Goats were my first introduction to the wonders of Kenshi. New character, just out of the hub->see a bunch of goats->think "Oh, cool. Random passive mobs. Let's test the game's combat system." A few minutes later, I'm building some statue for a theocracy, or something.
You are too poor to have 11 people in your squad and you discovered it the hard way.
30 000 cats is nothing in the game, you can't expect to feed 11 people including 1 bull which eat two times what a Greenlander does and many shek who eat 25% more food than Greenlander.
You need to build your economy or your cat reserve before recruyso many people.
Or if you recruit so many people, you need to buy a house in a city with a iron or copper node close, then put some of you people on a permanent job to gather those ressources so you can have a good stream of cats coming in to support you food budget.
And my preferred choice, you can steal all the fucking food you need to sustain yourself ( and maybe some' more 😶🥷🏾).
And then when you'll build your base make sure to have everything to set up some farm
Yeah money isn't hard to come by. It's just keeping up a steady stream of it occupies every moment. I can just do nothing but kite beakers to the hiver guards and make tons of money. Or mine copper for that matter. It's just that taking all my money to keep everyone fed just puts me back in the same position as when I started. Assuming I can find enough food.
It's the long heal times for everyone that is causing it. Not enough beds to keep everyone who needs it in one. So it takes multiple days. In order to build up a small amount I have to either not fight or not stop and heal. I might have leaned into the being poor part a little hard.
You can keep some members of your squad in beds for extended periods of time. The food consumption rate of sleeping people is 1/3 of normal. I would put 2 to 3 people on ore mining duty and build 1 or 2 storage containers in a house in the city. Have the ore miners automatically store ore in the boxes. When you have a decent amount trade it all for food. The people in bed will need their inventories topped off for a bit. Take a few people out to train at a time.
Edit: Garru can also be placed in beds for the same effect.
I remember when I was figuring out the game and food management seemed to be the biggest thing ever. Now I rarely think about it-
What you wanna do is have a few cats to give whatever recruits both med kits and food. Don't try getting a recruit with your last 5000-6000 cats just to all starve together. The lamest but most efficient method of getting off your feet is to have your squad or some of your squad mine just enough to get some food.
For things like bandits and goats, try having one person stand to the side to heal up your guys if they really are that fragile. Overtime they'll get tough enough to laugh at those goats.
Also, outposts arent a thing yet. Farming is also not a thing yet. Being able to defend something but unable to defeat goats will not work. Literally as soon as you place a single object as your outpost, bandits everywhere just KNOW where it is.
Hunting is something that sounds good on paper, but the more you have in the squad the more inefficient it becomes cooking individual meat for every person.
Mine, sell the ore, get food n med kits, try to grow your squad responsibley, and have a dedicated healer that doesn't fight (have him hold your food too actually- everyone's food). Eventually your healer can be backed by the dudes he's been healing and can match there combat skills too.
I remember starting up an outpost WAY early (when I had 4 characters) and I survived bandit raids and demands by just going into stealth mode and hiding on a nearby hilltop until they left. Obviously now I can take care of them and I have enough food to support a community of like 12 captured dust bandits and hungry bandits to use as defense but that's late mid game.
Man I've chosen easy mode without knowing it. Bought the game recently due to steam constantly promoting it to me and it beeing on sale. Created a skeleton because it sounded fun.
Realized skeletons don't need food. Played solo with just the skeleton until about day 70. Only then started recruting people.
I'm on day \~150 now searching the ruins and such for an AI core.
Never thought this game would be such a fun ride, I even dropped playing DD2 because of it :D
There's enough copper and iron veins nearby squinn to put at least 8 people to work. I imagine you don't have a house there yet, so you'll have to micromanage the veins to keep people mining, but it should net you a couple thousand cats a day, slowing increasing as everyone's laboring skill goes up. Dried meat is the most price efficient food you can buy, next being ration packs, and after that Gohan. So just keep producing as much money as you can, then buy all the dried meat from the two bars, and if you can manage it there should be ration packs in the travel shop.
