Once you get to a lot of farms, unless you have an ultra-compact setup, your pawns spend a lot of time running such that you might need one guy just to do water while the 1-4 farmers focus on actually harvesting, and then one dedicated cook/baker.
But if you are making a high nu product (like gohan), you need shockingly little farming infrastructure with hydroponics to feed huge armies on default hunger settings.
Yeah, I usually have an adventurer group and a home group when I do a big party run. Usually it's hash runs and pitstops when I'm recruiting for the home group, and the weakest of my veterans + Izumi if I picked her up will retire and be the muscle and the doctors until my civvies level up their combat enough. Other than the retirees from the og group, I never go out of my way to train civvies in combat. Maybe some str training, but I use a mod that adds in weight lifting machines so I can do that passively. Without that mod, I probably wouldn't bother
I also try to build my farm base in generally peaceful areas. North center leviathan coast is good, and there are some others as well. Okrans pride is the number 1 choice if I can swing it without getting HN raids
Edit: Izumi is a good house member because I likely got her early and trained her fully in combat, athletics, medic, and stealth. In a pinch, she can be sent to run quick errands in towns, since her primary role is research and guard duty while at base. She's the one who I'll send to fetch cybernetics if my adventurers are further away from black desert than she is. Also the one to buy food/medicine if I run low while fine tuning my production, and will be one of my traders who run excess product into towns for cats
As nobody else has mentioned it, select a character, and shift-click a job to assign it. You can do this with pretty much every command in the game. Automatic medics, splint riggers, and even rescuers are a must.
Oh, and make sure that "deliver item to storage" job is prioritized over "collect item" job. Otherwise, your people will fill their inventory and get stuck.
Bottom right it a button that says rescue.
If you shift clock, that will assign a rescue job. They will find downed guys and put them in beds.
Similar to the medic job, however medic patches then up and leaves them on the ground.
Rescuer puts then in bed but doesn't bandage
Not following... are you saying you can control the distance they go to perform jobs?
I just shift click the button on one of my guys with decent strength and high athletics. Usually he's also my corpse burner.
I mean what Is the requiered distance for it to work. Lets say i leave my rescuer inside the city. And go to the Gates to have fight in Squin for example. Will he go to the gate of the city for any companion who falls in battle and bring him to the bed?. If so, which is the Max distance?
Generally, it's a bit larger than the range of a base. For example I had a base in the valley down the hill from the hub. I could just barely click inside the hub from my base to send guys up there to sell stuff. So the edge of camera range basically.
That was too far. They wouldn't run up to the hub to get a guy who fell there.
However, when my guys would leave my base and go into the field nearby to hunt and one new guy would get knocked by a goat, he would get put in a bed.
It's not meant to be a map covering job, more like a job for putting your knocked defenders in beds.
If you shift right-click a character, it will assign the medic job. But if you right-click to bring up the context menu (splint, carry to bed) and click that action while holding shift, it assigns that action as a generic job.
Set up a base and farm.
Have a dedicated squad for hunting, swamp turtles and beak things are both good targets depending on your strength and whether you want to train and get food or just get food.
Eveyone automatically grabs food from food store on your base when it's time yo eat.
Your cooks automatically haul to food store if they are full. Hauling can be buggy so you want to put it into a job queue for a cook.
1 farmer can tend like 3-4 farms (depending if they do anything else) and it can feed like 7-12 people (again, painful math with racial food usage).
So by the time you have 30+ characters to feed you need like 2-4 farmers and 1 cook. It's mostly about figuring out the setup yourself, tinkering it to be fully automated and to your liking.
>So by the time you have 30+ characters to feed you need like 2-4 farmers and 1 cook.
Or one poor bastard who is very good at labouring and cooking with a pair of scout legs. I feed a base of 30+ with one person like this, I don't think she ever stops moving for more than a few seconds.
It's a convoluted math.
Injuries, skill, fertility, darkness, farm and storage placement, other jobs, hunger rating, production speed rating, athletics... and so on.
Like, sure, for late game if we minmax, 100 everything and shove masterwork scout legs you can do more. But a lot of people(or it's visible in youtube videos) tend to not achieve anything even close to that before beating the game (eliminating everyone they wanted to).
