Reliable Food Sources?

[WhatTheDuck]

Hi community,

i stopped playing since the Ranching Upgrade and was wondering how much has the food sources changed?

Atm it seems to me that growing food is easier than ranching meat, is this correct?

I dont need a no-brainer food source, i just want to invest in something worth it.

A pacu farm seems to be easy but i sounds a little glitchy to grow fishes out of nothing (does they still produce eggs before death from starvation?)

 

Mealwood: good for early game but needs dirt and has a bad taste

Bristle: needs water but as long as i can sustain the water its a good source

Wheat: not worth the hassle in comparsion to Bristle

Shrooms: some people like them, a lot of people dont like to handle slime... not sure about them.

 

Meat: Pacu and Dreckos seems to be the best, but still harder than growing?

 

So do you have any tips for me, are my explanation correct and how important is high quality food with the new increased expecation from astronaut duplicants?

 

Regards WhatTheDuck
 

[BlueLance]

In all honesty I think the answers are going to be really varied.

For instance I usually get mealwood until I have glossy dreckos, then I switch to meat, omelttes and mushrooms + wild food like pincha peppernuts and sleet wheat. Once I have a good source of water I then build my farms and literally farm everything except sleet wheat mainly because I have never really tried farming it before. But everyone has their own preferences!

Mushrooms are great so long as slimelung isnt an issue, a good thing to do which I found out accidently was to make a storage compactor filled with food poisoning, it then somehow kills the slimelung.

[Neotuck]

I like to build good water treatment plants for my colonies so I tend to farm bristles for early mid game

Then pincha peppers for mid late game so I can make stuffed berries, BBQ, and coffee 

[avc15]

Early on I gradually dig to access every wild sleet wheat and pincha I can find. Then I cook pepper breads without farming at all, just setting them to harvest.

Eventually gathering wild ingredients becomes worse than farming. I.E. when the time spent running all over the map to gather ingredients is more than the time i'd take to tend about 1/8th as many crops, and you have all the equipment you need to run that farm. But I'm on cycle 371 and still just harvesting wild plants.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Personally, I use a variety of food sources that partially depend on my progression through the tame.

1. Mealwood is decent for early-game.  Don't go for mushbars -- unless you like diarrhea and have a HUGE amount of water to spare.  Mealwood grows quick, only uses dirt -- which the starter biome has a lot of -- and doesn't require much dupe attention.  Don't bother cooking it into bars, though; it takes too much water.
2. As soon as I have a light source, I start a bristlebloom farm and start getting rid of my mealwood.  Cooking gristleberries makes these pretty efficient.  They become even better when you can start using farmer's touch on them.
3. Once I have access to slime, I start a mushroom farm and get rid of the rest of the mealwood.  Mushrooms and bristleblooms will do wonderfully for a long time
4. Late in the game, I'll start having "leftovers" from ranching.  For example, using hatches for coal and dreckos for plastic will result in an excess of eggs and meat that I can use for cooking.  I don't necessarily make a ranch specifically for food, but its a great supplement to my other food sources.
5. At some point, I'll eliminate my bristleblooms and farm sleetwheat and pinchapeppers.  If I have a puft ranch, I'll keep the mushrooms going off the slime they produce (My current map has FOUR polluted oxygen geysers), and I'll limit the food certain high-skilled dupes can eat.

[Gurgel]

By now I do only 2 steps:

1. Direct to mushrooms from the start. Slime is plenty and some careful work with deodorizers and health-monitoring makes it accessible safely early in the game. There are just about enough Muckroots to get there and usually I can do it without using any Mush-Bars now. Do not go above 3 dupes until you have set it up and it works. Most critical step is to build a low mushroom cavern early and make sure all the CO2 pools in it and that it is not too hot.

2. End-game either Drecko-farming and omlettes from that or Berry Sludge from wild Sleet-Wheat and some domesticated Bristle Berries.

[Tranoze]

6 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

As soon as I have a light source, I start a bristlebloom farm and start getting rid of my mealwood.

I dont even farm mealwood since light source started at day 1.

Although i stopped the water supply cuz i have a decent wheat farm and pepper, but this is how i always start. Those light are permanent.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 minute ago, tranoze said:

I dont even farm mealwood since light source started at day 1.

Although i stopped the water supply cuz i have a decent wheat farm and pepper, but this is how i always start. Those light are permanent.

 

I've used a similar method as well.  You can put 5 planter boxes beside the printing pod and start growing bristleblooms as soon as you have basic farming researched.  Or if you use the Sandbox mode, you can put glass tiles directly above the pod and fit 9 more planter boxes in the light.

[Tranoze]

Just now, KittenIsAGeek said:

I've used a similar method as well.  You can put 5 planter boxes beside the printing pod and start growing bristleblooms as soon as you have basic farming researched.  Or if you use the Sandbox mode, you can put glass tiles directly above the pod and fit 9 more planter boxes in the light.

The glass is what i built later on, and i dont use planter box because i will have to switch to hydroponic farm anyway, i just wait 2~3 days for my dups to complete the researches, which, doesnt hurt much anyway. They ll eat meal wood during the time.

The golden rule is

1. Dont accept any more dups until you are sure you can handle their food and oxygen, i keep 3 dups until my first harvest of those bristle blossom.
2. Aways disable eating direct meat/bristle blossom, and have one chief right when you can harvest them and cook them for most kcals gain.
3. Never dig mealwood, but dig all bristle blossom for seeds, wild bristle blossom require 24 days of light, which, you wont be able to harvest anymore anyway.
   
    

4 hours ago, WhatTheDuck said:

Wheat: not worth the hassle in comparsion to Bristle

Ehh, what are you trying to say? Wheat is the most important thing to farm right now, because of the impression update, you need pepper bread, require wheat and pepper, BBQ give soul food, which, decrease the movement speed, which is very bad since stress is easy to handle anyway.

Also Berry Sludge is the most OP food for mid quality job, they will never stress with tier 3 food and they will never spoil, and their kcals is insane.

Pepper is easy to farm, it not hard to raise temperature.

If you want reliable and good food source, wheat is the way to go.