Food Help

[Grimm Spector]

I've got around 130 people in my city now, and I've never really had food problems, but now I do. I have a massive ranch for the pigs, the cows and a smaller ranch for the sheep, I've got a huge fishery with the fish guys fishing, several large farms employing like 30 people for all the food types, and of course bakeries.

No matter what I do I run out of food, my farms don't produce nearly enough food, I always have 300+ meat in the warehouse, my bread vanishes quickly despite getting ~200 grain a season, and I get like 40 veggies and fruit per season which disappears basically immediately. As far as I can tel I never build up any fish at all the production is crap, like +2.00 or something. I have Cretans doing the farming, the fish guys doing the fishing, what am I doing wrong here? I don't have tech points to spare on random stuff, and I've even tried buying some tools to improve my yields but it's had no discernible impact.


Please help, it's becoming unplayable

[Luckycharms]

Import food, its going to take a while before you can set up a viable long term farming system, for which you'll to dig out canals. So sell whatever you can, wood is easies, and buy food, food is cheap so you should be fine.

[Catsander]

Looks like it is the pastures that are eating your workforce since you don't need all that meat. Maybe you should remove the pastures and build farms instead?

[Catsander]

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

As far as I can tel I never build up any fish at all the production is crap, like +2.00 or something.

Also did you upgrade the fisheries? Upgrade is tech-free. I find Fish is harder to produce surplus of than anything else. Even mushrooms.

[soldiers[PL]]

Picture of how your city looks would help, alongside stuff likie your population composition (how many and of what race, since preferences are a thing) and what's your food rations are set to

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by Luckycharms:

Import food, its going to take a while before you can set up a viable long term farming system, for which you'll to dig out canals. So sell whatever you can, wood is easies, and buy food, food is cheap so you should be fine.

Yeah I am nowhere near having enough tech to dig canals.

Originally posted by Catsander:

Looks like it is the pastures that are eating your workforce since you don't need all that meat. Maybe you should remove the pastures and build farms instead?

I don't understand how food is prioritized, why won't they eat the meat?

Originally posted by Catsander:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

As far as I can tel I never build up any fish at all the production is crap, like +2.00 or something.

Also did you upgrade the fisheries? Upgrade is tech-free. I find Fish is harder to produce surplus of than anything else. Even mushrooms.

No I haven't, but furniture is my primary export, so I don't want to spend the furniture if I can avoid it.

Originally posted by Catsander:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

As far as I can tel I never build up any fish at all the production is crap, like +2.00 or something.

Also did you upgrade the fisheries? Upgrade is tech-free. I find Fish is harder to produce surplus of than anything else. Even mushrooms.

Yeah the msuhroom farm I built is garbage for output.

Not sure if this image will help, but here we go.

https://imgur.com/a/6HLw0Hi

[Grimm Spector]

I guess to some degree I am having trouble understanding how much food is needed, of what types (since they seem to ignore the meat often), versus my yield?

[soldiers[PL]]

Well, for one your main race are Cretonians, they PREFER to eat fruits, vegies and bread
For second, there's tab in upper left that you can click, short form that shows up on top is how many days of food you got left but you can click it to show you details
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3228976650
In there, you can hover over specific foods for more details and to see what races like to eat what, they CAN eat other stuff but they WILL go for them if available.
Also, dear lord that's an UNFORTUNATE combination of races, you might want to phase some of them out as game goes on or else you gonna have problems long term, Lizards don't like any other race, Elves tolerate other races aside from dwarves and bugs but problem with them is fact that they WANT large slave population and cannibalism

Also, mushrooms are good when you have mountain or are in extreme biom, if i understand it right, they don't reaaaaaaaally scale that well off fertility? It does help that they HAVE to be indoors

Edit: You don't have to use imagur, you can do F12 to make pic and then upload images as non-public (or whatever its called in english), people still gonna see them if you post them but they won't pop-up on your timeline or without a link

[soldiers[PL]]