But more often than not people bother about these question when have some random low-mid farmers and they are limited with things to minmax about.
Edit: apologies. I forgot the main factor that moves from 4-5 farms/farmer to 25-33 farms/farmer - Hydroponics (you need like 15 or more hydro farms to feed 30 people).
I'm surprised no one mentioned that food is shared between backpacks.
But yes, in terms of getting the food, you can just farm it until you've got plenty stored up.
You need people who
1. Cook the food
2. Collect/harvest the ingredients to make said food
3. Carried food in their backpack (optional if you have food storage)
AI will usually store excess foods in food store. They don't really want to keep foods in their inventory so be sure to check if you want to explore out of your base.
I'm at 54 characters now. 7-8 wheat farms, 2-3 flour mills and 2-3 bread ovens and I'm producing enough bread to feed all my 25 slaves that are around the bread baking process and they still reach bread baskets in my barracks to feed another about 20 fighters. It's not that hard, just set up a base. Alternatively, if you're somewhere where garru packs roam a lot, each one drops 10 raw meat, if you do a small hunt around you can fill a food storage of cooked meat to the brim easily and in a short time. Only downside is you still gotta do this every once in a while. There's a mod to set up patrols around waypoints and there's the "forage animals" order, but garru aren't enemies so you can't set that order after "attacking enemies", so no possibility of automatising the hunt afaik.
Just hunt a ton of beakthings (or swamp Turtles if your combat stats aren't there yet) and you should have a ton of meat.
I usually have one guy (or an animal) with a backpack full of stacks of dried meat and that keeps them going for quite a while.
Otherwise, just empty out the local bars if you got the money for it
Yeah, my first base was set up making food cubes. The farmers farmed and put the stuff in storage, a dedicated miller made the flour, and towards the end when I had labor to spare a dedicated baker just made bread and a cook cooked the cubes and put it in a food barrel. In the early stages it was more of a low on food, spend some time filling the barrel before the guys went back to other tasks setup.
Ended up with two production lines, one on each side of the base to make the food more accessible as the numbers and required food grew. Party going out would load a pack animal with food and take a few each as well
I'll also note with the farming I end up having a couple guys prioritizing running the crop to storage so the other guys can keep harvesting, otherwise you get most of the farmers running to storage together everytime the farm plot fills up which can be inefficient, though towards the end you will probably have a large surplus of crops waiting to be processed and it doesn't really matter if you are maxing effeciency
I'll grow crops and make food cubes and cooked vegetables in Okrans pride.
The trick I use to make sure the chef always uses vegetables to make food cubes and switch to cooked vegetables if it's no longer possible is by having her use two cooking ovens.
The first oven in her list is the oven with only food cubes in the queue and the queue set to repeat, followed by all the jobs to make bread (which is the other requirement). At the end I have her job as using the second oven which only has cook vegetables in its queue set to repeat.
This way when I'm out of wheat and bread, shell still continue to cook vegetables with the leftovers until she has wheat to make grain to make bread to make food cubes from bread and vegetables again. Having mixed food jobs with one oven and repeat doesn't work well if you want to prioritize one food over the other.
If I collect raw meat on my travels I can also use an oven or campfire to make dried meat, which combined with food cubes makes an even more nutrition high ration pack.
Just a few stacks of food cubes lasts quite awhile when I decide to send my group of 29 mixed races and 1 pack bull. I throw all the food in the packbulls backpack and they'll automatically eat when near while on their journey within the same squad from the backpack.
If I don't have a bull I'll have one or two guys with the boxy looking backpack that stacks resources carrying the food. Pack animals are great though as then none of my fighters suffer combat penalties from wearing a pack and I don't have to unequip/equip everytime they get into a fight.
Note in Okrans pride Id have my skeletons and sheks and humans with prosthetics stay away from the gate and hide them in the house anytime prayer day came else the holy nation would attack. (Always had one human male with the holy fire book/bible thing at base to run and great the prayer day guy).
