What's the secret to food?

[Syg]

I've tried everything....a spam of foragers, two hunters on every herd, fruit, cows, multiple crops, fish, and bread. No matter what stage of the game, no matter what the population, I'm always 3 months or less from starvation.

Fields are 100% fertile, logistics chain (distance to travel) is as tight as I can make it without pissing off housing.......

I've stretched to t3/t4 multiple times and crested at around 400 population before the mass extinction event.

I feel like I'm either missing something or consumption bugs. What's your thoughts/experiences?

[grungydan]

Similar. Doesn't seem to matter how many hunters, foragers, apiaries, fruit trees, smokehouses, etc. etc., my towns are always on the brink of starvation.

I have TONS of laborers, so it shouldn't be a transport issue.

I feel like at present, the game's systems are just way, way too opaque.

[Ninjafroggie]

1) meat MUST be smoked. It spoils hella fast if it isnt.

2) DO NOT grow greens (cabbage and leeks), they spoil hella fast. Grow root veggies and legumes (peas, beans, carrots, and turnips). Greens can be preserved for a long time with glassware, but its better used for fruits and berries since the long lasting veggies will satisfy the veggie food group. Set your food fields up with the following cycle: year 1: work, clover, work - yr2 peas, clover, turnips - yr 3 carrots, beans. Make fields in groups of 3 and stagger the crop rotation so that 2 out of three are growing food in any given year. With meat and cheese helping out, you can easily feed 300 pop off of 3 12x12 fields.

3) Berries and gathered greens spoil hella fast if not preserved in glassware (available at tier 3). Do not rely on foragers for food, they are for gathering herbs, medical roots, and willow, with berries as a supplement to prevent widescale scurvy. Even though they dont keep, it's worth relocating blueberry bushes to make a blueberry patch in the areas where your foragers work. It'll mostly spoil for now, but ensures theres enough to prevent scurvy. You only need 2 or 3 foragers total to gather enough willow/herbs/roots for a decent sized city, and by bringing the berry bushes to where theyre already working you increase their usefulness

4) Fruit from the orchard spoils hella fast if not preserved in glassware, it's a waste of time to harvest if you arent preserving it, as most of it will go bad before being eaten.

5) Bread spoils hella fast, and most of it will be lost to spoilage, so dont bother with grain production until you reach tier 3 housing and need another food group to reach tier 4 housing. Use your fields to grow more veggies as above instead.

6) Milk spoils hella fast, but cheese is easy to make in mass quantities and keeps for a long time. Get more barns, fill them with cattle, and then build 2 or maybe 3 cheesemakers, enough to use up all the milk. Remember to assign a 2nd worker to the barns and two extra workers to the cheesemaker, as this drastically improves their efficiency at generating food.

7) Upgrade your root cellars, and fill them with barrels from the cooper

8) Turn OFF food storage in the stockhouse and starter cart, food doesnt keep anywhere near as long in them. Food should ONLY be stored in root cellars, markets, and houses.

9) ensure everywhere food is stored is covered by a ratcatcher

10) honey is NOT a food item on its own. It can be sold at the trade post or used to make medecine, but it does not feed people

I can almost gaurantee you're losing most of your food production to spoilage.

[paoweeotter]

If you’re constantly at 3 months supply of food that is fine I’ve gone up to Year 77 . In that playthohrough I had 70 tiles worth of farms, 3 12-16 cow barns, 5 bakeries, 1 cheese maker, 1 preservist, at least 5 full circles of arborist trees

[grungydan]

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

<awesome informative post>

Wow, thanks for sharing your observations!

See, this is what I mean by "systems are too opaque." I get it's in EA and whatnot, but so much of this game has no supporting explanation/documentation. Like, I get that they're trying to get us to use trading for stuff we can't make yet, but how are we supposed to magically know stuff like "okay, now we're letting you plant fruit trees, but they're useless right now because you can't make glass so don't do it yet?"

[Ninjafroggie]

Originally posted by grungydan:

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

<awesome informative post>

Wow, thanks for sharing your observations!

