The spreadsheet is up on Google Docs and the link is in the description! The URL might change as I locally edit and re-upload because some of the edits are saving.. oddly. Something to keep in mind for later! Also, I'm sure some of the "formulas" can be more simply done, but ah well right? EDIT: Updated the URL - Stony Soil was dividing growth rate instead of multiplying. I believe we have correct numbers now!
What about better than simple meals? How does that factor into the equation for your colonists? Which is more efficient out of chickens/cows/goats to get the added animal based ingredients?
Thanks a bunch for the work you put into this. It's helpful to know how much land has to be utilized and how to increase it as new colonists are "acquired". :D Cheers (and stay safe)
@@KirthGersen09 I believe those questions are outside the scope of Yetis findings. But, Fine and Simple meals are mathematically identical to each other, other than needing an ingredient mix for Fine Meals. 0.5 Ingredient Nutrition for 0.9 Meal Nutrition. So in that regard, there's no real change if you're using a mix of both anyway. You're only going to see differences when it comes down to Pemmican, Survival Meals, and Lavish Meals. All three are worse meal solutions when it comes to conversion, in exchange for different perks. Pemmican is 0.5/0.8(About 12% loss.) Survival Meals are a bit worse, 0.6/0.9(20% loss.) Lavish Meals are 1/1 - so 2x the ingredients of a fine/simple meal for 11% more end product nutrition(80% loss if my math is right.) Only worth it for the buff if you need it to bring a colonists mood up, or have a Royal Title requirement.
Maybe pin in an edit that depending on your latitude and season day will be longer or shorter, which rimworld does simulate. This is particularly relevant to polar colonys
@@TheSoulbanker cooking paste out of human meat and then cooking paste out of human meat paste removed the flag before, so they didn't know. Was feature removed?
My understanding is that the advantage of corn is less man-hours per meal, when compared to rice. Which can be a big deal in certain colonies. As for the animals, two things: 1- Once your population of chickens/ Goats is sufficient, you get some extra nutrition in the form of meat when a new member grows and you butcher the oldest one, so the numbers are slightly bigger than calculated. Also, much more annoying to calculate. 2- They are a renewable source of fine meals for the morale boost. They are never going to be as efficient as going vegetarian, but it can be worth the investment.
He's also operating on the assumption that 100% of the animal's diets comes in the form of player-grown haygrass, which when you don't have a ton of animals, allowing them to graze will keep them fed, and then it goes from "really inefficient" to "free food out of thin air"
@@rustyspurs771 If you've got the grass to feed all of the animals, then by all means go for it. A lot of colonies don't, and if you're looking for guaranteed numbers then grass complicates things.
@@ClosetYeti - As far as animal grazing goes, planting dandelions seem to be the best. You need a colonist to constantly replant them everywhere, but outside of winter seasons it is a lot less hassle than hauling hay back to the barn. It's a great way to keep stockpiling hay for winters, and for kibble as animals seem to prefer grazing before hay or kibble. In my previous modded run on a 350x350 map for several scrollbars worth of animals it made the difference between having to slaughter them and feed the rest from my hydroponics to having 12K+ hay and 10K kibble saved for winter (40 growing days/year). It also kept the killbox zones clear of trees that enemies could use for cover.
A very important column I think you forgot to include is labor per yield which is extremely important. As it stands by your information with a sunlamp you have to spend almost 4 times as much labor to get just a small amount more food than corn. Oddly enough berries is a strong contender for a fast consistent food supply that is 50% less labor intensive as rice and can be eaten raw. So thank you for this information.
Also time the crop lasts after harvest is different for each. Since I keep my freezer full of meat and meals I tend to keep stocks of corn in spare bedroom or prison they last longest.
@@llamaa6433 True. Of course, since you cant control which ones are used first, at least without serious micromanagement, there is still a real chance of spoilage. The tactic I try to use is having several different crops in small fields in different areas and conditions. This way I get near constant inflow of vegetables with quite low chance of massive bumper crops that would overwhelm my system and workers. Start with tiny field of rice on the first day, and live on foraging and hunting. Tiny field of strawberries or potatoes the next, preferably berries in the start. Tiny field of corn on the next. Or, if the situation calls for it, very tiny fields of each every second day for a few days. If all goes well, you can expect small mini-harvests on most days, with bit larger crops every now and then.
@@ribbitgoesthedoglastnamehe4681 You are right but how I go about this is I'm sending corn with least shelf life with caravans that way it's pretty simple to separate them mid to late game. Early spoilage it's not a problem since most of the time everyone is half starved. There should be way of setting prioritiy for shelf life just like it is for skill at cooking station.
According to the wiki rice only gives 2% more nutrition per day than corn, and that’s assuming 100% harvest/sow efficiency. All the extra time spent without anything sown (and any time spent with the plant sitting at “ready to harvest” before it gets harvested) would more than make up for that 2% difference in most situations, unless you have a colony with a large number of high skill crop farmers. As others have said, the truly limited resource in rimworld is not available space to sow but pawn labour (unless playing desert/ice). Maybe a rice patch would give more nutrition per day than a corn patch of equal size, but if you equalise for labour investment, you could sow and reap a corn plot that’s probably 5 times as large as the rice one for the same amount of labour (since the rice will have to be harvested and resown multiple times before the corn gets its first harvest).
one hidden variable on the efficiency of food animals is that they're basically free to keep alive if you're in a warmer climate that regularly regrows grass outdoors. I've sustained animals through winter with very small plots, even having to make room to store the excess haygrass when winter ends
The actual advantage of animals is that they can just eat the grass that grows everywhere on maps where it isn't an ice sheet or desert. That's pretty much the advantage to them irl too lmao
@The Mine What are you even talking about? Having basically a machine that turns grass into milk was amazing for early humans, if it wasn't worth it they would never have started domesticating them in the first place.
'Potatoes are one of the worst crops to plant' Tell that to my tribal colonists living in a desert. Less fertility sensitive crops are great for terrain that has crappy soil
Well that is still a fairly rare case. Which is a bit of a shame really, more varying fertility and less available fertile farmland could be an interesting mechanic. It's rarely a big deal though.
@dereinzigwahreRahl I was just pointing out that people purposefully play on maps where this stuff is actually an issue. I fully agree that it should be a bigger deal than it is on most maps though.
Love the work put into this, it's a wonderful reference for information that was impossible to find. As a side note in practice you would run cows to provide milk as part of fine meals, so in those instances you would half the amount of haygrass required as half the nutrition comes from the vegetarian side. Assuming I am reading the data correctly that would be 17.1 rich haygrass plots to provide the meat component to one dupes meals every day. So one greenhouse could support about 5 with some left over to account for problem. Still a rather expensive way to get the meat component of a meal but it could potentially be the only option on some map types. Again love the work on this.
a random Francis XD. yes, speaking about fine meal you need to half the need of haygrass, but you also need to add the half of one other crop. in general animal for food is not great, just beter to hunt them down as soon as spawn like you do. a least are you revalueate your choise of using potato? love your video, keep going
Finally! a video that actually gets to the point of the title, talks about the information and doesnt spend 10 minutes repeating the title with different words before telling you 3 words of the stuff you came here for! thank you for the in depth explanation!
Rice also means A LOT more work. Corn gives massive yelds at much longer spaced intervals, meaning it saves a lot of worked hours for your pawns, for an almost identical average nutrition per tile.
By the way, the saturation mechanic you're referring to with chocolate is actually just their nutrition bar. Pawns will not consume more chocolate based nutrition than they can currently fit on their nutrition bar. So if their nutrition is at 0.9/1 (if they recently ate a meal), they'll only consume one chocolate unit. However, how the AI works is that when a pawn goes to eat chocolate, they will take a quantity of chocolate that is determined not by how much nutrition they can fit in, but by how much recreation they hope to gain by eating the chocolate. So if they have a nearly empty recreation bar they might grab 4 or 5 bars of chocolate, but if their nutrition is full, only 1 of them will be consumed and the rest will be dropped on the floor. It's a bit of an error in the AI that needs addressing imo. It could be changed so that pawns will only grab the amount of chocolate that their current nutrition can hold, but imo it would make more sense to just let them eat the quantity that will fill their recreation bar regardless of current nutrition level.
4 bars to fill the recreation needs. They want eat more. It's not really food. More a boost. Or you need mods to change things, like still. But chocolate is good to have for emergencies, Example to boost some pawn with recreation need to fill when a raid is showing up.
