RimWorld is a colony-building simulation game that likes to make players and their colonists suffer. There will be many challenges along the way, but one of the worst ones will be providing your people with food.
There are many sources of food in RimWorld, ranging from crops to livestock. However, some are more efficient, while others will leave you waiting for days for a sign of nourishment.
Recommended Read: Best Starting Colonists in RimWorld
Players very often tend to underestimate the amount of food they need each time they recruit a new colonist, so knowing which source of food is the best will help out a lot.
The best food source in RimWorld has to be crop farming, and you should aim to grow both rice and corn for maximum efficiency.
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Best Food Source in RimWorld
There are around four ways you can consistently get food in RimWorld:
- Farming
- Raising Livestock
- Hunting
- Foraging
Foraging is just something players will do at the start of the game when their crops are just beginning to grow, so we won’t even go over it.
Hunting is also just something that players might want to pursue if they didn’t plan accordingly when they planted their crops or they might have random needs for quick meat.
Raising Livestock in RimWorld
The only two food sources that can be considered the best in RimWorld are farming crops and raising livestock. However, the livestock that you raise shouldn’t be a constant source of meat. They should most likely give you milk and eggs.
If you have plans to grow animals to kill them for meat, we have bad news for you. This strategy just isn’t worth it. Animals won’t reproduce fast enough to provide your whole colony with enough meat.
Especially considering their constant need for food as well. If you want to use livestock for food, animals that produce eggs and milk might be the best choices.
This way, you can butcher 99% of males when they reach adulthood for meat and farm the females for their resources. Chickens and cows are incredible for these kinds of farms.
The only problem with making livestock one of your main sources of food is that you will have to micromanage a lot. Players will have to constantly keep an eye out for their animal population and butcher all the extra livestock.
If you have a really large pen with a lot of livestock, you will also have to feed them kibble or hay to keep them from starving to death. This will also take a lot of time from your pawns that they could have used for something more useful or efficient.
Farming
The best food source in RimWorld is a basic crop farm. No matter what crops you plant and grow, they will always be the best food source in the game.
Crops are consistent, fulfilling, and easy to grow if you have at least one or two people with decent skill in Plants. The only problem with them is that they take a lot of time to plant and harvest.
Best Crop Food Sources in RimWorld
There are three main crops that are the best when it comes to food in RimWorld:
The difference between them is their growth time and yield. Rice grows the fastest, but it has the lowest yield. Corn takes a long time to grow, but has a huge yield. Potatoes are in the middle.
In general, the best way to go is to plant only rice at the start of the game and start slowly changing the production to corn. Since corn has the highest yield, it will also require less time and work from your pawns to grow.
Just plant the corn once, wait a lot of days, and harvest a lot of food. However, since many players tend to plan poorly on how their colonists will eat, planting only corn might result in a few starvations.
So, it might be best, in the mid to late game, to have a small rice patch and, besides that, plant only corn. This way, you will make sure that you still have food to go on and get that huge corn harvest later.
That’s everything you need to know about the best food source in RimWorld!
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