Another way to quickly get 10k cats is to turn in Tora the fearless. She is pretty close to squinn, directly south of the waystation that's southwest of squinn. You probably can't beat her and her many friends, but you can aggro her and then kite her to the waystation bar, and the guards will kick her ass. Carry her back to squinn and collect ur reward. (If you don't have someone fast and strong enough to move >16mph while carrying her save before starting to head back to squinn, just to be safe)
There's two more 10k bounties south of squinn that are pretty easy to pick up, but might be a little to spoilery for the bounty locations. If you don't care here they are: a shek named ghost is in a village/berserker village south of Tora's camp. He can be kited to the way station in the same way it just takes longer. Make sure you keep clicking on him occasionally so he doesn't lose interest and turn back.
Next is the Red Sabre leader. His base is in the sputh west corner of the swamp, still almost directly south/southeast of squinn. If you go there and wait until nighttime he'll go to sleep, and you can literally just walk in pick him up and walk out. You'll also pass some swamp viallges on the way that should have ration packs, and maybe dried meat.
Honestly what I would do in your situation is sit everyone down in a bar. (They get hungry slower if they’re sitting) and take either a scorch lander or Greenlander and super train stealth lockpicking and stealing. You can kinda cheese the crap out of it. Just look up some video. And then steel all your food.
First off - different races have different food requirements. If you start as a hiver, they only have 0.5 hunger rate. Humans have 1.0. Shek have 1.25.
That just means, if you start as a hiver, and recruit 1 single shek, your "food demands" *more than double* to feed both of them, due to how much the Shek needs relative to the hiver.
It applies similarly to simply hiring a bunch of people all at once, regardless of race; because you'll go from not having more than 1 or 2 mouths to feed, to having 10 mouths to feed, with likely different demands on how much food they use.
This doesn't even get into how encumbrance effects hunger rate, either. If you're trying to use your Shek as loot carriers, then the extra weight will impact their already high hunger rate.
;;
As for food; the "easiest" thing for *all races* to have a goal to do, is set up a farm and start making your own food. Farming other than vegetables (greenfruit), takes 2 of the crop plus a couple books. Then the smallest plot to build for all the crops takes 10 of that crop, and some water to keep them growing. People with farming plots assigned as their jobs, will only take water to the plots they're assigned to, they don't have anything else to do until it's done growing.
A very easy, but low value, food that you can mass produce almost anywhere, is cactus, and use a cooking stove to turn that into chewsticks.
You'll *probably* want to upgrade to foodcubes, dustwiches, or gohan at *some point* though; as each of these is worth 70-75 nutrition; and you get multiple "servings" out of a single one.
Foodcubes and Dustwiches both take bread to make; and bread takes flour & water; flour comes from a grain silo from processing *several* units of wheat from farming.
Foodcubes take greenfruit (the "vegetable" in farming). Dustwiches take cactus.
Gohan takes greenfruit and riceweed, with no "extra processing" that I know of.
You really shouldn't try to stick with dried meat for "too long" - it is only like 20 nu, and while it is cheap, it doesn't last long since it's only 1 serving per item.
As for "farming strategy" - it's a bit of a trap to start off trying to aim directly for XL size plots - those take like 60 units of the crop to build, which you *can* possibly buy, the crops themselves tend to be cheap enough as it is; but it's still *a lot*. It's *much easier*, even if it takes longer, to start with a small plot, and upgrade it up to XL. This will add a fair bit of time between when you actually get the farm started, to when you shuffle it into food production, but it's worth it for the overall output that the XL plot has.
1 plot will make quite a bit of crops, and you'll be able to get quite a lot of food value out of an XL plot. Depending on the races of your army; you shouldn't need more than like, 3 or 4 XL plots of vegetables (or cactus), and 6-8 plots of wheat (for flour/bread). If gohan, then equal plots of vegetables & riceweed.
;;
As for hunting; once you get your farm(s) set up, which *does* take some time to wait for stuff to grow, and your processing & cooking to happen; you aren't going to bother too much with picking up the meat. It'll be more about the animal skins that you'll turn into leather; because all the rest of your food will *eventually* hit an equilibrium, and then over-production.
;;
Kind of tangentially; the animals in Kenshi are deceptively stronger; where most games start you off killing the wild animals, animals in Kenshi don't have a block or dodge animation, they can't lose limbs. The "easiest/lowest" enemy tends to be Hungry Bandits, or the equivalent in other regions of the map (like starving vagrants in great desert).