There are ways to get better numbers for animals. The most obvious would be that animals can eat grass which doesn't require any colonist time. Also, during summer, you can leave a lot of animals with a caravan and let them graze on grazable tiles in the map. They won't reproduce directly on the map but they may reproduced whenever your caravan gets raided. You can actually get pretty good numbers this way. You can actually get a lot of value from shearing apalcas everytime your caravan gets raided. Of course, getting raided presents some risks, but you can get very good engagements if you use your animals as meatshields. You don't even have to train them, you just need to send them toward your enemy by manipulating their zone. Some animals such as pigs will happily eat human corpses which means it's possible to horde all raider corpses in your base into a frozen room. You can let pigs slowly dispose of them without having your colonists repeatedly view them. You can then get a tiny fraction of it by eating your excess pigs without having to deal with the moral debuff from butchering humans. Alternatively, you can get a lot food from it if you stockpile corpses until your colony gets some kind of moral boost, and then you use that time to butcher human corpses. You can then multiply the food value you get from that by 3 by turning human meat into nutritional meals, although this will require micromanagement. Nutritional meal can be eaten even by vegetarian animals and it's technically possible to get more food value from cow milk than you even put into the system. This can be useful in extreme maps like sea ice and ice sheets.
There are more things to consider, for example labour intensity. What potatos and corn win over rice is that you get more food per harvest, meaning that rice requires more harvests meaning more labour is needed. All labour put into harvesting rice could be put into other things. This is especially important as your colony grows larger, where labour-effectiveness is usually more important than plot-effectiveness. Likewise with animals: they are usually not that labour intensive. Having a few cows feeding off the naturally grown grass is an insinely labour-effective way of providing food for the colony. If your cows only eat haygrass, then it starts to make sense to avoid them.
Thank you. The sight of an intelligently compiled spreadsheet always gladdens my heart. :) I recently started playing Rimworld again (like many others). Although I don't want to min/max, I've always believed that characters should have at least a rough idea of food production requirements etc. for RP purposes. Biggest surprise here is chocolate, which I've never grown in the past but have just planted in my present game. Presumably it's intended mainly as a trade item? And that might be a topic for another vid - better trading tactics. ;)
@@imperiallarch7610 Thanks. I knew about the recreation boost but it seems very strange that the colonists have to be force-fed it rather than automatically taking some. Just another of those odd game mechanics I guess. :)
@@machar8740 You need to set your colonist's to be able to eat chocolate for a mood boost under the recreation drugs I do believe. That way they will freely eat it when they need it freeing up it being tedious. However it is also a great product to sell for extra cash if you are struggling to get money but it grows so slowly its not really worth it. Beer is a much better product.
Dirk Mckinnis It’s not just the growth rate. Being a tree, it takes a huge amount of work to sow and to harvest, and I don’t think the high price per bar of chocolate fully accounts for that. A full tree gives (from memory) 19 units of chocolate, at $3 each, as opposed to corn giving 21 units at harvest, worth $1.10 each, but with the corn taking probably one tenth of the time time to sow as one tree of cocoa, or even less. Then the cocoa takes 50% more time to grow, and that’s only if you’re not growing the corn in rich soil. You’d probably be better just selling corn to bulk goods traders than trying to make money with chocolate lol. Beer is good to sell too though, I agree. Easy to produce in bulk too.
I'm a corn fanboy. Similar plots/colonist to rice but you'd have to harvest rice 3 times before your first corn harvest... unless I'm missing something? And if you're moving up to fine meals would cow's milk still be the best animal product to use?
@David JR Still, corn is good if you want your growers to do other things besides full-time rice planting, and it also has more hitpoints which makes it less likely to burn down in a fire.
@David JR Having a second corn field at least 4-5 cells away from the other fields also basically negates the impact of blight on your food supply; either of the same size, or cutting the amount of fieldage you expect to need in roughly half between each field. It also lets you stagger your food income, which can be situationally nice. Either way, Corn has the lowest Work per Nutrition out of any crop, thanks to its insane harvest yield and long growing time, which is nice. For consideration for Tribals, Corn also has (I believe) the longest shelf life of any crop by far, which is important because you have to stagger your hunting to avoid losing meat to spoilage when making pemmican. On a more temperate map with a decently long winter, it can basically be stored indefinitely.
I also prefer corn... but the issue if is there is some problem with balancing or something happens, it takes way to long to get food. Usually I have a few hydroponics with rice as emergency food production
This is a very good start, but as mentioned in the comments: Potatoes are better in stony soil. Corn is much less work (but takes longer to grow so you need better margins for blight and fire). Using good or lavish meals for the mood boost makes life easier, but takes a lot more farming/herding/cooking. You always have to adapt any strategy depending on biome, tech level (especially refrigeration, but also hunting weapons) and pawn skills. (Hunting rhinos with skill average 2 and a short bow? Guess you need a wooden leg, if you are lucky.) Grazing also has the advantage of keeping your defensive zone (kill box/killing field) clear of cover while keeping the slow movement of the soil. Sure, setting fire to a field of hay grass in the box can be both fun and effective, but it takes work to tend those fields.
I've never done this in any game. General rule of thumb is if you start in a desert biome with low fertility soil you do potatoes. Rice is best until you have a freezer with a nice stockpile. Then corn to keep an income and hugely reduce the amount of harvesting needed. Berries is when you just need to eat something raw. Every crop has a purpose and that is the way I like it.
There is a biome where potato efficiency in gravel is relevant: extreme desert. Extreme deserts have no regular soil at all, but does have gravel/rocky soil near the rock formations/mountains. You can use these to plant crops and potatoes are the best for food there. This is particularly important if you're tribal, though good luck finding wood to cook anything there as a tribe...trees do not grow nicely there. Technically, ice sheet is the same as extreme desert in terms of available soil best I can tell, but because it is too cold for crops the ability to grow in gravel isn't useful. You would need to use sunlamps and at that point you might as well use hydroponics.
I always thought the growth boost from hydroponics was underwhelming, but I never thought it was because my beloved potatoes could betray me. Thanks for making this, this was super informative, not to mention concise.
Awesome! Thanks for doing the math. I've always wondered about this. I still think this shows that corn is king. It takes 3.75x to grow which means much less labor while only require around 3% more space. Berries or rice in hydroponics is a lot closer though. 1.5x grow time versus 1.15x the space. Trade off there is going to depend on whether you're short labor, or space and materials.
Yes, if you are limited by work hours rather than farm space (which is most likely the case in any biome other than ice sheet and desert) then corn has the best nutrition per work hour value. Second place is potatoes. That is why I hate hydroponics, you cant plant corn and potates don't benefit as much from the increased fertility and anything else is a lot more work for your colonists. I recommend you only use hydroponics if you have absolutely no other choice. Rice in hydroponics does not come close, because the work per nutrition is independent from grow time. Fertility does only change your space efficiency, but not your work efficiency.
I champion the humble berry. In soil, in hydroponics. If you refuse to use the nutrient paste dispenser, which some people do, berries are a great replacement because of the labour saved by not having a dedicated cook. This can give you a significant leap ahead early on in a playthrough. Just grow and eat, and have your cook do more productive things, like construct or craft. Rice, in my opinion, is too labour intensive. You spend too much time in the field, planting, harvesting, etc, and then cooking. Berries and corn will feed a colony efficiently and without too much headache.
If you ever get the chance, consider factoring harvesting time for each crop. Rice really great, but you gotta expend a lot of extra time planting, harvesting and hauling it. Not generally a problem once you hit mid-game but early game when you've got low growing stats and only a few colonists, needing to devote one or two pops to the constant cycle farming cycle means you can end up lacking in workforce for everything else, which in only made worse if, for whatever reason, to need to start microing the process.
This is huge relief for me for couple of days i was reading wiki and tried to calculate the number of tiles needed but it was pain in my ass. I know how much work u have done behind this sheet. This made my life way better with regard to food atleast for now in rimworld.
I tend to grow a field of every food crop; i know colonists dont have favorite foods like in dwarf fortress, but this is a habit i acquired from my df days
Great spreadsheets, definitely something I was trying to think about lately, so I greatly appreciate the work! The big thing with animal nutrition I think is the sustainability for lavish meals which require a portion of protein
Animals are the original winter crop. Food bank for when times are lean. Don't know the advantage yet of taming versus hunting wild ones. Wild ones just graze wherever. Tame ones I gotta feed. Thanks for the tips - new to Rimworld but old in real life. Grew up in the country where people would slaughter hogs in the early winter and survive on pork and pickled vegetables and fruit until the spring greens and carrots started coming in. Old days.
It's worth considering however that Corn takes considerably less EFFORT to grow. You spend almost 4x more time planting, harvesting, and hauling Rice than you do Corn and that is a significant amount of time that your colonists could be doing something more productive.
Another thing to consider is that corn lasts longer, which can be very useful to tribes. Also another video of the same type that could be interesting is comparing animals that make wool, cotton and devilstrand. Also the video was very informative, thanks for doing all that work for us!
