OK a little setup here. I got this map to a stable point and before pushing for more population wanted to understand a little better about how resources were being consumed. So I just let the game run for about 2 years to get a steady state to see what was being eaten.
I have 4 max-size farms, 1 barn & 1 upgraded barn, 2 arborist buildings with full circles around them, and a few each of hunter shacks, forager huts, and fishing shacks. As you can see in the screenshot below, this is FAR too much food for 426 population and a good chunk of it spoils every year, but I thought it would be interesting to break down what the villagers are choosing to eat given their choices.
My high level summary is: they are eating A LOT of meat, and not enough bread. Here are my consumption observations (I’m not focused on production/spoilage as I know I have too much food):
In total for 420 pop they ate 15,333 food (36 food per person)
Their diet breakout was 41% protein, 5% grain, 27% vegetables, 14% fruit, 13% dairy. All in all… a pretty paleo crowd.
Based on the rate of spoilage, you can see that they could have chosen to eat a LOT more plants, but chose to eat protein to the point of almost no spoilage.
If you look at rate of spoiled/consumed, you see: protein 3%, grain 140%, vegetables 199% (OK I admit I’m growing too much cabbage), fruit 19% and dairy 6%. I read that as the villagers prefer to eat in this order: protein, dairy, fruit, grain, vegetables…but this might also be a function of how much I’m producing.
My questions for you are:
Have you done any similar experiments, and did you see similar results?
Any theories on what drives the choices they make on what to eat?
Anything I can do to get them to eat more bread? Maybe a “cake” upgrade in the future for bakeries?
I haven’t done any experiments like this but notice the same things. I think it needs to change to prefer to stock/eat perishables first.
There are actually som work arounds you can do to increase consumption of for example bread, berries and fruit: you have to assess it carefully in terms of how much you produce, but if you produce not huge amounts, you can untick storage in the root cellar and other storage buildings, and then the baker will deliver to the market directly. The grocer guy takes into account what’s in the market before going on a supply run, so then he will pick up less other foods, resulting in more bread actually being eaten.
I usually place some arborists also with a thought to deliver “straight to market”. It’s a reasonable workaround that’s quite low effort. I usually also set the berries to be delivered straight to market.
Interesting tactic. Force the shorter decay timed foods into the immediate supply points for earlier consumption and the longer ones into storage for later consumption. I’ll try this on my next play through.
On further reflection, this really does highlight a balance issue IMO. I can make so much protein with a handful of people vs a full chain of farmers, millers, and bakers to make bread that ultimately the settlers don’t prefer. This would make more sense if meat were harder to make and it was hard to get over 20% of your diet from it. Would love to see the barns rebalanced to provide less meat and more tallow (which always seems to be in short supply).
Just chuckling a bit here- why do Bakeries add desirability value but villagers don’t scarf the bread down? I know- it makes the place smell great, but… I think they hid a little joke in ere about having your house smell like fresh-baked bread or cookies during a house showing when selling seems to add interest in your house and may result in higher bids.
When they add production limits, I am hoping they make sure Bakeries are able to be limited, as well as Windmills. Until then, I’ll keep stashing grain in the Trading Post to make sure I have some in reserve for my cows.
On another note- have you done any studies to see if the amount of food eaten by each villager is weighted by age? Do infants eat less than children, children less than adolescents? Do adolescents eat more than adults/seniors/elderly (if you’ve got kids who are teens- you’ll understand this)? Or is it just a flat person eats [this much] regardless of age?
OK one more thing to add… I just realized it’s probable that preserved foods are being double counted in the totals… for example meat is produced, and then consumed by a smoker to make smoked meat, and then the smoked meat is consumed by the villagers. Same would apply to smoked fish (fish), preserves (fruit/berries), preserved vegetables (root vegetables), and cheese (milk).
If this is indeed how it works and I take that double counting back out of the totals, now food consumption is:
Total consumption = 11,038 or 26 food per person (A LOT different than 36 above)
Protein = 3,612 / 33% / 8.5 per person
Grain = 747 / 7% / 1.8 per person
Vegetable = 3,710 / 34% / 8.7 per person
Fruit = 1,629 / 15% / 3.8 per person
Dairy = 1,340 / 12% / 3.1 per person
I have not, this would be a cool little wrinkle if so, although maybe unnecessarily complicated.
