How do I know how much food my township needs?

[Alxndr]

So I've started levelling up my township now I have a somewhat decent gold income from fishing and here's what it looks like so far https://i.imgur.com/czhYNAs.png

As I understand it, you need food to sustain your population but I don't actually know how much food my population needs?

[sonen4]

You don't 'sustain' township through food. Food is treated like any other resource, wood, planks, etc, that are made by and spent in township exclusively. Each update (every real life hour) you generate resources depending on buildings built (seen in the little green numbers below each resource).

Food is needed to upgrade some buildings, usually population increasing buildings like the 'house' and the 'tavern' that you show the in screenshot.

There is a repair mechanic in township. In the upper middle of the screen, you have the 'Repair all' button, and to the right of it is 249 Gold, 31 Wood, and 19 Stone. This is the cost for repairing all buildings that have degraded. Any constructed building has a chance to degrade during each update. You can see if a building has degraded by the 100% in the upper left of each building. If this number goes down, the building has degraded, and its efficiency in resource generation has decreased. Food will sometimes be required to repair buildings if the buildings themselves require food to build.

Early on in township, I'd recommend ignoring the repair indicators. A building is automatically repaired to 100% each time a new building is built, so just focus on building new buildings and don't worry about repair. Repair for structures will start to be important only after you've built all buildings in that category.

The other part of township to pay attention to is the 'Health'. You can see you have 99% health in the top right of the screen. Health is another thing that can degrade during each update. Lower health means lower population. In order to restore health, you need either Herbs or Potions, which you are not generating any of right now. Build the 'Gatherer's Hut' in Swamp or Valley for Herbs, and the Herbalist in Valley for potions. Then once you have these resources, you can restore health with the buttons under the 'repair all in this biome' button where is has '[Health] +1 Cost [Herb] -1'

Hope this helps.