food reserves low?

[DragonStryder]

the game says my food reservers are low even tho i have over 800 fish and 400 fruit and 500 bread? and people starve to death?

[Casanova Frankenstein]

800 fish? 400 fruit? May as well have half a cup of rice for the entire village.

[DragonStryder]

Originally posted by Witch Doctor:

800 fish? 400 fruit? May as well have half a cup of rice for the entire village.

what do you mean ?

[Nakia]

The villagers in this game eat quite a bit. This is just a guess but I think if you do not have enough food to last a year you get that message. Villagers should not starve. The gatherers are quite a bit overpowered. You start with 10 people, 6 adults. Two gathers, two fishers.Build one small house and get rid of one shack. Build slowly.

[amaruakx]

A basic rule of thum is that each villager needs 120 - 200 food per year.
If you take your population into account and their consumption, you'll see that food reserves are actually low.

[cstoneburner]

Also the low food reserves isn't necessarily triggered by total reserves but by going below some trigger level in any barn. So if you had some meat or veggies but ran out or just ran out in one barn that may have triggered the warning. Starving to death may have to do with how far from either work and/or a barn with food your people live. Distance kills in this game.

You do want a varied diet as it seems that when its more limited villagers eat more overall. If you only have fish and fruit you need to work on getting vegetables and meat.

It may also be a bug check - if you spot someone who is starving see if they are stuck. The last couple of patches seem to have reintroduced the occasional patthing problem. If that is the case follow the procedure pinned at the top of the forum for support request, then go into first person and see if you can unstick the hungry. To try to preVent this from happening more establish a road, or if there is already one, try getting rid of it and rebuilding.

[MeTaLL]

Hmm, i seem to get "food reserves are low" message quiet frequently even though they surely arent and i have enough variety (meat, veg, fruit, fish and since recently honey). (surviving fine without having milk or eggs or coops or bakery stuff in all my playing time so far btw).
I have same villager amount for a while for example and as i get more food, (even having to have to build another barn), the message still shows. So 30 ppl, 70% full barn with lots of food - message. Then same 30 ppl 100% full barn - message. Then 32 ppl and a 2nd barn with more food in it - message.
Its no biggy but it too often unneccesarily takes away your attention just to find out once again that food reserves are fine + only increasing and noone has starved/got hungry once.
Also the barns are shown as "almost full" and while i might be lacking a bit of fruit for now, the meat, fish and veggies are in their 2000's and holding, so cant say theres cause for warning of low(ering) reserves.
And just like "food reserves are low" is being too unnecessary and frequent, same goes for barns and warehouses being "almost full". One thing is that again, they surely arent almost full and theres no change when they are indeed full. So i would say that "almost full" means like 85-99% full barn or warehouse. But it already shows "almost full" at like 65-75%, again needlessly giving me "building almost full" messages and a huge basket sign above said buildings (which really could be done without when not really needed as it ruins the view when looking around and enjoying the village from a distance, there are already enough markers above buildings like question marks "?" when employee is needed, but at least those are correct and make sense).
When the building IS indeed full though and resources have started to be carried to a newer built one, nothing changes, it still shows "building is almost full" messages and still same basket sign above giving same message when you point the mouse at it. .

[Lerrasien]

People will starve to death due to not having food within their own home. You can have a village full of people and thousands of food in storage. But the villagers aren't intelligent enough to eat from anywhere but their own home and the rest of the villagers are too stingy to share even if you're dying.

[Suicider]

i have had a few times were villages just died randomly for no reason. they were not sent on long paths.
but i havve had a bug were the pathfinder didnt work as intended.
and all my houses and my Barn were full


as to the low on food msg

i got 10k Veg, 5k fruit
and once i drop to around 5k veg 1k fruit i get the msg my self and i got a pop size on about 60

a tip for you is to build a few Barns close to each other and let the Villages fill them up
that way you will only get spammed by building almost full
also this way will ensure that you will not run dry on food for a year if you decide not to farm food.

[Anolis]

Early in the game use gatherers they seem more productive. I just use farms for grass, flax oats and to top off fruit.

I fing fruit farming and farming in general awkward Farmer seldome completes the harvest even when I start early.
I like the idea of assigning extra people during havest.
Manye the farmers children That wold be realistic

[cstoneburner]

The best way I've found to get all the fruit is, once it's all ripe, set it to harvest then go in in first person (if I have a spare teen I usually use them, but unless I'm trying to find some place to keep people out of trouble I often don't have anyone assigned for most of the year) and harvest all of the orchard and then when winter comes assign spare farmers to empty it. If it's a huge orchard I'll just make sure there are people assigned so that it gets partly emptied while it's being harvested otherwise there won't be space.

[Nakia]

I have old orchards. With the small orchards I have discovered that at least in the mild climate if you go in right after the trees are planted and have your teen pick a tree and click on it over and over it grows. Sometimes it takes two teens to mature the tree. That way I get a early harvest. Later on having one teen go in and click on a tree helps the crop mature. Of course as your village enlarges this may not be convvienent.

[bspawn]

I think the "low on food" message is triggered when only one of the food stocks gets low (usually fruit or meat), and that it has to do with the need for a balanced diet that's not yet fully implemented.
If the need for a balanced diet is eventually emplemented, we'll need to be able to configure the maximum stocks for all food types separately to prevent storage from being clogged up by the food type that has the most production.

[Nakia]

@bspawn, you may be correct but in my current game the gathers are not finding that much fruit and I haven't built much in the way of orchards, not enough workers yet, and I haven't gotten the message. I have loads of veggies and meat. I also dropped low on fish and even locked it for a while to let it build up. No message there either. Currently I have a good supply of bread so maybe that helps.