If you’re a new player then these few tips may help you to understand the mechanics of getting food.
Food Tips for Beginners
No item you can craft that will boost food?
You have to find it at first, till you can make some. There should be some in the blue boxes as you wander around. Collect it and open.
Search wrecks and chests for food and seeds that you can grow later in game.
As long as you are exploring, you’ll find food packets. You’ll also get the food grower tech fairly quickly.
Important note
If you have crafted a bunch of food growers and they say growth is 100%, but left click on them doesn’t give you any food then you need to click the grown plant not the crafting station.
How to get food up fast
You need to rush oxygen production to unlock the food grower. Prioritize exploring wrecks, to find food and flower seeds. Make vegitubes ASAP for any flower seeds you find, and upgrade to the T2 versions as soon as you can.
Also throw down as many drills and heaters as you can (along with the necessary power items) using the materials you find in/around the wreck before heading to the next wreck. If you are efficient about it you can get the food grower after 2-3 wrecks, and then you can relax and play more generally.
I had hoped that the food grower would be moved up the charts so you could make it almost from landing. I should be able to make food on landing.
Yea, I don’t see how I am suppose to survive if i can’t get food up fast enough. Playing on the most difficult settings seems …. most difficult.
You need to rush oxygen production to unlock the food grower. Prioritize exploring wrecks, to find food and flower seeds. Make vegitubes ASAP for any flower seeds you find, and upgrade to the T2 versions as soon as you can. Also throw down as many drills and heaters as you can (along with the necessary power items) using the materials you find in/around the wreck before heading to the next wreck. If you are efficient about it you can get the food grower after 2-3 wrecks, and then you can relax and play more generally.
I didn’t start like that at all. I went to the default starting position and then wandered off. What I found was space food in lots of chests scattered around, and almost always some in wrecks. Food growers were to me a power hungry novelty until I hit the lakes TI just because I found so much food lying around.
Same here, I live off that space food for quite a while, though I do use Food Growers ASAP to start getting Mushrooms stocked for Bioplastic, Eggplants stocked for Fertilizer, and Squash stocked for Fertilizer T2.
Well, tell the devs they need to add more food in chest around the crater, because I have found plenty, and NONE have food. Hardcore mode defaults to the crater.
You can leave the crater. You can get to any starting area from any other starting area right at the beginning of the game. Fastest way to the default area from crater is to go into the north cave, follow the left wall, and you will come out above sand falls. Run east down sand falls into sulfur valley, and then north and you are in the desert between iridium and super alloy caves, just west of the default starter area.
Ice only blocks shortcuts, Osmium and the backs of caves. It doesn’t block any of the map.
Assuming you don’t start in the Crater, there are PLENTY of Space Food packets to go around.
You’re meant to, you know, explore. Find blue boxes laying around, open them to find more seeds that you can stick in vegetubes, and if you’re lucky you might even find a box with a golden seed.
Two Golden Seeds can give you enough o2 production (assuming you started the game with a Terraformation Multiplier of 1x which is the default) in a vegetube (take the seeds out of the T1s, deconstruct and replace with T2s when you unlock the T2) to get you the Food Grower before the Space Food in your drop pod runs out (assuming you don’t get bonked by a meteor or take fall damage). This is, of course, not counting the plethora of space food you’ll find in random boxes laying around on the ground.
That’s 1200% total between the two golden seeds. Exploring nearly any wreck should get you enough plants to get up to that amount, you just need a few extra solar panels to power the vegetubes if you don’t know where the golden seeds are.
EDIT: The battleship wreck in particular (the big one in the desert) has guaranteed plants (IE, not in randomly generated boxes), more than enough plants to get you up there. I think there’s even a few in the smaller ship near the Iridium Cave, too. Both of these wrecks also have food seeds laying around that are guaranteed, as well.
I found the crater to be the most difficult starting location even playing normal mode, I’ve got hundreds of hours in the game and wouldn’t start there playing on the hardest mode.
if you go with the normal start in the lake/crater the game gives you tons of food in the surrounding regions, enough to last you till the food grower by far. now if you crank up the diff it can be a little more tricky, but you can still bee line it to the grower unlock fairly easily.
If I spawn in a less-than-optimistic site I simply gather the resources to build a single compartment with a door and hustle my way to a more forgiving area. I just build the compartment as needed to get a breath of air and then deconstruct it to continue on my way. Some areas are VERY lacking in convenient food-giving wreckage.
It’s really sad that the answer to starting in the crater is to LEAVE the crater. As said, it is non-viable. I went through a green cave, cheesing my way along by building a living compartment and door, get more oxygen, disassemble, until it was much easier to just find resources along the way. It is just too easy to restore oxygen in this game by doing that.
You should feel anchored to your start location for at least through the first part of the game. It should be very difficult to change locations. There should be impediments to doing so. I just don’t see why they even bother with the crater start location if people are just going to leave it. It is just too damn difficult to gather resources in that area.
Just an add on, although it was not difficult to build a base with oxygen in Subnautica, it at least to a bit of time and many more resources than this game. IIRC you could possibly fit all of the components in your pack, but that is about it. You had to build over time in that game. Oxygen was something you really had to watch out for as you could NOT quickly build a base fast enough to refill your oxygen. Yes, that is the solution. They should just copy Subnautica build mechanics. Make it take far more time to build things, and more resources.
What I just did feels soooo dirty and cheesy.
I disagree entirely. This game isn’t trying to use exploration as a progression barrier the way Subnautica was, and being able to explore widely is a key part of the early game. Making it harder to explore early on would not only hurt players by making it harder to scavenge food and resources and find new biomes, it would also hurt the overall game experience: having seen all the locations in their early, barren state gives you the best impact later when you see them in their full, lush state.
I am being sent to this planet and I should be able to make some type of food pretty darn quickly. I have over 700 hours in the game and some playthroughs getting food packets or certain seeds is an issue.