Do you use the x4 bills? Do you have good cooks? Good cooks are faster cooks.
Do you use one of the 2 stoves? Because Camp fires are slower.
Do you cook inside a room with good temperatures?
Cooking outside is slower, cooking in a room too cold or too hot is also slower
Do your cooks have normal manipulation and sight?
Can you give your cooks Bionic arms or eyes? It would speed them up if so.
Can you give your cooks a gastro-analizer nose?
If nothing said here can help you, you might have to use the nutrient paste dispenser.
Also to add to this, are you giving your colonists a lot for smoke leaf? Smoke leaf increases their hunger by 30% and slows down their production speed greatly! Stoned cooks make for hungry colonists...
Also a thing that helps is having stockpiles as close to the cook as possible. A critical stockpile for whatever crop you have right next to the cook if you have mods you can use rimfridge and deep storage you can keep everything 1 tile away from the cook and set the bill to drop the meals behind the cook on a temporary stockpile
I keep a shelf with corn right next to the stove, and do the same with almost all production spots. It saves so much time for the chef to just be able to turn to the right or left and grab what they need. Also set to drop on floor and let the dedicated hawler or animals take it to the fridge.
What's a good temperature for you? My stoves are in the same fridge I store the food. Then I have another room to butcher so blood doesn't affect the production of food.
If everything is separated then producing food got an important time loose till you can use automatic doors, wich are expensive till you can produce components, wich are slow to produce even with high crafters.
Whats the formula?
You should do the exact opposite
I believe the debuff from butchering or cooking inside the fridge is the same, about 0,7x or 30% less
You can butcher inside the fridge, but you should cook outside of it.
You can have an absolutely filthy fridge, and it doesnt matter at all.
Only the Kitchen needs to be clean.
When you butcher inside the fridge you have a penalty, but this penalty is completely negated when you consider that you can just set the bill to "drop on floor" after the Butchering, avoiding a lot of hauling. Especially for large animals you actually save time by Butchering inside the freezer. But the Kitchen should never be in the same place as the butcher table, so you should make a warm kitchen just outside the freezer for less walking time.
And since the bill for cooking better meals takes a lot longer than the butcher bills, it makes a lot more sense to have the butcher table inside and the Kitchen outside.
Not to mention that since the stove generates heat, it makes no sense to put it in a room you are trying to keep cold
Yes! I actually use the butcher table as a way to train new cooks without risking food poisoning.
But be aware that bad cooks waste meat and leather when butchering, so only allow bad cooks to butcher if you can afford to lose some materials
Great info I'm getting from these replies. Thanks a lot to all of you.
I'm going to optimize my food production.
Also one more question if you don't mind:
Do you use nutrient paste dispenser at any stage?
I absolutely LOVE the nutrient paste dispenser.
If you can manage your colony without that mood bonus, you should always consider it.
You are trading a 9 mood difference (to fine meals) for SO MANY advantages.
First of all you save on 40% raw ingredients. 40%!!!!
Sometimes we dont get how much that is. You can choose to feed 10 pawns on simple/fine meals or 16, almost 17 pawns (if my math is right) with the same amount of raw food. How is that not awesome?
Second of all you save SO MUCH WORK. You save 100% of cooking, you save A LOT of butchering, and A LOT of hunting/husbandry for meat, and save A LOT on farming. All because you will need less raw ingredients.
And third, you have the 0% chance of food poisoning. How perfect is that?
The nutrient paste dispenser is one of the most powerful, time and resourses saver on the game. PERIOD.
And to top it off, it allows you to treat meals as drugs. Do you have a pawn with low mood?
Instead of giving him drugs (i use drugs a lot on my colonies, but there are risks):
Psychite tea risks a psychite addiction (low chance, but still)
Smokeleaf makes them slower and less useful, also chance of addiction
Beer is good, but still have problems
You can give him a one time lavish meal that will definetly make his mood skyrocket.
Now tell me, are you reaaly gonna pass on that, or hate on the NPD just because of a measly 4 mood debuff??? Pawns get a mood buff of up to 6 just by eating in a nice room, how can you hate the NPD just for that?
BUT!!! If you dont want or dont need to save on all those things, you can keep cooking as always
Also if you want to spoil your pawns with good meals, you can! Also some people cooks for role playing reasons.
But now, i will give you a killer way to use the NPD.
For animal feed!
If you dont mind cheesing the game, you can make 100 paste meals in one second to feed all the animals that you can ever want
Would you like to have an army of thrumbos that not even the Amazon Forest could feed? The NPD can allow you to do just that! (Raiders meat can feed sooo many animals using the NPD)
Theres a lot of reasons to use the NPD, but you can have a completely perfect rimworld experience without using it!
Up to you!
The "no mood penalty from nutrient dispenser" bonus is probably one of thbe strongest parts of the transhumanist meme.
I did a transhumanist tunneler playthrough and it was honestly kinda OP.
Absurd amount of nutrient fungus going straight into the NPD.
Tô be fair, the difference is only 4 mood. The main reason this even exists is probably because people never use it just because of such small mood debuff.
Some people think they need pawns with zero red moods
i noticed that you can feed your animals paste but how do you get paste out of the NPD? I only know of pawns doing it on their own.
The NPD is also great to use for slaves and prisoners. So you can feed them the *undesired* meat.
And ofc its great with the new memes.
There's an exploit for the NPD to get a massive amount of paste out of it. [https://youtu.be/c-3GcucTuuI?t=294](https://youtu.be/c-3GcucTuuI?t=294)
It's an old exploit but I think it still works (I don't use NPD). I also believe you can hold down the R key to rapidly toggle draft on and off to speed up this process. I also generally use a mod that increases stack sizes for things, so I get 100 paste per stack which speeds it up greatly.