From other things, you I noticed, you got tons of flour, you might want to throw more bakers at the problem, also, that farm looks mighty small so I hope you ARE paying attention to number of Farmers that are shown when placing farms since remember, game will ALWAYS round that value up if you have decimals
So if you are shown 1.5 Farmer, it means that farm will employ 2 farmers that could handle a bigger field and will sit idle on their ass or work as oddjobers after they are done with workload, you want that number to be as close to integer as possible (tho its advantageous to leave it lower if they got long travel time)
Aside from that its important to remember that farm's yeld goes up and down depending on a lot:

• Fertility - Ground has base number and effective number, with effective being combination of base fertility and sweet water on that spot
  
• Work Value - This gets increased by your peons citizens as they work the field, it should always be 100% unless you have logistics issue with them having to travel long distances to services/food/home, this is per day statistic
  
• Skill - don't let the name fool you, this is basically all misc bonuses you see in various places, its stuff like what species works the field, technology, education, etc
  
• Moisture - don't worry about this unless its in extreme biom, I THINK you can increase it with moisturisers from decorations and sweet water

Fertility and Moisture look like average of all tiles that make up a field, and fertility wise you can bring that ♥♥♥♥ up with canals but that's for later, you need to optimise what you got until then.
Also, here's a pretty big tip, HOVER OVER EVERYTHING, seriously, dev worked hard and 90% of all stuff you want to know is in the tooltips like here
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3229023243
Aside from that, check your food stalls, panel on the right shows only stored stuff, so only surplus that is spoiling so you might have more surplus then you realise

[fortydayweekend]

You might have too many pastures, and not big enough farms.

200 grain and 40 vegetables/fruit isn't a big enough yield for 120 people. How many employees are your farms?

300 meat is also a lot to have stockpiled. How many workers are in your pastures?

If you aim for 1/3 of your pop in food production early on that's 40.. and you might want roughly half of those in grain, so 20 working grain farms and 20 spread around everything else.

For fine tuning check the Goods tab and hover over previous season bar graph to see consumption of each food type, and try to produce slightly more than that. Keep in mind that shows seasons (4 days) so divide by 4 to get daily or multiply by 4 to get annual amounts

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by soldiersPL:

From other things, you I noticed, you got tons of flour, you might want to throw more bakers at the problem, also, that farm looks mighty small so I hope you ARE paying attention to number of Farmers that are shown when placing farms since remember, game will ALWAYS round that value up if you have decimals
So if you are shown 1.5 Farmer, it means that farm will employ 2 farmers that could handle a bigger field and will sit idle on their ass or work as oddjobers after they are done with workload, you want that number to be as close to integer as possible (tho its advantageous to leave it lower if they got long travel time)
Aside from that its important to remember that farm's yeld goes up and down depending on a lot:

• Fertility - Ground has base number and effective number, with effective being combination of base fertility and sweet water on that spot
  
• Work Value - This gets increased by your peons citizens as they work the field, it should always be 100% unless you have logistics issue with them having to travel long distances to services/food/home, this is per day statistic
  
• Skill - don't let the name fool you, this is basically all misc bonuses you see in various places, its stuff like what species works the field, technology, education, etc
  
• Moisture - don't worry about this unless its in extreme biom, I THINK you can increase it with moisturisers from decorations and sweet water

Fertility and Moisture look like average of all tiles that make up a field, and fertility wise you can bring that ♥♥♥♥ up with canals but that's for later, you need to optimise what you got until then.
Also, here's a pretty big tip, HOVER OVER EVERYTHING, seriously, dev worked hard and 90% of all stuff you want to know is in the tooltips like here
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3229023243
Aside from that, check your food stalls, panel on the right shows only stored stuff, so only surplus that is spoiling so you might have more surplus then you realise

I had a lot because I had harvested it recently, it'll be gone pretty quick, that's half the harvest that's left.

Are Humans, Dwarves and Cretans an ok combination then? Cuz they Cretans are SO bad at industrial stuff. Trying to make the city half round and half not is pretty annoying though.

