Not doing well? 
T4, with 22(7) months of food.
I suggest you agree to disagree and leave it at that.
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Glass requires technology to produce. Did you think to advance the glass making tech to strengthen glass, for the purpose of reuse. Plus fragile glass could amount to a % of loss each hour or day. Meaning producing it is a constant.
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Glass can be recycled unlike pottery. Perhaps used glass could be remelted with a 10% loss on each recycle? That would extend the sand resource considerably without resorting to the trading post for it (sand and/or glass). We shouldnât need to be forced to buy from the trading post when there could be a viable solution to the problem.
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Maybe a new âBottlewasherâ that has to be built at a waterâs edge or next to a well, can match, at a declining scale for some percentage of breakage (the T-tool shows us that Crate is VERY GOOD at that 
), the production of the Glassmaker, in returning glassware to storage for reuse by the Preservists?
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Glass / Preserves manufacturing and sand mining may need some rebalancing and I will look into that.
In terms of the historical accuracy of glass consumption, yes, often bottles were used more than once but I can also say, having done a little archeological excavation of colonial midden piles in school, that they are often filled with glass.
Really, if we want to be picky, fruits and vegetables would likely have been preserved in clay at that time, not glass. Not to mention, I donât think âpreservistâ is a real profession or that there was much commercial production of fruit preserves or pickled vegetables. I imagine mostly families did that themselves or traded with neighbors who did.
At some point though, in game development, things have to be abstracted for the sake of gameplay and simplicity.
An argument could have been made to use pottery for preserving instead of glass but I felt using glass would be more familiar to most people today and it worked for gameplay, in terms of making the ultimate tier of food security something you unlock later in the game.
Having glass just be consumed in the process is simple and supports a constant need for production. It does only take 1 glassware for 8 preserves but who knows, maybe it needs to be 10? The numbers can always be tweaked if the issue is really just that it requires too much glass and by extension, sand, to maintain production. And we can always imagine people are re-using these jars and what not for other things at home hahaâŚ
Adding in a whole other mechanic of % loss and re-use would take a bit of programming work. It is not entirely straightforward attempting to track preserve consumption, then add glass back into town inventory based on that. Not saying we couldnât do it but is that really an interesting enough mechanic to invest engineering resources into? It could already exist and you probably wouldnât realize it if we didnât also then make some effort to communicate to the player somehow that glass was being re-used, so then weâd need some sort of UI to track and display it. Then ultimately, itâs something that doesnât really have any player thought or involvement, so its just something people could discover and be like âoh uhh, cool, guess some % of glass gets reusedâ and never think about it again.
There are, admittedly, various aspects of FF that are not quite historically accurate but, at the end of the day, itâs meant to be a game and the primary goal is for it to be engaging and fun for people. I do try to keep it mostly historically accurate where it makes sense but there times where you have to ask whether itâs worth the extra development to fully simulate something that most players wonât notice and which wonât really add any fun to the game vs. spending that time on something more impactful.
If we were going to do this, I think a bottlewasher is the method that would make this most visible to players and add a bit of gameplay to bottle conservation. But, where space in the professions UI is already limited, do we want to use up a valuable slot for a guy to just wash bottles for X% lower consumption vs. something a bit more interesting, like a book-maker, which would support libraries or any number of other things? 
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Medierra ,
Thank you for the comprehensive, and interesting reply.
Rather than addressing the issue from what to do with the finished/used Glass, maybe the way to balance it is from the beginning of the Sand-to-Glass cycle?
The current ratio of 3+1+1=1 of 3 Sand, 1 Coal and 1 Firewood making 1 Glassware, means that the Glassmaker can consume an entire mapâs allotment of Sand in just a few seasons, unless youâre playing an Arid map in which where Sand and Coal are everywhere, but the Fertility will not support enough farming to warrant the need for Preservists.
Changing the ratio of Sand used-to-Glass made would go a long way into making the two buildings, Glassmaker, and Preservist, into far more generally useful tools, without the need for major programming and using the limited work-slots available.
3+1+1=5, or 1+1+1=3, rather than the current 3+1+1=1.
I really donât know why I suggested a Bottlewasher.
I absolutely hate doing dishes.
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I completely agree. In my whole map I only have one Sand deposit (and not all too close either). and when then runs dry (so to speak), I wonât be able to make preserves anymore for the lack of glasswareâŚunless purchased (whenever possible).
A couple hundred units of sand at a time from the traders wonât make much glass. The answer is to figure another way to get your food to last through the winter.
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Nice to see the devs engaging in the discussion! The problem is simply that itâs not economically viable to produce conserved fruit/veg the way the game works today, so players who care about their resource efficiency wonât use the preservist. Why should I spend scarce (on most maps) resources to make berries last longer when I have smoked meat, cheese and beans? Better to send the perishables straight to the market and accept some spillage, itâs overall better use of resources and worker-time. I think it could be 20 berries/fruits use 1 bottle (not just 8 or 10) and it would still be a sketchy decision if you should preserve or not, given the scarce inputs.