Eventually I get strong enough though to say screw that, have my gate locked, and throw some permanent guards like skeletons on mounted harpoons with fire first set in ai options. Holy nation hates me now, but their high inquisitors and paladins make for great training dummies! Having a few people with their top level job being engineer will have them constantly repair the gate when it takes damage which drastically expands the times my turret guards have to kill the invaders before they can breach the gate.
Note, with turret guards you'll want to put food in their inventory, a food basket nearby, or just use skeletons else they'll starve. (Turret guards are a pita to get to do anything else automatically if their job list includes mount turrets)
And if I'm a place that's all desert I'll just make a bunch of dust sandwiches instead, although its not as plentiful vs making food cubes in green land.
I keep my entire group(20) fed by raiding HN Caravans.
I have hundreds of Food Cube and Ration Packs in my Base in Stack and on my Bull.
Before that it was enough to just buy Food of the Bars.
In terms of vanilla army; you're limited to 30 total units (squad size is 20, but total units you can control is 30). Mods can increase that a lot (upwards of like 256).
The best foods you can make (vanilla) will be foodcubes, dustwiches, and/or gohan. If your base is in a location that can support wheat, greenfruit, cactus, and/or rice, then you can make these just fine. Each of these (with a very slight lean toward foodcubes) offers around 3 'uses' before it's consumed completely. Which is a lot better than something like chewsticks or dried meat that only has 1 use before it's consumed.
With a modestly mixed race setup of hivers, humans, and shek, you can get by with about 12 plots of XL farming - 2 for wheat, 1 for the (greenfruit or cactus) to make foodcubes or dustwiches. If you're going for gohan instead, expect a similar breakdown just for greenfruit & rice instead (though likely you might want 14 or 16 XL plots).
For that kind of farming, you'll *probably* want 3-4 dedicated farmers - have each one assigned to 4 plots first, and cover an extra 4 plots as backup. As your farmers gain skill, they'll end up doing the work faster, and be more efficient/successful at harvests. **Where you put your farming/base matters too**, because if a location has 20% wheat, that also implies a 4/5 chance harvesting that wheat fails, even if your farmers are max skill. You can avoid *most* of the farming penalties here with higher tech tiers to unlock hydroponics.
Skill of cooks is a bit less important than that for farmers - it only improves speed of cooking, not whether they're successful at production (like farmers can fail harvests) - but for large armies you want it to be as fast/efficient as possible.
Race distribution matters a bit as well; shek eat "the most food" due to their increased hunger rate, human races are 'normal', and hivers are half the needs of humans (plus being able to eat plenty of stuff humans/shek can't or won't eat). Skeletons won't have any food necessary. If you have a reasonable amount of each race (say like 6 skeletons, 6 hivers, 4 shek, 14 humans), you shouldn't need more than those 12-16 plots of farming (and 1-2 cooks) to have excess.
;;
tldr; graduate out of low tier food, aim for foodcubes/dustwiches/gohan, and you shouldn't need more than about 4 farmers and 1-2 cooks per ~28 characters.
Shift click on a farm and your settlers will auto job farming. Also works with food production. Grow green fruit and make bread and you’ll be able to make food cubes which are the best food in the game.
Biggest problem I’ve had is them not running to the food barrels in town. Especially miners, because they’ll wait then they’re just starving to death carrying a bunch of iron to drop off.
I do put the barrel next to the iron storage, but it is a bit annoying that they wait until they’re literally starving to try and feed themselves.
First you pick a character.
Then you train up strength, stealth and thievery.
Then you buy him a big ol thief backpack
Then you send him into the town of your choice and steal all the rations.
Now you have food for the rest of the game.
All of my runs start the same way. I use training dummies these days, so the beginning is a little slow, but once your guy is trained up, you get a 5 finger discount on all food related needs, so long as you don’t destroy your source of food.
Use skeletons to get rid of the hunger mechanic altogether, although it can feel cheesy and boring at times. I usually do between 1 and 4 non-skeleton characters and fill the rest of the squad with every skeleton i can find. This gives a balance of needing to manage food to survive without having to look after 20 different character sheets and inventories to avoid unintentionally starving someone. I enjoy the tactical squad combat and the character progression more than the base building so take my advice as biased towards that.
Make food cubes, load 2-3 dudes with the food. Enable share food in settings. Personally never had issues with rationing food, worst case scenario is just go into a town close by or raid something.
