Experimentally derived numbers the game probably should have told you but doesn’t.
Stretch Foodstrong and Your Crew’s Need Bars
- Shifts: your working crew is split, evenly, in to two shifts. One half will work jobs while the other half is “off duty” and will seek needs fulfillment. This means you need to consider half of your crew has about twelve hours to restock all of their needs.
- Crew will seek to fulfill a need once it reaches at least 75% and the bar turns yellow.
Important note: they do not use a machine until the need is filled. They seem to take a fixed amount of time regardless of how depleted the need is.
- Each ~10 crew on board consumes ~0.15 food per hour.
- Crew takes about an hour and a half (1.5h) to finish eating at a table.
- Crew takes about an hour to take a shower.
- Crew sleeps for about 3 hours.
- Crew drinks from a soda machine for about ten minutes.
- Kitchen—crew takes 15 minutes to cook a meal.
You should be able to work out from this that a single bunk can optimally service four crew in a shift. You’ll want to overbuild since crew don’t show up at the exact right times to sleep and will wander off to do something else if the bed is taken.
I’ve also simplified the numbers after calculations so they are easier to keep in your head. This means they’re slightly off the actual count, but you will need to overbuild to account for the crew’s meandering anyhow.