How to process corn faster?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Dehydrating corn takes far more time than harvesting corn

I decide to harvest the corn in a farm field. Harvesting is fast. But I have to dehydrate the corn kernel with the FOODCO kitchen buddy immediately after I collect about 250 corn cob. Otherwise, the corn will rot. That dehydration steps takes lots of time and is the bottleneck of the whole process for turning corn into food.

Harvesting the corn with a vehicle won’t help in this case because the dehydration step instead of the harvesting step is the bottleneck. I don’t have the book to make the reaper anyway.

Estimation of Time vs Reward

I can get 250 corn kernels from 250 corn cobs. Dehydrating 50 corn cob takes about 6 hours. And I can only process 100 corn cobs per day, since I also need to spend time to make corn bread and eat the bread. Processing 50 corn kernel gives 150 cornmeal and I can only make 37.5 cornbread. I usually eat that 37.5 cornbread in 2.5 days.

The whole farm field has 2100 tiles of corns, which should give about 4216 corn cobs. Processing all of that requires 42.16 days and provides food for 210 days.

How to do this faster? Is wheat much better than corn in terms of food vs time?

Two “fast” methods to make dehydrated corn kernel

For some strange reason, there are two “fast” ways to make dehydrated corn kernel according to the crafting screen. One method uses food dehydrator, takes 19.25 minutes, and produce dehydrated corn kernel with “99 Calories”. The other method uses both the food dehydrator and the chemistry set, takes 21.5 minutes, and produce dehydrated corn kernel with “132 Calories”. Both methods have a batch time saving of 67% at > 5 units.

Does the slower method really produce cornmeal with more Calories?

2

I can’t swear it works with corn, but the best way to dehydrate stuff is to use a smoking rack (or several of them). The smoking rack is passive, i.e. you fill it with charcoal and food, light it up, and collect the results 8? hours later.

3

You can use smoking racks, each processes 20L of food in 6 hours with no intervention.

But that’s not really the answer here, the fundamental problem you are having is that you picked a bad food item to get your calories from. It makes no sense to process stuff for a whole day when you can just eat vegetables and fruits directly after picking them. I can recommend grapes and cattail rhizomes for this, both are high calorie meals.

For the first 3 months you will gather grapes and plant them, and you will eat cattail rhizomes (or other berries - blueberries) while doing so. Then after 3 months the first grape plants will mature and you will switch to eating these from your now massive and concentrated grape farm.

Additionally, bread in particular is a horrible waste of time.

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