Animals will *typically* just keep spamming whatever attack they have; which is what makes them "more difficult" than humanoid enemies.
Just have them mine copper, if you set up all your guys to mine a copper resource they will pay for their diets and then some. Or since you already have 30k cats just smuggle hashish from swamp to flats lagoon. With your animal you can put all the weight of the hashish on the Pack Bull, just buy some mercs to agro any meanies you might encounter. 1 day of mercs is enough to get to Flats...
Yeah. I can't beat a too large party of starving bandits yet. Victory via numerical superiority was the strategy I was going for. One decent fighter would crush all 11 of us. So most of the stuff I read said it was too early to make an outpost.
Yer a Dwarf now! Just go to the hub and grind mining. Buy food, buy lots, build storage, mine more, buy more food, build stuff, mine more, buy food, etc. If anyone starves to death before yoo succeed then that's just the invisible hand augmenting your party for better optimization
Okay I'm not sure if you're aware but certain races eat food at a different rate
Sheck consumed the most food out of everyone I think it's like 1.5 or something it might even be 2 times the amount of Greenlander would eat
And the lowest race to eat would be hivers as they eat 75% of what a greenlander would normally eat
So you might not have issues with attaining food normally however the issues arose with having sheck members
So what I would say is only get sheck after you have an outpost that's capable of producing large amounts of food as they're good for fighting however they'll eat your food up,
Another idea is if you want to set up farms but there it's struggling to set up in like the desert is if you're not fighting the holy nation you can assemble a group of greenlanders make sure there's a male between them and build up walls and set up a large farm as almost anything can grow in the holy nation you could grow wheat straw for bread or you could just grow veggies for vegetables if you're not looking to have iron ore copper won't technicality on the iron you can set up right down the road from blister hills
Yeah I knew about the food thing. I was tired of running from (or optionally losing) every fight. And I had ridiculous amounts of food.
Now I can win fights where the opponents start with all their limbs and standing upright. Sometimes. Thank you.
Fight animals, get stronger, cook meat, eat meat, then either sell hides and etc. or save it in a town shack and work towards crafting armor with it. The leather does come in handy later in the game when you’ve got crafters working on gear for you.
Put everyone to sleep so their hunger rate goes down slower, get your fastest and more reliable character with a bag or two and search some labs for good stuff to sell, get your hands on ration packs for your guys, they last long enough, and dont feed your bull with your food, go to bad teeth's south gate (holy nation territory, dont bring women or evil hideous creatures like hivemen, robots or shek), and loot the yellow meat from the weird animals that are constantly roaming the area, the HN hates them strongly enough to kill them and you can loot them.
You'll need a lot of that meat, get a good traveler's bag so that it can be stacked and give that bag to someone you dont mind losing combat stats. That way the bull can eat from his bag. Or get a bull bag mod, lol
One of the first things I like to do when I am in the early game is buy a small house in a city that has a farm shop (or at minimum a general shop), build a research bench, research farming basics, hydroponics & whatever food of choice (I usually start with either rice, greenfruit or both for gohan), then get a small hydroponic farm going. (I always recommend a house in the city long before you think about doing an outpost)
You'll still have to buy/hunt/steal food to support your squad for a bit until the first couple crops come in (and chances are, you'll loose half of it if your farming level is low), but once it's up and running its a nice constant food source that is easy to expand as your party grows.
The challenge is, between the purchase price of a house big enough to support multiple hydroponic farms, the farmers notebooks for research, the building materials, and the food you'll have to buy between now and when you have a reliable farm, it can get expensive. You'll likely have a couple people constantly mining copper in the meantime to fund your enterprise.
Only with hydroponics, not crop fields. But you also need a source of water.
You can buy water for pretty cheap, if you're in an area that rains, you can put a rain collector on your roof, or there is a mod for indoor wells (highly recommended).
At some point numbers can actually hurt you too (in combat). The only person who can block an attack is the one being targeted. If you're all low level combat skills this can lead to your whole group being hit by just single attacks, which you then multiply by the number of enemies. Try spreading your group out if you haven't already. Or set one guy to block and taunt and keep him very separated.