Yeti, potatoes do have some redeeming qualities, mainly they take way less work than rice to keep your colonies fed, last longer than berries and don't have a cycle as long as corns which makes them vulnerable to blight, sudden weather changes, etc. I actually like to start my colonies on potatoes because my early bottleneck isn't land for crops, but manpower. Manpower is usually the main bottleneck and not available farmland in the early game. They're quite bad for hydroponics though, I'll agree.
Potatoes are excellent if you do not have a freezer. I believe they last the longest unrefridgerated out of all the crops listed. They are my staple during lost tribe starts until I can preserve my ingredients, at which point I switch to corn.
This was an interesting study. I think I will still grow a couple small patches of each crop because I like to, but focus more on rice in the future. Also I like to keep animals because it is entertaining, but it is really good to know how much better goats and cows are if u are just using it as a farm animal compared to like yaks
thanks mate, I was looking for some research into what pets are most worthwhile recently. I might just try keeping a heard of them in my next play through.
Good vid! One thing to note is that animals can feed on normal grass and shrubs and such. Normal grazing can (on some biomes) make the bulk of their diet
Wow, thanks for the work you put into that. Some things to factor in with animals (particularly fast breeders like goats) (which you no doubt know) are: 1. They should be grazing in unplanted areas most of the time and only eating hay grass in winter/emergencies 2. You eat/sell the males and any of them in an emergency 3. Animal products count toward fine and lavish meal requirements 4. You get free leather, and 5. They make good meat shields. 6. Some, like camels, are also pack animals 7. Some, like Yaks, give wool So yeah, you can't live off goat's milk, but unless you're on an ice sheet animals are a resource. Add to the list the efficiencies in not being reliant on hunting, which can be unpredictable and dangerous, training up your handlers so that they can tame high-value beasts, and having "meat on the leg," meaning in tribal runs you don't have to
Thank you so much for this, folks like you who take the time to not only do the math, do the testing, get the data, but do it in such a thorough and articulated way that is easy to be shared are such a backbone in gaming communities, or just internet communities in general. Sorry some folks are downvoting this, they're just scared of math haha. But seriously, great video, very helpful, I had been debating doing something similar but you did it better than I ever would have thought to :)
Potatoes are really just the go-to crop for non-ideal areas before you get your hydroponics up, particularly the desert biomes. Likewise, they operate well enough as a non-rich soil starter food source to cut back on colonist field work until you're on your feet and can afford to let someone spend the time harvesting and sowing at the pace rice demands. Low Colonist count scenarios such as Naked Brutality/Rich Explorer and any custom ones benefit from the early game use of potatoes.
Someone else already mentioned it but animals are pretty good for turning non edible plants into nutrition like IRL, they'll forage in the summer if you set them up with preferably walled pastures, eating bushes, moss, ivy etc. Keep the haygrass for winter and you're set, converting the insect / human meat you may have into kibble with it for good feeds. Also kibble is GREAT for chemfuel refineries if you can justify the labour of making it and then refining it on top.
This was an awesome video Yeti! Very much appreciated. I've been playing Rimworld over the years and I always had a feeling animals really weren't worth it. Although that being said I have enjoyed using Muffalo multiple times as they can be very useful in caravans. I was also very surprised to learn that potatoes are actually pretty shit.
As someone with a couple of thousands of hours of Rimworld under his belt, all I can say is that since you already(hopefully) own a walk in freezer and have the Deep Stack mod installed, the best way is to just endlessly stockpile. If you have enough mods with enough horrible events installed, chances are that sooner or later, there will be a series of catastrophes that might seriously disrupt your food production, possibly for years. At some point, you will have at least 20-30 people who will consume inordinate amounts of food and while having enough stockpiles to last for a year might seem a lot, any horrible calamity or even a moderate one could force you to extreme measures. It's even more important when you try to keep your colonists happy with fine or better meals. In any case, I feel good when I have 7000+ units of rice stocked up and maybe exchange it for some fancy items when traders come around. Also, It's really good to have 1000+ units of survival meals, just in case. P.S.: Before you ask, I was the guy who bought up all the flour this time last year.
I think for many colonies the limiting factor is more the amount of time taken in sowing and harvesting. Rice needs to be planted and harvested every 6 days. Corn every 22. Potatoes are OK because they're a happy medium and can be grown anywhere. Blights also affect these things too. Plants with long growth cycles are more affected by blight. Similarly, with rich soil you tend to crowd your plots around. Potatoes are good because they're versatile and can be planted anywhere. Rice is good for fast food, corn is good for efficient food. Both of those are best in fertile soil. Potatoes are alright to plant further away from your main crops so they can buffer in case you get hit with blights. Ostriches drop fertilized eggs and only lay every 23 days, and while you CAN eat the eggs for nutrition, you could also let them hatch and grow up which then provides 90 meat, and I think their maturity time is about 27 days. It would be interesting to see the conversion of haygrass into meat. Animals also do a good job of protecting you against agricultural disasters.
Thank you for the work you did but something i think you need to consider when deciding whether Crops or animals make a better food source, is that crops don't give leather. Now granted you cant consume that but it sure makes for a pressing advantage when your food source is also a clothing source.
Thanks for pointing out the thing with the potato fertiltiy sensitivity, lots of people dont know this. But i think the spreadsheet is incomplete, our fellow extreme dessert players need to know how crops do on stony soil. Let the potato have its famous moment!
Thanks for sharing this. I am always looking for the most efficient way to keep my pawns feed. I hate wasting work hours in fields just to be over-farming. Either having to expand my cooler space or leaving the food to rot.
If you dont want to waste space, stagger your plots. That means, plant many small plots of different plants. That way, you dont get one huge crop at a time, but a steady supply to counter daily use.
I’ve started nutrient paste for my colony’s at first for like the first 30 days and it’s made a huge difference in my growth not having to have a dedicated cook all day
My colonists frequently dine on berries and rice in the early game. Once I have a hen and a rooster, food is no longer a problem. After a few eggs hatch, it’s chicken and rice meals all day long. I might plant some other crops, but those are the staples.
I think its important to note that corn is a lot more efficient per time worked, rather than space, which can be very important, allowing you to grow a large surplus with the same amount of growers or free up pawns for other work. Sure, if you're space limited its not the best but this often isn't an issue for most colonies.
Rough rules of thumb. -Rice to get started if you have good quality soil. If you have poor soil, potatoes are the way to go. -Corn once you are established. Not as nutritionally filling as we see with rice, but you save on work hours which can free up specialists in a mature colony. -Berries for bumper crops. If for some reason your meals are destroyed, berries can keep your pawns from mood spirals. -Cows are best nutritionally but are hard to breed quickly. Chickens are great for setting up a farm and can be sold off/butchered during lean times. Be careful of depleting the map of grass/plants with chickens though.
You forgot one important detail in animals! Rats will happily eat any corpses you give them (which are always in unwanted excess anyway), making them extremely cheap to maintain. They also reproduce quickly, making for a super easy slaughter animal. Or a raider fodder animal, or even a viable defense when you set their restricted zone onto a group of enemies on your own map. (It might not work the same on enemy maps)
A couple points to mention: Potato low fertility sensitivity works both ways. So if you play on a low fertility biome, like tundra, potato's are the way to go, because they would still grow at a decent speed in rocky soil. Also you kind of left several important things out of your calculations. For example work required. Sure rice requires marginally less plots to feed a colonist than corn, but it also requires to be planted and harvested almost 4 times more often. Ant time your colonists spend planting and harvesting is time they could've better spend elsewhere.
Nice video. It would be awesome to add a conversion of 'open grassland' into 'hay plots'. Also some factor for the additional nutrition you get from meat when the animals breed. That would could be complicated since you don't get milk from a Bull for instance, but would the added meat from say 3 cows giving birth however often they do compensate for the lost milk production?
Rice: Is good if you have an urgent need for food, Grows quickly and decent yield, Keeps Farmers regularly occupied (good4training&bad4othertasks) Potato: Mostly ignores fertility, for maps with low fertility they may be your only viable option. Corn: Great once you have food stockpiled. Takes a while to grow so your farmer has more free time (bad4training, good4othertasks) Strawberries: If you are so starved of food that your colonist will raid the crops and eat them raw then and there, strawberries are good i guess. - Note: Corn has an advantage on productivity if your farms are far from your colony, less trips means less distance traveled and more work Extra Note: Having all crops makes it easy for your farmer to always be harvesting something, quickly increasing skill and reducing decay
I love the info here. I don't know why I never thought of this. I disagree with the 'animals are garbage' sentiment, though. A good handler and breeding lean the scales toward a farm being an awesome strategy.
