OK. So it’s clear there are some great food mechanics. Wildlife munching crops, disease, weather, but imo not so functioning storage and spoilage. The ratio between months supply and spoilage seems to always be 3:3. or or if lucky 3:2 (the numbers are examples but I’m sure you get the point). Now what to do to improve that? First option…root cellars…doesn’t actually move the bar. Second option…upgrades to storage…nope…nothing changed yet. Third option…barrels…if it moved the bar it was tiny and my villagers still feel very food insecure. Fourth option…preserving…been there, done that…by now I suppose I might be hitting the 3:2 ratio a bit more (which actually never killed anyone but…) my settlers are constantly malnourished which I believe by now I actually fixed about 5 years ago. Thank you for listening.
Make more food.
Forget the losses.
They will fix buggy stuff over time.
I worried about that too until I realized…
Who cares just make more and its not an issue anymore.
One point though about Root cellars, there is an up side to them as they limit what can be put in them. And you can and I believe should block food stuffs from going in gen storage.
This way you can have an even spread of food being stored in only Root cellars and you place them close to locations that you want food to be available to like residence and fields.
(Control over your food storage locations)
I have 7 large fields…5x8…5x10. That is not the issue I an attempting to highlight. Adding barrels, updating storage etc is SUPPOSED to cut back on spoilage. I’m not seeing the proportions advertised. FWIW none of my villagers ever died of starvation…but that’s not the point. This game is early access and I reckon the Devs would like the feedback from a player perspective of what is working …and what isn’t. They will only “fix buggy stuff over time” if we tell them what we are seeing. Isn’t that the point of early access?
Firstly, you need enough smokers for the fish and meat. this is to prevent the food from spoiling. this is a start.
The fields needs to have a fertility of at least 90% and 100% is better. Remove all weeds and rocks. It took me more than 100 hours to figure out the how to manage my fields.
This is also important: check the market if you’re population has permission to get the goods from te market. When the market is build and upgraded, the permission for a lot of goods is denied. The food ends up being spoiled.
In the third tier you get a building to preserve vegetables and fruit, use it!
In the second tier you mainly need bread and meat (it should be enough.)
I’ve got the feeling that it’s a combination of the four. Also building the fields in clusters of three is recommended.
I’m a gardener in real life, growing and storing a ton of my own food. So I applied some real world logic, and it seemed to work.
Pay attention to harvest windows. That’s essential. Blueberries harvest in March/April.
Peaches in June/July
Apples and pears in Sept/Oct
Then your field crops harvest x days after planting.
Make sure to stagger your harvests, if it all comes in at once, your laberors don’t get to it in time and it rots in the field.
Cows are born early in the year.
You can absolutely subsist and grow your population with just 1-2 months of food reserves. Food doesn’t store indefinitely, it’s not supposed to, so you won’t push those numbers very much. That’s by design. And if you plant an overage if crops, most of them will spoil in storage. That just means you wasted a lot of your laberors time when they could have been more productive. You do want some overages to check against failed crops or untimely raids during the harvest window. But 2 months is plenty.
As any gardener, agriculturist, horticulturist or permaculturist will tell you, planning a crop is less about the space in which you grow and more about the effecient planning of time.
This is the first game that I’ve seen that actually got this mechanic right. Someone on the team actually knows their stuff. I tip my hat to them.
Forget about the numbers and plan so you are harvesting about 1.5 months worth of food every month throughout the year, and have enough long term storage and hunting to carry you through the winter. If you do that, you’ll be fine. The numbers at the top of the screen is just a mental trap for gamers who compulsively think bigger number means better outcome. This is about effeciency, not net yield. That’s the trick, but it may not be evident to people who haven’t actually grown subsistance crops before in the real world, which I imagine is most gamers. A little tutorial or explination in game could go a long way to helping with that.
Food is easy. I believe the problem you are facing is, your food spoils too fast, not because the population is eating them. You do need to upgrade the Root Cellars to fix this, at level 3 city.
My stats:
350 population
4 bean farm , 12x12 size, 7 pop each
Zero fishing, Zero Hunting
4 barns (2 pop each)
3 Cheese makers
6 Smoke house
Total population making food = 45
Total free population = 60-80
Total Upgraded stores = 20
0 Barrels, I am too lazy to use them
I use Cheese as $ , so I will sell all of them to all traders, then use the $ to non-renewables, like sand clay iron wood etc. I sell about 3000 cheese each time.
I make so much leather items (leather, shoes, jackets, shield, armor) and soap from the barn, I have over 1000 each, which will bankrupt any traders that stop by.
I think the main problem is more, that Villageres tend to eat the preserved stuff, which mean the rest is still rotting, if not needed. Or they prefere the fresh stuff. You can see which stuff has what spoilages in the overview.
This also means, the bad stuff keeps getting worse.
