I see many requests for foresters to be added to the game, and maybe they should, but it is actually already possible to set up completely sustainable (zero micro management) log gathering. The only real pain is the thousand odd clicks to plant the forest initially, but after that they will run forever without another click. You can see in the picture below the rings of regrowth that make this possible.
Yeah, for 1k pop village you need over 40 of theseā¦
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Maybe if youāre wasting a ton of wood? I guess it depends how you have designed the rest of your economy. Are you unnecessarily smoking meat? Making more furniture than you need? Rebuilding wooden walls every raid? That town of 315 is fine with 5 rings, and I wouldnāt be surprised if it could support many more.
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Iām quite sure like 90% goes for firewood
Looking again at your pic, it could be less than 40 needed when the trees are literally next to the camp. Iām still sure it will take more than 30.
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Probably, many things use firewood. The planks used for building maintenance are probably significant too with 160 odd manors. You could go through the resource graphs to work out how much is being used in production and subtract that from the total used to find out exactly how much is being used for heating and repairing. My PC canāt handle 1000 pops, so any numbers I could provide will only be evidence for a 600 size village.
[Edit] Actually just turn off everything that consumes logs, firewood and planks for a couple of years so the numbers will only represent what is used for upkeep, much easier than math.
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I already started new game but Iām sure it was like 3200 firewood needed per year. Then 2 upgraded sawmills and 1 not upgraded just to sustain repairs with barely any surplus for new constructions and just 1 folk making furnitures. Yup I was wrong with the numbers a bit, Iād say itās like 40% firewood and 40% planks. Total it was like 200+ for firewood and 200+ for planks with total yearly usage of 500+ logs (600+ if buildings repairs were needed, sometimes even up to 700).
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So 7-8 rings? That doesnāt seem unreasonable.
I will push my current village up 500 later this evening and get some accurate numbers in terms of what the rings can sustainably output and how much is actually used for heating and repairs.
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Yea but without a mod to spawn trees (which Iām unwilling to use, feels like cheating) getting forests like that would make me go mental. Looking at your pic, it would take about 13 rings. But with while your village grows, so does the distance they have to walk so the productivity goes down. Then normally the trees donāt regrow fast enough so camp workers spend a lot of time just wanking 
And you end up with about 40 and no trees on the map at all. I know itās possible, I just canāt be arsed.
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Yes, players already know itās possible to set up by planting decorative trees, but thatās not what they want to have to do. Hence the requests for a way for the game to automatically plant trees by work camp workers or similar when they cut them down. Which, to be honest, is pretty much what happens in real life foresty. Plant to replace what you take.
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I think most players believe you need to constantly replant decorative trees to have a stable supply of wood. Iām pointing out that isnāt actually the case. Done correctly you can plant them once and have a constant supply without ever touching it again. I havenāt seen that really explained, maybe I did a bad job of explaining it though.
I think everyone agrees that manually planting decorative trees one by one needs to change. If I could plant trees by dragging out an area though, I would consider wood management as basically usable and functioning in itās current state. I actually enjoyed playing around to figure out the puzzle of how to get it to work without requiring micro to sustain. Iām fairly certain the solution isnāt even something the designer intended.
I think every player that has played this genre before is immediately surprised by the absence of a forester. I remember playing Settlers 2 as a kid in the 90s and it having a forester. So of course everyoneās first suggestion is to ask for what theyāre expecting. And maybe you should, but maybe there is something interesting in leaving it as a puzzle for players to solve. A puzzle suits the survival genre. Just making it simply require placing a building suits the pretty city builder genre. Currently FF straddles the two, so you might go either way.
In real life modern forestry sure, Iām not so sure about real life medieval forestry. Probably not given the vast scale of historical deforestation.
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iām pretty sure the devs have said in patch notes that Decoritive trees do not spread trees. i think the regrowth you are seeing are natural trees regrowing that were already in those locations.
i have planted oks in areas with no trees, and i canāt get them to āregrowā after a work shop has cut down āmature onlyā trees. i have to replant them.
Iām aware they have said that, so it obviously isnāt hard coded for this to happen, but something about the way trees work produces this outcome anyway.
Iāve had the setup work where there were previously no oaks, so it canāt just be natural regrowth of preexisting trees. I have noticed it doesnāt work everywhere though.
My guess is that it has something to do with the water table. If you press i you can see the trees have a big effect on the groundwater, but not everywhere. It would make sense that tree spawning would take that into account.
I have also observed that more trees regrow where they have been cut down, but donāt really expand outwards outside the edges where trees have never been planted or cut down.
This is what I love in old games. They donāt hold your hand through the whole process, there arenāt even hints. No pointers on map, no markers, you had to discover/research everything yourself.