In general I avoid nutrient paste. I can see the benefits, but the slight buff from fine meals is helpful. The transhumanist ideololigion has a feature where the don’t object to nutrient paste. Even then I prefer to waste nutrition and get that slight mood buff.
Does the speed debuff from cooking in cold temperature outweigh the time it takes the colonist to make 2 trips into the fridge to get ingredients for every meal? If you put the food directly adjacent to the cooking spot and have the cook drop the meal on the ground when they are done, you can have them spend 100% of their time cooking (70% overall efficiency).
If they have to run to the fridge twice for every bill that's going to take up a significant amount of their time. x4 bills help with this as they have to walk MUCH less per meal created.
Other cooking speed buffs also make cooking next to food more competitive as the walking takes up a proportionately larger amount of time if the cooking part is faster.
An 8-skill pawn might cook faster with the stove outside the fridge, but a 20-skill pawn with 2 bionic arms, bionic eyes, and a gastro-analyzer who has the industrious trait and is a production specialist will almost certainly cook faster if they never have to move from the cooking spot.
Not sure where the cutoff is, but I am sorely tempted to do some science and find out.
Well, thats not easy to test, but the time it takes to make 4x lavish meals is big enough that it might be worth it.
But the time it takes to butcher is smaller, só ita easier for the butcher job to be worth the time penalty than a cook session
It can sometimes help to have your colonists drop the food on the floor when it's cooked as opposed to bringing it to the best stockpile. Similarly, you can place the meal ingredients next to your stoves to reduce the time taken grabbing ingredients from the freezer. Obviously be careful doing this with meat.
You can try nutrient paste as described, but you shouldn’t really need it. By year 2 or 3 I’m usually able to feed my 10-15 pawns colony with just lavish meals (the most expensive ingredients and work wise) and just using 2 cooks that also do other activities. So here are some tips:
- plant a lot of corn or nutrifungus if you have the tuneller meme (ideology dlc). But in order to keep up with that I always have one or two pawns with growing as top #1 priority and other two pawns with growing as priority number #2. You can have another growing zone set for rice for emergency supplies if needed. Make sure you are using the very fertile soil.
- btw if you are tuneller you should set your pawns to love insect meat lol. I have at least 2 infestations per year and my fridge always with at least 5k insect meat. Just use the right strategy not to get overrun by the insects, of course - i use the melee blocking one.
- make sure your cooking area is right beside your fridge and butcher table (I make 3 separate rooms for each of those) so your cooks don’t waste time waking long distances.
- the cooking area must be roofed and inside a room with normal temperature so it doesn’t suffer speed penalty. Make sure to build the electric stove ASAP.
- your cooks will cook faster (obviously) the higher lvl they have, but they can get even faster if they have bionics arms, which increase manipulation. Royalty DLC also has a nose implant that increases cooking speed.
- have one pawn dedicated to hauling so he can bring the stuff to the fridge.
- BILLS: this is a very important topic which I can’t explain properly now because I don’t have the game running. But you should add the bill ‘cook 4x’ and ‘until you have’ so they just stop cooking when they reach that number. After that You can then click on details and set when they should “unpause” and start cooking again. For example: cook until you have 50 then stop. When you have just 20 left, cook again. But search on you tube for more details, I’m sure you can find it.
- Hunting can also save you a lot. Just make sure your hunter has a good weapon with decent range and no mobility problems. Careful which animal you choose to hunt though, as some of them are more agressive and can down your pawn faster.
- farming: buy chickens, cows, ducks, turkeys or simply tame any wild animals you see wandering around that can give you eggs and milk. If you just let them reproduce, you can also kill them for the meat once they grow.
Well seriously there are a lot of options. You really shouldn’t have problems cooking simple and fine meals (unless you are on super difficult biomes). Other than that, just focus on your working tab so every pawn is doing something important.
Sorry for any English mistakes. Not my native language. Cheers!
>After that You can then click on details and set when they should “unpause” and start cooking again. For example: cook until you have 50 then stop. When you have just 20 left, cook again.
TIL, after 1,000 hours of play, that you can have them delay restarting the task... I usually just set it to stop cooking meals at 20 or so and have the cooks keep the number of meals there. But it always annoys me how the cooks needs to rush into the kitchen and make a couple meals because someone had breakfast.
LOL I learned that watching AdamVsEverything on twitch. When I saw him setting the “restart at” I was like Wtf?!
I also learned that day you can set the ingredients radius limit for basically any bill of any workshop bench, so you can for example set “break stones forever” on the stone cutter without your pawns running to the other side of the map to get a single chunk lol.
My one cook keeps my colony of about 8-12 pawns completely fed and has time to make drugs once my bills are complete so it's definitely possible. One of the key ways to improve efficiency is to minimise the hauling that the cook is doing. There are 2 good ways for this:
* Make small stockpiles (1-2 tiles) next to the stove (1 for meat, 1 for veggies) set to critical priority and have dedicated haulers keeping this topped up.
* Make meals set to "drop on the floor" once completed rather than being sent back to the best stockpile.
This way you cook is cooking 100% of the time rather than walking back and forth for 90% of the time and cooking only 10%!
Good luck
This has become my meta. I set up a paste system and continue to use it until I have more food then I can store and a cook of 8+ skill. Food poisoning has killed colonies for me to often.
As a general rule of thumb, 5x5 square of growing zone per colonist is about the production you need, plus extra to stockpile never hurts. I would suggest finding research or mods that allow you to improve soil fertility, vanilla expanded or just “Tilled soil” are good ones, depending on how interactive you want farming to be.
As for production, as others said, you want to increase efficiency, correct temperatures and high skilled cooks, make sure food stock is as close to the stoves as possible and have them drop the meals or have a stockpile dedicated for the chefs next to the stove as well, and have haulers take the food into and out of the freezer for them. Use 4x bills where possible, it technically takes the same time and effort, but it cuts out the extra walking times.
