezing, the meat is frozen and doesnt spoil. alternatively i harvest berrys and bring rice and make it into kibble, which i then feed to livestock greenhouse needs a heater/bonfire, a sunlamp with electricity and a roof, thats it.
Or if you are low on power use nutrition fungus they only need heat no light needed
There's also mods that let you build skylights/transparent roofs, but that's getting outside the scope of the convo.
This is something I wish would actually exist in vanilla, make it so plants can grow 75% of the time while sunlight is only 50% uptime so that sunlamps have a purpose without hydroponics but I hate that sunlamps are hard required for any year round growth
Sunlamps have a *slight* bonus to growth due to instantly toggling to 100% light when the plants’ “growth period” starts, vs ramping up with the sun at dawn.
This, an alternative without being a replacement is nice
I'd say 80%, but yeah. The glass and frame blocking some of the light, still having the ramp up and down at dusk and dawn, but not needing electricity or repairs would be a pretty decent balance.
Well sun lamps do have a purpose without hydroponics, you can't grow everything in hydros such as devilstrand. Growing all year because it has a greenhouse on fertile land is great.
The game has pretty clear balancing on this, skylights are a no-no. There are several intended ways to grow food during winter, a free way to just grow plants at 75% efficiency would be way overpowered. There's some exploit-like mechanics where you can grow plants indoors without a Sunlamp by using a partially roofed room, which is just roofed enough to not instantly vent all the heater temperature outside. This will probably be patched *eventually.* If you don't want to deal with winters, then just... don't settle on a tile that has a short growing season?
Several intended ways? Like what? Sunlamps indoors are the only intended one, unless you count ideo giving tunnelers mushrooms which ehhhh feels like a stretch given its specifically meant for the people that don't go out and want low light instead of a more generic colony
Well, a big room, only partly roofed. Because it's a room, it's warm. Because there's no roof, you can grow in part of the room. Or, dandelions feed animals and you eat animals. Dandelions require only torchlight. That's two ways off the top of my head, there are probably others, so sunlamps aren't the "only" intended one.
I'll give a pass to dandelions although I'd imagine that's not sustainable at all as any animals of decent size that could feed you would be better off just butchering at the start of winter if you know you'll be using that trick with intent of eating them, it does work as a means to feed the animals if youre trying to keep them alive all the way through and lessen the drain on the food you do have tho. However they specifically said that the roof trick was exploit like so I'd assume they wouldn't treat it as an intended method, the dandelion trick to me falls under similarly murkiness as I don't imagine it's intended to feed animals off growing crops as they all have the same nutrition value while if such method was intended there'd be more value on things like haygrass or foods that actually make sense. Mind you animals eating growing crops is intended as that's the only way for wild animals to eat, but feeding domesticated animals via that method feels like it's pushing it, especially when you consider the pen is the method the devs intended for grazing animals to be fed like that.
For the greenhouse you can also build a big enough room with about 20-25% unroofed area, keep it warm and plant in the unroofed area. Not very efficient, but doesn't require electricity.
Build the t around a geothermal and heat is added by the geyser. Might have to supplement it but it'll be a lot of your heat need, and building a power plant on it does not lose the heat benefit
Or instead of a sun lamp, you can have a mod for Skylights, so you have glass roofs.
That's effectively just a free sunlamp. I understand that people like the concept of skylights, but know that it is *LITERALLY* just a free sunlamp and I consider that to be way overpowered.
Just build a sun lamp then a square/circle around it, add a heater and start growing, congrats you have a year round food supply
Addition: i noticed i can just send a caravan to any spot i want on the map, im just not sure if they can enter the tile. So maybe the long range scanner isnt needed at all
Might I make a modest proposal you feed on the freeloaders?
Ooooooh Jonathan Swift regent ends VERY NICE. …I think was Swift wasn’t it? Edit- why did auto correct change “reference” to “regent ends”?
A Modest Proposal?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A\_Modest\_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)
yes.
Freeloaders? More like free kibble and hats to sell
It’s an option, but then I wouldn’t have someone always cutting stone blocks (even though my base is built and I have a stockpile which is 10x what I’d ever need) or sowing plant pots
Freeloaders can always be excellent bullet magnets. Even animals for that matter. Put them in the first line, have them as a token to exchange for time.
