Herb gathering

[Primus]

Hi guys, Im populating a dense city but herb and health became a very serious problem. Ive CC and medieval mods. Im using the barber dentist bathhouse aswell but even If I have around 10 herbalist in woods. without their areas colliding to each other. the herbs amount is always around 0-10 and health is going critical. How am I going to increase the herb amount. If I'm to expand my city. I cannot cut the woods or herb situation will go worse. If I expand a side than that side will be far from forest therefore the herbalists. Need some expert ideas. thanks

[Vrayna]

Since you are using CC, try building an apothecary and see if you can use some of the other stuff you're producing to make some poultice or some of the other healing stuff. It wroks exactly like herbalist/herbs.

Another thing is that your people might be way too unhealthy in general, or your herbalists are very inefficient.
Check how far your herbalists live from their work place. Sacrifice a few squares of forest to provide housing a bit closer if needing.
Improve the overall health of your villagers by making sure they all have a healthy balanced diet. It helps if you make all types of food, and if they are forced to go to the market to pick up food. The market vendors will make sure there's always some of everything you produce there, so your villagers are more likely to get a bit of everything instead of picking up only proteins if they live near a fishing dock for example.

[ebrumby]

The Herbalist in the woods collects herbs found under full-grown trees. People then take those herbs back to the herbalist who uses the herbs to make them healthier. The NMT barber, dentist and bathhouse are staffed by physicians - like a hospital. They can only treat sick people. You should put a NMT Apothecary which is staffed by an herbalist in your town. The CC Apothecary is a little different - that person makes other remedies that can make people healthier - they are good to have too. You can also buy herb seeds to plant or trade for herbs.

[Ghostlight]

As well as the Herbalist Huts in forest hubs, you need a few extra in main city centres. Otherwise sick people have to travel out quite far to get herbs and this can compound their health issues as they take ages to collect them.

[Primus]

I see. What about entertaiment btw. Ive alot of honey. I converted them into mead with taverns, I made that parked tavern etc, but people dont seem to be entertained. Ive courthouse, wells, markets full staffed but entertaiment goes down all the time?

[ichaleynbin]

So I was going to suggest markets, because markets made the difference for me to go from 4.5 of both to 5.0 of both, but the fact that you've got fully staffed markets is a bit puzzling.

My first thought is protein. Venison is mandatory early, herdables later, idk if fish counts. Maybe mushrooms do? But you need a balanced diet for health, including proteins.

My second thought is to your production distribution. Do you have stuff centralized, or do you have your production quite well distributed? You can tell by your market's fill status. If you have 100k food sitting around, but a market is sitting at 30%, your food production is too far from your villagers, your vendors are running as fast as they can but they can't keep up, and you're taking HP hits due to lack of food/variety. You also need to keep a sizeable margin of stockpiled food, or your markets will not help. With distributed food production, markets will keep your settlers alive and semi-healthy through starvation, and if you keep the food trickling in you can mitigate a TON of starvation deaths. But without distributed food production, markets without a good sized food buffer will certainly be the death of hundreds of settlers.

Also, make sure your marketmen aren't walking too far. Keyboard shortcut combo F2-7 is incredibly useful, the path tool. Tells you where an entire building is working in one click. I like to cluster my houses right up against my markets, 20-30 houses per market. Minimizing walk time is like 90% of the game.

Someone else posted a VERY solid piece of advice that I'll relay to you now: I don't recommend building markets until you can cover a large map without them. At least a medium. But you want to be able to healthily expand and cover an entire map without using them, before you use them. The point of a market isn't to distribute food production from a centralized valley, it's to speed up settler food/tool/coat grab time and to increase variety of foods available. The vendors should stock up on a bunch of local food first and make runs to the far corners of the map to get things they don't have available locally. For me, markets just smooth things out and make my villagers more efficient.**

**When you get to acquiring half your food from trading posts markets are a necessity. But at that point you'll have 800 extra population sitting around in your laborer pool anyhow so who cares? I have 425 vendors, 200 traders, 50 builders (for complete stone road on a large map) and 92 laborers still, in a 1700 population town. I only go below 5 stars in health when I run below ~30k in food for more than a season or two, and I have 10 herbalists in 5 huts supporting 1700 people. Half my food pro is distributed evenly, the other half comes from trade posts.