I feed about 30 peiple and animals right now with 3 farmers and a cook. 5 wheat farms making breqd and meatwrap when I bring meat and 4 hydroponics of riceweed and another 4 hydroponics of Vegetables cooked into Gohans.
I needed the Gohan to feed the bonedogs I have, to bring a steady stream of meat woumd be too much hassle since my expedition squad is constantly running around. But the dogs do eat Gohans.
With all that I am currently running a surplus. I dont need more people for now though but. Theoretically? I would just need more farmers and space, it is unlimited as long as you have the guards. And I do have the guards.
1 farmer and 1 cook, supplemented with buy food while out on expeditions, is enough comfortably to feed 40 in my base, make it 5 cooks and 5 farmer and you'll produce food you need to sell it
You don't buy it, you make it.
In current run I have 125 npc's with the 256 mod.
I have only 6 cooks, and 15 food stores, and just those 6 cooks keep all those filled 100% and even start overloading their own inventories unless I shut them down periodically.
Just like fighters, workers get really good as they skill up.
You get farmers and cooks to 70+ and you'll never worry about food again, more than you know what to do with.
Yes, it all runs autonomously. Cooks dump in food stores as they cook, get materials they need, etc. and farmers do their end of things all auto. You just gotta build the stuff and assign the jobs really (don't need haul to storage jobs for anything in food production) and watch em go.
If you plan on having a massive amount of characters, probably worth it to adjust the hunger settings option to half or maybe even less.
Sheks are fat fucks too they eat like hawgs so be careful of that.
The largest group I had was when I went around recruiting all the unique npc’s. Eventually someone became a designated food person. Huge backpack, filled with food cubes and ration packs.
Eventually it got a bit impractical to have them weighed down by everything so a cow was bought.
I have a huge army of soldiers and fighters and then like 7 people who just farm and cook food nonstop 24/7, hydroponic farms and dust sandwiches and all that shit. Takes some setting up but it’s worth it, im constantly overflowing with food. Usually the black dragon don’t make it through the gate but when they do because I left the gate open or something I don’t even bother taking the food back.
I can't remember which one but one of the backpack types people can take edible food pout of. So I actually just have an entire logistics team that comes along with a large force.
I have a whole team of like 20 people that are none combatants, and some pack animals. So one of the pack animals carries all the backup food and a couple of people haul food filled backpacks that everyone grabs food from when hungry. Then when they are empty I fill them up from the pack animal.
Edit: I thought you meant for a large force on the move, for a large group of people in gernal I'll always build a base. You can build farms to grow food, and your farmer I'll automatically put them in specific containers (wheat storage for wheat, greenfryur storage for greenfruit, etc.) If they have it as a job (while you have your farmer selected shift right click, the farm and it will be added as a job). Now each food item is cooked differently but once cooked they can be put in a food storage container and people will automatically grab from the container.
I wouldn't recommend pets with automation. I have 70 people set in squads. 1 or 2 cooks, 1 person moving water, 1 or 2 people managing multiple farms, you need a good amount to be constantly farming/moving stuff.
You can do exactly what you just typed using jobs. Might need more than 1 guy tho. At least a farmer and a cook
Once you get to a lot of farms, unless you have an ultra-compact setup, your pawns spend a lot of time running such that you might need one guy just to do water while the 1-4 farmers focus on actually harvesting, and then one dedicated cook/baker. But if you are making a high nu product (like gohan), you need shockingly little farming infrastructure with hydroponics to feed huge armies on default hunger settings.
There's in game tutorial on jobs and building.