...so they aren't freeloading?
No it was a joke, they’re doing useless tasks
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They either hate being outside or move literally as slow as my mascot tortoise
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They kinda do need to be happy, I’d prefer to not have to deal with mental breaks
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I’d be doing that if I could, I can’t
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It’s a joke that they’re doing useless tasks, but everyone that moves fast is already doing something relatively important
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They either hate being outside or would plant like 4 plants a day
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I don’t want mental breaks
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Like what? All I’ve got right now is yayo, but even that’s running low
the trick is to harvest enough in summer so you can live off it in winter also greenhouses exist
I try but my colonists eat it all
Then you're not planting enough.
What do you mean? I try to plan, but I have to use my winter stock (animals) in summer so my colonists don’t die. Unless I had like 3 people sowing seeds I’m not sure how I could plant that much corn/potatos as to carry me through half the year
You just answered your own question. Have 3+ people sowing seeds.
But then non of my other things would get done, I’m already short
Then your evolutionary branch is coming to a swift end. Adapt. Compromise. Survive.
If they are freeloaders they can plant and harvest. They may suck at it but it’s better than them doing nothing and you will still yield some crops.
I think (could totally be wrong) that it's not desirable to have low skill pawns harvest because it is more likely to botch the harvest and get nothing from it. Planting however is a totally fine task since the pawns will just retry til they get it right.
I agree but based on what he said he doesn’t have the pawns to spare so imo something is better than nothing. I don’t take in low skill pawns to my colony at all.
Harvest correct, but they could be doing the plant cutting and sowing to free up time for the skilled others.
focus on planting at the beginning of summer, pausing all other projects. once the seeds are in the ground, then let everyone resume other tasks. in the fall, focus everyone on hauling grain, then you got the whole winter for other tasks. remember you do NOT need to refrigerate corn, as it will last a full year just sitting on a shelf, so build as many cheap sheds as you need. with a little math, you can calculate the bare minimum required amount of corn to last the year, and plant that much. each corn plant is worth 22 corn, give or take, modified by blights, food poisoning, animals eating, early cold snaps, etc. that’s enough to sustain one pawn for one day. if you use nutrient paste, that’s 1.5 days. there are 60 days in a year, so you need 60 corn plants per person, per year, or 40 if you are using nutrient paste. 13 people makes 780 plants, or 520 with paste. that’s a 28x28 field, or 23x23 for paste. that’s the BARE MINIMUM and does not account for animals. that’s also assuming only one harvest a year. your fall harvest will be at bare minimum, 17000 corn, or 11500 for paste. you will need 38 or 26 double shelves just to stockpile it all if you instead switch to hydroponics year round, you only need about 1.5 basins per person, or approximately 20. you can fit 24 basins under a single grow light. however this costs far more planting labor, a significant startup cost of 2000 steel and 20 components, plus a robust power grid that can operate year round and keep it warm.
Genuinly what is more important that food, your colony dies without food. What tasks are more important for your 12 other colonist? Hauling rocks, smelting slag, crafting blocks, research, mining and building can all be paused for a little bit just to get your colonist to prioritize growing You can have people grow and do other work too. Growing in my experience is more like a part time job for pawns since it’s only planting and harvesting when they are busy Have your pawns take a few days out of their schedule to prioritize food. It’s that simple. And build a massive freezer
if that happens then you didnt harvest enough
? How do you plant that much? I struggle to get my small in base + 1 large out of base farms sowed more than 2 times per season (with corn) with my 1 plant and animal pawn, and even they’re letting construction fall behind when they’re doing that so I can’t spare any more
more fields or just the already mentioned greenhouses so you can simply plant in winter as well
I think enough sun lamps to grow a seasons worth of food would drain my entire energy supply
buil more energy generators not that 13 colonists is much anyway you only need like 2-3 sets of hydroponics in sunlamp radius to feed those
If you eat paste, each hydroponic basin is enough to just barely feed one person (assuming you perfectly cycle rice). With 13 people you don't even need a full hydroponics room. It's less than half of one.