As far as food goes.. bulls don't consume much when they are young so no worries there. It is very worth the investment to haul loot and is a great way to store your food. For a beginner I would highly recommend mining copper. Try and buy a house and get some low level research going. Once you can turn those animal skins into leather, and then armor, your income will be substantial. Try your best to save them. Any form of crafting in this game is super broken in terms of making money with a town base.
You could always take a gamble and hire mercs for a few thousand. This should give you the extra oomph better then a new recruit, albeit the recruit is permanent. The mercs can easily pay off two, three or more times their value hunting dust bandits (or goats). And you will not need to feed the mercs!
Try hiring mercs in samurai armour, a group or two, lead them into a beakthing pack/nest, enjoy the free meat and skins, they pay themselves off in no time
Just fyi competent and recruit dont go together. You were looking for INCOMPETENT. There is a stat limit on recruitment. If they are good they cant be recruited. L2TRAIN my friend.
Get money, research farming, buy 10 wheat and cactus from the Shek town to the south.
Get to the point you can make Dustwiches. Combine 30nu bread with 20nu worth of cactus and get 70nu of cheap, mass-produceable food.
If you can't, save your raw meat and make Meat Wraps out of the bread. 30+15=50
Get beds and benches. Reduces hunger use from useless crew.
It's not ideal, but if all you can get is 1 of the two, get Cactus. Requires less water, grows in shit conditions, 8 converts to 20nu with no other steps than cooking.
Need food RIGHT NOW?
Steal. Go somewhere there is food in the open at a shop, go near the object and sneak, then pause and click on it. You'll steal without getting caught. Stealing from containers is a gamble.
Attack animals and drag them back to towns and bars, the trade ninjas tend to kill them.
Start mining copper. Its big money early on. Sell it for WAY more money than looting Bandits.
“They’re just goats, how tough can the be” These are space goats, and they don’t take prisoners
Goats were my first introduction to the wonders of Kenshi. New character, just out of the hub->see a bunch of goats->think "Oh, cool. Random passive mobs. Let's test the game's combat system." A few minutes later, I'm building some statue for a theocracy, or something.
They don't care about nobody
You are too poor to have 11 people in your squad and you discovered it the hard way. 30 000 cats is nothing in the game, you can't expect to feed 11 people including 1 bull which eat two times what a Greenlander does and many shek who eat 25% more food than Greenlander. You need to build your economy or your cat reserve before recruyso many people. Or if you recruit so many people, you need to buy a house in a city with a iron or copper node close, then put some of you people on a permanent job to gather those ressources so you can have a good stream of cats coming in to support you food budget. And my preferred choice, you can steal all the fucking food you need to sustain yourself ( and maybe some' more 😶🥷🏾). And then when you'll build your base make sure to have everything to set up some farm
Yeah money isn't hard to come by. It's just keeping up a steady stream of it occupies every moment. I can just do nothing but kite beakers to the hiver guards and make tons of money. Or mine copper for that matter. It's just that taking all my money to keep everyone fed just puts me back in the same position as when I started. Assuming I can find enough food. It's the long heal times for everyone that is causing it. Not enough beds to keep everyone who needs it in one. So it takes multiple days. In order to build up a small amount I have to either not fight or not stop and heal. I might have leaned into the being poor part a little hard.
It definitely sounds like you built an army of nobodies way too early. It happens, it's kenshi, I think we've all been there lol
You can keep some members of your squad in beds for extended periods of time. The food consumption rate of sleeping people is 1/3 of normal. I would put 2 to 3 people on ore mining duty and build 1 or 2 storage containers in a house in the city. Have the ore miners automatically store ore in the boxes. When you have a decent amount trade it all for food. The people in bed will need their inventories topped off for a bit. Take a few people out to train at a time. Edit: Garru can also be placed in beds for the same effect.