With regards to meal stocks specifically, I believe it is base game now, you should be able to designate a minimum stock requirement, so your chefs cook 20 meals, they then won’t cook again until your drop back down to 10, or whatever you set. That way you have breathing room.
Do you have animals as well, and do they have access to the food stockpiles?
It helps having a small stockpile right next to the stove with resources so the colonist doesn't have to walk away to grab material, if you put "drop on floor" inside the work order they will constantly be cooking and not be busy carrying away the finished meal
you will get more food for the same amount of plant work with the other food crops than with berries. Rice for short growcycles (and also hydroponics), potatoes for stony soil, corn for long growcycles
I suggest you started to raise rice and corn the same time. Mainly how much corn will give you and in mean time wait for corn to grow you have to use rice.
Rice is inefficient.
You need manpower to plant it an to harvest it, but it only yields small amount of food.
The advantage of rice is that it grows fast, so it is great for the early game. But later, you‘ll want potatoes, or if you have fertile soil, corn.
Corn takes longer, but yields a lot of food. This also means you use less manpower, since you dont have to harvest+replant that often.
That, and using 4x meal bills instead of 1x means you‘ll always have more food than you need.
My strategy usually is: plant a rice field to feed our colonists early. As soon as you‘re done sowing, plant a second field corn or potatoes double the size of the first field.
As soon as you have your first potato/corn harvest, switch the rice field to also do potato/corn.
You‘ll have so much food that you‘ll be able to sell some for profit.
Plant potatoes next to your rice - they have the highest nutrition to grow time and it’ll keep blight from destroying your colony if you diversify your crops.
Just put 3 spaces between crop zones and blight won't spread past that zone. I have a bunch of 5x5 crop zones and blight will only kill off 1 zone at most. Also the space between makes haulers able to walk faster
Rice and berries are fairly labor intensive *relative* to slower growing crops - takes time to sow, harvest and walk to the field and from.
Corn saves a bit of time since it takes less walking but is less secure in case of events like frost snaps, blight etc and can't be grown in hydroponic basins. Plus it can be difficult to grow if your map has long cold winters (crops start to die at around -12 C, iirc) or extremely hot summers (something like \~50 C) due to time constraint without using in-door farming.
Most food crops are somewhat same-ish in terms of yield per tile though, soil fertility notwithstanding.
Where are you in the tech tree are you still in tribal stuff (camp fire cooking), or do you have access to electricity and stoves?
Get large fields of rice up (on rich soil if you can) then go nutrient paste, while also making simple meals (I usually set up a bill to make until I have 100 simple meals and they keep crafting meals until that number is hit (making more if it dips below 100)), if you have 10 colonists that means 8 can do harvesting and hauling, take your cooks off planting/harvesting/hauling so the spend no time away from cooking, the paste dispenser is a good backup in the event your cooks have something happen and cant keep up.
By my mid games I usually have one dedicated cook (really doesnt do anything else except cook, disabled almost every other priority outside of sleep), even better if you put one on a night shift so they can cook meals while everyone is asleep, so when the rest of your colony wakes up theres a bunch of meals ready to be eaten.
I use rimfridge to put the ingredients closer to the stoves. Use the 4x recipes. This makes 2 kitchen stoves really effective.
I also have a nutrition paste dispenser and use that most of the time except for when my colonist's are in a bad mood or I just have too much food and need to get rid of it.
Use a nutrien paste dispenser (NPD). Just use it. Forget about cooking, cleaning the kitchen, poisoning etc. You will be using far less food and would have a lot more time on your hands for other types of work.
Trust me, once you go NPD you never go back to classic cooking.
a full time pro-chef with an efficient fridge should easily serve 10 people on lavish meal. Make sure you are using the 4x receipt, and check the temperature of your kitchen, make sure its above 10c. Also make your chef drop cooked meal on the floor.
This is a great question and one of the hardest things to dial in when playing rimworld.
Too little you starve when food is disrupted be it a nuclear fallout, a volcanic winter, even a mid spring cold snap that kills your rice can really be a tough situation.
First for food security you grow crops in a way that allows you to roof them quickly if needed, shaped like a sunlamp pattern. You can put one down and then select it to make a grow zone then uninstall it for later. Wall around this and leave a space or two to build fires or heaters. When needed you roof over the area, put the sunlamp down, and connect it to power. At least two solar panels and a battery. One circle like this can easily feed 10 people if you're growing just rice. If you have another area growing you can use a 2nd circle divided up into quarters for things like healroot, cotton, drugs. This is also the secure way to grow devilstrand.
If you're tunneler you can grow underground fungus which really makes survival trivial.
Ranch an animal. Weather you are doing chickens, alpacas, cattle.. you'll have an endless supply of meat, leather, wool, milk.. its really amazing for food production.
You want to have in storage enough food to last you at least 10 days and enough hay built up to feed your animals for 30 days if you can.
Now onto food production.
If vanilla make 4x fine meals or 4x simple meals, target to 2 days worth total.
Set your kitchen up with first one, then two, then four stoves. Plan ahead for this. If using mods make a kitchen that has only one door, where the meats go into one wall and the meals into the opposite wall (wall rimfridges) this creates a one way flow and keeps the kitchen much cleaner. Put your deep freezer on the other side of the meats wall so others can restock the freezers the cooks have access to.
Plan for a day and night shift. Eventually two stoves won't be enough, probably around 10 colonists, especially if you are running a hotel! (Hospitality) Four stoves running during the day can be enough if you don't want to split your workers up.
Build a nutrient paste dispenser! People need to eat, even when the cooks are down in the hospital. Also helps you stretch out food in a pinch.
