No idea what is going on here, but all my beehives suddenly stopped producing honey. They used to produce something like 10 each every year, but the previous year it fell to 7. I assumed this was because I built several without increasing the number of farmers, so I added a lot of farmers this year.
However, honey completely plummeted to 3 or 4 per apiary, even though I had more farmers for the same amount of apiaries now. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, but if it’s a feature I would love to know how it works and how I can prevent it.
Honey already needs a boost anyway, as the demand for it skyrocketed with the addition of pastries in 0.94. It’s fine in the early and mid game, but in the late game you don’t really have a way to produce it in bulk.
Could it be, that the drop is due to not enough farmers? Farners collect honney as you know. In my game, there was a “breaking point” were honney is not collected anymore. I only stock 50% farmers on a farm typically and repurpose them in the winter.
If there are too many busy working on a fields, you switch farmers off too early before winter or fields are too far away (traveltime), the honney might not get harvested. Can you take a look, if the local inventory of the hives are still full or if they were emtied? For 47 honney, you would only have about 6 hives (8 honney per hive) which sound a bit redicolous for a town of a thousand. Could you also take a look, if the root cellars are all too full and honney will just not be stocked? Honney is harvested later in the year when other goods already occupy the cellar and warehous.
Honney production will be buffed, zentai stated that n a different post in the playtest.
No, it’s not because of a shortage of farmers, because that’s the first thing I tried when it dropped from average 10 to 7 (that’s the numbers the inventories of the apiaries show). I added 40% more farmers for the next year, but it only fell further, to 3 or 4 per apiary. I did not add any apiaries in that time period.
I had 48 apiaries, according to their inventories most of them had produced 3 or 4 that year, which is extremely low, but still not as low as that yearly number of 47 implies so I don’t know how that went wrong, but sometimes the game does not yet count things right I think.
Had no storage issues either.
Yet another year later the honey production largely recovered to something like 8 per apiary again, although I didn’t change the number of apiaries OR the number of farmers this time, didn’t do anything differently than the previous year.
BTW, you touched upon this in another thread, but we really need MORE STATS in this game. We shouldn’t have to guess if less honey was produced because of not enough farmers. The number of farmers visiting an apiary, and its impact on total honey production, should be a metric that is shown in the apiary’s inventory.
Similar to fruit trees and patches of plants, that generate resources that will disappear if not harvested in time. Their inventories should SHOW it, if some of the resources they generated the past year did not get harvested, so the player knows whether it makes sense to add more workers, or he’s already maxing out on production.
If your apiaries are near farms, it could be because of what you’re farming. Different crops have different be attractiveness. (Notably, clover is extremely good for honey, although I don’t think I’d actually bother with clearing a site for all-clover-all-the-time grazing and beekeeping.)
That couldn’t explain the difference in my case because I always have the exact same amount of clover every year, and more or less the same balance of other crops as well. But there is no difference between apiaries near clover fields or those near hay fields, they all go down in equal measure.
Also, the vast majority of my apiaries aren’t near farms anyway. My farms, my entire village and every road I built to anywhere are covered with apiaries in a desperate attempt to get a honey production going that can support some basic pastries production.
