Disappearing Food

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

How can I go from 18k+ food one day and down to less than 2k in two days?

[pdoan8]

Two days? There isn't a concept of "day" in Banished.

You need to give more info. A screenshot with some stats window would be nice.

[evil bob]

A lot of people or trader taking it to the trading post

[Phénomènes Mystiques]

You need to stop them from selling it in trading but i use trading posts for storage as well for the excess.

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

By two days I meant two years. I currently have four fully staffed Gatherer's Huts, four fully staffed fishing huts, three fully staffed hunter huts and six 10x10 crop fields with two farmers each and I can't keep up feeding 150 settlers. I build houses and storage near all of these facilities to ensure short commutes.

I don't have a trader.

I built a town hall to check the production and all of the potential of the production described above is slightly less than consumption.

I recently downloaded and enabled the full Red Ketchup mod and the same thing has occurred in the last three starts. I haven't had this issue before enabling the new mod. I'm enjoying the mod and would like to fix the food issue.

[Phénomènes Mystiques]

I have had a similar issue where I had 200K food but was dropping hardcore about 20K per year or so and my problem then was that I had a fast growing community at the time so they were consuming far more than normal plus I had a lack of storage one time in another run which made the food total go way down as the food could not be stored properly plus also that time, I had storage facilities very far from farms so the walk was too far so the crops would die off or not be collected before going bad after harvest season.

This prompted me to build a MASSIVE storage facility/area for everything including food storage equating to a total of 25 stage units for food storage located in the middle of the colony with the wood and stone, etc.. on the interior and food storage on the exterior or within the residential areas - the farms were in the middle of residential areas.

Thinking more about my own battles, I was taking in 88 - 100 nomads that made my food total go way down for 5 years so increases in colony population take a huge toll even at a low pop. increase - so you have to make sure food comes first as population goes up but also make sure those farms and storage are very close to each other as well as the farmers homes which if you removed everyone from the work force and then positioned them closer starting with the farms, you should get farmers living closer and workers living closer to their careers, but also in the winter, I was removing farms and sticking them in other professions, such as the mines as well as orchard workers when I had a lower population for the mines and such - the job assignments will go to those that are closer to the job : residence (this trick also works great in big die-off eras to position people closer to their jobs and food sources without removing/demolishing homes).

You have to make sure to cover the population food total PLUS have about 5K+ more being produced per year or something like that - I forget the math but you need quite a few food resources and then some and you cannot have enough food in storage and you should NEVER put a cap on food production nor firewood.

[olympe]

Each of your "bannies" eats around 100 food per year. With a population of 150, you need to supply them with 15,000 food per year. With those numbers in mind, it's easy to explain how you can get from 18 k to 2 k in just two years.

There's quite a few issues with your set-up.

1. Hunters work at 80 to 90% efficiency with only one hunter. Two hunters puts them at almost 100% (somewhere between 95% and 98%, would be my guess). Staffing a hunting cabin with 4 hunters is a waste of work force.
   
2. A single farmer can take care of a field of around 120 tiles in a mild climate, up to 150 tiles if you grow beans. This means ideal field sizes are 11x11, 10x12 and 8x15. Yes, for a single farmer. Your fields are 10x10, so 100 tiles, and worked by two farmers each. Another case of wasted work force. Just make sure you have storage barns and living spaces right next to those fields.
   
3. The fields and the gatherers alone should be enough to feed your population - unless something else is horribly wrong. Do your fishing docks have a lot of water within their yellow circle, and no other buildings (save for the occasional bridge when necessary) inside it? Do your fishing docks' yellow circles overlap? (This is a bad, bad mistake, and even a small overlap can affect your fishing docks quite badly.) Are there enough mature trees around your gatherers? (If not, set the foresters next to them to planting only. This can increase the amount of food produced by one fully staffed gatherer's hut to over 3,000 units. At least after a year or two.
   
4. Are you brewing ale? Because ale is a bad investment, and brewing uses up a lot of food for... well, non-food. Alcohol is a luxury item that you currently cannot afford.
   
5. Do you have enough laborers? The number of laborers should be at least 1/3 of your adults. Because, yes, laborers are important.

Another issue is building homes. Whenever you do, the new occupants will fill their pantry to the brim. Which means that for every home you build, 500 food will vanish from your storage into this newly built home. Better expand slowly, but steadily.

Now, as a short-term measure, trade whatever you can for food. Yes, this includes food for food. Venison and other meats (I think? Depends on the mods involved...) have a value of 3. Exchange them for foods with a value of 1 (fruit, nuts, fish, vegetables).

Another thing you can do is look for wild foods (outside your gatherer's areas) and manually send your laborers to collect them.

When you use mods, not all new food options are good ones. Especially salting and smoking is a bad investment in banished mods. Instead, go for mills&bakeries or tinneries. As an aside, which of Red Ketchups "full mods" did you enable? Editor's Choice, Medieval Town version xyz, any other???

[pdoan8]

Each person will eat 100 food per year regardless of age. 150 people will eat 15k food a year. If 18k is the amount you have after harvest, then the result does not come as a surprise for me.

If your production set up well, you should be producing: 9600 food from 4 gatherer's hut, and 4200 food from 6 10x10 crop field, and at most 8000 food from 4 fishing dock. That is almost 22k. You have about zero room for mistake, because I'm not sure your production will post that high number every year.

My estimation is pretty easy: I need 500 food per house, and my food producers need to average 400 to survive and 500 to grow pop.

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

Thanks for the data!! I'll use it to stay ahead.

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

I enabled RK's Editor's Choice.

[dixiechow]

Make sure you have a market. Markets prevent hoarding.

[Claybot]

The simplest fix is to produce more food. If what your doing isn't working try something else. Don't limit your self by doing what every else does, just because it works for them doesn't mean it will work for you. There are a lot of different ways to play.

[Curmudgeon Emeritus]

Originally posted by Claybot:

The simplest fix is to produce more food. If what your doing isn't working try something else. Don't limit your self by doing what every else does, just because it works for them doesn't mean it will work for you. There are a lot of different ways to play.

I'm producing a lot more food. I'll keep tweaking all of it until it feels right. Thanks.