It depends on your crops, your storage and your preservation techniques.
My current town, which is in the ‘random’ map is 20:9. At times I’ve had even better ratios.
My strategy is that every barn, hunter and fisher has a smoker. The crops I grow are mostly peas, beans, root-crops and grains. I always build a cooper and (if the price is right) buy barrels whenever my stock in barrels is at zero. I build root cellars to store all my food and if I see starting to show up in warehouses, I build more root cellars.
Leeks, cabbage, fruits and unsmoked meats degrade fast. Beans, peas, grains, smoked meats, pickled vegetables degrade slowly. Barrels help slow down spoilage.
EDIT:
Oh, I forgot. Cheesemakers!
EDIT 2:
Currently 11:6 at the end of summer before the harvest. So lots of greens from the gatherers but not much in the way of long-term storage crops.
Except it is working as far as I can tell from every city I’ve built…
I’ve even had up to 18 (4) at one point. These are just from random screenshots of other things.
With very few exceptions, my usual crop ration is as follows:
Year 1: Field Maintenance / Clover / Turnips
Year 2: Peas / Beans
Year 3: Clover / Wheat (or substitute Wheat for Flax when enough fields have been sown to make up for the difference)
Provided you’re on a map that provides clay, use pottery as your money maker. If clay is not available use manufactured items like shoes or coats if you can spare any. And when you have the ability to make Apiaries construct a bunch to cover the town without overlapping and sell your honey. Just remember that you can’t make apiaries until you have at least one farm! If you’re on Pacifist Mode and have access to iron, make Heavy Tools and sell any surplus. And, of course, any gold you may find, smelt that up and it’ll become your own money.
As far as getting enough food goes, when I start I usually like to find as many deer nodes within proximity to each other that I can. Hopefully they’ll be near water as a bonus but if not, no worries. Usually the deer nodes will last as long as you allow them to so long as you don’t hunt them out. Additionally, don’t build in the area where the deer spawn locations are and also, don’t clear the trees out from there, either. I don’t know if having the trees there helps but I’ve noticed that the deer nodes almost never disappear so long as the trees remain. I had the same three deer nodes remain from the very beginning until the 1000 population mark when I restart my towns on a different seed. And this was with five hunter’s cabins constantly hunting them. The deer always return so long as you don’t build over their spawn points.
Build several smokers. I always start out with three smokers if I have plenty of deer and/or fish nearby. Combined with root cellars it makes for lots of food that will last for a long time.
Don’t be afraid to “go overboard” on building lots of hunting, fishing and foraging buildings so long as both the map and, most importantly, your population can withstand. Make as many shelters as you can that you know immigration and/or births will be able to handle.
As for farms, I usually don’t start a farm until I’ve upgraded the Town Hall once. Then I build a 12x12 farm and then a barn and wait until I’ve got the coin to buy a cow or two.
As far as arborists go, I usually wait to plant orchards until I upgrade the Town Hall twice. That way the trees will have matured by the time I’ve got glass and can make the Preservists.
With luck you will have plenty of food to last. I routinely have a 9:6 ratio or better. Toward the end game it can sometimes get better or worse but I will very rarely get the “Low Food” warning.
Then I need help!
I have four barns, two at maximum capacity where I’m slaughtering two or three each year, and two at one-half or three-fourths capacity. I have a granary between two of the barns, and just a few tiles away from the other two. I have a storage building within a few tiles of all four barns. I have maximum herders in each barn, but these lazy louts won’t get out and go to the full or nearly-full granary or the storage building and pick up food! I’m constantly showing the little icon for low food over my barns, especially the two with the fewest cows in them! I set the cows out to graze in early spring and bring them in in late autumn, with maybe one brief period in high summer, when I bring them in to be milked, then I turn them out again. So they mainly need food in the barn for a very brief time in summer, and then for the winter.
I have five crop fields, each 10x10. I do my best to keep them maintained, fertile (five composters), and do my best also to control the diseases that pop up from time to time. Each of these fields is on highly fertile (the darkest green) land, and fertility is not a real problem.
I have an abundance of deer and fish, yet my hunters and fisherfolk just can’t keep up. I have foragers, some of which have a rich supply of nuts and berries.
I have one aborist, fully planted. I have a preservist, fully staffed. My cheesemakers are also fully staffed, and busy with all the milk my cows produce making so much cheese, I can sell a goodly amount at the trading center I have now. Unfortunately, the traders don’t often have food for me to buy.
But I’m still having to turn immigrants away because I don’t have enough food, and with all this, I’m right now experiencing a food crash. With so much in smokehouses, root cellars, and storage facilities, why am I having this food crash? What am I doing wrong?
I tried once before having smokehouses near my hunting cabins and fishing shacks, and root cellars near my foragers, but wasn’t impressed with the results. Maybe that works better now. Advice?