When playing Planetbase, one of the first major hurdles you will run into is feeding your people. With that always comes the question, “I keep getting yellow and orange wrenches over my crops… How can I fix this?”. When you see the wrenches, it means that the amount of biologists you have in your colony cannot keep up with the maintenance that your crops require. The fix for this is to know and understand the ratio behind how many crops your biologists can work.
This isn’t a simple answer simply because different kinds of crops require different amounts of maintenance. In order to keep malnutrition at bay (which happens when your colony members consume too many basic rations in a row without a proper meal… AKA Fork Disease) you need to have a mixture of crops going. My favorite combination is 1 tomato crop for every 2 wheat crops. With this combo, you will pretty much always have “Pasta” in your meal makers thus keeping away Fork Disease. When you have a combo of one high maintenance (the tomatoes) and two normal ones (the wheat) two biologists should be able to keep up with it. So with this setup each biologist can keep up with 1.5 crops. If you go with just high maintenance or the GMO’s, plan on at least 1 biologist per rack. If you have 3 or 4 of them, it won’t hurt to have one extra biologist on hand. If you are just going with normal producing racks, 1 biologist to every 2 crops will work.
Once you start mixing in the meat makers in the laboratory, these seem to require about the same amount of maintenance as a normal crop. As I mentioned before, I like the tomato and wheat setup when I’m first starting out. What’s cool is as I expand and add on the lab and start producing meats, those can combine with the wheat to make burgers. So as you grow and add a couple meat makers, add a few more wheat into your bio-dome to keep the ratios correct to produce both pasta and burgers and introduce 1 or 2 more biologists to the colony to accommodate the additional workload. Goodbye fork disease!
Questions?
Got questions or other remarks? Feel free to post in the comments below!
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