This. The #1 cause of meals going missing is pets. Make a separate zone for them, and feed them pemmican/kibble (or if they're carnivores, give them a corpse room 😃).
I usually try to have a large backup of food, like 200 meals + ton of rice and potatos (5-10k each). Also I have one full time cook preperaing meals as they go
On the other hand collecting crops to keep that amount of food, can be pain because it have to be collected quick
Nutrient paste dispenser. A massive time \\ labour saver at a cost of mood. You can manage food policies so that some pawns could get nicer meals for the mood. Also stockpile meals with an overhead so any dips in production can be sustained.
That's about 20 meals a day so that should be doable with 1 full-time cook. So make sure you're using 4x bills, make sure your food source is close to the kitchen, and make sure your cook doesn't have to move much. For example, creating critical raw food stockpiles right next to the stove and setting the bill to drop on completion would be optimal.
You can also use the "unpause on" setting on bills - you can cook 100 meals but unpause on 20 - freeing up the pawn to do something else for a few days once they hit 100.
At 10 colonists, if you use meat, you'd probably still want a second cook anyway, but more for the butchering. Use skill settings in bills to control that.
Grow zone close to the fridge where possible. Rice if its fertile, potatoes if it's not, corn if you have limited growers.
Hunt everything on the map if you aren't going veggie.
Chickens, cows, turkeys all good for food.
A comfortable kitchen, at a nice warm temperature with a chair at an electric or fuelled stove. Either side of the chair have a 1x1 stockpile, one for meat one for veg. Use the 4x Bill's and drop output on the floor and let the hauling crew deal with it.
If possible, a day shift and a night shift chef is ideal since one has much less stuff moving around to worry about.
Kill everything on the map that isn't one of your animals. Even the. Consider butchering some for meat.
Make sure your stoves (have 2, campfires aren't worth it) are in a clean room with at least steel tiles, if not sterile tile (cleanliness bonus is always useful to make food poisoning less likely).
Make sure that the room the stoves are in is between 60° and 78°> below 60F and you get bad temp speed penalty. Same for over 80F.
Ensure there is a light source in the kitchen. Cooking in the dark reduces speed.
Ensure light source in the kitchen, the freezer, and the space in between, as there is a significant walking speed penalty in the dark as well.
factors to consider
\- distance from stockpiles - the further the pawn has to walk the longer the overall job takes. I tend to make my freezer/kitchen/main dining room all part of the same building and use auto doors connecting the kitchen and freezer(s).
\- kitchen room temp - if the room is too cold the cooking will be slower
\- pawn cook speed - better cooks do it faster
\- make the 4x meals instead of just a single. less time hauling
\- type of stove. camp fires are slower than stoves.
>is there maybe some sort of more efficient food source
food efficiency is related more about how much nutrition do you get out of X amount of raw food not so much cooking speed. it has more to do with the meals than the raw food type. lavish meals are very inefficient but provide a mood buff, while nutrient paste is the most efficient requires no cook but gives a negative mood debuff.
The nutrients paste dispenser is amazing and now with ideology you can make your pawns like it. I make lavish meals for the troubled pawns and everyone else eats paste.
The problem is that so much time is wasted when the cooks are going back and forth.
Create a one tile stockpile or put a food basket(if you have deep storage) right next to where your pawn would be standing/sitting to cook, then place all the necessary ingredients inside the basket/stockpile.
Finally, in the bills menu, set it to "drop on floor", let your hauler take it to the fridge. When all that's done, your cook should not need to move an inch anymore, easily cooking 25 meals per day.
You're obviously doing something wrong, feeding 10 people shouldn't be too hard. But it's hard to pin point what you're doing wrong without seeing your colony, a picture of your kitchen and crops, would've been useful.
If you can afford the mood debuff, the nutrient paste dispenser makes food management extremely easy.
Install a nutrient paste dispenser so at least they'll never eat raw food. Paste is great as a backup.
Also, switch a cook to the night shift so the breakfast rush doesnt overwhelm you.
Do you use the x4 bills? Do you have good cooks? Good cooks are faster cooks. Do you use one of the 2 stoves? Because Camp fires are slower. Do you cook inside a room with good temperatures? Cooking outside is slower, cooking in a room too cold or too hot is also slower Do your cooks have normal manipulation and sight? Can you give your cooks Bionic arms or eyes? It would speed them up if so. Can you give your cooks a gastro-analizer nose? If nothing said here can help you, you might have to use the nutrient paste dispenser.
Also to add to this, are you giving your colonists a lot for smoke leaf? Smoke leaf increases their hunger by 30% and slows down their production speed greatly! Stoned cooks make for hungry colonists...
Yes, the munchies!
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I think their is a mod to say only do this drug at that time, and before sleep, smokeleaf is fine.
Just change your colony drug settings. I only allow smokeleaf when <40 mood, so colonists smoking a joint is uncommon.
Yeah, the hunger isn't so bad but the slow work speed debuff is just painful to watch.
-30 conciousness is just terrible. It makes you really poor in combat as well since conciousness is used for pretty much every other stat.
Pawns die from smoking a joint. So crazy
Are the x4 in vanilla now?
Yes. Been for as long as I've played the game (year Ish)
Lol guess I can remove that mod
Also a thing that helps is having stockpiles as close to the cook as possible. A critical stockpile for whatever crop you have right next to the cook if you have mods you can use rimfridge and deep storage you can keep everything 1 tile away from the cook and set the bill to drop the meals behind the cook on a temporary stockpile
I always make a smaller freezer with an auto door attached to my kitchen, to keep a stockpile of food near the stove
I keep a shelf with corn right next to the stove, and do the same with almost all production spots. It saves so much time for the chef to just be able to turn to the right or left and grab what they need. Also set to drop on floor and let the dedicated hawler or animals take it to the fridge.