That can’t be right, hydroponics only grows 1 per tile right? A sun lamp only covers about 8 basins (I forget if I’m using a VE basin, but if I am it’s just like 5 basins in one long strip) which is only 120 squares of corn/potato, hardly enough for a day or two
one per tile with a growth level of 280%. you can harvest rice like every 2-3 days
It’s 280%!? gadzooks
Vanilla hydroponics is 1x4 tiles, and a good hydroponics layout can fit 24 basins in the effected region of a sunlamp. That's a LOT of growing potential given then growth bonus of the basins. That should adequately feed a colony of 13 with your dirt farms growing haygrass to bale for winter. [Hydroponics layouts](https://dotesports.com/general/news/best-efficient-hydroponics-layouts-in-rimworld)
Each hydroponics light can cover 24 basins.
The idea is that you grow most of your crops outside during summer, and then keep a large enough stockpile for winter. Make a freezer and store the food there, you should be able to get thousands of rice and corn with not much effort as long as you have at least one dedicated planter. Get your less plant-skilled colonists to also help out with the sowing, this should be #1 priority after you start a run. You *first* make a growing zone of like 12x12 with Rice and then you start doing the rest of your stuff. Rush batteries and power generation research and you will be able to build a freezer room with 2 coolers set to -5C (or about 23F) before the first winter.
if you’re open to using mods, try the new [tractor](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3276694110) mod?
You may need to focus more than one pawn on the job, then. Early game, before your base is all built, food is a major demand. Throw your non-specialized pawns in, squeeze those useless pawns for another 6-8 squares of planting. Sow and farm like you're gonna open a corn syrup factory for export. Once you're reliably selling excess food for money, then you can spin up a different economy. (For now, though, forage like mad, hunt whatever comes your way, sell whatever you have that's worth selling, and buy out food from traders. Or just, y'know, give in to madness and start cannibalizing. Always an option.)
Do the math on how many meals are ate in a day and set the bill to maintain 3-4 months of that in a freezer. That much is probably overkill, but it's what I do and I don't remember the last time I've had a colony starve. With 13 colonists having a dedicated cook shouldn't be that hard to accomplish.
I have a dedicated cook, but they’d have to cook like 50 meals a day to feed the whole colony for the day and also put a days worth of food into storage and afaik that just isn’t possible (and I’d have to have that many resources) at the moment I have to put my sanguine pawn to work in the middle of the night so my pawns have breakfast, I just can’t keep up nor can I spare another pawn to be a chef
You can make 4x simples meals at once, you know this right? I have only one cook and she can keep up with my 14 colonists' needs and still have a little time to herself. I understand you have a supply problem too but one cook should be enough.
Get a 2nd cook, I tend to aim for 1 per 10 colonists. Don’t spare other pawns to do it, get more pawns. Grab a 2nd cook from a raid, and 1-2 more planters
How efficient is your kitchen? Do they have to walk very far to get materials? 50 a day shouldn't be difficult, especially with the x4 bill.
The room next to the freezer
> I have a dedicated cook, but they’d have to cook like 50 meals a day to feed the whole colony for the day and also put a days worth of food into storage and afaik that just isn’t possible So you have 20 colonists or so? By that time you really should be good on food and have 1 or 2 dedicated cooks. It takes me literal ingame years to get to 20 colonists. If this is too much you can always consider nutrient paste.
I’ve got 13 colonists, but cooking two meals for them to eat today and two meals for them to eat in winter equals 52 a day
I try to have 2 large fields at least. One for rice for non stop quick harvests and another for corn to actually fill the storerooms. Having enough farmers can be rough but they’ll skill up fast with the rice.
You aren’t growing enough food. You need surplus for the winter For your animals, grow the herd for faster reproduction or cull it for immediate food. For meat eating animals, freeze raider corpses and prevent the animals access to your normal food Paste dispensers are efficient to stretch food further
I can’t grow enough food, I can barely sow my fields with a dedicated pawn + one borrowed from another job, my herd is starving but I’m only at like 10 animals (I’ve got a pretty big pen, too, imo). Will do the frozen corpse thing, and I can’t tank the paste debuff. Right now I’m feeding my happiest pawns 1 time a day so the sad fuckers can get breakfast and dinner
Just ditch the save at this point and learn from your mistakes. I lost my first 10-15 colonies before I figured things out. Failing colonies tend to snowball.
