Water/Food Consumption

[Grimm Spector]

What is the actual consumption values for this?? I've got resevoirs, the best water building, 5 of them with 10 educated workers with steel tools working on them and I cannot make enough water to get off 0. My people aren't dying, but they're upset over it. I've got nearly 200 citizens. Producing enough food for them seems absurd as well, I have fertilized farms, several of them producing several foods, and pastures on the grass icons producing turkeys, geese and buffalo, but it's never enough food. I've got such a huge swath of my population just making food and water I have to start taking away from any advancement.

[Ashiver]

This is under the statistics in the top left. I believe the hotkey is i.


I've just been unemploying the person I want to work somewhere and the person who is working there currently if they live farther away, and then throwing the farther away person on a different job closer to where they live. Sometimes you can just hire and fire and it will cycle through nearby unemployed residents. Over time people are pretty good at moving themselves around generally though.

[Kuro | Box of fish. because.]

So, I have the same blasted problem and the 'i' screen isn't helping one bit. I have production for both food & water well in exccess of what my consumption is. (literally x2 more) but noooo everyone is starving, everyone is thirsty there never seems to be anything in supply. Either the data I am being shown is wrong. Or something, somewhere, is broken/hidden.

[GM]

Originally posted by Ashiver:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2628245383

I thought those numbers were available in the menu, but I don't have access to the game at this point. On the fence about buying with how much feedback they have received and how few even small problems have been fixed so far.

[GM]

Have you tried shutting down your reservoirs and using more big wells placed right beside, or very near the marketplaces? That will keep transit time to a minimum for the most part and they do put out pretty well with just 2 workers.

[Ledow]

Can the people GET your food and water?

Is it close to their houses? Do you have markets close enough to distribute that food? Do you have the tech where markets deliver food/water to people's houses? Do the industries that generate it place it somewhere nearby or are they spending all their time delivering it to storage/markets?

Plus... changes take a while to take effect. If you've had a shortage for a long time, it'll be a shortage through pure logistics for quite a while as they fill all the houses back up.

Do individual houses have food, water? If no, follow someone from that house.

It's probably not that you're not producing it... you are just not distributing it to those who need it quick enough.

[Carthanial]

Originally posted by Honeywell:

It's hard to get a grasp of what you need because the production AI is designed poorly. Workers either pick things up immediately or items are produced into their inventory. But they seem extremely reluctant to deposit anything into storage so that creates shortages.

Which creates unhappy citizens...

Which means they work for a bit, put the 20 or so items they produced in their inventory and then wander off to go home, mess around and then maybe go back and do some more work. The entire time they're doing that nothing they produced is going into the supply.

The best work around seems to be to keep things as stable as possible. Homes and storage (not that they'll use it but still...) near work places and try to open and close work places or switch workers from job to job as little as possible.

Wow awesome insight into the ai workers! I have definitely not played enough yet to get that deep. I last played banished years ago and I am wondering if the ai in this specific use case are acting in a better way ie. finishing their job before going home lol (putting things in storage). And if that is the case it could be a good suggestion as a separate discussion post to hopefully get the attention of the devs who could tweak the ai algos.

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by 76561198101883072:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

View what? I already listed what's in that view and it's not helpful.

Look at the water output and consumption of the previous year and compare the data.

That doesn't correlate, even if I turn off every building that consumes water the numbers are wildly different, even with a stable population.

Originally posted by Kuro | Box of fish. because.:

So, I have the same blasted problem and the 'i' screen isn't helping one bit. I have production for both food & water well in exccess of what my consumption is. (literally x2 more) but noooo everyone is starving, everyone is thirsty there never seems to be anything in supply. Either the data I am being shown is wrong. Or something, somewhere, is broken/hidden.

yup I've had this too

Originally posted by GM:

Have you tried shutting down your reservoirs and using more big wells placed right beside, or very near the marketplaces? That will keep transit time to a minimum for the most part and they do put out pretty well with just 2 workers.

Wells near markets take valuable housing space, but also I found with 4 wells in the housing zone it wasn't keeping pace with my 200 people.

[Mysterycookie]

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

Originally posted by DD-Chinook:

Instead of asking the dev to supply something like this in the arrogant & angry way you do, how about you inform the rest of us peasants how many distilleries and whatnot that you have? That way, there is a chance we can help..

Ah yes, my original post is so super angry and arrogant, and informing you of the quantities isn't meaningful to the data I'm looking for. Go ahead and call yourself a peasant and make yourself the victim of my inquiry, have fun with that.

Originally posted by Midas:

It only shows stored in warehouses, so after you increase food/water first the houses increase their stock, you dont see it in your overall but its stored in the house,

Yeah, I've noticed that, which I find also not super helpful in the interface and numbers being presented. It's like sometimes it's in stock in a building, but it's not in stock, and other times it is.

Originally posted by Mysterycookie:

Sorry for the dumb question but..how do you assign specific people to specific houses? To make sure those farmers are actually living next to farm? This is my issue right now, it seems random who gets assigned to which houses, I am probably missing a setting somewhere?

If there's a way to assign housing, that would be interesting. Though I'm unsure how useful it would be because of the way markets work, and all my folks need to be around the market. Adding more markets just compounds the workforce problem.

If you could assign specific professions to houses that would fix my problem.
Like..."Only farmers can live here"
"only loggers can live here"

Or something like that

[Tenoshii]

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

Originally posted by 76561198101883072:

Look at the water output and consumption of the previous year and compare the data.

That doesn't correlate, even if I turn off every building that consumes water the numbers are wildly different, even with a stable population.

Would you elaborate further on the discrepancy you're seeing?