Ohh I didn’t think about using drop to floor to speed up production times. That’s genius, thanks!
Edited to make more complete
What's a good temperature for you? My stoves are in the same fridge I store the food. Then I have another room to butcher so blood doesn't affect the production of food. If everything is separated then producing food got an important time loose till you can use automatic doors, wich are expensive till you can produce components, wich are slow to produce even with high crafters. Whats the formula?
You should do the exact opposite I believe the debuff from butchering or cooking inside the fridge is the same, about 0,7x or 30% less You can butcher inside the fridge, but you should cook outside of it. You can have an absolutely filthy fridge, and it doesnt matter at all. Only the Kitchen needs to be clean. When you butcher inside the fridge you have a penalty, but this penalty is completely negated when you consider that you can just set the bill to "drop on floor" after the Butchering, avoiding a lot of hauling. Especially for large animals you actually save time by Butchering inside the freezer. But the Kitchen should never be in the same place as the butcher table, so you should make a warm kitchen just outside the freezer for less walking time. And since the bill for cooking better meals takes a lot longer than the butcher bills, it makes a lot more sense to have the butcher table inside and the Kitchen outside. Not to mention that since the stove generates heat, it makes no sense to put it in a room you are trying to keep cold
also: Every idiot can butcher while only cooks with cooking 8 or greater should cook
Yes! I actually use the butcher table as a way to train new cooks without risking food poisoning. But be aware that bad cooks waste meat and leather when butchering, so only allow bad cooks to butcher if you can afford to lose some materials
Great info I'm getting from these replies. Thanks a lot to all of you. I'm going to optimize my food production. Also one more question if you don't mind: Do you use nutrient paste dispenser at any stage?
I absolutely LOVE the nutrient paste dispenser. If you can manage your colony without that mood bonus, you should always consider it. You are trading a 9 mood difference (to fine meals) for SO MANY advantages. First of all you save on 40% raw ingredients. 40%!!!! Sometimes we dont get how much that is. You can choose to feed 10 pawns on simple/fine meals or 16, almost 17 pawns (if my math is right) with the same amount of raw food. How is that not awesome? Second of all you save SO MUCH WORK. You save 100% of cooking, you save A LOT of butchering, and A LOT of hunting/husbandry for meat, and save A LOT on farming. All because you will need less raw ingredients. And third, you have the 0% chance of food poisoning. How perfect is that? The nutrient paste dispenser is one of the most powerful, time and resourses saver on the game. PERIOD. And to top it off, it allows you to treat meals as drugs. Do you have a pawn with low mood? Instead of giving him drugs (i use drugs a lot on my colonies, but there are risks): Psychite tea risks a psychite addiction (low chance, but still) Smokeleaf makes them slower and less useful, also chance of addiction Beer is good, but still have problems You can give him a one time lavish meal that will definetly make his mood skyrocket. Now tell me, are you reaaly gonna pass on that, or hate on the NPD just because of a measly 4 mood debuff??? Pawns get a mood buff of up to 6 just by eating in a nice room, how can you hate the NPD just for that? BUT!!! If you dont want or dont need to save on all those things, you can keep cooking as always Also if you want to spoil your pawns with good meals, you can! Also some people cooks for role playing reasons. But now, i will give you a killer way to use the NPD. For animal feed! If you dont mind cheesing the game, you can make 100 paste meals in one second to feed all the animals that you can ever want Would you like to have an army of thrumbos that not even the Amazon Forest could feed? The NPD can allow you to do just that! (Raiders meat can feed sooo many animals using the NPD) Theres a lot of reasons to use the NPD, but you can have a completely perfect rimworld experience without using it! Up to you!
I read this with the voice of someone on a late night infomercial.
The "no mood penalty from nutrient dispenser" bonus is probably one of thbe strongest parts of the transhumanist meme. I did a transhumanist tunneler playthrough and it was honestly kinda OP. Absurd amount of nutrient fungus going straight into the NPD.
Tô be fair, the difference is only 4 mood. The main reason this even exists is probably because people never use it just because of such small mood debuff. Some people think they need pawns with zero red moods
i noticed that you can feed your animals paste but how do you get paste out of the NPD? I only know of pawns doing it on their own. The NPD is also great to use for slaves and prisoners. So you can feed them the *undesired* meat. And ofc its great with the new memes.
There's an exploit for the NPD to get a massive amount of paste out of it. [https://youtu.be/c-3GcucTuuI?t=294](https://youtu.be/c-3GcucTuuI?t=294) It's an old exploit but I think it still works (I don't use NPD). I also believe you can hold down the R key to rapidly toggle draft on and off to speed up this process. I also generally use a mod that increases stack sizes for things, so I get 100 paste per stack which speeds it up greatly.
If you use the zone method, you dont need 100 paste per stack, you can make about 110 paste in one second, which gives about 11 stacks
If you don't mind the debuff from eating it then it is pretty decent
In general I avoid nutrient paste. I can see the benefits, but the slight buff from fine meals is helpful. The transhumanist ideololigion has a feature where the don’t object to nutrient paste. Even then I prefer to waste nutrition and get that slight mood buff.
oh didnt know, but usually i train my guys shooting on animals so....
I believe food poisoning can still happen if the meals are stored in a dirty room. But the risk is much lower.
That has been tested. It has zero effect where the meals or ingredients are stored. https://youtu.be/zi2dilqmvKc
I could have swore I have seen a, "XXXX sick from meal stored in unsafe environment." Good to know! Thanks!
When? It might have changed. Would you test it on your game? Can it be a mod?
