New to this game, but many many years playing games like this. Honestly, it seems unplayable right now. Start a new game, it complains you are out of food. Create food camps, no one hunts or harvests. Finally make a farm, animals eat it and what’s left, doesn’t count towards the food stock. I sure hope there is some sort of tutorial out there because I am on the verge of uninstalling.
Sorry for the rant.
eh… welcome to the early release of the game?
I’d say given my limited success, take a deep breath, start over on reasonable settings and advance slowly.
Hunters and Gatherers do the major lifting to start with. You need to turn firewood cutters on in the late summer and off in the late spring in the early game (i.e. you’ll build two or three buildings and stop production on at least two) so that you have more laborers. My first game, I don’t think I had a farm for about 4 or 5 years.
Since all is not balanced or fine tuned in the game, you have to do some of the work as your city grows. The example is the Cobbler, where one building is not quite enough. But, if you have raids on the easy setting, one fletcher may be enough.
Try again and let us know how it worked out.
Unlike most other games, the hunter and forager does not roam the map looking for a target. They work primarily within their assigned circle. By default, this circle is around the building you see when you place it. You can move this around manually, which may be necessary early on with small populations. Some berries for example come to ripen at different times of the year. Blueberries ripen early, and then all of a sudden those plants will turn grey and later you’ll see the other berries (same icon) ripen and you can harvest them. Fortunately, you can move blueberry bushes close to your forager huts for quick gathering so as you explore the map more and reveal them, you can build a small orchard of blueberry bushes all for one shack to harvest.
Hunters are a great initial defense for raiders as well because they don’t cost gold (Au) to maintain but they also are not heavily armored. You can select the individual and tell him to attack a target, or pick up a carcass (animal corpse) if other citizens mobbed on one, even if its outside of his designated hunting grounds. A carcass has a limited span of time before it despawns though, so don’t wait or even bother if they’re too far of a run as only the hunters will gather them and process the meat. Even barn hands won’t harvest them though they have the tools and skills to butcher cows.
I played one game with a lot of hunters just because there were boar spawn locations and you need two or three of them to hunt together. You also have to manually tell them to attack a boar unless the boar goes on the chase towards one of your villagers (including the hunters). Reluctantly, the hunters are all too easily scared running home to mommy with barely a scratch on them while the boar is (or nearly) dead already. The furs they bring in can not only support a healthy production of coats and shoes, but when you get your market up, you can sell off any excess.
The hunters work all year round, as do the fishing shacks so meat production is a very good food source year round. You’ll need ample firewood for those smoking shacks, so watch your inventory of raw vs. smoked meats and fish to see that you have enough smokers. Raw meats will perish much too quickly to serve as food stocks. Yes, unlike other games, food will perish in Farthest Frontier. There are various ways to see how much you’ll lose each year, but as long as you are keeping enough to get through Winter, you should be fine to go on year after year. Certain buildings and products you can build help with making food last longer, but placement of these buildings is important as you have to deliver new food to them, protect them from wild bear attacks, and have access to them where they are needed. Spreading them around seems to help with early game as your population grows, but eventually the rat problem will kick in and rat hunters cost money so you’ll be pushed to rethink placement of these. It does get pretty complicated quick, but this is what drives many of us to keep trying.
The worse thing I have ever done was fail to get firewood going before the winter. I also only had 1 of the 4 shacks build needed to sustain the starting population, but that didn’t stop them from freezing to death without firewood, so make this a concerted effort. If the firewood splitter can’t get wood, then you are either not harvesting any, or committing too much of it on new construction early on. Once wood is moved to a construction site, it is considered used unless you select the site and reclaim/delete it. Then you might not get everything back, but at least you can get some of it.
So yeah, it can take a few tries just to get the hang of it, but after a while things start to become pretty clear what you have to do.
Oh, one more hint of advice. Just as certain plants the foragers gather are only ripe during certain times of the year, plants are never harvestable during the winter. Watch when your foragers say they are idle with nothing to do and hit P to reassign all of them back to other jobs. Any not given a specific job will be tasked with harvesting trees, picking up piles of dropped resources, and many other miscellaneous tasks. Many buildings don’t even require a full load of workers to sustain your needs. For instance, a barn can do just fine with one worker until you have more than 6 cows (roughly). Farmers also don’t do anything during the Winter, so foragers and farmers are primarily my source of general labor for cutting wood and gathering stone during the winter, but watch out for the travel distance as winter is over before you know it.
Many have figured out that you can shut down your guard towers and barracks for a few years until just before the raiders come but keep in mind there is a one time cost each time you hire them again so if you can put a guard tower to use all year round, keep it full (2 workers) as they cost the same regardless of how many workers it has. The barracks will charge you per worker. Guard towers can help the hunters if placed near boar spawn sights, and they never run out of arrows as long as the worker stays in the tower.
During a raid, the town center has a bell to call people in until it gets full. Not everyone will rush to get there, but those that do contribute to its defense shooting arrows like the guard towers so use this information in your defense strategy. Just don’t forget to release the workers again when the threat is over, if not before. You can also open this building and use the bell at any time, even before a raider attack.
You will find it slow getting wood at first because you use it up so quickly with new construction, so the best thing to do is try not to grow too quickly, in my opinion, but find the best way to sustain the population that you have while you build up resources. Larger populations (not gold) are what set the raider size. You can build up your defense slowly without populating guard towers at all, saving you the monthly cost. Then when you are ready to increase your population, and have the means in place to make money off that population, you can really start to take advantage of these buildings.
Welcome don’t uninstall you wont regret trying over, not only is it a great game but the community is nice and the devs are listening which ups a games appeal tenfold for me. Like jasper said its a good idea to start on easier settings to begin with. I started on easy everything and ticked pacifist mode till I had got to grips with basic game mechanics.
F4 key is your friend…use it to see what resources are around you
you can make as many saves of the same map as you like so if it all goes a bit wrong you can always roll back
There are lots of guides on YouTube also if you are really struggling just remember its early access so things change, always a good idea to check release date of video with last big updates and be prepared that earlier ones may differ slightly……for instance ignore any guide that tells you to place plazas under roads to up your house appeal 
Watch some starting out videos on youtube and you will get a thiving town started in no time.