I really should because it’s so terrible and I want to download some mods like rim war, but it’s crawling along, like I’m barely surviving and I’ve got 80 hours in it
You’ll need a team of 3-4 growers man. Nobody survives with just one.
In another post you said you need a cook to cook like 50 meals a day to keep up with demand. That means you have 20 colonists or so. HOW do you not have at least 3 colonists that are at least decent at planting, out of all those 20? Are you per chance playing with custom premade xenotypes from Biotech that have a lot more nutrition demand and less metabolic efficiency?
I need 26 meals a day to save for winter, I forgot you can just save the food itself though then cook meas
1 farmer with 13 colonists is... not great.
Most animals aren't that efficient for the amount of nutrition consumed versus what you get back. If you've got a lot of unneeded land to grow haygrass then you can use that to feed them but you may as well just use the land to grow rice, potato or corn and forget the animals in the first place. Pigs or boar are really good though because you can always feed them inedible meat, like insect or humanoid meat that your colonists might not eat anyway and use it as a way of converting it into edible meat.
I’m thinking of that yeah, killing off everything apart from my muffalos and horses and just using all the space for pigs
They are viable unless you're wealthy enough to start spawning mechanoid raids. Then you'll beg for a regular pirate raid to feed your pigs
I’m getting mechanoids, the current strategy is to blow the to bits with mortars though so I’m not sure how much will be left for the pigs
i lock horses in a room connected to a nutrient paste dispenser and freezer if you feed the horses paste made from horses, they will eat less food than they generate just add more horses as needed it's a bit micro heavy feeding them every couple days, but it works bonus if you get a fleshmass nucleus. just lock it in the freezer and it will keep the hoppers full. you might even be able to skip having a freezer altogether
Jesus christ
Randy is the only one you can call out to on the Rim
He might listen. He might not.
He always listens. It’s whether or not he cares. But he always listens
I mean, you *could* call out to Jesus, or anyone else you'd like. They won't answer, but you can call out to your heart's content all the same.
Thermodynamics work different out on the rim.
Tynan used to do the math for this, way back before release. For instance, plants were deliberately designed so that their output would have to be less than an amount that could be processed into chemfuel needed to run generators that would support the grow light. No escaping thermodynamics But then he realized it's a game and that's dumb. So now you just feed a boomalope and it will fuel a couple gens easy
[удалено]
too much feature bloat and i've been advised that everything VE is a performance problem i just use Nutrient Paste Dispenser Command or AutoNutrientPasteDispenser
scout more useful pawns and either banish the useless pawns or get them killed in combat. if you're too emotionally attached to the freeloaders consider working with gene modification from the biotech dlc to make them more useful
the greater food problem can perhaps be solved through hydroponics, expanding your farms and storing food for winter, expanding your max livestock or trade if you cannot set up something self sufficient.
Hydroponics is too energy intensive though, I run 1 sun lamp for my coke farm and that’s a little less than all my other indoor lights combined
You can grow nutrifungus faster on hydroponics, so that you don't need extra electricity on sun lamps.
Bro is running a coke grow op and yet complains that his one farmer can't feed 13 people! Priorities, man... Ditch the drugs or get more farmers! The drugs can grow outside. No space police are doing inspections. They're a far lower priority than stable continuous food supply during the winter.
I need the drugs, my colonists are regularly in the red (at least a few regulars)
Why are you growing coke if your colonists are starving?
I’ve got addicts who are constantly in the red (aka undergrounders who are only good at outdoor tasks)
Sorry to say it, but it sounds like you need to let some folks go
13 is a LOT. How did you manage to get that many colonists without having a food surplus? In the future only recruit “usefuls”.
Randy, and wanderers. There’s always some small job to be done or I think I could use extra mining or construction
Whenever a wanderer wants to join, if you can’t see their stats or bio, the answer from me is always no.
