Has anyone taken the time to scribble down some maths around food required per per year? I'm constantly underestimating the food required and I'm running short. When i increase my farms and harvest a great crop I feel comfortable only to find myself starving at the end of winter.
I know all that is part of the game and wouldn't change it but has someone done the maths to know that every colonist requires 10 (or whatever) strawberries per year to remain alive? I need to start forecasting my food residents better.
A single colonist requires 2 meals each day, thats's 1200 raw, 600 meat/veg for one year.
To get 600 with a single harvest you need:
100 tiles rice
55 tiles of potato
28 tiles of corn
A sunlamp provides 100 tiles.
I like to start with two 11x11 fields, one with rice and the other with corn.
My colonist live of simple meals made out of meat during the summer.
As soon as the rice is harvested, I turn it into pemmican, for my pets and travelling.
Corn get's harvested during fall and gives you food that should last you through winter, and toxic fallouts.
Those two fields are walled in seperataly, get an early fallout or cold snap I can roof it over and save a lot of the harvest.
That's for your first year, as a tribe that is.
Grow more than you really need, uou will lose some harvest most likely.
So, ignoring hunting and random events, one tile of 11x11 pet colonist per year?
Vegetable diet with no meat, requires 1200 vegetables of any kind for one colonist.
Corn harvest is 22 corn for each plant. Divide 1200 with 22 and then you need 54.54 tiles.
8x7 per colonist is enough for one colonist for a year.
One rule of thumb I use, is to grow the slowest-growth (usually most efficient) crop that will fit into the growing season where my base is, for the majority of my crops. So if the area I'm in has a growing season of 20 days, that's just barely long enough for corn. If it's 10 days, I'll only grow rice or potatoes. The slow-growing crops will take the least amount of work for the largest amount of harvest, since your pawns don't have to constantly harvest and re-plant the crops.
It's also a good idea to grow a mix of different crops, so no one thing will starve your colony. Corn lasts the longest time in an unrefrigerated (but walled and roofed) warehouse, so you can overproduce it, and just keep a big stockpile. However, it takes the longest time to grow, so fires, toxic fallout, blight, and cold snaps will be a lot more penalizing if you're only growing corn. Rice grows the fastest, and lasts a decently long time unrefrigerated, so you should almost always have a small plot of rice, at least until you've got a big stockpile of other food. Potatoes rot the fastest, but grow well in stony soil / gravel. Strawberries can be eaten raw without the "uncooked" mood penalty, if you're out of fuel or there's a solar flare.
Finally, as mentioned previously, you can store a lot of uncooked vegetables in an unrefrigerated warehouse. A stack of uncooked corn has less total nutrients than a stack of meals, but the corn will last an entire year (60 days on this planet) unrefrigerated, while the meals will rot in only 4 days. A single 4x4 room will hold exactly the 1200 corn needed for one (non-glutton) colonist for a year. If you make the room 12x12, that's enough for 9 colonists, but will only need one outer wall (and a single pillar in the middle?) to hold up the roof, saving construction time. Note that a large warehouse can have fire spread and burn the entire stockpile, so you might want to have smaller warehouses for your grains, in case raiders or anything else sets part of it on fire.
My approach to dealing with large warehouse fires is to set up firefoam poppers - 1 in the middle and 1 in each corner. For indoor 11×11 farms - 1 in each corner.
Is a guiding principle I will try to use it.
Depends on the biome you're in. Shorter growing season biome means more growing tiles needed. Also, all the crops need roughly the same amount of tiles to give the same amount of nutrition for 1 growing year.
The biome section in this guide has calculations of how many tiles you need per pawn.rimworld crop guide (https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/a1rhjt/grow_more_potatoes_and_rice_is_overrated_rimworld/)
I'll add one little trick I've tried a few times, in a 30/60 biome, and that is switching crops mid-season. I'd grow corn on some tiles, because it is less manpower-intensive than rice, and switch to rice after the first corn harvest. This method lets my farmers do other stuff too while the corn is growing, then the short growing time for rice gives me say two more rice harvests before the winter comes.
An added benefit is that both corn and rice spoil slower than potatoes, which is a bonus for my usually tribal pawns.
1. Plant an extra. Blights, toxic fallouts and other stuff can happen.
2. If you see that you underplanted - start hunting safe animals (with 0% chance on revenge).
3. If it's not enough you can "manually" feed colonists (it's not too tedious if there are not many of them). For that set them on "nothing" food restriction and when they are near-zero hunger you order them to eat. That way they need ~40% less food.