Why food is always not enough?

[The ONLY Miki P]

I opened fishing, farmland, apple trees, barn, hunting and gathering places. But still, two people starved to death! WTF

[susannag]

Do you have a market? How close are it or the barn to your population? Do you produce more food than you eat in a year?

[Vrayna]

Did you maybe send them to work far from home or were they living very far from storage? If they got hungry while far from any source of food, they maybe starved on the road.
In general, each person (even the 0yo babies) will eat 100 food a year, so make sure you plan ahead and have at least 1 year's worth of food stored.

[Fimbultyr]

You sure about that 100food/person rule? I checked my consumption with my population and i dont get close to that ruleo only if children eats half, it could be possible.
Fishing isnt a good source for food, unless you have excellent infrastructure and education.
Sometimes you people take a long walk to the mapborder, for surpassing a river and starve while that travel. If you see the starving symbol, click at it, and see why this people couldnt get food in time. Normally the markets/homes are to far away from their work.

[Gopher]

You opened with five food sources at once? Mate, slow down! Best bet is to start with hunting and gathering with a few houses and a storage barn alongside a woodcutter. Get all that up before autumn, and you'll be golden to get your Blacksmith going to avoid toolpocolypse. Once you overcome that hurdle and get your schoolhouse going, THEN you start worrying about getting your other sources of food! Course, I play on "hard", so I don't have to mess around with that silly housing arrangement they give you on medium. Bit of advice: Look up Banished Crossroads strategy. There's a video guide, but a bit of plunking around in the comments will pull up a written guide that explains a highly effictient setup that'll get you going hard and fast. Best advice, regardless: Don't build too fast or too slow. Too fast, and you'll produce way more people than you can safely feed. Too slow, and your population generations will stagnate and you'll be stuck at whatever number of population you have once the old generation starts to die off

[DiniahNightshade]

Also, keep in mind your people are rather ... dumb. I have had children wander off into never never land for no reason other than to "play" and starve or freeze before they get home.

[Doh!]

Originally posted by Gopher:

You opened with five food sources at once? Mate, slow down! Best bet is to start with hunting and gathering with a few houses and a storage barn alongside a woodcutter...

This. On the other food sources, make sure you check some guides to know how to get them to produce enough food per worker and when they'll produce. For example:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=465745880

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by Fimbultyr:

You sure about that 100food/person rule?

100 food per person is what everyone works on.

However, one annoying thing about the Town Hall stats is how it handles Trade Post purchasing and sales. That's because it includes those figures in its stats, so unless you made no trades in a year then that will probably explain why you get a mismatch.

[ebrumby]

The most important information isn't what you built, but how much food you are producing vs how much you are using. Best way is to look at Town Hall stats, but if you don't have one, you need to manually add up the food produced at each site.

[pdoan8]

Each food producing worker needs to produce average 500 foods per year and one worker per house to be on the safe side.

Both gatherer and fishing dock continuously produce a little food through out the year, so they are good for sustaining the population when foods are just barely enough. Both are best for starter.

Orchard is not good for starter because it needs time to mature. If you must build it, here is what you can do: create an orchard and pick type of tree as normal. Wait until all the trees have been planted. Unassign the farmer (have him work some where else). Trees will continue to grow until mature in 2-3 years (some trees may die but rare). Of course, you can not count on it as a food producing source until it mature.

If you start easy, starvation will almost always happen because of hoarding. At least one house won't get enough food. It is strange that survival rate can be higher in harder starting condition when you build just 1 house for every one.

[ebrumby]

Originally posted by pdoan8:

If you start easy, starvation will almost always happen because of hoarding. At least one house won't get enough food. It is strange that survival rate can be higher in harder starting condition when you build just 1 house for every one.

I almost start on Easy and no one EVER dies of starvation.

[Vrayna]

They eat 100 food per person each year. You need to make that an average though: People eat food from their own house in priority, and those personal reserves aren't counted in your stats.

Some years people will all be eating the food they havestored in their houses and it will seem that the food used is much lower than 100/person/year. Some years, a lot of families will need to fill their house with food (either because they ate everything the last year of because you just built new houses) and your food reserves will melt as if everyone ate 3 times as much as you expected.