Na, wanderers are always useful for the colony. Either they are good and recruited or they are used to increase the adaptation factor.
If youre not using Nutrient Paste Dispensers then i suggest you do, it would stretch your food supply more because it uses less ingredients per meal.
I struggle keeping my colonists happy with normal meals, nutrient paste would make them all crazy flake fiends
Starvation probably also makes them unhappy
worst that happens is they go crazy and the resulting violence might solve your issue
Using Set Up Camp (preferably the one included in ReBuild/ReGrowth) you can send out your colonists on little hunting trips. Because wildlife spawns whenever you enter the tile, you can just head 2 tiles over (since you can't have it right next to your base), hunt them to extinction, leave the camp, then do it all over again. Wealth is only included when the camp is active - plus it's a small map so it's negligible. Combined with Vehicles and you can just have an animal-drawn cart back and forth with your goodies. Edit: reading the rest of the comments.. what is your job makeup for the 13 colonists? You should have more than enough food at this point - in theory. If you're struggling, make ALL of your pawns do growing/harvest for the warmer months. They can do the rest in winter. Once you're more established and you have surplus food, they can work on their preferred jobs. The only ones you shouldn't force to grow is your scientists, anyone with a religion against it (unless you can negate the debuff), or your cooks. I'm also curious about your climate. It sounds like your warmer months are comparatively quite short to your colder months; diminishing the time you CAN grow.
I would not suggest throwing mods into the mix before OP gets further along in the learning curve, there are harsh lessons to learn and the mods will muddy the waters a bit
That's fair - I put in mods after my very first colony and went from there, but that's just my play style with most things. I still think the second half of my comment is valuable though given that's pure vanilla.
Only mod I'd recommend for begginers: Pick Up and Haul Vanilla haul pathing is atrocious
Yeah, I'd actually rephrase that, I'd suggest a few QOL mods. Construct carefully, the improved interface one, and honestly after a few runs just use character editor or something of the like, and I use the mod that lets me preview the topography of where I'm landing. I plan after I get bored to challenge myself with more blind landing spots and rolling for pawns but 600 hours in and I can get stunlocked for half an evening rerolling pawns and trying to find a map I like for base building.
it doesnt feel as bad as it used to atleast
I’ve got 13 pawns more or less doing each job, problem is, people on unskilled labour (3) either get into mental break territory or take 3 quadrums to build a wall
That's where the problem initially lies. One pawn can't feed 12. You'll have to assign more growers. Stonecutting, mining - all of that can wait. It won't get done if they're starving! Also, do you know why they're breaking so often? Starvation does lead to tricky situations, but it shouldn't be all of the time (unless you're unlucky). Your pawns shouldn't be taking multiple quadrums to do /anything/. That makes me think there's a problem with the game itself. Even a pawn with 0 in Construction can build a wall in about a day and a half.
They break often probably due to the bodies littered around (I started picking them up after raids, but I still miss some which are forbidden) or because I torture my prisoners… or because they’re in pain (especially my hunter) or because they’ve gotten no sleep due to prioritised work
I don't mean any disrespect, and I hope you can sort out these issues. Hear me out. It seems like the question you're trying to get a positive answer to is "How can I fix this problem I have without changing anything about how I play the game?" The answer is, you can't. You need to feed your people. Plain and simple. Either you need to reduce the number of mouths to feed, or increase the amount of growing you're doing, or procure food elsewhere via raiding, commerce, etc. While I get that this may be a rough transition, and you'll need to change or abandon some of the things you're doing in the game, ultimately it sounds like that's going to happen to you anyway. Either via fixing your problems, or by way of colony collapse and restart. I sincerely hope you can work out the problems plaguing your colony. If not, then rest assured, you will improve at this if you continue playing. It does get better. Chin up, you've got this.
Feed the free loaders to the working men.
Stick the freeloaders in cryptosleep during the winter
Those who don't work, become food for those that do.
I would send off the 6 to war
With fava beans and a nice chianti
I miss being new to rimworld (no offense OP, most of us would have eaten five of those useless pawns already)
Grow more corn and banish some people.