What people dont consider so often though is the time taken to complete the task. If your cow fields are far away your colonists will spend all day running back and forth with milk. Thats the reason i switched to dromedarys, gives 18 milk instead of 11, but only needs to be milked every 2 days, making them much lower maintenance. Good pack and riding animals too.
hey love your vids and have a lot of similar conclusions! everything with rice and corn is in line with what I found as well except I find takes 1/3 of the work to grow corn but a much higher risk of blight or short growing season's. also with animal's i've been trying to figure out the animal's meat to leather amount and quality to hunger rate. but i've barely scratched the surface on that as i can tell the breeding time of animals can be influenced by cooping them up together and i dont know if their pregnancy or growth period are different per animal. I've been slowly filtering out which is better than which but it'd be interesting to see yourself or someone in the community shed some light on this.
I use animal ranching sometimes, chicken breeding can be a great way to get meat on maps with little wildlife roaming, but that is after the recent update that gives you bonus meat from slaughtering animals that was meant to make the ranching style of gameplay a little more feasible
wow love the work, time effort and spreed sheet. hydroponic rice is pretty op...... def use up the smallest amount of space to feed the most people. also corn i thought would be better........ that said i realize rice u planting, harvesting, hauling 4 times basically in that same time as corn........ so u use-waste a lot of man hours there. but hydro u dont replant... so just harvest and haul repeat.
I'm wondering how much work goes into the crops. I've always started with rice and then moved into corn or potatoes after a bit because with rice, every six days you have to stop whatever your doing and harvest the crops. With corn there's a harvest once every three weeks or so. I would be interested to see how this work investment from the colonists plays out. Like, sure rice produces the most food for plot, but it takes at least twice the work of any other crop.
I would say chicken and egg really works quite well. I just put up two sun lamps in a rich soil field. Then have the chicken walk right to the edge. So when I harvest it.. I just have to move it a few squares. The benefit from eggs is that you just can go collect them.
you should take into account the labor. it may take 20 plots of rice and 20 plots of corn to sustain a colonist, but 20 plots of corn only need to be harvested 1/3 as often. if you have enough land but not enough labor (almost always the case earlygame), the yield is limited by the amount of plots you can effectively manage hence is bottlenecked by your labor.
Again, while I laud and appreciate the immense quantity of work that must have gone into this, I have some minor problems with the presentation. The spreadsheet has a heading that reads "Plots for Endless Feeding." This is confusing. I ask because I play something that I am trying to improve on: 15 10X10 plots--2 each growing haygrass, potatoes, rice, corn, and strawberries; 1 growing smokeleaf, psychoid, healroot, hops and cotton. I eventually supplement this with a hydroponic garden in the shape of the footprint of a sunlamp filled with basins, split between rice and cotton. I also usually put the cotton plot next to the haygrass plots and let the animals graze on those three while I restrict them away from the rest. The first winter is usually pretty tough, but the colony makes it. After that, the colony runs out of room in its 10X10 cooler pretty quickly. I'm giving my sizes in the distance unit of the colony board, which I, for lack of a better term, will refer to as "squares." So...in the spreadsheet, how many squares are there in one of the plots that it refers to?
@@MurdersMachine Thank you for the information you provided, it's a great conclusion. I know because I reached it separately. :P :p :P So...what do you believe works best? How many of those plots to feed a three-colonist crashland scenario?
Why tropical rainforests are superior: - Unlimited wood - Cool animals - So many animals you don't even need to worry about planting things, just go hunt stuff and you'll have loads of food instantly. Get beaned on.
In defense of animals, a big part of their charm is their ability to graze on wild plants which grow on their own naturally. Not to mention that should somthing like a volcanic winter or toxic fallout occur you can simply Take a colonist with either enough food to last or a decent plant skill and have them sheperd your flock on the saftey if the world map
as a quicck note, Haygrass isn't actually the efficient way to fed cows - they can eat simple meals which doesn't really waste nutrition for something so portly, which actually becomes far more efficient for them and allows them to feed themselves far more easily with simple meals - as they produce 0.90 nutrition a day max and can further have it cooked into around 1.62 nutrition, they effectively create more calories than are required to feed them.
Not surprised to find out that rice is (usually) the best plant, though seeing the comparison between corn and berries more clearly is interesting. As far as animals go, there's three things I feel were left out. First, animals that eat hay can also can also just eat normal grass that spawns naturally (at least in temperate biomes). In that way, rather than converting a farmer's time and resources, it's a free, passive income. Second, you're often going to have animals for more reasons than just as a food source (whether that's textiles, hauling, defense, or packing). Even in the case of chickens, where they're there just for food, the eggs they provide gives you easy access to fine meals and significantly decrease the burden on hunting. Lastly, I wish you had made a point about slaughtering your animals (for example, I tend to keep only two male and four female muffalos). I know the impact of that would be much smaller than regular milk or eggs, but it'd still be cool to know and is definitely related to the scope of this video. Overall, good information though! I like your videos on the game's mechanics.
The spreadsheet is up on Google Docs and the link is in the description! The URL might change as I locally edit and re-upload because some of the edits are saving.. oddly. Something to keep in mind for later! Also, I'm sure some of the "formulas" can be more simply done, but ah well right?
EDIT: Updated the URL - Stony Soil was dividing growth rate instead of multiplying. I believe we have correct numbers now!
What about better than simple meals? How does that factor into the equation for your colonists? Which is more efficient out of chickens/cows/goats to get the added animal based ingredients?
Thanks a bunch for the work you put into this. It's helpful to know how much land has to be utilized and how to increase it as new colonists are "acquired". :D
Cheers (and stay safe)
Dude you so should have streamed all this work! I would have watched it for sure.
@@KirthGersen09 I believe those questions are outside the scope of Yetis findings. But, Fine and Simple meals are mathematically identical to each other, other than needing an ingredient mix for Fine Meals. 0.5 Ingredient Nutrition for 0.9 Meal Nutrition. So in that regard, there's no real change if you're using a mix of both anyway.
You're only going to see differences when it comes down to Pemmican, Survival Meals, and Lavish Meals. All three are worse meal solutions when it comes to conversion, in exchange for different perks. Pemmican is 0.5/0.8(About 12% loss.) Survival Meals are a bit worse, 0.6/0.9(20% loss.) Lavish Meals are 1/1 - so 2x the ingredients of a fine/simple meal for 11% more end product nutrition(80% loss if my math is right.) Only worth it for the buff if you need it to bring a colonists mood up, or have a Royal Title requirement.
Maybe pin in an edit that depending on your latitude and season day will be longer or shorter, which rimworld does simulate. This is particularly relevant to polar colonys
There's a food besides Rice Paste Meals and the odd insect jelly. Interesting.
Wait, there's rice paste meals? And here I was making raider human meat paste...
@@unocualqu1era have they removed the debuff? I had to make a paste out of raider meat paste previously
@@koutatakanashi4435 colonists know when you use human meat to cook anythin even human paste meals
@@TheSoulbanker cooking paste out of human meat and then cooking paste out of human meat paste removed the flag before, so they didn't know.
Was feature removed?
@@koutatakanashi4435 HAHAHA THAT'S HILARIOUS. Did they take that out? I didnt even realize you could put paste meals into the dispenser
The only milk I need from animals is the kind that you make into mortar shells
You mean insect-meat-fuel?
@@jb663 chemfuel from boomalopes
J D you mean human meat fuel?
That’s right. I kill my enemies with the corpses of their dead allies.
@@coops3600 😂😂😂 that's beautiful
Nishe Siel I like to think of raids as hat and chemfuel supply runs
When someone comes with an Excel sheet you know he ain't joking.
And opened via OOo Calc
They*😉
Only play games that have videos with spreadsheets for them!
You can register and make your sheets on google sheet, easy.
@@derekli8957 He*😉
It's pretty chilling when you check out a chicken's family tree after a few years of farming.
Big wheels keep on turning
@@maikv750 alabama want to knpw your location
@@BenL-wh4pt you beat me to it😂
When your family tree is a circle.
*Correction: Family circle
"But how often do you really have a stony soil farm?"
You underestimate my desire to run extreme desert and sea ice playthroughs
you sir are a legend, one of the rare few people that will chose a the path least tread upon, i respect that
Yeti is streaming, doing a lets play on along with tutorials of Rimworld. Give us the sign that you're OK and not been held against your will!
Blinking intensifies
Yeti AKA ClosetYeti EDF! EDF!
Hhhhhhuuuuuuhhhhgggggg!
EDF!
EDF!
@@ClosetYeti
the organization will hear about this :^)
My understanding is that the advantage of corn is less man-hours per meal, when compared to rice. Which can be a big deal in certain colonies.
As for the animals, two things:
1- Once your population of chickens/ Goats is sufficient, you get some extra nutrition in the form of meat when a new member grows and you butcher the oldest one, so the numbers are slightly bigger than calculated. Also, much more annoying to calculate.
