Some amount of food spoilage is unavoidable in Farthest Frontier just as it is in regular life. The purpose of this mechanic is to try to maintain some level of challenge and food management throughout the game vs. past games I’ve played where you get ahead on production and it just constantly accumulates, until you eventually have a hundred years of food stored up. Spoilage also provides reason to invest in upgrading storages, producing barrels and gives some strategic value to diversifying which foods you grow, when you grow them and how you process them. Preserving food has long been almost as integral a part of human civilization as producing food and we wanted to try to reflect this in the games food economy.
An important thing to consider, which can help make management a bit easier is that villagers do not need you to have 6+ months or every food type stored. They only care about variety when it comes to their diet over the course of a year. As long as they get a chance to eat some variety of things, they’ll remain in good health. For food stores, they want the security of knowing they’re not on the brink of starvation and it doesn’t really matter what you have stored up - it could be all cheese or all smoked meat and they’ll be happy with that.
Another factor is that grain itself is not counted under “months of food” since it is not directly consumable. This is a bit awkward, since obviously knowing you have 12 months of grain stored up would put people at ease but we felt it would also be misleading to show that as months of food left when, potentially, villagers could still starve if your town wasn’t able to convert that grain into flour and then into bread fast enough.
Bread spoils faster than many other food items though, so you do not want to create a large surplus of bread. Flour spoils slowly but still a little faster than unprocessed grain, so you also do not want to amass huge amounts of flour. You can use production limits though to help regulate this, ensuring you never have too much flour or too much bread. Because grain and flour store for so long, ensuring a constant production but not surplus of bread is a good way to reduce your villagers over-consumption of other long-storing, more costly food types like smoked meat, cheese and preserves, allowing you to stockpile more of those and amass a good number of months of food at all times.
On the flip side, some of the lowest cost to produce food, like “greens” crops, do not keep for very long, so it is not advisable to rely on too many of these or to produce too much of it at the same time. You should think about how many greens you are producing in spring and in fall, spacing them out and limiting them to reduce spoilage. A glut of greens harvested all at once is a recipes for mass spoilage. Leaks and cabbage are high-yield crops though, so it makes sense to grow some number of them and doing so will reduce the rate at which villagers eat through more costly, longer-keeping foods.
Of course, this can be easier or harder, depending on the map type. On maps with fishing and plentiful fertile land, it is just a matter of good food economy management. On maps like Arid Highlands, it can be a persistent struggle though and it may require focusing on manufacturing gold and other items to sell for food.