Hold a trial and find the 90-year-olds guilty of being old. Then either execute them or sentence them to be old someplace else. If you don’t have any of the DLCs, then I guess you can do pretty much the same thing via dev mode.
If you don’t work, you don’t eat
You say that half your colonists aren't working, and you also say that you aren't making enough food. May I suggest getting your colonists to make more food?
Whenever I get a mass of free loaders, I usually just massively boost my corn intake in the summer, like I make sure that I have enough that I still have corn leftover by the time spring ends Mechanitor is free labor Break the Mech You get 6 Bandwith, 2 Lifters, 2 Agrihands, 2 Cleansweepers, and all your early game QoL is handled
Animals menu has this nifty slaughter button and do you NEED the 90 yo old? Just put a joy wire in him and start training medical by removing and adding peg legs
I kinda got attached to him, I’d feel bad treating him like a prisoner
Is easy, some people call it a cheat. I call it Nutrifungus. Your outdoor farms will grow walls and a roof, and with 2 heaters you're set for a infinite supply.
Howdya grow it? And does it have mood debuffs? Half my colony has a yayo addiction because they’re all horribly depressed, I’ve got a tortured artist who’s also a cave dweller so loves mining, but hates being outside with the deep drill, she’s been through so much coke man
Im pretty sure a roof or a shack around the drill would be enough for her to think it of it as inside
Easy you feed the free loaders to each other. They get food and the number of those lazy sacks of tasty meat goes down.
Well either you build a nutrient paste dispenser so you use the available nutrients more efficiently or you could feed on the freeloaders.
Try setting up a "Art Studio". Get a deep mine drill and just have it setup to mine chunks, then build both a stone cutting table and an art bench nearby. Now your useless pawns can making art from an infinite resource. Have your most capable pawns trade the art to other settlements for food as needed. Plus as a bonus you'll end up with a ton of statues that you can use to make rooms more beautiful.
Elect the 90 years old as colony leader and watch the world burns.
Dubs skylights + dubs hygiene = food
Dude i read everything and your issue is clear. Dont take in useless meat pawns. Throw the bitches in cryosleep and forget about them, they’re dead weight. Also, not everything is going to get done exactly at your bidding. If you queue up some bricks, it’s okay if they take a couple days to get done, you LITERALLY have forever to get them done, i promise it’s not worth the extra food.
Unless his entire colony is literally incapable of planting / hauling for some reason, this is on OP for just not planting enough crops and using the labor he *has* properly, not the pawns' fault for "freeloading". Dude said he has a single farmer for 13 pawns and is using his only sunlamp to grow psychite. Swapping that one grow zone over to rice and assigning another 2 pawns to help plant would instantly solve his problem. Harvest should probably still just be done by the most experienced pawns if you can handle the micro, but there are no downsides to the others helping sow crops, or dedicating them to hauling so the plants specialist can skip that labor.
Wait a second, you can manually queue? Like separately to prioritise?
Yeah, just queue it and it’ll get done. No need to over micro the game, it ends up more inefficient
How do you do that?
Click on the workbench, press bills, add a bill
Oooh, I thought you meant tasks like construction or mining
Rice grows fastest. rice also can be stored anywhere and wont rot for like a few months/years— when i grow fields of rice I make vegetarian lavish meals because I just have like a 6k stack of rice after one yield and it keeps their hunger down longer and mood up Edit: tomato part, tomatoes are modded
Tomatoes aren't base-game.
Ah yea woops
Rice has the best *per tile* output, but corn is the best output per-labor. But you could waste a *lot* of that labor if you have a short growing season that cuts off your last harvest at a bad time. Rice is a good default pick.
Build a greenhouse around any nearby rich soil. Unroof it during summer seasons, then re-roof it during the winter so you can still grow from it year round
Send the 90 year olds off to fight the next raid bare naked with no weapons. That should make it easier to feed the remaining colonists.
What do I do if he wins
Send him on a caravan to raid their base.
I believe in him
You can banish pawns and slaughter animals.
I think I’ll put the freeloaders in cryo, I already slaughter my animals down to 3 per species
Feed the superfluous pawns to the more useful ones. Seems a little obvious now that I write it out.