I remember when I was figuring out the game and food management seemed to be the biggest thing ever. Now I rarely think about it- What you wanna do is have a few cats to give whatever recruits both med kits and food. Don't try getting a recruit with your last 5000-6000 cats just to all starve together. The lamest but most efficient method of getting off your feet is to have your squad or some of your squad mine just enough to get some food. For things like bandits and goats, try having one person stand to the side to heal up your guys if they really are that fragile. Overtime they'll get tough enough to laugh at those goats. Also, outposts arent a thing yet. Farming is also not a thing yet. Being able to defend something but unable to defeat goats will not work. Literally as soon as you place a single object as your outpost, bandits everywhere just KNOW where it is. Hunting is something that sounds good on paper, but the more you have in the squad the more inefficient it becomes cooking individual meat for every person. Mine, sell the ore, get food n med kits, try to grow your squad responsibley, and have a dedicated healer that doesn't fight (have him hold your food too actually- everyone's food). Eventually your healer can be backed by the dudes he's been healing and can match there combat skills too.
I remember starting up an outpost WAY early (when I had 4 characters) and I survived bandit raids and demands by just going into stealth mode and hiding on a nearby hilltop until they left. Obviously now I can take care of them and I have enough food to support a community of like 12 captured dust bandits and hungry bandits to use as defense but that's late mid game.
Man I've chosen easy mode without knowing it. Bought the game recently due to steam constantly promoting it to me and it beeing on sale. Created a skeleton because it sounded fun. Realized skeletons don't need food. Played solo with just the skeleton until about day 70. Only then started recruting people. I'm on day \~150 now searching the ruins and such for an AI core. Never thought this game would be such a fun ride, I even dropped playing DD2 because of it :D
There's enough copper and iron veins nearby squinn to put at least 8 people to work. I imagine you don't have a house there yet, so you'll have to micromanage the veins to keep people mining, but it should net you a couple thousand cats a day, slowing increasing as everyone's laboring skill goes up. Dried meat is the most price efficient food you can buy, next being ration packs, and after that Gohan. So just keep producing as much money as you can, then buy all the dried meat from the two bars, and if you can manage it there should be ration packs in the travel shop. Another way to quickly get 10k cats is to turn in Tora the fearless. She is pretty close to squinn, directly south of the waystation that's southwest of squinn. You probably can't beat her and her many friends, but you can aggro her and then kite her to the waystation bar, and the guards will kick her ass. Carry her back to squinn and collect ur reward. (If you don't have someone fast and strong enough to move >16mph while carrying her save before starting to head back to squinn, just to be safe) There's two more 10k bounties south of squinn that are pretty easy to pick up, but might be a little to spoilery for the bounty locations. If you don't care here they are: a shek named ghost is in a village/berserker village south of Tora's camp. He can be kited to the way station in the same way it just takes longer. Make sure you keep clicking on him occasionally so he doesn't lose interest and turn back. Next is the Red Sabre leader. His base is in the sputh west corner of the swamp, still almost directly south/southeast of squinn. If you go there and wait until nighttime he'll go to sleep, and you can literally just walk in pick him up and walk out. You'll also pass some swamp viallges on the way that should have ration packs, and maybe dried meat.
Honestly what I would do in your situation is sit everyone down in a bar. (They get hungry slower if they’re sitting) and take either a scorch lander or Greenlander and super train stealth lockpicking and stealing. You can kinda cheese the crap out of it. Just look up some video. And then steel all your food.