That's why you need to have a lot of food in advance and not just what they need to survive right now. If a house has no food at all in it and 3 of the people feel hungry, all 3 will go grab enough food for the family at the same time, which leads to hoarding and making food pretty scarce for everyone else. You can never have "too much" food, but you will often find out that your "enough" food actually wasn't enough at all :D

[sbg137]

Originally posted by Gopher:

Bit of advice: Look up Banished Crossroads strategy. There's a video guide, but a bit of plunking around in the comments will pull up a written guide that explains a highly effictient setup that'll get you going hard and fast.

Agree 100% with Gopher. Crossroads taught me a lot and stopped me failing so often early in games. I have my own variations on that strategy now but it was certainly my start to playing the game better.

[hjjr78]

I've seen so many answers on the internet about why there's not enough food even though you have a tone of food sources and people working those sources, but none of them mention a key fact that will break the AI of the game and you will ALWAYS have no food if you don't do this... This is where the "Devs" "phuked" up....

You would think food goes to storage first, which may be true if that was the only place to put it. Here's the thing most players don't know and it's not explained in the tutorial either...

If you have a market place, that market place ONE, must be at or near the farming location. Even better if you can centralize it so all food sources are around it. TWO, pay attention to the area the market place covers...that's the circle you see when you click on it. Make sure all houses for that area are going to be in that circle.
Why all this?

The "Devs" for some reason, made the AI ignore storage in favor of the market places, so when food is gathered, the workers will go to the nearest market place and if that market place is far off, they will have a bad yield on the farming out put, because time is wasted walking back and forth. When markets are filled, then the workers will start using nearby storage.

It took me awhile to figure out why all of a sudden, my food would drop to nothing, when I had an overflow of food. It's because as a gamer, not knowing what I mentioned here, you're bound to add on to your town and place farms and houses that are not within a market range and it's totally messed up how that breaks the game but it does...it's a "phuked" up AI thing. Even if you have storage near the farms, it doesn't matter... Workers will still head to a market first.

So there you have it... If you are producing a "chit" load of food and you get that no food issue, it's probably the market placement issue. You basically need a new market with each new area you buildup.

Your welcome, Internet.

[pdoan8]

Originally posted by hjjr78:

I've seen so many answers on the internet about why there's not enough food even though you have a tone of food sources and people working those sources, but none of them mention a key fact that will break the AI of the game and you will ALWAYS have no food if you don't do this... This is where the "Devs" "phuked" up....

You would think food goes to storage first, which may be true if that was the only place to put it. Here's the thing most players don't know and it's not explained in the tutorial either...

If you have a market place, that market place ONE, must be at or near the farming location. Even better if you can centralize it so all food sources are around it. TWO, pay attention to the area the market place covers...that's the circle you see when you click on it. Make sure all houses for that area are going to be in that circle.
Why all this?

The "Devs" for some reason, made the AI ignore storage in favor of the market places, so when food is gathered, the workers will go to the nearest market place and if that market place is far off, they will have a bad yield on the farming out put, because time is wasted walking back and forth. When markets are filled, then the workers will start using nearby storage.

It took me awhile to figure out why all of a sudden, my food would drop to nothing, when I had an overflow of food. It's because as a gamer, not knowing what I mentioned here, you're bound to add on to your town and place farms and houses that are not within a market range and it's totally messed up how that breaks the game but it does...it's a "phuked" up AI thing. Even if you have storage near the farms, it doesn't matter... Workers will still head to a market first.

So there you have it... If you are producing a "chit" load of food and you get that no food issue, it's probably the market placement issue. You basically need a new market with each new area you buildup.

Your welcome, Internet.

I have played many map without market. So, market placement is not the problem, and market is not required. In fact, the biggest mistake is using market as storage and not building enough barn. Market can only hold 1680 of each type of food (protein, grain, vege, and fruit). Farmers will stop harvesting if there is no more room to store their harvest.

Food production (and barns) does not need to be within the market radius. The houses within the market radius will get some bonus, but do not have to take everything from the market.

I have never seen AI ignore storage (barns) and prefer market. AI normally dump their load at the nearest storage, either to their work place or their houses. Again, market has limited quota for every goods. Market is not a place optimized for storage. Market is for distribution of all goods.

Since all things need to be stored before it can be used, make sure you have storage near all production sites.

Also, don't just blame the Dev for everything.

[OhhJim]

Originally posted by pdoan8:

Market can only hold 1680 of each type of food (protein, grain, vege, and fruit).

I know you know what you're talking about, so maybe I'm missing something. I just checked my market, and it has 2427 Pumpkin and 1998 Fish.