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SpringFall Wiki

Food & Eating

What you start with

A new colony arrives with travel food in everyone’s pack: hardtack, dried jerky and mixed travel rations. It is enough to feed everyone for about five days on Standard difficulty, more on easier settings and less on harder ones. These rations fill the stomach and do little for morale, and they spoil very slowly, so they buy you time to set up foraging, hunting and farms. When the rations run low, you can cook more at a fire.

Overview

Food is how colonists refill their hunger, and feeding everyone is squarely your job — not theirs. Colonists will happily walk across the map to eat something the colony already has, but they will never go pick berries or hunt to fill their own stomachs. A colony that runs out of food gets hungry and idle, and that is the game telling you to fix the supply.

The single most common mistake is thinking you have food because it exists somewhere. What matters is whether it has been stored.

How it works

A hungry colonist looks in a strict order and takes the first thing they find:

  1. Their own pack — a carried ration, eaten where they stand.
  2. Colony storage — a container or a painted stockpile holding food. If both are options, they go to whichever is nearest.
  3. A loose stack on the ground — food that’s been dropped, spilled from a corpse, or is waiting on a hauler.
  4. Nothing. They say so (“No food!”) and stay hungry.

The order is strict, not “whatever’s closest”. A colonist with a ration in their bag eats it even if a crate sits two paces away.

Eating is a real, timed action with an animation, not an instant top-up. If one portion isn’t enough, they’ll eat another. A colonist too hungry to work won’t take new jobs until they’ve eaten — see Jobs & Work.

A backup portion. In the Assignments window’s Food tab, tick Carry a spare portion on a diet and everyone on it keeps one extra portion in their pack. Hungry, they eat the spare first. With the pack empty they go to storage, eat what they need there, and take a new spare back with them. Hauling never carries the spare off to a chest, so it stays in the pack until it is eaten. Switch it on for the colony’s default diet and it applies to everyone who hasn’t been given another.

Playing with it

  • Build storage early, and put it near where people work. Food a hauler has stowed in a container or on a stockpile is food your colonists can find. An unharvested field is not.
  • If people are starving beside a full farm, you have a storage problem, not a food problem. That’s the classic version of this: plenty of food, nowhere for it to be stored, so nobody can find it.
  • Distance is no excuse. Colonists will cross the whole map for stored food, so a single central larder works fine. You don’t need a pantry per building.
  • Watch for cooking. Raw ingredients that need cooking aren’t meals yet and get skipped — check you actually have a cook if your stores are full but people still complain.

Good to know

  • Colonists eat whole meals. They won’t take one bite and wander off mid-animation.
  • Ingredients that require cooking are ignored by hungry colonists — they’re left for the Cook.
  • Food reserved for a job won’t be eaten. Items you’ve specifically directed somewhere are safe from being snacked on in transit.
  • Nobody forages to feed themselves. This is deliberate: hunger is meant to be visible pressure on you, not something the AI quietly solves off the land.
  • Hunger costs mood, and the cost accelerates. Slightly peckish is nearly free; genuinely starving is expensive. Catching a shortage early is far cheaper than catching it late — see Mood & Morale.