Food, farms and going hungry

Everything grown anywhere in a sector goes into one shared store — a farm on the ground, a hydroponics bay on a hull in orbit, all of it — and everybody in that sector eats out of the same store. A unit eats 1 Food a turn.

What a farm is actually worth

Output scales with the tile's food potential, and the variation is enormous. A farm on poor soil is close to wasted effort, and the tile panel tells you what a tile will yield before you commit to it. The single most common beginner's mistake in Starfoundry is a farm placed for convenience rather than for yield.

An Agronomist on a farm is worth half again as much as an untrained Colonist on the same farm. Trades matter more than buildings do; see people and trades.

Hydroponics is the exception to all of this. It takes nothing from the ground it stands on and gives the same crop over dead rock as over meadow, which makes it the answer on a world that grows nothing and the wrong answer on a world that does.

Births

A new unit is born out of food that is actually in the store, not out of a hidden meter. The sector has to be holding 60 plus 6 per existing head, and the birth spends a real share of it — about 50% for an average people, more for a slow-breeding one like the Varkesh Host and less for a fast one like the Sepharai Shoal.

Two things stop growth that are not hunger. There has to be somewhere to live: bare ground holds only 30% of a world's natural habitability, and everything beyond that you build and place. And there has to be something to do — once more than 20% of a sector's people are standing about with no post, nobody else is born. A society with nothing for its people to do stops growing.

When it goes wrong

Running out is survivable, briefly. A colony goes hungry for 3 turns before anybody is actually lost; after that each unit has a 25% chance per turn of being the one you lose. Growth progress drains at 25 a turn throughout, and hunger adds 15 points of unrest on top.

So a famine gives you about three turns to fix it. Ship food in, turn a tile over to farming, or move people off — all three work, and all three have to be ordered before the grace runs out.

Food in deep space

A fleet between the stars lives on what it carried in, and a fleet that runs the larder dry loses its crew, then its warp speed, then itself. Check the Provisions figure on the fleet panel before you commit to a long crossing.

Hydroponics aboard counts against that. A hull that grows as much as its crew eat never runs its larder down at all, however far it is going, because everything grown is banked before anybody eats.

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