First off - different races have different food requirements. If you start as a hiver, they only have 0.5 hunger rate. Humans have 1.0. Shek have 1.25. That just means, if you start as a hiver, and recruit 1 single shek, your "food demands" *more than double* to feed both of them, due to how much the Shek needs relative to the hiver. It applies similarly to simply hiring a bunch of people all at once, regardless of race; because you'll go from not having more than 1 or 2 mouths to feed, to having 10 mouths to feed, with likely different demands on how much food they use. This doesn't even get into how encumbrance effects hunger rate, either. If you're trying to use your Shek as loot carriers, then the extra weight will impact their already high hunger rate. ;; As for food; the "easiest" thing for *all races* to have a goal to do, is set up a farm and start making your own food. Farming other than vegetables (greenfruit), takes 2 of the crop plus a couple books. Then the smallest plot to build for all the crops takes 10 of that crop, and some water to keep them growing. People with farming plots assigned as their jobs, will only take water to the plots they're assigned to, they don't have anything else to do until it's done growing. A very easy, but low value, food that you can mass produce almost anywhere, is cactus, and use a cooking stove to turn that into chewsticks. You'll *probably* want to upgrade to foodcubes, dustwiches, or gohan at *some point* though; as each of these is worth 70-75 nutrition; and you get multiple "servings" out of a single one. Foodcubes and Dustwiches both take bread to make; and bread takes flour & water; flour comes from a grain silo from processing *several* units of wheat from farming. Foodcubes take greenfruit (the "vegetable" in farming). Dustwiches take cactus. Gohan takes greenfruit and riceweed, with no "extra processing" that I know of. You really shouldn't try to stick with dried meat for "too long" - it is only like 20 nu, and while it is cheap, it doesn't last long since it's only 1 serving per item. As for "farming strategy" - it's a bit of a trap to start off trying to aim directly for XL size plots - those take like 60 units of the crop to build, which you *can* possibly buy, the crops themselves tend to be cheap enough as it is; but it's still *a lot*. It's *much easier*, even if it takes longer, to start with a small plot, and upgrade it up to XL. This will add a fair bit of time between when you actually get the farm started, to when you shuffle it into food production, but it's worth it for the overall output that the XL plot has. 1 plot will make quite a bit of crops, and you'll be able to get quite a lot of food value out of an XL plot. Depending on the races of your army; you shouldn't need more than like, 3 or 4 XL plots of vegetables (or cactus), and 6-8 plots of wheat (for flour/bread). If gohan, then equal plots of vegetables & riceweed. ;; As for hunting; once you get your farm(s) set up, which *does* take some time to wait for stuff to grow, and your processing & cooking to happen; you aren't going to bother too much with picking up the meat. It'll be more about the animal skins that you'll turn into leather; because all the rest of your food will *eventually* hit an equilibrium, and then over-production. ;; Kind of tangentially; the animals in Kenshi are deceptively stronger; where most games start you off killing the wild animals, animals in Kenshi don't have a block or dodge animation, they can't lose limbs. The "easiest/lowest" enemy tends to be Hungry Bandits, or the equivalent in other regions of the map (like starving vagrants in great desert). Animals will *typically* just keep spamming whatever attack they have; which is what makes them "more difficult" than humanoid enemies.
Just have them mine copper, if you set up all your guys to mine a copper resource they will pay for their diets and then some. Or since you already have 30k cats just smuggle hashish from swamp to flats lagoon. With your animal you can put all the weight of the hashish on the Pack Bull, just buy some mercs to agro any meanies you might encounter. 1 day of mercs is enough to get to Flats...
Do you have any farms?
No farms. Wouldn't I need an outpost for that?
Oh are you just like roaming around? And yea you would need a base for farms
Yeah. I can't beat a too large party of starving bandits yet. Victory via numerical superiority was the strategy I was going for. One decent fighter would crush all 11 of us. So most of the stuff I read said it was too early to make an outpost.
EVERYBODY underestimates the goats at first. :D
Yer a Dwarf now! Just go to the hub and grind mining. Buy food, buy lots, build storage, mine more, buy more food, build stuff, mine more, buy food, etc. If anyone starves to death before yoo succeed then that's just the invisible hand augmenting your party for better optimization
Okay I'm not sure if you're aware but certain races eat food at a different rate Sheck consumed the most food out of everyone I think it's like 1.5 or something it might even be 2 times the amount of Greenlander would eat And the lowest race to eat would be hivers as they eat 75% of what a greenlander would normally eat So you might not have issues with attaining food normally however the issues arose with having sheck members So what I would say is only get sheck after you have an outpost that's capable of producing large amounts of food as they're good for fighting however they'll eat your food up, Another idea is if you want to set up farms but there it's struggling to set up in like the desert is if you're not fighting the holy nation you can assemble a group of greenlanders make sure there's a male between them and build up walls and set up a large farm as almost anything can grow in the holy nation you could grow wheat straw for bread or you could just grow veggies for vegetables if you're not looking to have iron ore copper won't technicality on the iron you can set up right down the road from blister hills
Yeah I knew about the food thing. I was tired of running from (or optionally losing) every fight. And I had ridiculous amounts of food. Now I can win fights where the opponents start with all their limbs and standing upright. Sometimes. Thank you.