2- They are a renewable source of fine meals for the morale boost.
They are never going to be as efficient as going vegetarian, but it can be worth the investment.
He's also operating on the assumption that 100% of the animal's diets comes in the form of player-grown haygrass, which when you don't have a ton of animals, allowing them to graze will keep them fed, and then it goes from "really inefficient" to "free food out of thin air"
Yeah, what's the plot per harvest ratio?
@@rustyspurs771 If you've got the grass to feed all of the animals, then by all means go for it. A lot of colonies don't, and if you're looking for guaranteed numbers then grass complicates things.
@@ClosetYeti - As far as animal grazing goes, planting dandelions seem to be the best. You need a colonist to constantly replant them everywhere, but outside of winter seasons it is a lot less hassle than hauling hay back to the barn. It's a great way to keep stockpiling hay for winters, and for kibble as animals seem to prefer grazing before hay or kibble. In my previous modded run on a 350x350 map for several scrollbars worth of animals it made the difference between having to slaughter them and feed the rest from my hydroponics to having 12K+ hay and 10K kibble saved for winter (40 growing days/year). It also kept the killbox zones clear of trees that enemies could use for cover.
Not to mention you can train them up to help defend your colony, cant tell you the amount of times my hoard of dogs and donkeys saved my colony.
A very important column I think you forgot to include is labor per yield which is extremely important. As it stands by your information with a sunlamp you have to spend almost 4 times as much labor to get just a small amount more food than corn. Oddly enough berries is a strong contender for a fast consistent food supply that is 50% less labor intensive as rice and can be eaten raw. So thank you for this information.
You are absolutely correct.
"A lie, a damned lie, a statistic."
Worktime is your most precious commodity and corn is still the king.
Also time the crop lasts after harvest is different for each. Since I keep my freezer full of meat and meals I tend to keep stocks of corn in spare bedroom or prison they last longest.
@@llamaa6433 True. Of course, since you cant control which ones are used first, at least without serious micromanagement, there is still a real chance of spoilage.
The tactic I try to use is having several different crops in small fields in different areas and conditions. This way I get near constant inflow of vegetables with quite low chance of massive bumper crops that would overwhelm my system and workers.
Start with tiny field of rice on the first day, and live on foraging and hunting. Tiny field of strawberries or potatoes the next, preferably berries in the start. Tiny field of corn on the next.
Or, if the situation calls for it, very tiny fields of each every second day for a few days.
If all goes well, you can expect small mini-harvests on most days, with bit larger crops every now and then.
@@ribbitgoesthedoglastnamehe4681 You are right but how I go about this is I'm sending corn with least shelf life with caravans that way it's pretty simple to separate them mid to late game. Early spoilage it's not a problem since most of the time everyone is half starved. There should be way of setting prioritiy for shelf life just like it is for skill at cooking station.
According to the wiki rice only gives 2% more nutrition per day than corn, and that’s assuming 100% harvest/sow efficiency. All the extra time spent without anything sown (and any time spent with the plant sitting at “ready to harvest” before it gets harvested) would more than make up for that 2% difference in most situations, unless you have a colony with a large number of high skill crop farmers.
As others have said, the truly limited resource in rimworld is not available space to sow but pawn labour (unless playing desert/ice). Maybe a rice patch would give more nutrition per day than a corn patch of equal size, but if you equalise for labour investment, you could sow and reap a corn plot that’s probably 5 times as large as the rice one for the same amount of labour (since the rice will have to be harvested and resown multiple times before the corn gets its first harvest).
one hidden variable on the efficiency of food animals is that they're basically free to keep alive if you're in a warmer climate that regularly regrows grass outdoors. I've sustained animals through winter with very small plots, even having to make room to store the excess haygrass when winter ends
The actual advantage of animals is that they can just eat the grass that grows everywhere on maps where it isn't an ice sheet or desert. That's pretty much the advantage to them irl too lmao
@The Mine What are you even talking about? Having basically a machine that turns grass into milk was amazing for early humans, if it wasn't worth it they would never have started domesticating them in the first place.
@The Mine you may have noticed humans didn't give up herding when they started farming. Marginal land is great for goats, etc.
I think that's only if you have mods that make the animals eat grass. Otherwise, they tend to eat your prepared foods as well as crops.
@@pershop4950 Create an area for animals and exclude your freezer and growing zones
@@pershop4950 they eat grass in vanilla
Rimworld Palyer: So I made a spreadsheet
All other Rimworld Players: Yeh, that makes a lot of sense.
Anyone that has made a spreadsheet automatically becomes credible.
🤣🤣🤣
'Potatoes are one of the worst crops to plant'
Tell that to my tribal colonists living in a desert. Less fertility sensitive crops are great for terrain that has crappy soil
Well that is still a fairly rare case. Which is a bit of a shame really, more varying fertility and less available fertile farmland could be an interesting mechanic. It's rarely a big deal though.
@@dereinzigwahreRahl yeah, it's sad that this is true.
dereinzigwahreRahl this is why many players purposefully opt for the most challenging maps. We want the challenge to keep it interesting.
@@coops3600 No shit Sherlock.
@dereinzigwahreRahl I was just pointing out that people purposefully play on maps where this stuff is actually an issue. I fully agree that it should be a bigger deal than it is on most maps though.
"Potatoes well in stony soil"
The irish: You don't say!
Love the work put into this, it's a wonderful reference for information that was impossible to find. As a side note in practice you would run cows to provide milk as part of fine meals, so in those instances you would half the amount of haygrass required as half the nutrition comes from the vegetarian side. Assuming I am reading the data correctly that would be 17.1 rich haygrass plots to provide the meat component to one dupes meals every day. So one greenhouse could support about 5 with some left over to account for problem.
Still a rather expensive way to get the meat component of a meal but it could potentially be the only option on some map types.
Again love the work on this.
a random Francis XD. yes, speaking about fine meal you need to half the need of haygrass, but you also need to add the half of one other crop. in general animal for food is not great, just beter to hunt them down as soon as spawn like you do. a least are you revalueate your choise of using potato? love your video, keep going
I love the "daily nut per plot" part.
Finally! a video that actually gets to the point of the title, talks about the information and doesnt spend 10 minutes repeating the title with different words before telling you 3 words of the stuff you came here for! thank you for the in depth explanation!
Rice also means A LOT more work. Corn gives massive yelds at much longer spaced intervals, meaning it saves a lot of worked hours for your pawns, for an almost identical average nutrition per tile.
Two days later in the patch notes:
*Reduce CROP and mining yields on savage and merciless difficulty*
use mods to rebalance it the way you want it. IMO the balancing in rimworld is overdone. if you want to bolster a crop because you want it, just do it
@@unlink1649 I use a mod called tilled soil which boosts soil fertility to 200% wherever you place it (placed like flooring)
Kitty Kat Same, nerfed it down to %175 but that should be a research topic in vanilla, we’ve been fertilising and tilling land for centuries.
SalmonToastie millennia, actually
Nishe Siel Thank you.
By the way, the saturation mechanic you're referring to with chocolate is actually just their nutrition bar. Pawns will not consume more chocolate based nutrition than they can currently fit on their nutrition bar. So if their nutrition is at 0.9/1 (if they recently ate a meal), they'll only consume one chocolate unit. However, how the AI works is that when a pawn goes to eat chocolate, they will take a quantity of chocolate that is determined not by how much nutrition they can fit in, but by how much recreation they hope to gain by eating the chocolate. So if they have a nearly empty recreation bar they might grab 4 or 5 bars of chocolate, but if their nutrition is full, only 1 of them will be consumed and the rest will be dropped on the floor. It's a bit of an error in the AI that needs addressing imo. It could be changed so that pawns will only grab the amount of chocolate that their current nutrition can hold, but imo it would make more sense to just let them eat the quantity that will fill their recreation bar regardless of current nutrition level.
4 bars to fill the recreation needs. They want eat more. It's not really food. More a boost. Or you need mods to change things, like still. But chocolate is good to have for emergencies, Example to boost some pawn with recreation need to fill when a raid is showing up.
There are ways to get better numbers for animals. The most obvious would be that animals can eat grass which doesn't require any colonist time. Also, during summer, you can leave a lot of animals with a caravan and let them graze on grazable tiles in the map. They won't reproduce directly on the map but they may reproduced whenever your caravan gets raided. You can actually get pretty good numbers this way. You can actually get a lot of value from shearing apalcas everytime your caravan gets raided. Of course, getting raided presents some risks, but you can get very good engagements if you use your animals as meatshields. You don't even have to train them, you just need to send them toward your enemy by manipulating their zone.