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Increasing the volume of materials preserved is another option, a fine one, one that can work in conjunction with altering the ratio of Sand to Glass, without too much new code needed.
Root veggies can come in at a rate of 10,000 pieces a year off of just a half dozen fields feeding a 500+ population.
Two or three years of that and every speck of sand on a map is gone to glass, then thrown away when the food is consumed.
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At this point you are right.
I get my Smokehouses and Cheesemakers up and running as soon as possible to extend shelf-life of foods.
And it doesnât bother me if they are idle half the year, as long as raw goods are not making their way into the shelter stocking routines of my workers.
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I agree the glassmaker is not correct. Needs to be reuse jars. I have been able to buy preserves and sand from the traderâŚbut that is not how I really want to play the game. At this point I could just have furniture, shoes, clothing made and trade it every spring to buy food and do away with all of the farms etc.
At that point the game would not be fun for me. I would prefer to be
self sufficient and only sell items.
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The problem I see is that having a Production Line for 2 types of food (Preserves, Preserved Vegetables) that, essentially, is using up all of a Resource simply means you will not bother with that Production.
Right now, the game provides, potentially, 5 different Food Groups:
Fruit, Protein (Meat and Fish), Vegetables, Grain (Bread), Dairy (Cheese and Milk)
Since, so far, you only need a maximum of 3 Food Groups for the housing upgrades, and the Glass-gobbling Preservists are not even the only way to serve Vegetables and Fruits to the houses, then I have to admit that so far I have yet to build a Preservationist Building. My little digital folks subsist on Smoked Meat, Bread, Cheese, and a smattering of fresh fruits and vegetables.
I suggest that either the Preservationist needs to be near-Mandatory to provide two food groups to a large population, or the Sand requirements need to be reduced so that it is Possible for the Preservist Production Chain to provide on the average map.
But right now, at least in my (limited) experience, you can ignore the whole problem and still play to the highest available level in the game . . .
Aye, turn them into a distillery instead⌠;o)
Well, according to the folksong, you can carry and serve distilled liquor in little brown pottery jugs, so no glass required there, and distilled grain spirits are aged in Barrels, preferably made from Oak. From the evidence, then, Glass containers would only be required for those effete drinkers who plan to only drink less than a quart at a sitting - surely not the group that any distillery in our rough and tumble villages are aiming at for customers!
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Yep, barrels needed too⌠good call! But I was thinking more the distribution of the liquor rather than the consumption (clay and metal tankards most likely). But glass and liquor would be luxury rather than regular foodstuff so for gaming purposes itâd be nice for something else to use glass for I humbly submit.
If you need that much glass, then youâre producing too much food. You donât need to stock up three yearâs supply of fruit and vegies as preserves and relish to get by. You can adjust your farming practices so that your population is eating more fresh fruits and vegies and you have less to worry about waste.
Personally, I find more sustainable options from smoked meat and fish because hunters and fishermen work all winter as well. Orchardists and farmers are useless for several months. The only reason to have plants for food is to meat the food variety requirements for home improvement and moral. You donât have to overstock on this to meat these requirements though.
True.
Except the AI is constantly looking for any weakness in your build to attack.
If it sees your food stores are produced in an âon-timeâ schedule, suddenly food rot and disease take over your fields, your peeps are hungry, and unhappy.
Larger populations can consume massive amounts of food in the blink of an eye, building multi-year reserves discourages the AI from attacking your food supply chain (anywhere farm to table) as vigorously as it might, preventing the issues it brings, and allows you to concentrate on other aspects and needs.
Waste (to me) is greatest when âraw goodsâ make their way into Shelter Stocking duties, causing more runs per year to replace the rot.
In V0.7.x the main problem was the lack (end) of productivity caused by sudden Shelter Stocking duties, and raw goods made more runs to compete this than were necessary.
The Market now handles some of this, but workers still leave when a new product is introduced to your economy after each new production building is finished and begins churning out goods.
Even if none of this were true, glass would still be considered a semi-precious item in such a village/society as we construct, and it would not be thrown away like single-use McDonalds burger-wrapping paper.
Iâm more inclined to see it treated as such, but the games mechanics would need serious rework to come up with some type of recycling system.
Increasing the productivity of raw goods is a much easier fix.
Either way, the fact that the AI continues to ramp-up its attacks against you without restraint, in the form of larger raids and increased interruptions to the food supply through disease, rot and animal incursion (any late-game breach of farm fences sees the mapâs deer mass, wheel and dive in like a flock of Starlings trying to get in), means that there is no such thing as too much food or too intricate a plan for your physical defenses.
A foxhole is never finished. 
A completely new building wouldnât be needed for a âbottle washer.â It could be part of the preservistâs building. They would stock âused glasswareâ they gathered from homes. Then convert X number of them to usable glassware. Maybe 3 to 2 or 4 to 3 to account for breakage.
Alternately, it could simply be another recipe, requiring slightly more used glassware to make the same amount of preserves to account for breakage, and taking a bit longer than a new glassware to preserves job to account for the preparation of the used glass.
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