I really think that vegetables are really undevalued in citizens diet. Specifically, I mean that cabbage and leek, that yield a lot of food are consumed in really small amounts while the vast majority just spoils and get wasted.
Let’s look at some statistics of my last game:
I don’t even bother with Greens. Even Beans spoil in high enough amounts, and they last longer.
However, don’t underestimate having under 6 months of food stores at all times in the year. Villager happiness can go right down as food stores go under this amount, and having food stores that will later spoil (if it doesn’t require so much workers) really helps keep things running efficiently.
Loading up my last Lowland Lakes game:
Vegetable Breakdown:
Vegetable Field Rotation:
Yeah, you are right. But I still think greens should be balanced otherwise they are nearly useless… Let them spoil fast but at least make citizens use them more when they are available.
@WhileyCat I’m really impressed! I’m hovering around the 6 months food storage, but 50% of my beans get spoilt. Whenever I boost food production, I just end up with more food spoilt rather than more in storage. And this is with the ice relic, upgraded cellars, barrels, smoking meat, preserving roots and fruits, the whole shebang…
I thought it might be the Balanced Diet mod that messed things up, but leaving the game running for a couple of years without it made no big difference (a bit fewer beans but more bread spoilt).
That’s a pretty bad crop rotation though. Firstly you’ve got to do maintenance sometimes to de-weed it. You also have consecutive peas in year 3, which means that you’ll have a whole bunch of diseases that will quickly grow out of control. You’d be better with peas + clover + parsnip ; clover + flax ; peas + maintenance + parsnip. Not having consecutive crops (including wrapping around winter from one year to the next) which share diseases is the key to keeping diseases to a minimum. In fact, if you reshuffle things around a little you can swap a parsnip for higher-yield carrot without sacrificing your high net positive fertility:
peas + clover + parsnip
carrots + flax
peas + maintenance + clover
It also distributes workload evenly across the year, so the same farmers can efficiently work multiple fields. When I don’t want grain and I’m still in the early game and raising the fertility of my fields, this is my #1 rotation.
Although, in your situation with a field at close to 100% fertility, you can definitely get more food out of it by running a fertility-negative rotation and using the occasional compost to top it back up occasionally (ie, replace the last clover with parsnip in the above).
But to get back to the OP, I agree that the food system leaves something to be desired. I wish that villagers prioritised eating (and stocking their shelters / personal inventories) with food that 95% spoilt and will be gone in a few days to a jar of pickles that has another 5 years to live. As it stands, growing greens is a complete waste of time unless you’re on the brink of starvation.
I’m playing in Vanquisher, where disease is actually a big factor, and that is a min/max production for disease. The two adjacent fields are planting either of the other two years, so disease never spreads field to field. Because of this any loss from disease is only a small reduction compared to planting less.
However with your method, my 3 fields together would be all full of Powdery Mildew all the time (Beans, Peas, Buckwheat, Carrots) since they would all be growing spreadable crops right next to each other.
As well I have 3 fields nearby (lack of distance between them by the necessity of the fertile area) growing Wheat & Hay, and Aster Yellows (Wheat, Carrot, Buckwheat) would be spreading all between them.
Also, many patches ago Farmers started automatically maintaining fields during blank planting periods. This means they still get the work done during the time between my peas, without spending unnecessary time (weeds and rocks at zero) doing it. Notice how my Weed Level is only 6% and Rockiness 0%?
So am I, and I’ve both experimented with this a lot and dug deep into the code. It is not a min/max for production or disease by a long shot. The important factor to consider is that disease spreading is a (relatively) small chance that only kicks in once there already is a disease, while spontaneously appearing diseases are inevitable and always get stronger if they infect consecutive crops. You must have had bean wilt (if I recognise the icon correctly) pretty badly for it to still be on your field 2 plantings later.
Huh, I never noticed that. Good to know.
But this is very off topic, so I’ll say no more about it here.
Agree about prioritization. Greens are good for:
That’s it. Nothing else. They are more limited than Beans owing to duration. They are much more limited than Root Vegetables since Roots can be Preserved, used as animal fodder, used for the all of the above, plus they last substantially longer. It’d be nice if there were alternative uses for the Greens or could switch them and Root Vegetables for some uses.
Food variety is between different types of food, not individual foods. The types are: proteins, grains, veg, fruits, and dairy, as per the food summary in the top bar. Having greens, and beans (which means the plant beans or the plant peas), and root veg, and mushrooms, and preserved veg still only counts as 1 variety of food. So greens don’t help here at all compared to roots / beans.
As for scurvy, I think any veg or fruit cures it, and greens aren’t better than the others. Although I haven’t double checked.
Which means that, yeah, greens are really lacking. They have higher yields but lower fertilisation more, have much shorter lifetimes, no way of extending that lifetime, and have no secondary uses. They are, sadly, borderline useless. Unless you’re on no food supply and need to maximise food production ASAP at any cost.
Agreed but getting Markets and the few Shelter Stockers to care about variety is hard enough as is, so giving them a lot of Greens helps them stock vegetables. Hence, Preserving Greens would put them into more consideration. Same with Mushrooms. Alternatively (cough DLC cough) Salt and salt-curing or some vegetable variation of smoking might be nice.
Does anyone know if Root Cellars do FILO or FIFO?
And, as a joke, if we could make Lutefisk, Settlers could use it as both food and as a weapon.
I’m pretty sure that all jobs take items closest to being spoilt. So that holds for cellars → markets and then for markets → houses. I think once its in houses it stops spoiling (I’ve never seen the food spoilt widget about a residence). The problem, IMO, is that when stocking markets or houses, villagers take items randomly, rather than trying to cover all the food types. Which means I always find them eating veg (because there’s 5 to choose from), and often ignoring grains or dairy (because there are only 2 of each to pick from).
I have a mod which fixes that - to some degree. And I have another on the way that makes them prioritises the most quickly spoiling food that’s almost gone for each food category. Results are promising but it needs more testing. Although if it works as well as it appears, I’ll probably have to reduce the base lifetime of all foods a little to not make the game too easy.