Some animals such as pigs will happily eat human corpses which means it's possible to horde all raider corpses in your base into a frozen room. You can let pigs slowly dispose of them without having your colonists repeatedly view them. You can then get a tiny fraction of it by eating your excess pigs without having to deal with the moral debuff from butchering humans.
Alternatively, you can get a lot food from it if you stockpile corpses until your colony gets some kind of moral boost, and then you use that time to butcher human corpses. You can then multiply the food value you get from that by 3 by turning human meat into nutritional meals, although this will require micromanagement. Nutritional meal can be eaten even by vegetarian animals and it's technically possible to get more food value from cow milk than you even put into the system. This can be useful in extreme maps like sea ice and ice sheets.
i have royalty and the mares i send out usually get pregnant. i guess
There are more things to consider, for example labour intensity. What potatos and corn win over rice is that you get more food per harvest, meaning that rice requires more harvests meaning more labour is needed. All labour put into harvesting rice could be put into other things. This is especially important as your colony grows larger, where labour-effectiveness is usually more important than plot-effectiveness.
Likewise with animals: they are usually not that labour intensive. Having a few cows feeding off the naturally grown grass is an insinely labour-effective way of providing food for the colony. If your cows only eat haygrass, then it starts to make sense to avoid them.
that's an astounding amount of work for a short 7 minute video. thanks!
Edit: i have no background in editing, and im sure that took a while too
Thank you. The sight of an intelligently compiled spreadsheet always gladdens my heart. :) I recently started playing Rimworld again (like many others). Although I don't want to min/max, I've always believed that characters should have at least a rough idea of food production requirements etc. for RP purposes. Biggest surprise here is chocolate, which I've never grown in the past but have just planted in my present game. Presumably it's intended mainly as a trade item? And that might be a topic for another vid - better trading tactics. ;)
The main point of chocolate is that you can make recreation-deprived colonists eat it for a quick recreation boost.
@@imperiallarch7610 Thanks. I knew about the recreation boost but it seems very strange that the colonists have to be force-fed it rather than automatically taking some. Just another of those odd game mechanics I guess. :)
@@machar8740 You need to set your colonist's to be able to eat chocolate for a mood boost under the recreation drugs I do believe. That way they will freely eat it when they need it freeing up it being tedious. However it is also a great product to sell for extra cash if you are struggling to get money but it grows so slowly its not really worth it. Beer is a much better product.
@@Torgar That's great, thanks. Brewing is on my agenda but I haven't got around to it yet - too many new mods to experiment with. :)
Dirk Mckinnis It’s not just the growth rate. Being a tree, it takes a huge amount of work to sow and to harvest, and I don’t think the high price per bar of chocolate fully accounts for that. A full tree gives (from memory) 19 units of chocolate, at $3 each, as opposed to corn giving 21 units at harvest, worth $1.10 each, but with the corn taking probably one tenth of the time time to sow as one tree of cocoa, or even less. Then the cocoa takes 50% more time to grow, and that’s only if you’re not growing the corn in rich soil. You’d probably be better just selling corn to bulk goods traders than trying to make money with chocolate lol. Beer is good to sell too though, I agree. Easy to produce in bulk too.
I'm a corn fanboy. Similar plots/colonist to rice but you'd have to harvest rice 3 times before your first corn harvest... unless I'm missing something?
And if you're moving up to fine meals would cow's milk still be the best animal product to use?
I like to supplement my corn with berries incase of emergency. They have a long shelf life and can be eaten raw
@David JR Still, corn is good if you want your growers to do other things besides full-time rice planting, and it also has more hitpoints which makes it less likely to burn down in a fire.
@David JR Having a second corn field at least 4-5 cells away from the other fields also basically negates the impact of blight on your food supply; either of the same size, or cutting the amount of fieldage you expect to need in roughly half between each field. It also lets you stagger your food income, which can be situationally nice.
Either way, Corn has the lowest Work per Nutrition out of any crop, thanks to its insane harvest yield and long growing time, which is nice.
For consideration for Tribals, Corn also has (I believe) the longest shelf life of any crop by far, which is important because you have to stagger your hunting to avoid losing meat to spoilage when making pemmican. On a more temperate map with a decently long winter, it can basically be stored indefinitely.
Plus corn takes so long to rot. 75 days I believe. Don't even need a fridge for some of your food.
I also prefer corn... but the issue if is there is some problem with balancing or something happens, it takes way to long to get food. Usually I have a few hydroponics with rice as emergency food production
This is a very good start, but as mentioned in the comments:
Potatoes are better in stony soil.
Corn is much less work (but takes longer to grow so you need better margins for blight and fire).
Using good or lavish meals for the mood boost makes life easier, but takes a lot more farming/herding/cooking.
You always have to adapt any strategy depending on biome, tech level (especially refrigeration, but also hunting weapons) and pawn skills. (Hunting rhinos with skill average 2 and a short bow? Guess you need a wooden leg, if you are lucky.)
Grazing also has the advantage of keeping your defensive zone (kill box/killing field) clear of cover while keeping the slow movement of the soil. Sure, setting fire to a field of hay grass in the box can be both fun and effective, but it takes work to tend those fields.
You telling me that everyone doesn't plant every crop? Huh
I've never done this in any game. General rule of thumb is if you start in a desert biome with low fertility soil you do potatoes. Rice is best until you have a freezer with a nice stockpile. Then corn to keep an income and hugely reduce the amount of harvesting needed. Berries is when you just need to eat something raw.
Every crop has a purpose and that is the way I like it.
I've always done this, everyone needs their variety of foods!
Same
I've always loved my people, gotta give them wide variety.
@My irons are rusted are you irish?
There is a biome where potato efficiency in gravel is relevant: extreme desert. Extreme deserts have no regular soil at all, but does have gravel/rocky soil near the rock formations/mountains. You can use these to plant crops and potatoes are the best for food there. This is particularly important if you're tribal, though good luck finding wood to cook anything there as a tribe...trees do not grow nicely there.
Technically, ice sheet is the same as extreme desert in terms of available soil best I can tell, but because it is too cold for crops the ability to grow in gravel isn't useful. You would need to use sunlamps and at that point you might as well use hydroponics.
Saguaro cactus is your wood source in desert biomes. It has low fertility sensitivity.
Whoa! Look at Mr Spreadsheet over here! Pretty damn amazing done Yeti!
I always thought the growth boost from hydroponics was underwhelming, but I never thought it was because my beloved potatoes could betray me. Thanks for making this, this was super informative, not to mention concise.
SOON in the patch notes:
- Implemented food nutrition
- food paste nutrition values is depended on ingredents in hoppers.
Awesome! Thanks for doing the math. I've always wondered about this. I still think this shows that corn is king. It takes 3.75x to grow which means much less labor while only require around 3% more space.
Berries or rice in hydroponics is a lot closer though. 1.5x grow time versus 1.15x the space. Trade off there is going to depend on whether you're short labor, or space and materials.
Yes, if you are limited by work hours rather than farm space (which is most likely the case in any biome other than ice sheet and desert) then corn has the best nutrition per work hour value. Second place is potatoes. That is why I hate hydroponics, you cant plant corn and potates don't benefit as much from the increased fertility and anything else is a lot more work for your colonists. I recommend you only use hydroponics if you have absolutely no other choice. Rice in hydroponics does not come close, because the work per nutrition is independent from grow time. Fertility does only change your space efficiency, but not your work efficiency.
I champion the humble berry. In soil, in hydroponics. If you refuse to use the nutrient paste dispenser, which some people do, berries are a great replacement because of the labour saved by not having a dedicated cook. This can give you a significant leap ahead early on in a playthrough. Just grow and eat, and have your cook do more productive things, like construct or craft. Rice, in my opinion, is too labour intensive. You spend too much time in the field, planting, harvesting, etc, and then cooking. Berries and corn will feed a colony efficiently and without too much headache.
A respectable opinion
@David JR It can. And that's a drawback.
If you ever get the chance, consider factoring harvesting time for each crop. Rice really great, but you gotta expend a lot of extra time planting, harvesting and hauling it. Not generally a problem once you hit mid-game but early game when you've got low growing stats and only a few colonists, needing to devote one or two pops to the constant cycle farming cycle means you can end up lacking in workforce for everything else, which in only made worse if, for whatever reason, to need to start microing the process.
This is huge relief for me for couple of days i was reading wiki and tried to calculate the number of tiles needed but it was pain
in my ass. I know how much work u have done behind this sheet. This made my life way better with regard to food atleast for
now in rimworld.
I tend to grow a field of every food crop; i know colonists dont have favorite foods like in dwarf fortress, but this is a habit i acquired from my df days
I tend to do the same, even though I doubt they care, I like to think they appreciate the color and variety of having different crops to eat.
