Early game food issues

[HorizonBuscat]

First time posting so please be kind! I've played 4 map seeds of the alpha and struggle for food every time. In the base game I rush first tier farming research and plop mealwood down and forget about it until I have enough water for bristle blossoms. In the alpha I haven't had more than 6 bog buckets and run low on sulfur for grubfruit plants pretty quickly. Swamp chard is great but runs low really quickly, even for three dupes. If I try to ranch critters then I either run out of sulfur or metal. I am using the electric grill to increase the amount of calories. To me this feels very similar to the base game early access when they needed to add more buried object mealwood seeds.  Am I the only one? Missing some obvious game mechanic? I know I can send a dupe to a sandstone other asteroid to grab seeds, but having to expand within the first 15-25 cycles when dupes have almost no skills seems really soon to me. Any recommendations would be great! 

[Gurgel]

Others have complained as well. Personally I did run into an issue where bog-buckets did not drop seeds until I re-loaded. But after that, it basically works if you stay at 3 dupes for a while. If you need dirt for mush-bars, use the new building for separating mud into dirt and water.

 There is also the new sub-forum for the alpha/DLC, you find more there.

[Demalis]

I have not had this problem yet, but on my next go I am going to give pacus/farming a go. I think pacus can survive on seeds now, so with a small farm you should be able to manage this. You may have to import algae until you have enough seeds to manage. Pacus are an easy starter food, start with one breeder, once the seeds roll in you can expand the breeding tank.

[Steve8]

Be careful when releasing the Pacus. They eat seeds now so remove the seeds from your PW tank before you consolidate all the water.

Sulfur is limited, but it doesn't run out that fast. You can also put some wild grubgrubs into the farms to massively decrease the growth time and increase the calories you get from grubfruit. Fertilizer is also a good option, even if you don't produce it yourself. There is a decent amount that can be mined

[HorizonBuscat]

Not sure if there is a way to reply directly, but to Steve8's point about grubgrubs- 2/4 maps didn't have any within the next nearest biomes (1 was exclusively cold ice biome surrounded) and digging with 3 was very slow with other necessary projects going on. Tried to use oxygen masks but quickly figured out those haven't been completely fixed yet. 1st map had a dupe starve in the process of trying to do that and just restarted. 

 

Thank you to everyone else as well! I thought this was the subforum for the dlc? Please correct me if there was somewhere else I should have posted this. 

[Steve8]

Then, as said, use the microbe musher if you have early game food issues. Same as on other hard map. Eventually you'll get enough resources from other biomes to stabilize.

I thought this was the subforum for the dlc

No. This is the regular forum