Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Orchards can also provide a lot of food, but they need a few years to grow the trees. And again a few years later some of the trees will need replacement, dropping the yield. Not my favorite choice. I only use orchards for food variety, which should help keeping your population healthy.
Gatherers are always good in combination with foresters. No matter how old a tree is - it will generate food to pick up nearby. Hunters are not very predictable. They seem to work best in quite areas, so forester+hunter may not be the best combination. Maybe Herbalists and Hunter are a better team, as Herbalists will need "old" trees to produce herbs.
Fishing docks are sometimes confusing me. Ok, in general they should produce more fish if there is a lot of water around. But this is not always true for me. I had fishing docks in small rivers with much more than 1000 food per year and I had docks with 500 food per year on wide rivers with a lot of water around. Or up to 2000 food. And really - 500 food is a bad output for 4 workers, only 100 more than they need for themselves.
The best thing about fishing docks is that they are able to provide food all the time. And you can or lower the yield by assigning more or less fishermen, which is not possible for crop fields and orchards.
One of my favorites are pastures. Sheep and Cattle will provide a lot of food with only 2 herdsmen. But it may take a long time to fill the pastures. And they will yield leather and wool, which are needed for warm cloth.
To truely maximize your output of these resources, I would reccommend you place them via hamlets, a small collection of houses, a storage barn and the hunting lodge, gatherer or fishing hut all tightly packed together. I've found if the workers live where they work and work next to storage, their output doubles or triples in efficiencies.
When you're trying to optimise food produced per worker, gatherers are fantastic. They give awesome food variety (keeping your population healthy) and generate a lot of food per worker if they're in a heavily wooded area. Make sure you have a storage barn and housing for your gatherers at the site of the hut.
However, gatherers need a lot of space - to get those fantastic yields, you need to have most of their yellow range circle be forest - and you really shouldn't overlap gatherer circles because they're picking from the same plants - it'll reduce the total yield of both.
Hunters need an area that has few roads - deer will only cross a road when migrating elsewhere, so roads block normal grazing movement. A hunters lodge can bring in a maximum of 1 deer every 2 months - you generally don't need more than about 2 hunters for near max yields. They don't have to be in forest areas. A deer is killed if a hunter wanders into a herd and it has been at least 2 months since that hunting cabin last killed a deer. So put them in places where you see deer travelling ;). This is one building where overlapping ranges is not so bad - because the limitation is per hut per 2 months, having 2 huts can give you 2 kills for the same time period. Just be careful not to overhunt the area and run out of deer entirely. New deer are generated each year (I think in Spring, but not entirely sure) in wild lands - hills I think, but again I'm not that sure on that one.
Fishing docks take up very little space on-land, and their yield is dependant on the amount of water in their circle AND how much time your workers spend transporting caught fish to storage or travelling to/from work. It is vital for there to be a nearby storage barn and housing for your fishers to get good yields from the dock (far more so than for gatherers). Like gatherers, do not overlap fishing circles - they affect the yield of each other since they're catching the same fish, and aim to have them on the inside curve of the river so you get the river curving around inside the fishing circle to maximise water area for the dock. With the right set up, they can be extremely effective - the best I've seen was around 2200 fish for the previous season, but 1600-1800 is more common. Labourers help improve fishery efficiency as they can take the fish from the dock to the storage barn instead of the fisher having to do it, allowing the fisher to continue fishing. Tools are vital for fishing - their efficiency plummets when their tools break.
Pastures don't take many workers, and are a good source of material for coats. Sheep are awesome, producing wool from the moment you put them in a pasture. For meat, the pasture needs to be full (or you need to move the slider to set a lower number of "desired" animals) before they'll start slaughtering animals (and you only get leather from cows when they're slaughtered). Once these are going, they become a very steady stream of food - and it's food that has a trade value of 3, so you can convert extra meat to 3 times as much grain/veges/fruit.