Your last numbers look more reasonable, albeit grain is still low. Would be interesting to see other tallies, I’ll look at how you did it and try to replicate in one of my cities.
Keep in mind that only 6.77% of total food produced in this town was grain - and the cattle probably ate some of it. Considering that, they disproportionately ate more bread than you’d expect!
Unless of course the consumption by cattle is also lumped in with the consumption by the villagers - if it’s something like 26 cows and each munches on 8 units of grain or root veggies per winter, that’s already 208 units gone. Out of 747 units of grain, and who knows how many carrots. I think the people could eat more bread even if they wanted to! Though spoilage is very high… is all grain/flour immediately turned into bread and therefore spoiling? Or is it produced constantly over the year, using the long shelf lifes of grain and flour to their full advantage?
The comparison for produced vs consumed:
Protein = 26.65% vs 33%
Grain = 6.77% vs 7% (how much is eaten by cattle?)
Veggies = 47.00% vs 34% (how much is eaten by cattle?)
Fruit = 8.78% vs 15%
Dairy = 10.80% vs 12%
When you now consider that a large chunk of the protein is produced all year round (hunters and fishermen), whereas all other food sources mostly come in large harvests - and people have to much food already - then it’s no wonder they eat more meat than all that extra cabbage. Add to that the basic shelf life of cabbage is only 8 months compared to 24 months of smoked meat/fish, and cabbage for some reason cannot be conserved (a personal insult to me as a Kraut! ) AND the aforementioned consumption of root vegetables by the cattle (unless that’s part of the consumption), those numbers imply to me that villagers might have no preference for any type of food at all. It could easily all come from how constantly the food source is produced, how long it lasts and of course how much of it is produced relatively to other food sources.
@frontiersman Have you tried turning off your hunters/fishers? With protein only coming in in bursts just like the others, it would be interesting by how much that might change the numbers!
I hadn’t accounted for grain being consumed by cattle, but in “food” category it is only referring to bread. Actual “grain” is in the separate agricultural products category. My question was more around availability vs. production…it seems they are eating all the protein available, but not all the bread available, even though they are already consuming way more protein than bread. I haven’t tried turning off hunters/fishers, but I think you can make the same argument about the meat coming in chunks with the barns…they are slaughtered once per year every spring when the new ones are born.
Because 7% of their diet is just a bit more than the percentage of bread produced out of the total food produced.
I also think your spoilage numbers aren’t helpful, because it’s food that spoiled from previous years. The number of “grain” spoiled + consumed is higher than the amount produced, because of this.
Exactly - if you turn off hunters/fishers, then meat comes in just like all the other harvests, in big loads all at once. That might make quite the difference.
I was using 747 / 11,038 (consumption, not production). I think villagers deciding what to eat based on how much is produced vs. what’s available is silly…but, maybe that’s how it works?
There could be a little bit of variation year to year depending on harvest time and crop longevity in storage, but my assumption is that would be relatively consistent year-over-year since I wasn’t changing my crop schedules.
Ah I see what you mean now, I misunderstood your previous point…that would be a good experiment since probably a lot of the spoilage comes from the large batches all at once.
I think a system of priorization of certain food types over others is pretty complex, and devs already had a lot to iron out with villager task priorization. If they also have to decide whether that steak a bit further away is more attractive than the head of cabbage a bit closer by… we’d see aditional bugs. Plus, if the devs actually have implemented such a system, why arbitrarily have everyone favour meat over veggies, instead of preferring to eat what will spoil next first. That would make more sense to me.
But I think it’s not that complicated at all. They just grab food, no matter what kind or how close to spoilage, only caring about distance to stock their shelter.
When all that’s in storage before the next big harvest is meat, it’ll be meat. Then the harvest comes around, they’ll still grab meat some of the time, veggies some other time. That alone could explain the differences you saw in your town.
Yeah, sorry, I misread where the number comes from.
But yeah, if only 1651 / 24,394 produced food is bread, then eating only 747 / 11,038 makes perfect sense. If there was 99% bread in storage and 1% meat, their diet would consist of 99% bread, even though both half the meat and half the bread is left to spoil (as there’s just too much food in general).
) AND the aforementioned consumption of root vegetables by the cattle (unless that’s part of the consumption), those numbers imply to me that villagers might have no preference for any type of food at all. It could easily all come from how constantly the food source is produced, how long it lasts and of course how much of it is produced relatively to other food sources.