Hey all -
Looking for some proven advice on hunter / smokehouse efficiency.
I currently have a population of 398 with 16 hunters, 8 of them upgraded with 4 traps each, and 5 smokers.
How many hunters can a smoker support?
How best is meat transported from the hunter cabin to the smokehouse and on to it’s final destination? Is this all supported by non-skilled laborers?
Is it generally best to have all the smoke houses in a central area, or should they be close to the hunter?
I’ve recently seen where I had 1500 or more raw meat and only about 350+/- smoked.
I’ve tried just about every conceivable setup I can imagine with hunters and smoke houses centrally located near root cellars and making the hunters walk the farthest, to separated, even had one smoke house for each hunter right next to each other at one time and I can say that was the absolute worst. Once the hunter hits their maximum they will walk across the entire map to another hunter to drop of a fresh kill before returning to their cabin to start butchering. I’ve seen it take 6 months round trip.
I’m hoping to make this as efficient as possible, but just haven’t found the right combination yet. Any tested and proven advise would be most welcomed.
I typically have two smokers at that size, and I will have 8-12 hunter depedning on how much prey I have. 4-8 fishers as well depending on access to water and such
Perhaps I have 3 smokers. I spread these out around the town in the outskirts to not lower desireability. But as close to town as possible. The workers will solve logistics well enough and I’m not too concerned about that more than just spreading out the production/smokers around a bit
If you have alot of spoiled meat you need to improve smoker efficiency, otherwise you’re good to go - never had much issues myself
Appreciate the response.
I do not have much spoiled meat issue at all.
Additionally, I’ve spent considerable time recently just following smokehouse workers and have noticed that they themselves stock the smokehouse, quite inefficiently from what I’ve noticed. The smoker will run around to hunter cabins, markets etc. and retrieve either raw meat or raw fish to take back to the smokehouse in an effort to fill the “recipe” of xx meat or fish to smoke. Unskilled labor does not seem to be involved in any way. Devs correct me if I’m mistaken?
Adjusting the meat:fish ratios seems to have helped significantly from one smokehouse to the next. Effectively “dialing in” each smoker to the closest available resource.
I currently have 3 main meat smokers in the center of town who’s ratios are:
2 - no fish at all
1 - meat:fish ratio 10:1
Additionally, I have one smokehouse closer to the fishing location(s) and they have the reverse meat:fish ration 1:10
Finally, one last smokehouse which I’m testing that is surrounded by 5 hunter lodges with 4 traps each and this one has meat:fish ratio no fish.
There’s still quite a bit of fine tuning to be done for sure, but I hope this non-scientific research helps someone else as well.
I have only two hunters so far, and two smokes close by and tanner and cobbler close around for skin.
Then I use my oxe wagon where they can put shoes, coat. also close by to fleacher for arrows, bow/crossbow. Oh yeah I have 3 fisher close by as well, so the fish get smoked.
I made sure the oxe wagon was more or less empty on stuff that shouldn’t be there, like wood, iron etc. and food. just some willow and wax was left.
But I had to take another hunter in one cabin as the one I had wouldn’t stop drinking and was more drunk then sober, so for a whole day he didn’t hunt
Smokers are most efficient closer to a fire wood splitter or storage. I have achieved 1200-1400 smoked meat/fish with the trio of fire splitter, stockyard, and root cellar all next to each other. With this set up 1 smoke house handles 3 to 4 hunters/fishers. However. Bi have noticed the efficiency goes down over time. Perhaps due to other laborers and market workers grabbing food before it can be processed
I’m confused - are you saying the hunters can be scattered about the map as long as the smokers are close to firewood splitter and root cellar?