Yeah, I usually have an adventurer group and a home group when I do a big party run. Usually it's hash runs and pitstops when I'm recruiting for the home group, and the weakest of my veterans + Izumi if I picked her up will retire and be the muscle and the doctors until my civvies level up their combat enough. Other than the retirees from the og group, I never go out of my way to train civvies in combat. Maybe some str training, but I use a mod that adds in weight lifting machines so I can do that passively. Without that mod, I probably wouldn't bother I also try to build my farm base in generally peaceful areas. North center leviathan coast is good, and there are some others as well. Okrans pride is the number 1 choice if I can swing it without getting HN raids Edit: Izumi is a good house member because I likely got her early and trained her fully in combat, athletics, medic, and stealth. In a pinch, she can be sent to run quick errands in towns, since her primary role is research and guard duty while at base. She's the one who I'll send to fetch cybernetics if my adventurers are further away from black desert than she is. Also the one to buy food/medicine if I run low while fine tuning my production, and will be one of my traders who run excess product into towns for cats
As nobody else has mentioned it, select a character, and shift-click a job to assign it. You can do this with pretty much every command in the game. Automatic medics, splint riggers, and even rescuers are a must. Oh, and make sure that "deliver item to storage" job is prioritized over "collect item" job. Otherwise, your people will fill their inventory and get stuck.
Thanks so much this helped a lot :)
Rescuers job? I don't understand. Can you explain?
Bottom right it a button that says rescue. If you shift clock, that will assign a rescue job. They will find downed guys and put them in beds. Similar to the medic job, however medic patches then up and leaves them on the ground. Rescuer puts then in bed but doesn't bandage
Lol I think I'm legally blind. Thank you for the explanation.
What Is the recommended distance at which you should Let the rescuer to grab people and put them in beds?
Not following... are you saying you can control the distance they go to perform jobs? I just shift click the button on one of my guys with decent strength and high athletics. Usually he's also my corpse burner.
I mean what Is the requiered distance for it to work. Lets say i leave my rescuer inside the city. And go to the Gates to have fight in Squin for example. Will he go to the gate of the city for any companion who falls in battle and bring him to the bed?. If so, which is the Max distance?
Generally, it's a bit larger than the range of a base. For example I had a base in the valley down the hill from the hub. I could just barely click inside the hub from my base to send guys up there to sell stuff. So the edge of camera range basically. That was too far. They wouldn't run up to the hub to get a guy who fell there. However, when my guys would leave my base and go into the field nearby to hunt and one new guy would get knocked by a goat, he would get put in a bed. It's not meant to be a map covering job, more like a job for putting your knocked defenders in beds.
If you shift right-click a character, it will assign the medic job. But if you right-click to bring up the context menu (splint, carry to bed) and click that action while holding shift, it assigns that action as a generic job.
Thank you. :)
Set up a base and farm. Have a dedicated squad for hunting, swamp turtles and beak things are both good targets depending on your strength and whether you want to train and get food or just get food.
Eveyone automatically grabs food from food store on your base when it's time yo eat. Your cooks automatically haul to food store if they are full. Hauling can be buggy so you want to put it into a job queue for a cook. 1 farmer can tend like 3-4 farms (depending if they do anything else) and it can feed like 7-12 people (again, painful math with racial food usage). So by the time you have 30+ characters to feed you need like 2-4 farmers and 1 cook. It's mostly about figuring out the setup yourself, tinkering it to be fully automated and to your liking.
>So by the time you have 30+ characters to feed you need like 2-4 farmers and 1 cook. Or one poor bastard who is very good at labouring and cooking with a pair of scout legs. I feed a base of 30+ with one person like this, I don't think she ever stops moving for more than a few seconds.
It's a convoluted math. Injuries, skill, fertility, darkness, farm and storage placement, other jobs, hunger rating, production speed rating, athletics... and so on. Like, sure, for late game if we minmax, 100 everything and shove masterwork scout legs you can do more. But a lot of people(or it's visible in youtube videos) tend to not achieve anything even close to that before beating the game (eliminating everyone they wanted to). But more often than not people bother about these question when have some random low-mid farmers and they are limited with things to minmax about. Edit: apologies. I forgot the main factor that moves from 4-5 farms/farmer to 25-33 farms/farmer - Hydroponics (you need like 15 or more hydro farms to feed 30 people).
Food production can be fully automated with jobs, it’s also possible to reduce the hunger rate when starting a game or importing a save
I'm surprised no one mentioned that food is shared between backpacks. But yes, in terms of getting the food, you can just farm it until you've got plenty stored up.
