I am having some late-game issues with food, and I noticed I am low on smoked meat even though I have 2 upgraded barns and 2 dedicated meat smokers, with dedicated (meat-only) root cellars right next to them. I then bought a bunch of meat at the trading post but none of it got smoked. It also didn’t get put in the root cellars, instead I found it spread out across my 3 marketplaces. Is this a common problem?
I thought that the workflow for meat was Barn/Hunter → Root Cellar → Smoker/Market
I have unchecked fresh meat from the marketplaces now to see if that will solve the probem, it’s not the best solution as ideally I’d like a mix of smoked and fresh meat at the marketplaces, however I am guessing that some villagers will get fresh meat directly from the root cellars so there will still be variety.
Smockers can access raw meat directly from hunters/barns. I have witnessed this many times before. Try unchecking raw meat from marketplaces and you should get all of your raw meat smocked. This is what I do myself. If devs add more management options for market/cellar/etc stocking then this problem could be solved easily by setting proportional stocking. E.g. max 200 raw meat per market and 2000 of smocked.
There is absolutely no in-game reason to have a market stock raw meat: one of the ways your villagers can get sick is specifically from consuming raw meat (and they can’t “cook” it themselves!). Make sureall raw meat goes into a root cellar immediately adjacent a smoker so it can be cured, which not only gets rid of such food poisoning incidents, but much more importantly, drastically improves the food’s storage life.
As the other posters have noted, Smokers will get raw meat/fish directly from the Hunters and Fisher Huts, and they will deliver raw meat directly to the Markets if you don’t have it unchecked at the Market.
My solution is to have 2 Root Cellars: one next to the ‘Smoker Farm’ (up to 8 Smokers for 1000 population) checked to take only raw meat and raw fish, and one in the middle of town as close to equidistant from the Markets as I can manage, set to take only smoked meat and fish. That makes the smoked goods most convenient to the Markets while the raw resources are most available to the Smokers.
what I do is uncheck raw meat EVERY WHERE. This forces all raw meat to go to the smokers,
Then of course all storage units and market allow smoked meat.
Managing resource distribution as it stands now is an All or Nothing proposition in the game: if you leave something open to be misplaced, the little digital characters running your town WILL misplace it. You have to give them absolutely No Choice.