A year's haul

[darkscaryforest]

Lately I've been obsessed with the question of how I could possibly maximize food production. There's lots of good posts describing obvious and not so obvious ways to attain lots of food such as:

, but the solution I've been searching for is a step up from what I could find - hence the reason for this post.

I suppose a good way to frame it would be to ask if there were a way to gather a year's worth of food in 2-3 days time in a renewable, sustainable fashion? For one person that's 75 * 70 days = 5250 hunger points. The bundling wrap allows you to save food indefinitely, so keeping food from spoiling isn't a problem. Working on this problem I ran into the following considerations:

-time to gather ingredients

-time to cook the ingredients (if applicable..maybe a year's worth of raw materials is better)

-how big a stack of food items am I able to take out of storage at one time (aka the spoilage rate of the food items/how many trips to storage do I make)

-the time to build and maintain whatever method is used to attain the food (want to avoid rare/hard to renew items)

The best I could come up with was a large fenced area that contained dozens of bunny huts. The fenced area led to a tentacle trap built by a wickerbottom. The way it works is that at dusk a player could stand outside the fence with meat in their inventory.  All the bunnymen come out of their houses and immediately aggro the player, but must go around the fence into the tentacles to get to them. The tentacles kill dozens of bunnymen, dropping loads of carrots and meat. These can be used to craft plenty of meaty stews- and with ~10 or so crockpots I could belt out at least a couple season's worth of food in a day.....except for the little detail of collecting all the fallen loot from the bunnymen which will be on top of gobs of tentacles.  At best, I could only collect 1 or 2 items before needing to move out of the way of emerging tentacles at a time.  There's the lazy forager, but orange gems are hard to come by and I wouldn't want to add killing the dragonfly as part of the method for example.

Anywho, if you have any great ideas, please share them! If I think of something I'll update this post with new ideas for any future searches.

 

 

[ShadowDuelist]

Ive been able to make about 3/4 year worth of meaty stews out of walking deerclops or bearger to unlucky beefalo herds. Eventually beefalos become a pest and need to be taken down, although im not sure whats the reproduction rate of beefs in order to make this sustainable. I do know for sure that if you separate baby beefs and make small herds all over the place you will rarely run out of beefs  and have loads of fun walking around when its mating season. Thats a lot of early preparation but an eternal source of food.

 

 

[Dekay]

Instead of using tentacles why not just befriend a couple of bunny men and create a bunny civil war? You can pick up the carrots safely as they drop during the fight and the meat and puffs after it’s over. Ofc the best source of food is fire farms but they don’t work in DST because of smoldering, 

[spideswine]

So uh, why not just bee boxes?

[HamBatter]

Bunnies vs Beefalo first, then Bunnies vs Bunnies for Meaty Stews. Can also get Butterfly drops on the side by planting flowers near Hound Mounds.

[Maslak]

Bee boxes. Make crapton of bee boxes. Eating raw honey is the best.

[darkscaryforest]

So the bunny wars suggestion is what I've been using until now and it does work great, but I don't know that it will scale. You have to "fake attack" each bunny you want killed and after 20 or so you find the sun coming up and all the bunnies run to their houses.  The bee boxes are also a good suggestion, the catch being getting that many bee honeycombs. If only don't starve together allowed world hopping! I suppose you could fight the queen bee until you have the right number of honeycombs. More than likely, I'll use a combination of these over a few days to do the trick.

So just a couple other ideas for anyone who stumbles on this:

-I've had old deerclops smash up tentacle traps thanks to his freezing attack. Each tentacle always drops 2 monster meat. One of the nifty properties of monster meat is that if multiple monster meats are left on the ground near each other...eventually the game stacks them together in one pile. This can make collection very easy..even on top of still living tentacles. I've gotten 5 stacks of 20 monster meats this way. Regular meat doesn't seem to stack like this.

-I did find some nice videos showing massive amounts of food in the making:

 

EDIT:

Shadow's suggestion of multiple herds of beefalo might actually be a great way to go about this since you can effectively create your own savanna biomes by relocating turf.  If you created say a dozen of these, then yeah I can totally see a rotating slaughter of giant herds. You could probably maximize the yield using deerclops (since he'll be less likely to die due to freezing). You could ensure there are so many beefalo clops will die and you just collect..

[HamBatter]

Bunnies can scale if you have bait or work in an area away from their hutches.

[CarlZalph]

Well, juicy berries should you have a world with them will give 12.5 hunger per berry uncooked, thus 420 uncooked juicy berries to survive a whole year.

If you're cooking them, then you get 18.75 hunger per berry and thus 280 cooked juicy berries.

You get 3 per plant, so 140 plants for uncooked or 93+1/3 (94) plants for cooked.

 

Wicker makes all plants within 30 units grow when it isn't winter, and it's 5 reads for that book.

A full reading would make this requirement go down to: 28 or 18+2/3 (19) bushes.

To get more books use a werepig to eat a lot of the berries for stacks of manure.

 

It takes one swing of your hand item to get all three knocked off and less than a second on average to pick up the three on the ground.

You can also get a lot of gobblers with these for some bonus drumsticks, or only pick them in non-day to not worry about them.

 

They're fairly low maintenance, and you can make the cooked berries rot in 1 day to get more rot for refertilization of the plants, though with the werepig you should have boxes of manure all over.

I'd say these things would net you the most food points with the lowest amount of effort.

 

The only real resources you'd be sinking is the shovel for replanting/removing plague, and possibly fuel for a flingo for the just-in-case.

 

Edit: And here's an image showing different layouts for higher density of bushes you could do for Wicker readings.  This is apart of a the circle in a circle packing problem, but the hexagonal approach grants much more than squares and is easy to do in-game.

Spoiler

1075 bushes for hexagon, 709 for square.

[ItsPizzaTime]

If you are still doing the bunny civil war method, try to make an enclosed area that the bunnies will be baited into walking into, closing them in for when you need them and the night isn't long enough that way even if they try to run back to their houses there's a wall in the way and will still fight if you fake attack. I suggest using some of the winter holiday food as bait as they do not expire. 

Bunny civil wars, bee houses, frog rains near beefalo in heat, and luring shadowmonkeys into traps during the summer. The combination of the last two has more food than my partner and I need for  the entire next year if you get enough frog rains and spend enough time farming monkeys. Otherwise like already mentioned the bunny houses and bee farm is quite easily the most reliable way to get a continuous stream of food considering the rate at which honey is produced (if bee houses are placed properly) and the fact that rabbits respawn at the same time they are killed the next day.