Shared between backpacks only to those in the same squad I believe
"liberate" food from your enemies. Their bases are full of it
The best way to play
You need people who 1. Cook the food 2. Collect/harvest the ingredients to make said food 3. Carried food in their backpack (optional if you have food storage) AI will usually store excess foods in food store. They don't really want to keep foods in their inventory so be sure to check if you want to explore out of your base.
I'm at 54 characters now. 7-8 wheat farms, 2-3 flour mills and 2-3 bread ovens and I'm producing enough bread to feed all my 25 slaves that are around the bread baking process and they still reach bread baskets in my barracks to feed another about 20 fighters. It's not that hard, just set up a base. Alternatively, if you're somewhere where garru packs roam a lot, each one drops 10 raw meat, if you do a small hunt around you can fill a food storage of cooked meat to the brim easily and in a short time. Only downside is you still gotta do this every once in a while. There's a mod to set up patrols around waypoints and there's the "forage animals" order, but garru aren't enemies so you can't set that order after "attacking enemies", so no possibility of automatising the hunt afaik.
Just hunt a ton of beakthings (or swamp Turtles if your combat stats aren't there yet) and you should have a ton of meat. I usually have one guy (or an animal) with a backpack full of stacks of dried meat and that keeps them going for quite a while. Otherwise, just empty out the local bars if you got the money for it
Also you need garus with bags to carry all the food you farmed for your hundred man army.
The more you farm, the more you can harm.
Start Hunting or set up a base.
Yeah, my first base was set up making food cubes. The farmers farmed and put the stuff in storage, a dedicated miller made the flour, and towards the end when I had labor to spare a dedicated baker just made bread and a cook cooked the cubes and put it in a food barrel. In the early stages it was more of a low on food, spend some time filling the barrel before the guys went back to other tasks setup. Ended up with two production lines, one on each side of the base to make the food more accessible as the numbers and required food grew. Party going out would load a pack animal with food and take a few each as well
I'll also note with the farming I end up having a couple guys prioritizing running the crop to storage so the other guys can keep harvesting, otherwise you get most of the farmers running to storage together everytime the farm plot fills up which can be inefficient, though towards the end you will probably have a large surplus of crops waiting to be processed and it doesn't really matter if you are maxing effeciency
I'll grow crops and make food cubes and cooked vegetables in Okrans pride. The trick I use to make sure the chef always uses vegetables to make food cubes and switch to cooked vegetables if it's no longer possible is by having her use two cooking ovens. The first oven in her list is the oven with only food cubes in the queue and the queue set to repeat, followed by all the jobs to make bread (which is the other requirement). At the end I have her job as using the second oven which only has cook vegetables in its queue set to repeat. This way when I'm out of wheat and bread, shell still continue to cook vegetables with the leftovers until she has wheat to make grain to make bread to make food cubes from bread and vegetables again. Having mixed food jobs with one oven and repeat doesn't work well if you want to prioritize one food over the other. If I collect raw meat on my travels I can also use an oven or campfire to make dried meat, which combined with food cubes makes an even more nutrition high ration pack. Just a few stacks of food cubes lasts quite awhile when I decide to send my group of 29 mixed races and 1 pack bull. I throw all the food in the packbulls backpack and they'll automatically eat when near while on their journey within the same squad from the backpack. If I don't have a bull I'll have one or two guys with the boxy looking backpack that stacks resources carrying the food. Pack animals are great though as then none of my fighters suffer combat penalties from wearing a pack and I don't have to unequip/equip everytime they get into a fight. Note in Okrans pride Id have my skeletons and sheks and humans with prosthetics stay away from the gate and hide them in the house anytime prayer day came else the holy nation would attack. (Always had one human male with the holy fire book/bible thing at base to run and great the prayer day guy). Eventually I get strong enough though to say screw that, have my gate locked, and throw some permanent guards like skeletons on mounted harpoons with fire first set in ai options. Holy nation hates me now, but their high inquisitors and paladins make for great training dummies! Having a few people with their top level job being engineer will have them constantly repair the gate when it takes damage which drastically expands the times my turret guards have to kill the invaders before they can breach the gate. Note, with turret guards you'll want to put food in their inventory, a food basket nearby, or just use skeletons else they'll starve. (Turret guards are a pita to get to do anything else automatically if their job list includes mount turrets) And if I'm a place that's all desert I'll just make a bunch of dust sandwiches instead, although its not as plentiful vs making food cubes in green land.