[Primus]

wow, I mean, Ive a centralized city build. 1 market in middle 3 buildings to E W and 5 buildings to south, market is covering up easily. IVe around %70 full on market, the food buildings arent realy far away either. Ive herb farms now, but the thing is my outgoing is SO much. I cannot mass produce anything but fish (I do not know how, Ive only 5 fishing station, got large farms, x4 30 cow farm, 10 diaries, 10 beefarm etc, but its always fish. always fish. Ive 50k fish in storage 10 cheese max. and how do I assign whether my people eat or not. I mean I want to use honey to make mead, but its eaten up asap. Aswell as grapes. Ive x3, 21-24 herb farm, full staffed and cant keep up 300 people. 70 of them child. cant find any laborers, had to empty mines for building jobs. I do not know. probably Im playing it all wrong, because I cared about visual alot, made big roads, proper city, hardly functional but good looking. and Ive a big storage complex very close to my main market, around x6 storage barn with 6k capacity, I made them so if market runs out it will be easier to resupply. Im having so much trouble with so low pop, dunno what will happen if I can reach your pop

[Vrayna]

When using a market and presented with choice, your people will always try to pick food from as many categories as they can, to keep a healthy diet.

If you see that your peope are unhealthy and that fish (proteins) stays in store while anything that's vegetable/fruit vanishes from storage, you can bet the balance of your food production is the issue there.

You need more farms that produce grains/ vegetables / fruits.
As a short-term solution you can add gatherers in the forest nodes where you have those herbalists and fully staff them. Remove fishermen if needed. If a food vendor comes to a tradepost, get any non-protein food you can from him.

Your health issue has reached a point where feeding your people herbs is not going to be enough. I believe they can only go to the herbalist at the maximum once per season (3 months), and one trip to the herbalist only makes them regain half a heart. If they don't eat a balanced diet, they'll lose that half heart pretty fast. It's a very deadly game of "catch up on health" that you are forced to run to get them healthier purely with herbs. They need to stop losing health as fast if you want things to stabilize :)

[ichaleynbin]

This is obviously a modded version with the fields mod in place, along with some other stuff, but yes, a balanced diet is essential. I'm forced to agree with Vrayna that you need more fruit/vegetable production, or gatherers. Maybe meats too? Idk.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=575475311

As you can see I'm having similar problems. I abandoned this town, learning experience and I can't handle the runspeed when I get much over 1200 pop. Plus disease problems but that's something else. Still, this method of production allows 1 villager to successfully plant and harvest a 4x60 field of beans(orchards do NOT work the same way, you need a bunch of dudes). Keeping your farmers efficient this way can let you build more farms with fewer people, harvest more land with 100% success rate, and feed more people.

But yeah making sure they're efficient is good, trading posts are awesome for increasing variety too.

I am questionable about whether or not fish counts as the same kind of protein as beef/mutton/venison. I have sizeable productions of them all and am running out of the 3 cost meats, while having plenty of fish left. This makes me suspect Fish is treated as its own group, with the other groups being proteins (meats), vegetables, gatherer plants?, and fruit.

I'm thinking that settlers have more need for some groups than others, and will take health hits if you miss out too hard. I know that protein will cause the hits, but I am 100% sure you don't need fruits or vegetables from farms or orchards or beef/mutton from pastures if you have gatherers, hunters, and fishermen. I was 5 stars health the ENTIRE time I did my "One with Nature" achievement, which allows only those 3 food sources.

Mods are fun but there are a few achievements which will make you a LOT better banished player, and achievements are only available in unmodded games. I have to recommend you learn to play banished properly before you go heavy into mods. I did the same thing as you though xD went overboard with mods and ended up with the wrong balance, lots of extra fish, and bad health.

[psicon]

CC adds herbs as a crop so now I just keep a small plot for growing them when I get the seed from the trader.