Outlanders is a quaint town-management game, with gorgeous cosy graphics and a whimsical storyline. But don’t let all those pastel shades fool you because Outlanders is still a serious management sim. There’s a lot to do in terms of looking after your people and keeping them healthy and happy. And if you fail to reach the level’s objective before the time limit is up, you will fail the level and must start anew from scratch.
The number one rule of having a successful township in Outlanders is ensuring adequate food supplies. Once you’re behind on food production everything will start falling behind as well. How it works in Outlanders is that villagers will eat periodically during the day at the table. If villagers do not eat for several days, they will get hungry and start to slow down. Eventually, if no food appears they will die and overall happiness will drop significantly.
In this guide, we’ll tell you the best crops to plant, a few tips on managing the population, and more.
About Food In Outlanders
Before we get into the best food crops in Outlanders you’ll want to know more about how villagers handle hunger. So that we know how best to manage our resources i.e. time.
Villagers have a hunger meter that reduces by one every day. They can go for a few days without food until their hunger meter reaches zero and they die. In order to replenish their hunger they will eat anything. But the quality of the food crop will impact how much hunger it replenishes.
For example, a pumpkin will cure hunger by 3 and takes 2 hours to grow. My very hungry villager eats a pumpkin that satiates their hunger level down three. That’s great! But if my villager isn’t very hungry and still eats the pumpkin they can’t store “extra” fullness. So maybe that crop isn’t being utilised in the best way. Instead, you can feed them a cheaper and faster-growing crop like lettuce. Or a high-yield crop like corn.
These mechanics will come into play in deciding the variety of crops you’d like to grow.
Best Food Crops
| Yield | Hunger Level | Growth Time | |
| Lettuce | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Eggplant | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Beans | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Tomato | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Corn | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| Pumpkin | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Wheat | 3 | – | 2 |
| Sugarcane | 1 | – | 2 |
Tomatoes and Eggplants are the best food crops to grow and produce the most food at the early levels. So always start your villagers off with that. Then as we mentioned as their hunger gets more satiated you can expand into Lettuce and Corn. And lastly have a field of Pumpkin on hand for those inevitable population booms.
A note about wheat. Wheat can grow pretty quickly but can’t be eaten on its own, it must be converted into bread. This requires you to construct a mill and have extra labour. Which isn’t feasible at all in the early levels and doesn’t become more relevant in the later levels either.
Build A Stockpile Of Food
We can’t stress how important food is in Outlanders. From the moment you start a level, you should get ready a steady stream of food on the table immediately. Your citizens can sleep on the ground for a while but will starve to death if they go for too many days without food. So while housing may seem important in the beginning food is really what you want to start setting up first.
You’re not going to go wrong if you start building up a decent stockpile of food as your first order of business. Because once your town starts developing and doing well you’re going to want that extra food for those happy villagers. Because when villagers are very happy, they will procreate like no tomorrow, and if left unchecked, your food storage will run dry before you know it. Resulting in some mass casualties. This brings us to our next point.
Manage Your Population
If you expect a big population boom to happen and your food reserves are not where you want them to be then use your Decrees. You can use Decrees to limit your villagers from reproducing. But be careful not to do it for too long as it will drop their happiness and overall productivity.
Some objectives however require you need to hit a certain population by the end of the level. Then you’ll need to use your Decrees to encourage reproduction. But ensure you’re absolutely ready to take on the huge influx of food intake. Being unprepared can make things go south very fast.
OUTLANDERS
Welcome to the Outlands! A faraway place where work is hard but rewarding, where people dream big but stay grounded, where friends become family, and settlements become cities.
Outlanders is out now on PC – Steam for $14.99 as well as on Apple Arcade.
For more city-building games like this one, check out our upcoming list here!