But they’re so innocent
That's where the flavor lives!
Nutrient paste, bigger farms / freezers, and a few roofed over grow zones with sun lamps. Also, 5 chickens is nothing. Gotta up those numbers if you want to be swimming in eggs!
Hydroponic rice is the answer to your woes
Get rid of the 90yo and go cannibalism, so raiders are free food
Big ass motherfucking freezer tends to get me through.
Give the free loaders basic weapons and send them raiding. If they did they no longer cost you and if they win they will pay for themselves. The 90 year old can also be restricted to certain areas so travel time isn't as important. Or harvest them all for parts.
I don’t have enough food to send them anywhere though
Lol I didn't say feed 'em. But for real, it usually depends on how far the raid is for me. If it is close enough I don't send them with food; if there aren't close raids I send them as caravans to trade for food instead under the same idea that if something happens to it they are disposable. Or butcher one to feed the others, then send them.
Cannibalism is always the answer. Decerases your food needs whilst increasing your supply. Simple
Plant enough food.... It's so easy to grow rice and potatoes. I usually end up with way too much honestly
start a second colony. send out the useless and have them make it self sustaining or die in the attempt. Reclaim wall maria energy. You solve your food issues either way
Grow more food. Hydroponic greenhouse Grow more food. Send caravan to buy food Grow more food
If they're not pulling their weight it's time to exile them. Less mouths to feed should take a lot of your pressure off. And next time, don't recruit useless colonists, and make sure you have a decent amount of colonists that can plant, a decent amount that can cook, a decent amount of doctors, and if you're playing on a non-easy difficulty, get a few good shooters. One pawn can often fill multiple of these roles. If you're attached to them put them in Cryptosleep.
If you have biotech expansion, make an agricultural mech
Hook up that slushie machine!
Cannibalism. Get your wealth up and then eat the people who try to raid you. You will have so much meat after a couple raids. Rice. It's the fastest growing and most efficient crop. Better than corn. Grow hay and convert only insect meat into kibble. Store the kibble on shelves in a closed room and only open the door for your livestock during the harshest winters when your animals are starving. Otherwise during warmer times let them eat plants outside until they start starving. You can even open up the doors and let them go outside the base to eat wild plants, then round them up later once their bellies are full. I personally think farming animals for meat is pointless. Never felt worth it compared to just hunting wild ones. It is just far too inefficient.
Turn the useless colonists into meat for the colonists who have earned the right to eat.
I’d just banish the freeloaders tbh.
He who works not shall not eat.
I don't play with mods and I'm currently settled in an extreme desert, and my "food problem" is that my freezer gets too full after enemy raids. Simply put, you need more growers and cooks, maybe more hunters and ranchers. Make sure that your kitchen is set up properly—there are bills to make 4× meals at once, and the meals should "drop on floor", and there should be a shelf in the kitchen marked Important or Critical for vegetables in order to have your "freeloaders" haul ingredients for the skilled chef to spend more time actually cooking instead of running their little feet. The way this game works, your current colony will self-balance. Some people will die of starvation. Some will fail during a raid and be killed or kidnapped. Steel your heart and implement these changes for the survivors.
Maybe i missed it, but why are you keeping the freeloaders?
That's on you for keeping more freeloaders than you can feed. Either put the worthless pawns on a fungus paste diet, or sacrifice them in the next raid. On top of draining your foodstocks, they also add to your raid score. It's advisable have a fungus paste (or bug paste, raider paste, whatever) dispenser anyway, to feed prisoners and animals in winter.
A) pick the worst of the freeloaders. Make an example of them (TL's note: example means hat). The others will shape up or you'll be able to provide new hats as rewards for more productive pawns. B) Meat beacons.
classic route would be, feed the least useful freeloaders to more useful freeloaders. Make hats out of them, too.
Divide them into elites and plebs. Use the eiltes to run some experiments on the plebs. Feed them bugs and force them to enjoy it.
You feed them to eachother. What? Don't look at me like that. I know what sub I'm in.
I'm knew but here me out feed the free loaders the other free loaders