My village often lacks enough food although there are 5 farms with mills and breadhouses, many hunter’s cabins and fisherman’s cabins. I can’t accept more immigrants because there’s not enough food, and sometimes I can’t get any fish due to the overfishing. It’s a paradox, right?
The village needs more workers, otherwise houses will be abandoned and new constructions won’t be done; however more workers means more desire for food.
Any great ideas? Desperately need your help.
Often times having enough raw food isn’t the issue, I’ve found thousands of grain and flour sitting around in my silos while people starve. But instead the issue is your supply network. If your baker is walking across town every time they need to pick up flour they’ll be extremely inefficient, and not make much food.
But some of my villagers ignore houses near their workplaces and travel far away…How to fix that?
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During my first few playthroughs I was struggling with low food as well. However, I agree with CSDragon as I gained more experience in the game; my current playthrough has a 14 12x12 fields with root cellars right next to the fields, enabling farmers to travel small distances in order to drop food off. This allowed me to get consistently 15+ months of food during mid game (around 300-400 people), mostly from agriculture. I keep my fields at 98%+ fertility.
To address your “more workers” issue: personally I leave the total number of farmers at half the total amount required. Sure, some crops will rot and some will freeze, but that other half is extremely valuable as you said, builders and laborers are very important to proceed in the game. Moreover, the amount that rots is really insignificant compared to the total amount of food produced by the farmers. For me, I am comfortable trading loss of food (due to the extreme surplus) with an army of builders, allowing me to finish construction quickly.
It would be nice if you might be able to specify some for ‘transport people’ ie: they would help stock the processing buildings while moving the processed items to storage. And possibly help to transfer items from a far storage to a nearer one. Say if 3 storage places are in a line from one point to another, there would be an attempt to equalize all 3. One moves from storage 1-2-1 and the other would 3-2-3… Take items from storage #1 to storage #2 and returning some from storage #2 back to storage #1…
Thanks a lot guys.
I’ve also had a much better time with food when I focus on the longer shelf life items like Cheese, smoked meat, and jar preserves. It helps even out your food supply and get through the winters. And then of course the other advice here was good as well.