Farms are the best food possible per square of land used. You can fit a lot of farms in the space used for a gatherer, and the total food produced will be far more than that single gatherer was - but you'll need a lot more people to staff those farms. You DON'T however need to staff the farms with the recommended number of people. A single happy, healthy, educated worker who lives near the farm and has a nearby storage barn they can use for their crops is capable of handling a farm of up to 11x11 in size. However, if they get delayed in the spring planting or have an early snow, you may not get the entire yield in every year (even if they only get 2/3 in, that's still over 500 food for a single worker - at max harvest it's 847 food which rivals/is equivalent to a good gatherer's output). A common farm layout I've seen and used was an 18x18 cube of area that had 3 9x9 farms in an L-shape with a single worker each, and the 4th corner had the 2 houses and a barn needed for the farms. I've also been experimenting with a 22x20 cube that has 2 11x11 farms, a 13x9 farm, 2 houses and a barn to test the larger sized farm yields per worker. Those 22x20 cubes can also switch the 13x9 field into a pair of 13x4 orchards, or do a 17x20 pasture with a barn and 3 houses, making them a bit more flexible in what you can fit in the space. All of those cubes also have space to fit a well in front/behind the barn, so firefighting has a close water source. One thing to bear in mind is that they harvest the field from the south, and leave it heading south - so try to keep the barn on one of the two southern corners. Your main problems with farms is that their output is very peaky - if you're relying solely on them you HAVE to have enough food at the end of the harvest to carry you right through to the end of the next harvest. They're best combined with something else that supplements the food stores during the rest of the year, like a few outlying gatherers/fishing docks/pastures ;). You also have the issue of food diversity - while gathering gives a fantastic food diversity, you'll need a few different types of crops to get similar diversity from farms. Beans are the best crop in terms of growing speed - it's not uncommon that they'll be reading to harvest sometime in summer/late summer. Squash is slow growing - but it will survive even in snow until the temperature drops below -1 degrees celcius (I had one year with a very mild winter when the temperature never dropped lower than -1, and the farmer for that field was in hospital for a disease, and they harvested the squash field in spring the next year *lol*). Wheat is fairly fast - almost as fast as beans, and a good grain crop for variety. Don't make the mistake of turning wheat into ale though - ale has a trading value of 8, but it takes 10 wheat to make 1 ale so you're losing value. It takes 6 berries for 1 ale, and 3 orchard fruit to make 1 ale, so if you have a glut of wheat trade it 1-1 for cherries/pear/peach/etc and make ale out of those instead. They make ale in batches of 10 - so for a tavern to brew ale they need 30 orchard fruit or 60 berries or 100 wheat in stock in the tavern.
The other thing farms do for you is that the workforce for the farm is ONLY needed for planting in spring, and then for harvest in late summer/autumn. The rest of the year, your farmers can actually be unassigned and given other tasks. I'd only recommend doing this on a small town since it needs a lot of micromanagement. The planting is finished when the harvest button for that field stops being greyed out. At that point, you can turn work off for that field - and either turn the farmer into something else, or get them to help out on another field that hasn't finished planting yet so as a group the farmers all finish the planting sooner. The earlier planting finishes, the earlier the crops will be ready for harvest, and the less likely you'll lose crops to an early frost. When all the fields are planted, turn your farmers into builders/labourers/whatever, and start turning them back into farmers and turn the fields back on as each field hits about 95% yield and set them to harvest (they'll often hit 100% or near it before the worker makes it back to the field, and the field continues to mature while they're harvesting, so you'll get most of the full yield). Towards the end of the harvest season, again get farmers that have finished harvesting their fields to help out others that were slower. When you've only got a dozen fields, this helps maximise your return and minimise the chance that you'll lose half your harvest to the winter. Once your town gets bigger, you start producing enough that if a few fields don't get properly harvested it won't be so critical on your food reserves, and this kind of micromanagement ceases to be as useful (and becomes more tedious with the larger number of fields to manage). The biggest problem here used to be the fact that farmers become temporary labourers after they finished their harvest, and would get sent entirely across the map to chop down a tree on the other side or to carry quarry stone from the quarry to a stockpile, and either starve to death on the way home or not get back to their fields to actually plant their crops until Summer. The 1.0.2 patch fixed this problem (but arguably went too far for people who were always labourers) - farmer yields in my large town improved by about 20% as a result of the changes to their AI/task assignment in that patch, and the 1.0.3 patch has tried to rebalance the permanent labourers so that both work properly (I'm still play-testing the end effects of that one).
Edit: I forgot orchards. The return on orchards is per tree, so you want a layout that maximises the number of trees per planted area. The layout is always horizontal, with a single column gap between trees horizontally (east/west) and a two row gap between trees vertically (north/south). That's why you see people recommending 15x4 as an ideal size - it takes a single worker, and gets you two rows of 8 trees. A 4x15 (vertical) orchard only gets you 5 rows of 2 trees - a loss of 1/3 of your trees for the same land usage. They take a while to get established, and then randomly have trees die out and need to be regrown - with no yield from a tree that is not mature, so they can be a bit variable. Great for brewing, good for adding food diversity, but not great for relying on as your main food source in my experience.
The Banished Calculator is useful to see where the breakpoints are on field/orchard/pastures/etc: http://banishedinfo.com/t/Size_calculator/orchard
I removed him from the orchard, but the trees still kept maturing on their own. In essence, it means you could start the orchard and once you see that all trees have been planted, leave that orchard alone for the next 3-4 years (however long it is to mature). At that time, you can reassign a farmer to it to being the many years of harvesting from that orchard.
It also brings to mind that for even more micromanagement, it might be the case that you don't even need a full-time orchard tender (similar to Dawnmist's comments about farming). I haven't tried it but it could be that you would just bring in a farmer when it's time to harvest. All other times, the trees grow on their own.
I'm not sure if it's like a pasture where, supposedly having a herder results in better output (thought that makes sense if it means a herder needs to pick up eggs or shear sheep or kill cows). But because orchards are harvested in the fall (even fruit trees) then only having the farmer at that time may be a feasible tactic (and you lose out on planting any trees that need re-planting during the year if you go this route)
For that size, how many people need to work on each Orchard?
That's what I was hoping you'd say.