Yeah I tried to optimizie my use of fertile land for farms as much as I could. And now I regret it some because it's a long distance to the river for pumps and pumps are crazy labour intensive.

My food stalls only seem to ever have a couple dozen of any given item at a time. The rest sits in the warehouses. Seems overall insignificant, I'm going based off the days of food and the complaints of my citizens about possibly starving making them disloyal.

Originally posted by fortydayweekend:

You might have too many pastures, and not big enough farms.

200 grain and 40 vegetables/fruit isn't a big enough yield for 120 people. How many employees are your farms?

300 meat is also a lot to have stockpiled. How many workers are in your pastures?

If you aim for 1/3 of your pop in food production early on that's 40.. and you might want roughly half of those in grain, so 20 working grain farms and 20 spread around everything else.

For fine tuning check the Goods tab and hover over previous season bar graph to see consumption of each food type, and try to produce slightly more than that. Keep in mind that shows seasons (4 days) so divide by 4 to get daily or multiply by 4 to get annual amounts

I'm pulling 140 Veggies, 190 Fruit, 250 grain a year, between 13 farmers, and I barely have enough hands to go around for the necessities and trying to produce a surplus of anything for trade.

Mining is abysmally slow with the like 10 people i have split between clay, coal and ore that I may as well not even be trying to do it.

I'll take a look at the goods tab, try and decode how much to put into it. The food tab was where I've been looking previously.

Part of why my pastures are large is to try to get leather and cotton, and cotton farming would take up valuable fertility I cannot spare, I have a small cotton farm and that's it.

[fortydayweekend]

Mining is usually not worth it unless you're turning it into higher value goods like tools or pottery. Maybe if you have an especially rich deposit

The game rewards specialization so it's usually better just to focus on a couple of things and import the rest. You might do better just focusing on one thing (metal or pottery or clothes) and invest tech points in that instead of having a small one of everything

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by fortydayweekend:

Mining is usually not worth it unless you're turning it into higher value goods like tools or pottery. Maybe if you have an especially rich deposit

The game rewards specialization so it's usually better just to focus on a couple of things and import the rest. You might do better just focusing on one thing (metal or pottery or clothes) and invest tech points in that instead of having a small one of everything

Yeah that was the plan, particularly with the clay. I had +3 clay when I started the game, but it shows the same crap quality as the rest of the materials that had no bonus for the starting location, so idk.

I started a new game, plan differently. Maybe it'll be better, though I'm concerned my neighbours seem less friendly...wish me luck!

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by fortydayweekend:

You might have too many pastures, and not big enough farms.

200 grain and 40 vegetables/fruit isn't a big enough yield for 120 people. How many employees are your farms?

300 meat is also a lot to have stockpiled. How many workers are in your pastures?

If you aim for 1/3 of your pop in food production early on that's 40.. and you might want roughly half of those in grain, so 20 working grain farms and 20 spread around everything else.

For fine tuning check the Goods tab and hover over previous season bar graph to see consumption of each food type, and try to produce slightly more than that. Keep in mind that shows seasons (4 days) so divide by 4 to get daily or multiply by 4 to get annual amounts

new game, high fertility, yield on vegetables is still crap, 20-40 for a worker versus SUPPOSEDLY 256 for 2 workers on grain, but the amount of grain reaching my warehouses doens't match the 2x 256 fields I have, though it did work when I only had 10 workers with 1 of them on 1 of those fields (didn't have two at the beginnig). So idk wtf, since I watched them move the grain, it shouldn't have rotted.

[Grimmrog_SIG]

yes veggies are supposed to be upper class food. just go and make bread. it's weird, but currently designed that way.

[icedude94]

You probably have too much labor on pastures.

Shift more farm production to grain. You don't need vegetables or fruit unless you are trying to promote happiness for immigration or need food for nurseries.

Get a laboratory up for research. The first few levels in farming tech are really cheap and start to make a difference when you have over a hundred.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3229960328