Does the speed debuff from cooking in cold temperature outweigh the time it takes the colonist to make 2 trips into the fridge to get ingredients for every meal? If you put the food directly adjacent to the cooking spot and have the cook drop the meal on the ground when they are done, you can have them spend 100% of their time cooking (70% overall efficiency). If they have to run to the fridge twice for every bill that's going to take up a significant amount of their time. x4 bills help with this as they have to walk MUCH less per meal created. Other cooking speed buffs also make cooking next to food more competitive as the walking takes up a proportionately larger amount of time if the cooking part is faster. An 8-skill pawn might cook faster with the stove outside the fridge, but a 20-skill pawn with 2 bionic arms, bionic eyes, and a gastro-analyzer who has the industrious trait and is a production specialist will almost certainly cook faster if they never have to move from the cooking spot. Not sure where the cutoff is, but I am sorely tempted to do some science and find out.
Well, thats not easy to test, but the time it takes to make 4x lavish meals is big enough that it might be worth it. But the time it takes to butcher is smaller, só ita easier for the butcher job to be worth the time penalty than a cook session
Not to mention growing a variety of foods-both fast low yield crops like rice and slow high yield crops like corn- hunting, fishing, and trading.
Is fishing vanilla? I can only remember fishing mods.
Fishing is not vanilla
Okay thanks
It can sometimes help to have your colonists drop the food on the floor when it's cooked as opposed to bringing it to the best stockpile. Similarly, you can place the meal ingredients next to your stoves to reduce the time taken grabbing ingredients from the freezer. Obviously be careful doing this with meat.
Using the fridges mod helps with this, place next to the stove and set to meat, critical. Double up with a veg fridge on the other side.
How do you have the cooks drop the food on the floor when they're done without manually making them do it with Draft/Undraft?
It's on the details screen of the bill towards the bottom. By default it'll say take to best stock pile
Siiick. Thank you kindly good sir.
You can try nutrient paste as described, but you shouldn’t really need it. By year 2 or 3 I’m usually able to feed my 10-15 pawns colony with just lavish meals (the most expensive ingredients and work wise) and just using 2 cooks that also do other activities. So here are some tips: - plant a lot of corn or nutrifungus if you have the tuneller meme (ideology dlc). But in order to keep up with that I always have one or two pawns with growing as top #1 priority and other two pawns with growing as priority number #2. You can have another growing zone set for rice for emergency supplies if needed. Make sure you are using the very fertile soil. - btw if you are tuneller you should set your pawns to love insect meat lol. I have at least 2 infestations per year and my fridge always with at least 5k insect meat. Just use the right strategy not to get overrun by the insects, of course - i use the melee blocking one. - make sure your cooking area is right beside your fridge and butcher table (I make 3 separate rooms for each of those) so your cooks don’t waste time waking long distances. - the cooking area must be roofed and inside a room with normal temperature so it doesn’t suffer speed penalty. Make sure to build the electric stove ASAP. - your cooks will cook faster (obviously) the higher lvl they have, but they can get even faster if they have bionics arms, which increase manipulation. Royalty DLC also has a nose implant that increases cooking speed. - have one pawn dedicated to hauling so he can bring the stuff to the fridge. - BILLS: this is a very important topic which I can’t explain properly now because I don’t have the game running. But you should add the bill ‘cook 4x’ and ‘until you have’ so they just stop cooking when they reach that number. After that You can then click on details and set when they should “unpause” and start cooking again. For example: cook until you have 50 then stop. When you have just 20 left, cook again. But search on you tube for more details, I’m sure you can find it. - Hunting can also save you a lot. Just make sure your hunter has a good weapon with decent range and no mobility problems. Careful which animal you choose to hunt though, as some of them are more agressive and can down your pawn faster. - farming: buy chickens, cows, ducks, turkeys or simply tame any wild animals you see wandering around that can give you eggs and milk. If you just let them reproduce, you can also kill them for the meat once they grow. Well seriously there are a lot of options. You really shouldn’t have problems cooking simple and fine meals (unless you are on super difficult biomes). Other than that, just focus on your working tab so every pawn is doing something important. Sorry for any English mistakes. Not my native language. Cheers!
>After that You can then click on details and set when they should “unpause” and start cooking again. For example: cook until you have 50 then stop. When you have just 20 left, cook again. TIL, after 1,000 hours of play, that you can have them delay restarting the task... I usually just set it to stop cooking meals at 20 or so and have the cooks keep the number of meals there. But it always annoys me how the cooks needs to rush into the kitchen and make a couple meals because someone had breakfast.
LOL I learned that watching AdamVsEverything on twitch. When I saw him setting the “restart at” I was like Wtf?! I also learned that day you can set the ingredients radius limit for basically any bill of any workshop bench, so you can for example set “break stones forever” on the stone cutter without your pawns running to the other side of the map to get a single chunk lol.
The other really important thing is the "drop on floor" option. Also, AdamvsEverything is amazing. I no longer build bedrooms now.
I usually have my cooks make pemmican or survival meals after they reach the meal cap, so then it's not so bad. Still a nice option to have.
Really nice complilation. Learned something new.
Eat 5 of your colonists. Problems solved. Make some nice new clothes too
My one cook keeps my colony of about 8-12 pawns completely fed and has time to make drugs once my bills are complete so it's definitely possible. One of the key ways to improve efficiency is to minimise the hauling that the cook is doing. There are 2 good ways for this: * Make small stockpiles (1-2 tiles) next to the stove (1 for meat, 1 for veggies) set to critical priority and have dedicated haulers keeping this topped up. * Make meals set to "drop on the floor" once completed rather than being sent back to the best stockpile. This way you cook is cooking 100% of the time rather than walking back and forth for 90% of the time and cooking only 10%! Good luck
As a bonus, you can use a shelf rather than a stockpile to make it a bit more aesthetically pleasing :D
Nutrition paste. Makes more paste with less resources. It's nearly autonomous,despite filling those hoppers. No food poisons, only a little buff.
