One of the most difficult aspects of playing Planetbase is getting your food stores setup and then expanding your production while growing your colony. After a lot of trial and error, I think I have a pretty good method to share with you guys that may help you out. The key you need to keep in mind is to hit it hard right from the start and don’t relent until you’ve hit your goals or milestones.
Right from the start of your game, if you are on any planet harder than the Class D you need to get a landing pad up as soon as possible so you can bring in more biologists to farm. To support a colony up to 20 to 30 people you are going to need around 8 or 9 of them. Along with keeping all of your colonists fed, you need to worry about malnutrition setting in. This occurs when a colonist eats more than 15 basic meals in a row. You need to have recipies setup so you are producing the more complex meals to avoid the dreaded fork disease!
I like to roll with tomatoes, wheat, and meat from the lab. These will combine to create pasta and burgers in the meal makers. The ratio you need to have is one tomato pad for every two wheat pads to make the pasta and two meat makers for every one wheat pad for the burgers. When you first start, build a large Bio-Dome and start off one tomato pad and two wheat pads. Don’t forget a medicinal pad too so you can build your medkits. 2 biologists will be barely able to keep up with this, but they should do so enough for you to bring in a couple more workers to bulk up your metal and bioplastic production.
As you continue to grow, get a lab up and get 3 meat makers built. Once you have those up get a couple more wheat going in the bio-dome to complete the burger recipe. Don’t forget to bring in more biologists to support the new crops. Blamo, now your making both pasta and burgers and well on your way to hitting those milestones! Just keep around 9 or 10 biologists on hand for every 30 colony members and you should be able to keep everyone fed. So once you are at 100 colonists, you should have between 30 and 35 biologists.
If you want to learn more about the biologists, crops and the perfect ratio check out this article I wrote a couple days ago about it.
Now go start a new colony and hit all the milestones!!! Good gaming!
Questions?
Got questions or other remarks? Feel free to post in the comments below!
Be sure to check out all of my Planetbase coverage here.