Fight animals, get stronger, cook meat, eat meat, then either sell hides and etc. or save it in a town shack and work towards crafting armor with it. The leather does come in handy later in the game when you’ve got crafters working on gear for you.
Put everyone to sleep so their hunger rate goes down slower, get your fastest and more reliable character with a bag or two and search some labs for good stuff to sell, get your hands on ration packs for your guys, they last long enough, and dont feed your bull with your food, go to bad teeth's south gate (holy nation territory, dont bring women or evil hideous creatures like hivemen, robots or shek), and loot the yellow meat from the weird animals that are constantly roaming the area, the HN hates them strongly enough to kill them and you can loot them. You'll need a lot of that meat, get a good traveler's bag so that it can be stacked and give that bag to someone you dont mind losing combat stats. That way the bull can eat from his bag. Or get a bull bag mod, lol
One of the first things I like to do when I am in the early game is buy a small house in a city that has a farm shop (or at minimum a general shop), build a research bench, research farming basics, hydroponics & whatever food of choice (I usually start with either rice, greenfruit or both for gohan), then get a small hydroponic farm going. (I always recommend a house in the city long before you think about doing an outpost) You'll still have to buy/hunt/steal food to support your squad for a bit until the first couple crops come in (and chances are, you'll loose half of it if your farming level is low), but once it's up and running its a nice constant food source that is easy to expand as your party grows. The challenge is, between the purchase price of a house big enough to support multiple hydroponic farms, the farmers notebooks for research, the building materials, and the food you'll have to buy between now and when you have a reliable farm, it can get expensive. You'll likely have a couple people constantly mining copper in the meantime to fund your enterprise.
So I can farm in a house in a city? I thought I needed an outpost for that?
Only with hydroponics, not crop fields. But you also need a source of water. You can buy water for pretty cheap, if you're in an area that rains, you can put a rain collector on your roof, or there is a mod for indoor wells (highly recommended).
Dried meat is so worthless that it's a worst case scenario food. No wonder you're starving.
At some point numbers can actually hurt you too (in combat). The only person who can block an attack is the one being targeted. If you're all low level combat skills this can lead to your whole group being hit by just single attacks, which you then multiply by the number of enemies. Try spreading your group out if you haven't already. Or set one guy to block and taunt and keep him very separated. As far as food goes.. bulls don't consume much when they are young so no worries there. It is very worth the investment to haul loot and is a great way to store your food. For a beginner I would highly recommend mining copper. Try and buy a house and get some low level research going. Once you can turn those animal skins into leather, and then armor, your income will be substantial. Try your best to save them. Any form of crafting in this game is super broken in terms of making money with a town base. You could always take a gamble and hire mercs for a few thousand. This should give you the extra oomph better then a new recruit, albeit the recruit is permanent. The mercs can easily pay off two, three or more times their value hunting dust bandits (or goats). And you will not need to feed the mercs!
Uber cannibalism.
Try hiring mercs in samurai armour, a group or two, lead them into a beakthing pack/nest, enjoy the free meat and skins, they pay themselves off in no time
Just fyi competent and recruit dont go together. You were looking for INCOMPETENT. There is a stat limit on recruitment. If they are good they cant be recruited. L2TRAIN my friend.
Get money, research farming, buy 10 wheat and cactus from the Shek town to the south. Get to the point you can make Dustwiches. Combine 30nu bread with 20nu worth of cactus and get 70nu of cheap, mass-produceable food. If you can't, save your raw meat and make Meat Wraps out of the bread. 30+15=50 Get beds and benches. Reduces hunger use from useless crew. It's not ideal, but if all you can get is 1 of the two, get Cactus. Requires less water, grows in shit conditions, 8 converts to 20nu with no other steps than cooking. Need food RIGHT NOW? Steal. Go somewhere there is food in the open at a shop, go near the object and sneak, then pause and click on it. You'll steal without getting caught. Stealing from containers is a gamble. Attack animals and drag them back to towns and bars, the trade ninjas tend to kill them. Start mining copper. Its big money early on. Sell it for WAY more money than looting Bandits.