Are there any official rules on how a starship is stocked with food and water?
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Not exactly. Food is cheap. I assume you can pay the listed price and store a decent amount on a ship for the listed price without needing a cargo bay. I'd also imagine there are at least a few hundred+ gallon tanks of water on most ships and a water recycling system of some sort.
Nothing official, but official adventures tend to handwave daily needs anyway.
...but official adventures tend to handwave daily needs anyway.
In my Home game, I'll usually allow my players to do the same for expediencies sake.
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The Hydroponic Garden expansion bay says:
"This space holds an entirely self-sustaining garden, complete with oxygen recycling, food production, and lighting that fosters advanced growth. A hydroponic garden takes up two expansion bays and can provide food for up to 10 Medium-sized creatures indefinitely, even if the rest of the vessel is without full power or propulsion. Multiple hydroponic gardens can be linked together to form one massive garden space."
This seems to indicate that, without this expansion bay, you'd need some other way to manage food. It does have other functions that are of value, like managing oxygen, so that if you handwave food in general, this bay doesn't become pointless, however.
Supercolossal ships have access to Recycling Systems, which are similarly vague about food, to allow for food being handwaved I assume.
Culinary Synthesizers (https://aonsrd.com/OtherItemsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Mk%201&Family=Culin ary%20Synthesizer) are cheap enough, and weigh only 1 bulk, that I would assume any ship with power would be able to be equipped with one and generate food from UPBs.
Rations are available in weekly allotments, and take up such little space and cost so little that it could be assumed that a ship would automatically be stocked with quite a bit.
Long story short: The game has given GMs the tools to either force their players to manage food on a ship, or to handwave it under the nebulous value of a ship's BP/fuel/restocking/docking fees.
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...but official adventures tend to handwave daily needs anyway.In my Home game, I'll usually allow my players to do the same for expediencies sake.
For the record: I also do the same.
No one wants to micromanage restocking ship's food, or use up precious BP and expansion bays to be able to ignore the problem.
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...but official adventures tend to handwave daily needs anyway.In my Home game, I'll usually allow my players to do the same for expediencies sake.
For the record: I also do the same.
No one wants to micromanage restocking ship's food, or use up precious BP and expansion bays to be able to ignore the problem.
Exactly. I'm telling epic space opera stories... not 'did I buy enough beef jerky last gas station' stories.
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Starfinder is very light on the "survival" aspect, even Environmental protetion systems become obsolete once a caster have "life bubble". So I wouldn't really bother with "daily needs" in normal adventures.
Of course there can be situations where daily needs matter (e.g. you are stranded on a desert planet and have to find a water source. But even then I would go with "You now have access to water" instead of counting the daily liters...)
Field rations and Culinary Synthesizers.
It is covered very basically in the crew quarters description.
More or less I envision it as:
Common: You have the equivalent of a Culinary Synthesizer Mark I
Good: You have the equivalent of a Culinary Synthesizer Mark II or III
Luxurious: You have the equivalent of a Culinary Synthesizer Mark III and have the capacity to store and prepare fresh food on board.
A ship that has been built with Colony Ship Framework add-on is supposed to be designed specifically with long-term sustainability in mind, so would by rules presumably be able to handle an extremely long time without an external refresh.
However, on the other hand, I think any drift capable ship is expected to be able to maintain its Max Crew worth of individuals, for even the longest planned Drift trip to the Vast, and honestly, probably back, at a minimum.
The Passenger Seating is the only expansion involving adding passengers that really seems to indicate it is not fit for long term travel.
Galactic Trade rules offers a BP cost for maintaining the character's life-style, however, it only mentions life on station or planet, so it doesn't really cover or say you pay it to live on your ship/maintain your ship. It does cover that if you don't keep some BP on hand to pay for cargo, you might have to downgrade your ship to buy your next cargo if something happens to an investment you were counting on.
I'd probably flavor it first as having a failure with a system that you don't have the funds to fix, rather than actually selling the components. Or would do that, at least the first time it happened. If it continued to happen I'd see it acceptable to seem like things are getting more dire, and they are needing to sell off or pawn components to get-by.
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Are there any official rules on how a starship is stocked with food and water?
The short answer is, nothing in depth. There are a few things that kinda address it, but mostly to the point of "buy this and you can ignore it".
Honestly, for the sake of players you should probably just ignore how food and water are obtained unless you want to have a specific situation where the ship has lost power and now the normal systems that harvest and recycle water and generate food from electricity don't work and they have to figure out how to remedy the problem in the first place.
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As a GM I don't normally track food and water. One character did find a clear spindle Aeon stone, which negates the need for for food and water.
Sometimes I throw in additional loot if there is an additional encounter cause by a side-trip. In the cargo hold of a Klockworx Prism cargo hold, I threw in for fun an Azlanti food replicator (turns UPBs into luxury Azlanti foodstuffs) which created all sorts of exotic things for them to try eating. Other than that, I only pay attention to food and drink if it's key to the adventure or adds color to a special restaurant visit.
Totally agree on resupply cycles. Considering you can travel from anywhere to Absalom station in 1d6 days via drift travel, I have to imagine most people are only planning for travel durations based on intended activities + 1 week for return + 3 weeks (3d6 travel time to anywhere in "near space").
So your probably looking at most vessels being supplied for anywhere for 1 to 2 months, and afterwards that's when it could start to get challenging. Or at least less comfortable. I think the onboard systems will always generate sufficient air, water, and nutrition for the normal crew compliment as long as you have power. But without your fuel resupply, you're going to run out of power.
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Thasteron was mentioned as a starship fuel pre drift. I think the books said its been replaced by newer fuels, rather than ships don't use fuel anymore.
Yeah, I assume there's some sort of fuel. Even if the fuel is nuclear in nature, it still probably has a limited supply of nuclear enriched fuel.