I’ve recently been studying smokers and have experienced that the smoker employee is the one and only one that will stock with raw materials; meat, fish and firewood, and then move the smoked meats into storage. However, that means that if the hunters and fishing shacks are off in the distance, it may take significant time before the smoker gets the resources back to the smokehouse to get the job done, not to mention dropping them off at a nearby root cellar or other food storage opttion that isn’t full at that time. Given a local storage is full, I’ve seen them move on to the next one which may be pretty far away again. In the meantime, the raw materials which would be next in line just wait.
Effectively it would seem at this point that the most efficient use of their time would dictate that they are equal distance to/from the hunter, fisher and drop off locations, which in large maps isn’t always easy to do given those hunting and fishing spots may be many square away.
And also, as I discovered when I tried it, putting the Smoker and a Root Cellar near a concentration of hunters to maximize the efficiency, I discovered that Raiders love to whack the Smoker and Root Cellar. After I rebuilt the same pair of buildings 3 times after 4 raids, I gave up on max efficiency among Hunters, Smokers and Root Cellars and now just co-locate the Smoker and designated Root Cellar within the walls as near to the hunters as I can manage.
It’s not perfect, but using that design on my current map, 3 smokers right next to the wall on the side of the map nearest to 6 Hunters (not upgraded yet) are keeping most of the meat smoked for long-term storage without major difficulty and feeding it all to a pair of Root Cellars right across the street from them.
Hunters being close obviously helps too but it seems the fire splitter and food/wood storage has a greater impact. The hunter being 5 or 10 tiles away has less impact. Just my findings.
16 hunters is a huge number, and bound to introduce extreme inefficiencies with respect to travel times.
Remember hunters have to transport meat to smokers (or e.g. root cellars), and smokers have to transport meat to (e.g. markets) while at the same time getting firewood, meat, etc.
If you have just 3 or 4 hunters and associated smokers and cellars, the travel times will not be he whichever way you set them up, but these will increase - exponentially due to work efficiency being a ratio of working to travel times - the more you have. By the time you get to say 4 hunters and four fishers, you really should be looking at transitioning to the other source of extra meat and hides: cows. Cows ar advantageous not only because they have much greater productivity, but because barns can be positioned more or less where you want, and not where you happen to find a particular resource, like game or fish.
I also have a single, T2 barn at the moment.
The meat production currently may be a bit beyond scale of early T4, however it won’t be nearly enough to scale up to 1k pop. Rather than continuously fall behind, on this series I’m trying to work on efficiencies early enough to sustain large increases in population rather than chase my tail when 15 more settlers join each time.
I’ve made additional changes since the original post.
I’ve moved 3 of the smokehouses into the central part of my production sector. This includes stock houses, root cellars and firewood.
I have a large grouping of 7 hunters and one fisherman working with a single smokehouse further out of the city proper. The smoker takes a fair bit of travel during the transport of produced goods, but their collection of raw meat from each of the hunter cabins is quite quick.
With such a large grouping of trapping hunters, the only travel time issues I have are when the hunters deliver pelts and tallow. The smoker collects nearly all of the produced meat, except for the few times when the market workers come and collect the raw meat to stock themselves. That’s an odd connundrum that I’ve yet to address.
If I had any input at all I might be inclined to ask the devs for options on selecting tasks for the different work types. For example, it would be nice to tell a market worker to only travel within a certain range for goods. The idea that they will travel clear across the world map to collect goods, only to have them ‘change their mind’ when the weather turns, seems wildly inefficient. If we could set the location from which they’d gather, much in the way we do with Foragers or Hunters for example, we could cut down on that travel issue as well. Similarly, we should be able to do the same for any other profession. I’m sometimes baffled by what a laborer thinks is priority. Additionaly, it is mind-blowing when a huge number of laborers are just standing around until I select a huge tract of trees or stones and then an army of workers heads off to collect. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that a ton of people are just standing around, thinking of along the lines of Age of Empires when you see a whole group 'idling" and can select idle workers to do your bidding.
This post grew much larger than hunter and smokehouse efficiency, but like the current status of the game, my play of it is also a work in progress.