Great spreadsheets, definitely something I was trying to think about lately, so I greatly appreciate the work! The big thing with animal nutrition I think is the sustainability for lavish meals which require a portion of protein
Animals are the original winter crop. Food bank for when times are lean. Don't know the advantage yet of taming versus hunting wild ones. Wild ones just graze wherever. Tame ones I gotta feed. Thanks for the tips - new to Rimworld but old in real life. Grew up in the country where people would slaughter hogs in the early winter and survive on pork and pickled vegetables and fruit until the spring greens and carrots started coming in. Old days.
@Yeti - THANK YOU SO MUCH YETI for doing this work and share it with all of us.
It's worth considering however that Corn takes considerably less EFFORT to grow. You spend almost 4x more time planting, harvesting, and hauling Rice than you do Corn and that is a significant amount of time that your colonists could be doing something more productive.
Like planting more corn :p
@@_Meriwether This guy gets it.
Another thing to consider is that corn lasts longer, which can be very useful to tribes. Also another video of the same type that could be interesting is comparing animals that make wool, cotton and devilstrand. Also the video was very informative, thanks for doing all that work for us!
You should have been a news anchor. Your voice absolutely sells it.
Yeti, potatoes do have some redeeming qualities, mainly they take way less work than rice to keep your colonies fed, last longer than berries and don't have a cycle as long as corns which makes them vulnerable to blight, sudden weather changes, etc. I actually like to start my colonies on potatoes because my early bottleneck isn't land for crops, but manpower. Manpower is usually the main bottleneck and not available farmland in the early game. They're quite bad for hydroponics though, I'll agree.
Tato is only good if you have an abundance of hydro but no dirt. It's the most pawn-work efficient option. Otherwise corn.
@@skylark306 Isn't it the other way around? As in corn is the most pawn-work efficient and good if you have hydro?
Potatoes are excellent if you do not have a freezer. I believe they last the longest unrefridgerated out of all the crops listed. They are my staple during lost tribe starts until I can preserve my ingredients, at which point I switch to corn.
@@Swordphobic It would be if it could be planted in hydroponics
This was an interesting study. I think I will still grow a couple small patches of each crop because I like to, but focus more on rice in the future. Also I like to keep animals because it is entertaining, but it is really good to know how much better goats and cows are if u are just using it as a farm animal compared to like yaks
Ahaha that dude that missed like 3 shots from the minigun on the beginning is a real accurste representation of combat in rimworld
thanks mate, I was looking for some research into what pets are most worthwhile recently.
I might just try keeping a heard of them in my next play through.
Good vid! One thing to note is that animals can feed on normal grass and shrubs and such. Normal grazing can (on some biomes) make the bulk of their diet
Wow, thanks for the work you put into that. Some things to factor in with animals (particularly fast breeders like goats) (which you no doubt know) are:
1. They should be grazing in unplanted areas most of the time and only eating hay grass in winter/emergencies
2. You eat/sell the males and any of them in an emergency
3. Animal products count toward fine and lavish meal requirements
4. You get free leather, and
5. They make good meat shields.
6. Some, like camels, are also pack animals
7. Some, like Yaks, give wool
So yeah, you can't live off goat's milk, but unless you're on an ice sheet animals are a resource. Add to the list the efficiencies in not being reliant on hunting, which can be unpredictable and dangerous, training up your handlers so that they can tame high-value beasts, and having "meat on the leg," meaning in tribal runs you don't have to
Thank you so much for this, folks like you who take the time to not only do the math, do the testing, get the data, but do it in such a thorough and articulated way that is easy to be shared are such a backbone in gaming communities, or just internet communities in general. Sorry some folks are downvoting this, they're just scared of math haha. But seriously, great video, very helpful, I had been debating doing something similar but you did it better than I ever would have thought to :)
I always play Randy Merciless Ice sheet naked brutality, so this is very helpful
You need to sit down in the mirror and start loving yourself. Because that's fucked up.
You need to sit down in the mirror and start loving yourself. Because that's fucked up.
corn helps alot because the less work you have to upkeep it
Did you intentionally use dyslexia-friendly font? I love it!
Potatoes are really just the go-to crop for non-ideal areas before you get your hydroponics up, particularly the desert biomes. Likewise, they operate well enough as a non-rich soil starter food source to cut back on colonist field work until you're on your feet and can afford to let someone spend the time harvesting and sowing at the pace rice demands. Low Colonist count scenarios such as Naked Brutality/Rich Explorer and any custom ones benefit from the early game use of potatoes.
Someone else already mentioned it but animals are pretty good for turning non edible plants into nutrition like IRL, they'll forage in the summer if you set them up with preferably walled pastures, eating bushes, moss, ivy etc. Keep the haygrass for winter and you're set, converting the insect / human meat you may have into kibble with it for good feeds. Also kibble is GREAT for chemfuel refineries if you can justify the labour of making it and then refining it on top.
i don't even want to know how much this took you so thank you very much
This was an awesome video Yeti! Very much appreciated. I've been playing Rimworld over the years and I always had a feeling animals really weren't worth it. Although that being said I have enjoyed using Muffalo multiple times as they can be very useful in caravans. I was also very surprised to learn that potatoes are actually pretty shit.
For food only they are not but they do have other uses. Now we have the info needed to see if the other uses are worth it.
As someone with a couple of thousands of hours of Rimworld under his belt, all I can say is that since you already(hopefully) own a walk in freezer and have the Deep Stack mod installed, the best way is to just endlessly stockpile.
If you have enough mods with enough horrible events installed, chances are that sooner or later, there will be a series of catastrophes that might seriously disrupt your food production, possibly for years.
At some point, you will have at least 20-30 people who will consume inordinate amounts of food and while having enough stockpiles to last for a year might seem a lot, any horrible calamity or even a moderate one could force you to extreme measures.
It's even more important when you try to keep your colonists happy with fine or better meals.
In any case, I feel good when I have 7000+ units of rice stocked up and maybe exchange it for some fancy items when traders come around.
Also, It's really good to have 1000+ units of survival meals, just in case.
P.S.: Before you ask, I was the guy who bought up all the flour this time last year.
This guide is very detailed and quite helpful. I thank you for all of the research and work that has gone into this
I think for many colonies the limiting factor is more the amount of time taken in sowing and harvesting. Rice needs to be planted and harvested every 6 days. Corn every 22. Potatoes are OK because they're a happy medium and can be grown anywhere. Blights also affect these things too. Plants with long growth cycles are more affected by blight. Similarly, with rich soil you tend to crowd your plots around. Potatoes are good because they're versatile and can be planted anywhere. Rice is good for fast food, corn is good for efficient food. Both of those are best in fertile soil. Potatoes are alright to plant further away from your main crops so they can buffer in case you get hit with blights.
Ostriches drop fertilized eggs and only lay every 23 days, and while you CAN eat the eggs for nutrition, you could also let them hatch and grow up which then provides 90 meat, and I think their maturity time is about 27 days. It would be interesting to see the conversion of haygrass into meat. Animals also do a good job of protecting you against agricultural disasters.
Thank you for the work you did but something i think you need to consider when deciding whether Crops or animals make a better food source, is that crops don't give leather. Now granted you cant consume that but it sure makes for a pressing advantage when your food source is also a clothing source.
Thanks for pointing out the thing with the potato fertiltiy sensitivity, lots of people dont know this. But i think the spreadsheet is incomplete, our fellow extreme dessert players need to know how crops do on stony soil. Let the potato have its famous moment!
He shows an update to the sheet for Stony Soil in this video.
Thanks for sharing this. I am always looking for the most efficient way to keep my pawns feed. I hate wasting work hours in fields just to be over-farming. Either having to expand my cooler space or leaving the food to rot.
If you dont want to waste space, stagger your plots.
That means, plant many small plots of different plants. That way, you dont get one huge crop at a time, but a steady supply to counter daily use.
some food keep longer than others while not refrigerated for those early tribal playthru !
I’ve started nutrient paste for my colony’s at first for like the first 30 days and it’s made a huge difference in my growth not having to have a dedicated cook all day
I respect you for this man you spent a lot of work logging all of this and making this video
My understanding is that corn’s advantage is that it keeps longer without refrigeration, so it’s good for tribals stockpiling for the winter
Excellent job on that analysis. I know that took some time to complete and we do appreciate it.
My colonists frequently dine on berries and rice in the early game. Once I have a hen and a rooster, food is no longer a problem. After a few eggs hatch, it’s chicken and rice meals all day long. I might plant some other crops, but those are the staples.
Thank you so much for taking time to do this, it's super useful and helpful!
I think its important to note that corn is a lot more efficient per time worked, rather than space, which can be very important, allowing you to grow a large surplus with the same amount of growers or free up pawns for other work. Sure, if you're space limited its not the best but this often isn't an issue for most colonies.
