Forager shack is the most irritating building to micromanage especially when village gets bigger.
-Typically it only takes 1/3 of the season for the forager to harvest all resources in the work area before being forced to relocate the work area 1-3 times in a year.
One solution would be the option to have a small, medium and large option for the work areas.
A better solution in my opinion would be to eliminate the Forager shack all together and simply allow laborers to harvest the forage resources the same way as they can harvest berries.
Replace the foragers shack with a herbalist hut or something where the worker could cultivate and grow medicinal roots, herbs and willow- these 3 resources can’t be replaced by farms and are impossible to keep in stock late game
Another possibility would be to have the visible plants represent only Concentrations of the gatherable resources. Given that people from gatherer cultures (professional foragers?) know everything about every plant in their area and what it can be used for, this would both increase (slightly) the amount they gather and keep them busy for the entire season.
Add to this the often-requested ability to gather Medicinal Plants and Willow into ‘concentrations’ the way the Berries can be replanted now, and the foragers could be kept both productive and busy constantly.
How about doing away with the work area altogether? You could select from a list of what’s available with desirable quantities, so for instance, go find 20 medical roots, then 25 eggs etc.
Quite agree that herbs and medicinal roots could be grown domestically once they’ve been found ‘in the wild’.
The game design seems to be focused on the idea of an area mechanic - for work, gathering, desirability, animals, etc., so I would assume they’d want to keep that.
BUT
There’s no reason not to have an Upgrade to the Forager that turns him/her into a Gardener, gathering the plants into a single place which could even be inside the town instead of spread all over (which, based on gathering Berries that you can do now, I’ve found increases the efficiency of ‘gathering’ dramatically). Given that there would be almost no limit to how many plant resources you could cram into the area around the forager/gardener Hut, if you want a specific number: 20 medical roots, 25 Herbs, etc, just gather and plant that number around the Hut.
Eggs would require a Coop of some kind for the birds (Medievals kept pigeons as well as chickens for meat and eggs), which could also be part of the ‘Forager Upgrade’.
Willow and Mushrooms really require special terrain to flourish - wet, dark, which would realistically limit where you could accumulate them, but that just gives an excuse to have several Gardener Huts in several different places: ordinary ground, marshy, dark forest, etc.
My suggestion is that the forager house can be upgraded, and multiple sections can be selected. For example, the forager house at level 1 can only select one circle, and at level 2, two circles can be selected. After the first circle is collected, the collector will go to the second circle to collect, which can reduce the repeated adjustment of the collection area within one year. The third is that when upgrading to level 3, some herbs and roots can be planted