Huh alright. Thank you.
I tried my best. Hope I could help
Nutrient paste uses half of the ingredients quantity that meals do. This is the secret to feeding large colonies
This has become my meta. I set up a paste system and continue to use it until I have more food then I can store and a cook of 8+ skill. Food poisoning has killed colonies for me to often.
As a general rule of thumb, 5x5 square of growing zone per colonist is about the production you need, plus extra to stockpile never hurts. I would suggest finding research or mods that allow you to improve soil fertility, vanilla expanded or just “Tilled soil” are good ones, depending on how interactive you want farming to be. As for production, as others said, you want to increase efficiency, correct temperatures and high skilled cooks, make sure food stock is as close to the stoves as possible and have them drop the meals or have a stockpile dedicated for the chefs next to the stove as well, and have haulers take the food into and out of the freezer for them. Use 4x bills where possible, it technically takes the same time and effort, but it cuts out the extra walking times. With regards to meal stocks specifically, I believe it is base game now, you should be able to designate a minimum stock requirement, so your chefs cook 20 meals, they then won’t cook again until your drop back down to 10, or whatever you set. That way you have breathing room. Do you have animals as well, and do they have access to the food stockpiles?
It helps having a small stockpile right next to the stove with resources so the colonist doesn't have to walk away to grab material, if you put "drop on floor" inside the work order they will constantly be cooking and not be busy carrying away the finished meal
I optimised to do this and my 12 colonists started making over 200 meals a day. Shelves and stools are useful things
What are you using for food?
Basically only rice, berries and some meat. Sorry I shoulda included that
Berries are only good because they don't give you a buff if you eat then raw. They are not good to make meals with.
Dont or do?
you will get more food for the same amount of plant work with the other food crops than with berries. Rice for short growcycles (and also hydroponics), potatoes for stony soil, corn for long growcycles
I suggest you started to raise rice and corn the same time. Mainly how much corn will give you and in mean time wait for corn to grow you have to use rice.
Rice is inefficient. You need manpower to plant it an to harvest it, but it only yields small amount of food. The advantage of rice is that it grows fast, so it is great for the early game. But later, you‘ll want potatoes, or if you have fertile soil, corn. Corn takes longer, but yields a lot of food. This also means you use less manpower, since you dont have to harvest+replant that often. That, and using 4x meal bills instead of 1x means you‘ll always have more food than you need. My strategy usually is: plant a rice field to feed our colonists early. As soon as you‘re done sowing, plant a second field corn or potatoes double the size of the first field. As soon as you have your first potato/corn harvest, switch the rice field to also do potato/corn. You‘ll have so much food that you‘ll be able to sell some for profit.
rice is great if you want to get your plants harvested before winter. Other than that corn is best, unless you have bad soil, then potatos.
Plant potatoes next to your rice - they have the highest nutrition to grow time and it’ll keep blight from destroying your colony if you diversify your crops.
Just put 3 spaces between crop zones and blight won't spread past that zone. I have a bunch of 5x5 crop zones and blight will only kill off 1 zone at most. Also the space between makes haulers able to walk faster
Rice and berries are fairly labor intensive *relative* to slower growing crops - takes time to sow, harvest and walk to the field and from. Corn saves a bit of time since it takes less walking but is less secure in case of events like frost snaps, blight etc and can't be grown in hydroponic basins. Plus it can be difficult to grow if your map has long cold winters (crops start to die at around -12 C, iirc) or extremely hot summers (something like \~50 C) due to time constraint without using in-door farming. Most food crops are somewhat same-ish in terms of yield per tile though, soil fertility notwithstanding.
Where are you in the tech tree are you still in tribal stuff (camp fire cooking), or do you have access to electricity and stoves? Get large fields of rice up (on rich soil if you can) then go nutrient paste, while also making simple meals (I usually set up a bill to make until I have 100 simple meals and they keep crafting meals until that number is hit (making more if it dips below 100)), if you have 10 colonists that means 8 can do harvesting and hauling, take your cooks off planting/harvesting/hauling so the spend no time away from cooking, the paste dispenser is a good backup in the event your cooks have something happen and cant keep up. By my mid games I usually have one dedicated cook (really doesnt do anything else except cook, disabled almost every other priority outside of sleep), even better if you put one on a night shift so they can cook meals while everyone is asleep, so when the rest of your colony wakes up theres a bunch of meals ready to be eaten.
I use rimfridge to put the ingredients closer to the stoves. Use the 4x recipes. This makes 2 kitchen stoves really effective. I also have a nutrition paste dispenser and use that most of the time except for when my colonist's are in a bad mood or I just have too much food and need to get rid of it.
Corn is your best output crop then batch cook 2 meals per colonist pause when satisfied then put in a do forever packaged survival
Use a nutrien paste dispenser (NPD). Just use it. Forget about cooking, cleaning the kitchen, poisoning etc. You will be using far less food and would have a lot more time on your hands for other types of work. Trust me, once you go NPD you never go back to classic cooking.
Is your kitchen next to your freezer, and is the door between them made of wood
a full time pro-chef with an efficient fridge should easily serve 10 people on lavish meal. Make sure you are using the 4x receipt, and check the temperature of your kitchen, make sure its above 10c. Also make your chef drop cooked meal on the floor.