Now most of the games are dumbed down because some mechanics are beyond comprehension of too many people. A perfect example in FF is building walls, most people are struggling, complaining they need to prioritise each single block - simply because they donāt pay attention to whatās happening in front of them - ignorance! While I got my walls up quite quickly. Same goes for building repairs.
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Hey! Could you please elaborate what you mean by this? 
Iām afraid I find myself in the group with the ignorant ones, which is most unfortunate, as Iāve been playing city-builders for many-many years! Iāve definitely missed something valuable in mechanics. So, whatās the trick to having the walls constructed faster, or repairs be done?
Both have been resolved in 8.0. I wouldnāt use the label āignorantā though. People play games for different reasons. Some of us enjoy figuring out the gameplay, while others just want to play the game.
In 7.6 the ātrickā was to build smaller sections of wall since the game mechanic was to assign 1-3 builders to a whole section at a time (this worked on roads too). If you would build for instance 3 segment sections of walls with 3 builders assigned to each, you could quickly get a wall built.
Players were dragging out a 100 segment wall at once (because the game dynamics let you) and then wondered why those 1-3 builders assigned to the whole 100 segment wall section werenāt getting it built immediately. Do you see the problem now?
I actually appreciated this mechanic as it enabled me to slow or speed up the construction by the length of wall section being built. I rarely found a need to have to have a wall built right this very moment anywayā¦ 3, 5, 10 yearsā¦ it didnāt matter. I rarely found an army that caused me any real issues even on Vindicator maps.
They fixed that too in 8.0.
As for repairs, Iāve never had an issue getting buildings repaired. Iām now over 300 hours and have had 1 home condemned (and no other building.) There has to be something in the style of gamesmanship causing this issue for some and not others. I expect that some are trying to do too much at once but since Iām not playing their game I canāt say for sure. I stop all new building for a full year every 10 years or so just to insure my builders got caught up.
BTW, I donāt usually play city-builder games. Perhaps that helps me because I donāt come in with baked in learning from other games?
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Medieval forestry (I heard someone say -) was a lot more complicated than simply cutting down every tree in sight - another argument for a specialized āForesterā.
The most interesting technique used, which would have great application to the game, is Coppicing. In the north/central European biome, many trees will grow new shoots rapidly right out of stumps left in the ground. Within as little as 3 - 4 years, these shoots can produce āsmall woodā suitable for firewood or fuel for charcoal burners, spear shafts, arrows, bow staves, or withys for wattle-and-daub construction. It does not particularly speed up the growth of timber for major building construction.
Coppicing also potentially provides better ābrowseā for foraging animals like Deer, so it increases the efficiency of hunting in the coppiced forest.
Frequently, coppicing was applied by sections - crop rotation with trees, so to speak - so that there was some part of the forest ready to āharvestā or exploit every year.
In game terms (more DLC content?) the settlement with a Forester in residence could manage its forested areas more efficiently to provide wood for almost all non-construction requirements, and more efficient Hunting Cabins, and take some of the in-game pressure off of the woodlands.
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Wow, perdrix, thank you for such a comprehensive answer! I appreciate the explanations. Need to check the mechanics while Iām on the 0.7 patch, itās interesting to see and feel the difference.
Speaking of the other city-buildersā¦ I would dare say now that Farthest Frontier is probably one of the best starting points you could ever have!
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Has anyone else done further testing on this? I noticed in my game recently that spots where I planted birch and maple (alternately), after cutting one round of them down, and then maybe a year or two later of leaving the area blank, a whole bunch of wild trees sprouted in roughly the same formation as what I had planted years earlier.
In case itās helpful to anyone: I had planted the birch and maple trees in areas where there were already existing trees of this type, so maybe that has something to do with this mechanic. Maybe if you manually plant the same tree type in a region that has those trees, you can encourage further wild growth after cutting the decorative ones down?
This could be a game changer for me on reforestation 
Iāve got it to work with trees completely foreign to the biome, so that rules out the them previously existing theory.
I accidentally, but somehow perfectly, planted the zone around a workcamp with half maple and half oak (it looked like a pokemon ball). Curiously the regrowth from each side spread over into the other half, which rules out trees simply regrowing exactly where theyāve been cut down.
Iāve had it working in the wastelands on top of mountains, so underlying terrain or fertility doesnāt seem matter at all.
Iāve found assigning two workers is always sustainable, as at a certain radius the regrowth rate matches the rate they can cut them down. If you plant about 3 layers beyond the range of the workcamp then you could safely assign the full four workers without the system ever breaking.
In the next patch theyāve increased the workcamp radius, which further helps this methodās potential. And finally, the production caps in the next patch help too, as hitting the cap will give the zone a bit of extra time to regrow even more.
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Hmm. Maybe it is indeed something with the water table then.