See, this is what I mean by "systems are too opaque." I get it's in EA and whatnot, but so much of this game has no supporting explanation/documentation. Like, I get that they're trying to get us to use trading for stuff we can't make yet, but how are we supposed to magically know stuff like "okay, now we're letting you plant fruit trees, but they're useless right now because you can't make glass so don't do it yet?"

The game is very much in a 'learn by doing' state right now, the tooltips hint at a lot of what I listed but doesnt make it explicitly clear.

[Syg]

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

1) meat MUST be smoked. It spoils hella fast if it isnt.

It is, I have multiple smoker's. Sorry, forgot to mention that.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

2) DO NOT grow greens (cabbage and leeks), they spoil hella fast. Grow root veggies and legumes (peas, beans, carrots, and turnips). Greens can be preserved for a long time with glassware, but its better used for fruits and berries since the long lasting veggies will satisfy the veggie food group. Set your food fields up with the following cycle: year 1: work, clover, work - yr2 peas, clover, turnips - yr 3 carrots, beans. Make fields in groups of 3 and stagger the crop rotation so that 2 out of three are growing food in any given year. With meat and cheese helping out, you can easily feed 300 pop off of 3 12x12 fields.

Those are my crops in rotation. By around 100 population, I've got 3 12x12 fields churning.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

3) Berries and gathered greens spoil hella fast if not preserved in glassware (available at tier 3). Do not rely on foragers for food, they are for gathering herbs, medical roots, and willow, with berries as a supplement to prevent widescale scurvy.

This playthrough, I'm likely not even going to hit t3. I also place them in such a way as to grab the necessities as the priority with as much trickle food as I can manage as a secondary concern.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

4) Fruit from the orchard spoils hella fast if not preserved in glassware, it's a waste of time to harvest if you arent preserving it, as most of it will go bad before being eaten.

This is the first playthrough I've tried mixing them in. What I find odd is that they are producing yet my food situation is essentially identical to previous playthroughs.....so what's happening to this supplimental source, preserved or not?

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

5) Bread spoils hella fast, dont bother with grain production until you reach tier 3 housing and need another food group to reach tier 4 housing.

This is interesting given it was a staple of medieval life and developing wheats refinement is what put the final nail in the coffin of humanitys nomadic ways.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

6) Milk spoils hella fast, but cheese is easy to make in mass quantities and keeps for a long time. Get more barns, fill them with cattle, and then build 2 or maybe 3 cheesemakers, enough to use up all the milk.

I've tried this previously but it had little impact. This playthrough is a lack of t3 atm.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

7) Upgrade your root cellars, and fill them with barrels from the cooper

Tier 3.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

8) Turn OFF food storage in the stockhouse and starter cart, food doesnt keep anywhere near as long in them. Food should ONLY be stored in root cellars, markets, and houses.

Figured this out and started doing this in earlier playthroughs.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

9) ensure everywhere food is stored is covered by a ratcatcher.

Yup.

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

I can almost gaurantee you're losing most of your food production to spoilage.

I dunno. Starting to think too much counter-spoilage is gate kept behind t3 since most of the solutions revolve around it.

[grungydan]

Originally posted by Sygnetix:

I dunno. Starting to think too much counter-spoilage is gate kept behind t3 since most of the solutions revolve around it.

Bang on.

I know they want us to use the trader, but it's just not viable as a work around for reaching T3 without constantly being on the verge of starvation in the current state, IMO.

[jhughes]

Originally posted by grungydan:

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

<awesome informative post>

Wow, thanks for sharing your observations!

See, this is what I mean by "systems are too opaque." I get it's in EA and whatnot, but so much of this game has no supporting explanation/documentation. Like, I get that they're trying to get us to use trading for stuff we can't make yet, but how are we supposed to magically know stuff like "okay, now we're letting you plant fruit trees, but they're useless right now because you can't make glass so don't do it yet?"

You aren't supposed to know it yet.. When the game exits early access, if they haven't documented it, then that is a problem. I know you are not specifically complaining, but non released EA games are not supposed to be complete. If they were, they would be GA and not EA.

