Mills have to be more productive!

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
1

Current state of bread production chain is dissapointing.
Lets compare it to other food production chains.

Meat/fish. At the early stages we have only hunters and fishers. Their avarage productivity including smokers is ~150 per year per worker.
Later on with barns we have 1364 per full barn, so ~200 (adjusted for the smokers). I assume milk is a compensation for winter feed, so I don’t count that.

Fruit and berries. Without preservist we have very high output for foragers and arborists ~400. But it is compensated with fast spoilage. With preservists it drops to ~200. So almost the same as meat production.

Beans and vegetables. One farmer can harvest up to 500 food per crop. And it is ready to eat with 1 year spoilage period. Very good. Field maitenance and preparation need to assign additional workers, but still avarage output 300+.

Bread. Now we have bread with chain “wheat-flour-bread”. Wheat output the same as beans and vegies let’s take 500 at best. Then we need to produce flour, and it is another 500 per worker per year. But including farmer there are two workers already, so it is 250 per worker per year. Then we need to bake bread, and baker’s productivity is another 500 per worker per year. So to produce 500 units of bread we need 3 workers. As a result we have output ~166. Not so bad you might say. It is even slighlty higher than hunters and fishers.

But! The bottleneck of this chain are mills. They are way to expensive - heavy tools, flax, tons of resources! And to provide one bakery with flour you going to need at least two(!!) mills. Another point is that bread spoils very fast. It is justified but it need to be compensated in some way.

I’d suggest doubling the mill’s output so we can have 1 mill per bakery at least. This will increase bread output to ~200 (keeping the same number of workers in mill - 2).

And another important suggestion: reduce the flour storage capacity to 100 units instead of 200. Flour is stored there for too long, and with multiple mills, that number can reach into the thousands - laborers can’t move all that flour closer to the bakery, and we need the bakery in a residential area and the mill far away. Therefore, bakers usually have to walk to the mill, which reduces their productivity, or the player has to build up a huge stockpile of flour before starting to bake bread.
Thus, the per worker per year output for bread is valid under very optimized logistics, whereas normally they would be significantly lower due to high storage capacity at the mill, even less than for hunters/fishers!

UPD. In addition to the last thesis - producing 500 units of bread, with all that walking done by bakers, it takes 4 workers - 1 farmer, 1 miller and 2 bakers (reduced output of a bakery is ~1000 per year instead of ~2000). So avarage output will be only 125 per worker per year

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I don’t bother with grain at all until I need that extra food type to promote shelters to the last tier. Not done any maths but seem to have far more food and spare labour before going into bread production.

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Yeah, that is the issue! Players don’t bother with bread while it was the main source of food in those times. Grain can be stored for a long time so people can make reserves of it and it was always available, so bread was the main dish even in times of hunger. But the current state of this food chain in the game makes it less profitable than the other types of food, so we usually just ignore it and the game allows to do so. This is wrong and should be addressed imo.

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4

I would definitely like the radius of undesirability decreased a bit for mills. In my experience the distance bakers have to travel to reach flour is the main bottleneck to productivity breadwise. Being able to build the mills closer to the bakeries is one solution.

One thing I do is just build a storage unit next to the bakery that is only set to store flour, so the baker only has to walk one tile to get flour.

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I do this too, but since flour needs to be stored in a granary, I get minorly annoyed by the visual of a granary within my residential areas! Don’t really have a solution for this. Toning down the undesirability of windmills could help reduce travel times - I’ve never really understood why they lower desirability anyway; they don’t smell or make loud noises…

Seconding Mr. Cat’s suggestion of turning down the mill storage capacity. Flour doesn’t have an infinite shelf life, so I like to cap the production to just over what my settlement can use in a year - and using his math, if I have 4 mills to supply two bakeries, that means nearly 800 flour can be stuck inside the granary. (IIRC, laborers don’t pull from production buildings to meet storage quotas elsewhere, is that correct? They just pull from other storage areas?) So if I cap my flour production at 1000, the bakers constantly have to be searching for flour, usually ending up traipsing all the way to the windmills.

Overall, agreed with all the points made, bread production chain does need some tuning!

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6

Mills were pretty loud, and downright dangerous at time.

IIRC, the current ratio (assuming equal logistics and off-work time) is about 3 mills to 1 bakery. Which feels obscene? If anything it should be reversed. But everything to do with flour / bread in this game is unbalanced to the point that it’s only really worth it from a roleplaying angle.

I’d actually say the analysis in the OP underplays how bad bread is. Hunters give you bonus things besides food, and smoked meat stores for ages. Barns give manure, and so compost, in large quantities, which multiplies your farming output. Bread has low yield, low lifetime, and a high investment cost. But I’ve ranted about this before already.

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What kind of layout are you using for needing to have 3 mills to 1 bakery? 1 mill should supply 2 bakers easily unless your bakers are somehow producing 1500+ bread a year

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8

In my expirience productivity of one mill is about 1000+ flour per year. And tier 1 bakery with 4 bakers can bake ~2000 bread per year.

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9

Weird I’ve never achieved over 1300 bred from a bakery but always get around 1200-1400 flour from mills.

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Not a layout question, I literally looked up the production speed in the game.

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11

My 2 lvl bakery produces 300 loaves of bread + 600 pastries. I have plenty of heavy tools from my metalworking business. One mill produces up to 1000 per year. I don’t see this as a problem…

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I keep flour and bread production at a minimum, as grain stores to the longest and bread spoils the fastest.

Having more than a few bread on hand at any time is a waste of resources.