Food and farming

Plant your first field

1. Turn on the Fertility view and find soil that can grow crops.
2. Paint Zones > Grow and select a crop.
3. Enable Grow work. Colonists sow the field, harvest mature plants and sow again.
4. Haul the harvest to storage and cook it into meals.

Potatoes and grain provide food, cotton provides cloth, and haygrass provides livestock feed. Herbalism unlocks healroot for herbal medicine. The plant catalog shows yields and base growth times.

Select the grow zone to choose Crop and check how much has been sown or is ready to harvest. Fertilize asks growers to apply available compost. View full screenshot

Fertile ground speeds growth. Ordinary crops grow slowly at night, and cold slows them further. Frozen ground cannot be sown; crops do not grow below 0 °C. Sand and rough stone need improvement before ordinary planting.

Use the Fertility view before placing a field. Green ground supports crops; compare nearby soil instead of assuming all open ground is equally productive. View full screenshot

Cook a reliable food supply

Build a Cooking hearth, select it and add a simple-meal bill. Use Until X to keep a reserve; the cook stops when that target is met. Do X makes a set number, while Forever continues as ingredients allow.

A bill needs an enabled cook, enough allowed ingredients and a reachable working side. A powered electric stove works faster after its research is complete. Cuisine unlocks fine meals and travel rations. Fine meals need the recipe’s different ingredient groups; a pile of one food may not be enough.

Add a simple-meal bill and choose Until X. This example maintains a target of 12 meals; the minus and plus buttons change the target. View full screenshot

Keep the kitchen clean. Dirty cooking areas increase food-poisoning risk. Build the butcher table away from the kitchen because butchering leaves blood.

Hunt and butcher

Open World > Wildlife, select an animal and mark it for hunting. Equip the hunter with a suitable weapon. Hunted animals leave corpses: a butcher table with a butchering bill turns them into meat and leather. Killing an animal alone does not create ready-to-cook meat.

Milk and eggs can also be cooked. Fertilized eggs are food too: exclude them from cooking when you want chicks.

Make compost and improve soil

Build a Compost bin and add its compost bill. Its filter chooses acceptable food. Haulers fill it with 30 units; after 3 days, paused while frozen, it produces 15 compost.

Use Architect > Structure > Soil on sand or rough stone. It costs 5 compost per cell and permanently creates ground with 80% fertility. A grow zone’s Fertilize option uses 1 compost per crop for 30% faster growth until harvest.

Grow through winter

For an ordinary greenhouse, enclose and roof a field, heat it, and power a Sun lamp. Roofs otherwise block the light crops need.

Hydroponics provides powered basins at 300% fertility, on any ground and without a sun lamp. Paint a grow zone over them. Basins need power to sow or grow, and temperature still matters. Removing a basin kills its crop; a power loss pauses growth.

Freeze stored food and prepare fields and clothing before the season turns. See temperature.