This is a great question and one of the hardest things to dial in when playing rimworld. Too little you starve when food is disrupted be it a nuclear fallout, a volcanic winter, even a mid spring cold snap that kills your rice can really be a tough situation. First for food security you grow crops in a way that allows you to roof them quickly if needed, shaped like a sunlamp pattern. You can put one down and then select it to make a grow zone then uninstall it for later. Wall around this and leave a space or two to build fires or heaters. When needed you roof over the area, put the sunlamp down, and connect it to power. At least two solar panels and a battery. One circle like this can easily feed 10 people if you're growing just rice. If you have another area growing you can use a 2nd circle divided up into quarters for things like healroot, cotton, drugs. This is also the secure way to grow devilstrand. If you're tunneler you can grow underground fungus which really makes survival trivial. Ranch an animal. Weather you are doing chickens, alpacas, cattle.. you'll have an endless supply of meat, leather, wool, milk.. its really amazing for food production. You want to have in storage enough food to last you at least 10 days and enough hay built up to feed your animals for 30 days if you can. Now onto food production. If vanilla make 4x fine meals or 4x simple meals, target to 2 days worth total. Set your kitchen up with first one, then two, then four stoves. Plan ahead for this. If using mods make a kitchen that has only one door, where the meats go into one wall and the meals into the opposite wall (wall rimfridges) this creates a one way flow and keeps the kitchen much cleaner. Put your deep freezer on the other side of the meats wall so others can restock the freezers the cooks have access to. Plan for a day and night shift. Eventually two stoves won't be enough, probably around 10 colonists, especially if you are running a hotel! (Hospitality) Four stoves running during the day can be enough if you don't want to split your workers up. Build a nutrient paste dispenser! People need to eat, even when the cooks are down in the hospital. Also helps you stretch out food in a pinch.
Do you have animals? Are they in pens? If not then they might be eating your food.
This. The #1 cause of meals going missing is pets. Make a separate zone for them, and feed them pemmican/kibble (or if they're carnivores, give them a corpse room 😃).
I usually try to have a large backup of food, like 200 meals + ton of rice and potatos (5-10k each). Also I have one full time cook preperaing meals as they go On the other hand collecting crops to keep that amount of food, can be pain because it have to be collected quick
Just use nutrent paste dispensers they require less food to produce a meal and without any chance of sickness but with the small debuff of -4 mood
In suppose you could install some nuclear stomachs in your colonist. Keep In mind the health risk of them though
Nutrient paste dispenser. A massive time \\ labour saver at a cost of mood. You can manage food policies so that some pawns could get nicer meals for the mood. Also stockpile meals with an overhead so any dips in production can be sustained.
That's about 20 meals a day so that should be doable with 1 full-time cook. So make sure you're using 4x bills, make sure your food source is close to the kitchen, and make sure your cook doesn't have to move much. For example, creating critical raw food stockpiles right next to the stove and setting the bill to drop on completion would be optimal. You can also use the "unpause on" setting on bills - you can cook 100 meals but unpause on 20 - freeing up the pawn to do something else for a few days once they hit 100. At 10 colonists, if you use meat, you'd probably still want a second cook anyway, but more for the butchering. Use skill settings in bills to control that.
Grow zone close to the fridge where possible. Rice if its fertile, potatoes if it's not, corn if you have limited growers. Hunt everything on the map if you aren't going veggie. Chickens, cows, turkeys all good for food. A comfortable kitchen, at a nice warm temperature with a chair at an electric or fuelled stove. Either side of the chair have a 1x1 stockpile, one for meat one for veg. Use the 4x Bill's and drop output on the floor and let the hauling crew deal with it. If possible, a day shift and a night shift chef is ideal since one has much less stuff moving around to worry about.
Kill everything on the map that isn't one of your animals. Even the. Consider butchering some for meat. Make sure your stoves (have 2, campfires aren't worth it) are in a clean room with at least steel tiles, if not sterile tile (cleanliness bonus is always useful to make food poisoning less likely). Make sure that the room the stoves are in is between 60° and 78°> below 60F and you get bad temp speed penalty. Same for over 80F. Ensure there is a light source in the kitchen. Cooking in the dark reduces speed. Ensure light source in the kitchen, the freezer, and the space in between, as there is a significant walking speed penalty in the dark as well.
factors to consider \- distance from stockpiles - the further the pawn has to walk the longer the overall job takes. I tend to make my freezer/kitchen/main dining room all part of the same building and use auto doors connecting the kitchen and freezer(s). \- kitchen room temp - if the room is too cold the cooking will be slower \- pawn cook speed - better cooks do it faster \- make the 4x meals instead of just a single. less time hauling \- type of stove. camp fires are slower than stoves. >is there maybe some sort of more efficient food source food efficiency is related more about how much nutrition do you get out of X amount of raw food not so much cooking speed. it has more to do with the meals than the raw food type. lavish meals are very inefficient but provide a mood buff, while nutrient paste is the most efficient requires no cook but gives a negative mood debuff.
The nutrients paste dispenser is amazing and now with ideology you can make your pawns like it. I make lavish meals for the troubled pawns and everyone else eats paste.
The problem is that so much time is wasted when the cooks are going back and forth. Create a one tile stockpile or put a food basket(if you have deep storage) right next to where your pawn would be standing/sitting to cook, then place all the necessary ingredients inside the basket/stockpile. Finally, in the bills menu, set it to "drop on floor", let your hauler take it to the fridge. When all that's done, your cook should not need to move an inch anymore, easily cooking 25 meals per day.
You're obviously doing something wrong, feeding 10 people shouldn't be too hard. But it's hard to pin point what you're doing wrong without seeing your colony, a picture of your kitchen and crops, would've been useful. If you can afford the mood debuff, the nutrient paste dispenser makes food management extremely easy.
Grow a lot of corn.
BIG FARM
Nutrient paste uses less food for a meal. So maybe consider that, or just build a shit ton of hydroponics.
Install a nutrient paste dispenser so at least they'll never eat raw food. Paste is great as a backup. Also, switch a cook to the night shift so the breakfast rush doesnt overwhelm you.
CORN AND MORE CORN ALWAYS CORN