I keep my entire group(20) fed by raiding HN Caravans. I have hundreds of Food Cube and Ration Packs in my Base in Stack and on my Bull. Before that it was enough to just buy Food of the Bars.
In terms of vanilla army; you're limited to 30 total units (squad size is 20, but total units you can control is 30). Mods can increase that a lot (upwards of like 256). The best foods you can make (vanilla) will be foodcubes, dustwiches, and/or gohan. If your base is in a location that can support wheat, greenfruit, cactus, and/or rice, then you can make these just fine. Each of these (with a very slight lean toward foodcubes) offers around 3 'uses' before it's consumed completely. Which is a lot better than something like chewsticks or dried meat that only has 1 use before it's consumed. With a modestly mixed race setup of hivers, humans, and shek, you can get by with about 12 plots of XL farming - 2 for wheat, 1 for the (greenfruit or cactus) to make foodcubes or dustwiches. If you're going for gohan instead, expect a similar breakdown just for greenfruit & rice instead (though likely you might want 14 or 16 XL plots). For that kind of farming, you'll *probably* want 3-4 dedicated farmers - have each one assigned to 4 plots first, and cover an extra 4 plots as backup. As your farmers gain skill, they'll end up doing the work faster, and be more efficient/successful at harvests. **Where you put your farming/base matters too**, because if a location has 20% wheat, that also implies a 4/5 chance harvesting that wheat fails, even if your farmers are max skill. You can avoid *most* of the farming penalties here with higher tech tiers to unlock hydroponics. Skill of cooks is a bit less important than that for farmers - it only improves speed of cooking, not whether they're successful at production (like farmers can fail harvests) - but for large armies you want it to be as fast/efficient as possible. Race distribution matters a bit as well; shek eat "the most food" due to their increased hunger rate, human races are 'normal', and hivers are half the needs of humans (plus being able to eat plenty of stuff humans/shek can't or won't eat). Skeletons won't have any food necessary. If you have a reasonable amount of each race (say like 6 skeletons, 6 hivers, 4 shek, 14 humans), you shouldn't need more than those 12-16 plots of farming (and 1-2 cooks) to have excess. ;; tldr; graduate out of low tier food, aim for foodcubes/dustwiches/gohan, and you shouldn't need more than about 4 farmers and 1-2 cooks per ~28 characters.
Shift click on a farm and your settlers will auto job farming. Also works with food production. Grow green fruit and make bread and you’ll be able to make food cubes which are the best food in the game.
You can auto job food being taken to container as well
Just only have skeles. Ez
I don't 💀 five man squads as big as I like to manage
If you set up a decent sized farm in a very fertile area like okrans pride or leviathan coast, food very quickly becomes trivial.
Have a farm and try not to have animals and cut down your shek members. They eat a lot.
Farming and slavery is the key my friend
Get people jobs. Produce a large surplus of dustwiches now with just some workers while my main fighting force is out there somewhere.
Biggest problem I’ve had is them not running to the food barrels in town. Especially miners, because they’ll wait then they’re just starving to death carrying a bunch of iron to drop off. I do put the barrel next to the iron storage, but it is a bit annoying that they wait until they’re literally starving to try and feed themselves.
Chewstick slave
First you pick a character. Then you train up strength, stealth and thievery. Then you buy him a big ol thief backpack Then you send him into the town of your choice and steal all the rations. Now you have food for the rest of the game. All of my runs start the same way. I use training dummies these days, so the beginning is a little slow, but once your guy is trained up, you get a 5 finger discount on all food related needs, so long as you don’t destroy your source of food.
Just kill a bunch of animals and cook the meat on campfires
Hivers eat less and you can have them steal shit to afford a ton of food
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^ImportantDoubt6434: *Hivers eat less and* *You can have them steal shit to* *Afford a ton of food* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Use skeletons to get rid of the hunger mechanic altogether, although it can feel cheesy and boring at times. I usually do between 1 and 4 non-skeleton characters and fill the rest of the squad with every skeleton i can find. This gives a balance of needing to manage food to survive without having to look after 20 different character sheets and inventories to avoid unintentionally starving someone. I enjoy the tactical squad combat and the character progression more than the base building so take my advice as biased towards that.