I have 160 inhabitants across 60 houses in my town. Between the estimated water in each house, water in the warehouse storage area, water in and consumed by the Distillery (only building consuming other than inhabitants), Production Overview numbers and the Data Chart numbers things appear to be relatively close.

For example, I can tell from the Production Overview on Water that I'm producing slightly less than I'm consuming (roughly 1900 vs 2100). This is making sense as I've been accepting immigrants the past two years and didn't expand my wells until the current year (roughly 30 more inhabitants) and had been selling excess water in the grocery store. When I looked at the Data Chart that shows water storage over the past year it shows a consistent decline down from 500 to 0, which makes sense as my water production hasn't stabilized yet so there isn't going to be a surplus for a while (built 2 more wells and added 2 people to each during the current year).

What was interesting to me was why my inhabitants aren't all dying from thirst yet. Turns out (as some other posters have mentioned in various threads) the resource counts (and Data Chart) on water doesn't capture the total count outside the warehouse. So I go to scan through about 15-20 of the 60 houses and I'm seeing anywhere from 7 - 56 water sitting in the houses. On average that's about 1500 - 1800 water not showing up in the Data Chart, but being covered by the Production Overview. The rest of the consumed water is the result of the single distillery that's still on.

[Commander Kris]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1509510/discussions/0/3122675677663119668/

Why all your chains break revolving around water and food ^

[Grimm Spector]

Originally posted by Mysterycookie:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

Ah yes, my original post is so super angry and arrogant, and informing you of the quantities isn't meaningful to the data I'm looking for. Go ahead and call yourself a peasant and make yourself the victim of my inquiry, have fun with that.





Yeah, I've noticed that, which I find also not super helpful in the interface and numbers being presented. It's like sometimes it's in stock in a building, but it's not in stock, and other times it is.





If there's a way to assign housing, that would be interesting. Though I'm unsure how useful it would be because of the way markets work, and all my folks need to be around the market. Adding more markets just compounds the workforce problem.

If you could assign specific professions to houses that would fix my problem.
Like..."Only farmers can live here"
"only loggers can live here"

Or something like that

I'd love that. Or tie it to workplaces somehow. Just farmers might mean a farmer halfway across the map in the wrong house lol

Originally posted by Tenoshii:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

That doesn't correlate, even if I turn off every building that consumes water the numbers are wildly different, even with a stable population.

Would you elaborate further on the discrepancy you're seeing?

I have 160 inhabitants across 60 houses in my town. Between the estimated water in each house, water in the warehouse storage area, water in and consumed by the Distillery (only building consuming other than inhabitants), Production Overview numbers and the Data Chart numbers things appear to be relatively close.

For example, I can tell from the Production Overview on Water that I'm producing slightly less than I'm consuming (roughly 1900 vs 2100). This is making sense as I've been accepting immigrants the past two years and didn't expand my wells until the current year (roughly 30 more inhabitants) and had been selling excess water in the grocery store. When I looked at the Data Chart that shows water storage over the past year it shows a consistent decline down from 500 to 0, which makes sense as my water production hasn't stabilized yet so there isn't going to be a surplus for a while (built 2 more wells and added 2 people to each during the current year).

What was interesting to me was why my inhabitants aren't all dying from thirst yet. Turns out (as some other posters have mentioned in various threads) the resource counts (and Data Chart) on water doesn't capture the total count outside the warehouse. So I go to scan through about 15-20 of the 60 houses and I'm seeing anywhere from 7 - 56 water sitting in the houses. On average that's about 1500 - 1800 water not showing up in the Data Chart, but being covered by the Production Overview. The rest of the consumed water is the result of the single distillery that's still on.

That right there is one of the problems, how it counts what is stock and what isn't.

[Tenoshii]

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

That right there is one of the problems, how it counts what is stock and what isn't.

Yeah I get that, but what are the "wildly different" numbers you are seeing?

I need to test more, but based on what I'm seeing so far, I'd say that inhabitants consume somewhere between 10-15 units of water a year. So if you are producing more than 2000 to 3000 water per year with your reservoirs and there are no other sources of water consumption, you should slowly start stockpiling water given a stable population of 200.

[Commander Kris]

A community food building for "raw foods" would be a solution. If it works the same as the boiler room building. It would help keeping most of the basic/raw materials from being used to store in homes. If you notice the same thing (almost) happens with heating fuel until you build boiler rooms. The homes should only be able to stock up simple and fine food ... not rough food.

[Laurelinvanyar]

Originally posted by Commander Kris:

A community food building for "raw foods" would be a solution. If it works the same as the boiler room building. It would help keeping most of the basic/raw materials from being used to store in homes. If you notice the same thing (almost) happens with heating fuel until you build boiler rooms. The homes should only be able to stock up simple and fine food ... not rough food.

Or have that toggleable in some way. If I could tell the AI it's ok to take pumpkins, for instance, but not raw meat that would be fantastic.

[Mysterycookie]

Originally posted by Tenoshii:

Originally posted by Grimm Spector:

That right there is one of the problems, how it counts what is stock and what isn't.

Yeah I get that, but what are the "wildly different" numbers you are seeing?

I need to test more, but based on what I'm seeing so far, I'd say that inhabitants consume somewhere between 10-15 units of water a year. So if you are producing more than 2000 to 3000 water per year with your reservoirs and there are no other sources of water consumption, you should slowly start stockpiling water given a stable population of 200.

I don't things he's too far off, sometimes deep into the game (year 36 for example) I noticed my water wheels producing less and less water. I wish I could understand why before in early years it produced 1000 or so, but now only like 800, sometimes even low as 600 or 700?

Does water evaporate during dry spell (disaster)? Does this slowly dissipate over time and your river eventually run dry the longer you play?

(fyi my water wheels had 2 people on them always, I always make sure water has max people)