Gathering food RimWorld Guide
Last update: 19 August 2016
One of the main problems in the colony is being low on food for the majority of time. Most scenarios will let you start the game play with some food, which should be enough to survive a couple of days. However, without a permanent food source, it will be extremely difficult to keep your colonists happy.
Remember! Eating uncooked, raw meals or eating flesh of the dead will cause several negative effects to the mental health. Apart from that, make sure to craft a dining table and some chairs. Eating from the floor will also affect the mood.
- Hunting
- Farming
- Other means of gaining food
- How to prepare high quality food?
- How to build a freezer in RimWorld?
Hunting
One of the quickest ways to obtain food is to send your colonists hunting. Select an animal with a single click (double click will select a large group and all nearby animals) and press the hunting button. The colonist that has his highest priority set to hunting will begin the activity. You should equip him with a range weapon, as most creates will react aggressively towards the attacker, which may eventually lead to severe damage. Once the creature was killed, the fallen body will be taken to the area marked as dumping zone. To prepare the food further, you will need a butcher table, where raw meat and leather can be obtained. The amount of obtained resources will depend on the size of the killed animal.
Farming
It is relatively easy to farm in RimWorld. In the architect panel select zone->fields and select the area where you want to plant. Then, click the newly created field and choose what you want to grow. After clicking "i" next to the name of the crop, additional parameters such as nutrition value, or aesthetics bonus will be displayed. Once this is done, a free colonist will start farming. Finally, the process of growing will take place - depending on what and where you farm, harvesting time may differ. When crops grow, they will be harvested and taken to the stockpile
Other means of gaining food
Apart from the two main methods of gaining food, you can also:
- Gather food from damaged capsules - Depending on the difficulty level, sometimes there might be damaged escape capsules with resources across the planet. Often there is food. You need to select resources you are interested in and order your colonists to use them.
- Purchase food from merchants - sometimes, merchants will come to help you. Send one of your colonists to them (press the right mouse button while on the merchant and select bargain) and purchase the supplies.
- Collect berries - sometimes you can come across berry bushes. You can collect them, but their nutrition value is rather low.
- Invest in your own ranch - it's a long term process, but in the long run when you tame/save a couple of animals, you can actually build a ranch for them. If you feed them and to pay attention to all their needs, you will gain access to products such as eggs and milk.
- Kill tamed animals -you can order your colonists to kill tamed animals to obtain meat.
- Rely on... corpses. If your colonists are starving, you may eat flash of the dead as a last resort. This will have a very negative effect on your colonists (unless they have the cannibalism perk).
How to prepare high quality food?
The food that you obtain is raw, untasty and will affect the mood of you colonists in a negative way. At first you can prepare it by the campfire - it's a quick and cheap method. However, you should invest in large kitchen. Equip it with cookers and press them to select which dishes you want to prepare. There are several meals to choose from. Those that are quick to prepare consist of only one ingredient, and will decrease your hunger level without improving the mood. On the other hand, better meals require vegetables and meat and will increase the morale of your colonists. An alternative option is to build a nutrient paste dispenser which converts raw food into nutrient pasta meals. It's a perfect solution when you are low on food but it will not improve the happiness of your colonists.
How to build a freezer in RimWorld?
Many types of food can spoil. In order to prevent that from happening, change one of the rooms into a freezer. Select the area of the stockpile, confirm that you only want to take food (optional but useful if you don't want to gather other resources). Make sure that the area is surrounded by walls and put the temperature regulator on one of them (make sure that the blue arrow points at the room and the red one on the outside). Select the freezing device and set the temperature to 0 or lower. From now on, food that will land here will spoil no more.