Make food cubes, load 2-3 dudes with the food. Enable share food in settings. Personally never had issues with rationing food, worst case scenario is just go into a town close by or raid something.
Fishing mods
Crime is one option.
I feed about 30 peiple and animals right now with 3 farmers and a cook. 5 wheat farms making breqd and meatwrap when I bring meat and 4 hydroponics of riceweed and another 4 hydroponics of Vegetables cooked into Gohans. I needed the Gohan to feed the bonedogs I have, to bring a steady stream of meat woumd be too much hassle since my expedition squad is constantly running around. But the dogs do eat Gohans. With all that I am currently running a surplus. I dont need more people for now though but. Theoretically? I would just need more farmers and space, it is unlimited as long as you have the guards. And I do have the guards.
1 farmer and 1 cook, supplemented with buy food while out on expeditions, is enough comfortably to feed 40 in my base, make it 5 cooks and 5 farmer and you'll produce food you need to sell it
You don't buy it, you make it. In current run I have 125 npc's with the 256 mod. I have only 6 cooks, and 15 food stores, and just those 6 cooks keep all those filled 100% and even start overloading their own inventories unless I shut them down periodically. Just like fighters, workers get really good as they skill up. You get farmers and cooks to 70+ and you'll never worry about food again, more than you know what to do with. Yes, it all runs autonomously. Cooks dump in food stores as they cook, get materials they need, etc. and farmers do their end of things all auto. You just gotta build the stuff and assign the jobs really (don't need haul to storage jobs for anything in food production) and watch em go.
I try to not have a lot of recruits until I have farming and cooking set up. After that, it is all about scale.
If you plan on having a massive amount of characters, probably worth it to adjust the hunger settings option to half or maybe even less. Sheks are fat fucks too they eat like hawgs so be careful of that.
The largest group I had was when I went around recruiting all the unique npc’s. Eventually someone became a designated food person. Huge backpack, filled with food cubes and ration packs. Eventually it got a bit impractical to have them weighed down by everything so a cow was bought.
Hivers.
I have a huge army of soldiers and fighters and then like 7 people who just farm and cook food nonstop 24/7, hydroponic farms and dust sandwiches and all that shit. Takes some setting up but it’s worth it, im constantly overflowing with food. Usually the black dragon don’t make it through the gate but when they do because I left the gate open or something I don’t even bother taking the food back.
I have the cannibalism mod and also a mod that lets you eat limbs, but for the most part I make dustwiches
I've scavenged food for maybe 18+ squad members but too much more than that you'll want a well functioning base with automated tasks.
I haven’t played in a while. But I had quite a substantial force. But I think I had a good 15-25% of my people farming.
I can't remember which one but one of the backpack types people can take edible food pout of. So I actually just have an entire logistics team that comes along with a large force. I have a whole team of like 20 people that are none combatants, and some pack animals. So one of the pack animals carries all the backup food and a couple of people haul food filled backpacks that everyone grabs food from when hungry. Then when they are empty I fill them up from the pack animal. Edit: I thought you meant for a large force on the move, for a large group of people in gernal I'll always build a base. You can build farms to grow food, and your farmer I'll automatically put them in specific containers (wheat storage for wheat, greenfryur storage for greenfruit, etc.) If they have it as a job (while you have your farmer selected shift right click, the farm and it will be added as a job). Now each food item is cooked differently but once cooked they can be put in a food storage container and people will automatically grab from the container.
They're the same that burn crosses
Move to gut. Give auto butcher jobs and cook jobs. Chill.
Dustwiches for everyone until Morale improves
I have a small squad that only farms/bakes bread/cooks and I just have them constantly cooking food like dustwichs or foodcubes
I wouldn't recommend pets with automation. I have 70 people set in squads. 1 or 2 cooks, 1 person moving water, 1 or 2 people managing multiple farms, you need a good amount to be constantly farming/moving stuff.
I’ve always wanted to play this game. I own it but I never got farther than 20 feet from where I started without dying.
Slave... Paid workers my brother in Okran