Rough rules of thumb.
-Rice to get started if you have good quality soil. If you have poor soil, potatoes are the way to go.
-Corn once you are established. Not as nutritionally filling as we see with rice, but you save on work hours which can free up specialists in a mature colony.
-Berries for bumper crops. If for some reason your meals are destroyed, berries can keep your pawns from mood spirals.
-Cows are best nutritionally but are hard to breed quickly. Chickens are great for setting up a farm and can be sold off/butchered during lean times. Be careful of depleting the map of grass/plants with chickens though.
Another thing to bear in mind is that a hydroponics basin takes a component to build. This can be a prohibitive luxury early in the game.
You forgot one important detail in animals! Rats will happily eat any corpses you give them (which are always in unwanted excess anyway), making them extremely cheap to maintain. They also reproduce quickly, making for a super easy slaughter animal.
Or a raider fodder animal, or even a viable defense when you set their restricted zone onto a group of enemies on your own map. (It might not work the same on enemy maps)
A couple points to mention:
Potato low fertility sensitivity works both ways. So if you play on a low fertility biome, like tundra, potato's are the way to go, because they would still grow at a decent speed in rocky soil.
Also you kind of left several important things out of your calculations. For example work required.
Sure rice requires marginally less plots to feed a colonist than corn, but it also requires to be planted and harvested almost 4 times more often. Ant time your colonists spend planting and harvesting is time they could've better spend elsewhere.
I usually end up with Forsakens mod - Ultraviolett plant producing frosties. Grows fast, high yield, efficient, give +3 mood boost.
Nice video. It would be awesome to add a conversion of 'open grassland' into 'hay plots'. Also some factor for the additional nutrition you get from meat when the animals breed. That would could be complicated since you don't get milk from a Bull for instance, but would the added meat from say 3 cows giving birth however often they do compensate for the lost milk production?
Rice: Is good if you have an urgent need for food, Grows quickly and decent yield, Keeps Farmers regularly occupied (good4training&bad4othertasks)
Potato: Mostly ignores fertility, for maps with low fertility they may be your only viable option.
Corn: Great once you have food stockpiled. Takes a while to grow so your farmer has more free time (bad4training, good4othertasks)
Strawberries: If you are so starved of food that your colonist will raid the crops and eat them raw then and there, strawberries are good i guess.
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Note: Corn has an advantage on productivity if your farms are far from your colony, less trips means less distance traveled and more work
Extra Note: Having all crops makes it easy for your farmer to always be harvesting something, quickly increasing skill and reducing decay
I love the info here. I don't know why I never thought of this.
I disagree with the 'animals are garbage' sentiment, though. A good handler and breeding lean the scales toward a farm being an awesome strategy.
What people dont consider so often though is the time taken to complete the task. If your cow fields are far away your colonists will spend all day running back and forth with milk.
Thats the reason i switched to dromedarys, gives 18 milk instead of 11, but only needs to be milked every 2 days, making them much lower maintenance. Good pack and riding animals too.
hey love your vids and have a lot of similar conclusions! everything with rice and corn is in line with what I found as well except I find takes 1/3 of the work to grow corn but a much higher risk of blight or short growing season's. also with animal's i've been trying to figure out the animal's meat to leather amount and quality to hunger rate. but i've barely scratched the surface on that as i can tell the breeding time of animals can be influenced by cooping them up together and i dont know if their pregnancy or growth period are different per animal. I've been slowly filtering out which is better than which but it'd be interesting to see yourself or someone in the community shed some light on this.
I use animal ranching sometimes, chicken breeding can be a great way to get meat on maps with little wildlife roaming, but that is after the recent update that gives you bonus meat from slaughtering animals that was meant to make the ranching style of gameplay a little more feasible
wow love the work, time effort and spreed sheet.
hydroponic rice is pretty op...... def use up the smallest amount of space to feed the most people.
also corn i thought would be better........ that said i realize rice u planting, harvesting, hauling 4 times basically in that same time as corn........ so u use-waste a lot of man hours there.
but hydro u dont replant... so just harvest and haul repeat.
Mom: So.... Have you been dating recently?
Rimworld players: 1:12
i think u should also talk about corn need 3 time less work when growing and harvesting it.
Good info about chocolate. I always wondered if I should be growing it or not. Now, based on your info, I can see that I could skip it.
I'm wondering how much work goes into the crops. I've always started with rice and then moved into corn or potatoes after a bit because with rice, every six days you have to stop whatever your doing and harvest the crops. With corn there's a harvest once every three weeks or so. I would be interested to see how this work investment from the colonists plays out. Like, sure rice produces the most food for plot, but it takes at least twice the work of any other crop.
Incredibly useful numbers, thank you so much!
You are awesome dude, you seriously deserve so many props for this.
This... is really amazing, thanks for sharing all your result with us !
I would say chicken and egg really works quite well. I just put up two sun lamps in a rich soil field. Then have the chicken walk right to the edge. So when I harvest it.. I just have to move it a few squares.
The benefit from eggs is that you just can go collect them.
you should take into account the labor. it may take 20 plots of rice and 20 plots of corn to sustain a colonist, but 20 plots of corn only need to be harvested 1/3 as often. if you have enough land but not enough labor (almost always the case earlygame), the yield is limited by the amount of plots you can effectively manage hence is bottlenecked by your labor.
Again, while I laud and appreciate the immense quantity of work that must have gone into this, I have some minor problems with the presentation.
The spreadsheet has a heading that reads "Plots for Endless Feeding." This is confusing.
I ask because I play something that I am trying to improve on: 15 10X10 plots--2 each growing haygrass, potatoes, rice, corn, and strawberries; 1 growing smokeleaf, psychoid, healroot, hops and cotton. I eventually supplement this with a hydroponic garden in the shape of the footprint of a sunlamp filled with basins, split between rice and cotton. I also usually put the cotton plot next to the haygrass plots and let the animals graze on those three while I restrict them away from the rest. The first winter is usually pretty tough, but the colony makes it. After that, the colony runs out of room in its 10X10 cooler pretty quickly.
I'm giving my sizes in the distance unit of the colony board, which I, for lack of a better term, will refer to as "squares."
So...in the spreadsheet, how many squares are there in one of the plots that it refers to?
a plot is a single square. and you're growing too much food.
@@MurdersMachine Thank you for the information you provided, it's a great conclusion. I know because I reached it separately. :P :p :P
So...what do you believe works best? How many of those plots to feed a three-colonist crashland scenario?
Why tropical rainforests are superior:
- Unlimited wood
- Cool animals
- So many animals you don't even need to worry about planting things, just go hunt stuff and you'll have loads of food instantly. Get beaned on.
-Disease (plague)
-Disease (plague)
-Disease (gut worms)
-Disease (gut worms)
-Disease (gut worms)
-Infection
-Infection
@@zubinzuro Yes. I'm gangsta until both my doctors get the Plague, along with three other people
TeammateNATE I prefer ice sheet
In defense of animals, a big part of their charm is their ability to graze on wild plants which grow on their own naturally. Not to mention that should somthing like a volcanic winter or toxic fallout occur you can simply Take a colonist with either enough food to last or a decent plant skill and have them sheperd your flock on the saftey if the world map
Can we get an uppdatera video on this?
as a quicck note, Haygrass isn't actually the efficient way to fed cows - they can eat simple meals which doesn't really waste nutrition for something so portly, which actually becomes far more efficient for them and allows them to feed themselves far more easily with simple meals - as they produce 0.90 nutrition a day max and can further have it cooked into around 1.62 nutrition, they effectively create more calories than are required to feed them.
Thanks for the video Yeti, very informative. I actually had no idea about the fertility sensitivity stat.
Not surprised to find out that rice is (usually) the best plant, though seeing the comparison between corn and berries more clearly is interesting. As far as animals go, there's three things I feel were left out. First, animals that eat hay can also can also just eat normal grass that spawns naturally (at least in temperate biomes). In that way, rather than converting a farmer's time and resources, it's a free, passive income. Second, you're often going to have animals for more reasons than just as a food source (whether that's textiles, hauling, defense, or packing). Even in the case of chickens, where they're there just for food, the eggs they provide gives you easy access to fine meals and significantly decrease the burden on hunting. Lastly, I wish you had made a point about slaughtering your animals (for example, I tend to keep only two male and four female muffalos). I know the impact of that would be much smaller than regular milk or eggs, but it'd still be cool to know and is definitely related to the scope of this video. Overall, good information though! I like your videos on the game's mechanics.
Hell yeah man, subscribing because of this video.
As a starting player these clips are really useful. But stil I try to find an in game balance. Stil great clip