To be honest, every issue I have seen in this game is expanding too fast. People (me included) run out of food because they have too many people. It is as easy as that.

Grow population only as much as you need to get to the next tier. Then use the preservation methods called out BEFORE you expand to grow to the next tier.

[Thargrim]

3 big fields for 400 pop is way to less
i'm at 930+ pop now, got 14 12x12 fields at ~500 pop i had 8 but 2 for wheat/flax 6 for food.
don't harvest every field at the same time play around with the withs of the different veggi types otherwise all foods will have nearly the same timer for spoilage.
u should use some "fast" spoil things like fruits or bread since from what i have seen in my game, they prefer bread and fruits over beens if possible, not everytime but i nearly never have spoilage from bread or fruits, sometimes 1 months worth but not every year.

[Ninjafroggie]

The issue with bread right now is that the mill turns ALL your grain into flour super fast, and the baker turns ALL your flour into bread super fast. Without production limits to say 'stop making flour when I already have X amount in storage' or 'stop making bread when I already have X amount in storage', they just burn through your entire grain production in a month, and most of the bread goes bad without being eaten.

Fruit spoils really fast without being jarred, so without mass scale glass production and preserving, most of it will spoil un eaten. You can offset this a bit by planting a mix of trees so you get fruit production from jun-sept, but it only keeps for like 2 months max without being jarred. Again, most of your production is being lost to spoilage.

Yes, most of the preservation improvements are gatekept behind tier 3, but thats what the merchant is for.

Use veggies and smoked meat to reach tier 2, add in cheese to get to tier 3, then go for preserved fruit and bread.

Also, jhughes brings up a good point...infants and children eat, but dont work. Keep your growth rate slow enough to keep at least 75% of your pop as workforce. Too many kids and your settlement stalls because theres not enough workers to feed everyone AND do the other work required to keep things running

[Thargrim]

u can easily crontroll it, place a grainery near it, deselect wheat in this 1 and at the other warehouses and grainerys deselect the flour, when the 1 grainery is full they will stop cause they can't place it anywhere.
to controll the bakery use less workers on it

also devs tried to address it since they changed the windmill, downgrading the speed to 50% from befor but now u can have 2 workers there wich would be the old speed then

[KillerTyphoons]

In a city of 280 i have 8 smokers running full time, i have a 1:1 ratio with hunters and like 4 fishermen. Almost everything gets smoked in time before the market steals some raw stuff for it to spoil there. The root cellars are a must with Barrels. If you see some barrels in the market buy them no matter the cost which us usually about 20 to 33 ish if the price is high. They will help a ton with food preservation.

I have about 100 - 140 tiles of farm land, 1 mill with 1 worker and 2 bakeries, 3 fruit farms, 3 barns, 2 cheese makers. i have a stock of 20 months of food with about 5 months of it in red. I usually end up selling like 1.5k of cheese for a nice profit every year. Make sure your food producers are spread out so they can be taken all over the city too. No sense having all the food in one spot where none of the villagers are unable to get to it.

[Syg]

Originally posted by Ninjafroggie:

Also, jhughes brings up a good point...infants and children eat, but dont work. Keep your growth rate slow enough to keep at least 75% of your pop as workforce. Too many kids and your settlement stalls because theres not enough workers to feed everyone AND do the other work required to keep things running

This is the likely culprit. Obv saw kids being born but no idea what their maturity rate is and didn't really think about it.

Teamwork makes the dream work. Thanks for talking it out.

[Indrakshi]

Can never seem to catch up, I have 7 crops 6 hunters, 8 foragers and still nope. I think game balancing is kind of whack, which is to be expected in early access.

[Ninjafroggie]

Originally posted by Sune:

Can never seem to catch up, I have 7 crops 6 hunters, 8 foragers and still nope. I think game balancing is kind of whack, which is to be expected in early access.

You're doing something wrong then. 3 hunters, 3 fishers, 3 foragers, 3 smokehouses, 3 12x12 fields growing legumes and root veggies, 2 barns full of cows and a cheesemaker is more than enough to feed 300 people and keep 15-20 months of stockpiled food.