No food variety/Can't find food on the market

[CantStopTheComf]

Very confused right now.

One year ago, everything was fine. Most of my settlers have their own gardens to grow food, those without bought them from the market stands. Now, out of nowhere, like 50% of them complain about no food variety or that they can't find enough food on the market. They have money, there are market stands with different types of food everywhere, most of them near max capacity.

Yet families start to move out.

[Claybot]

Do you have other food types as in fish, dried fish, buckwheat etc other than what is in their gardens?

[kiska87]

Are those people, who live in a house with garden also complaining about no food variety?
If so, do you use the default size for the gardens when building these houses?

Are the market stalls functioning? (= Do they have a worker)

Are there enough market stalls near those houses? (= More than 1 market stall in the range of a house)

If the market stalls have workers and your people are still complaining, then there are probably not enough market stalls. If the amount numbers in the market stall are written in red, that means that everything is already reserved by families (a family buys 10 units per food type). You can also hover with your mouse cursor over the amount to see how much of it is already reserved by families.
'reserved' means that if a family is going to buy something and they are on their way, they will reserve the amount of food/goods they want to buy. But that also means, that this is not available anymore to the other families.

So in case everything in the market stalls is already reserved, that would mean it can't serve all families nearby. You can simply solve this by building more market stalls.

Also check the households inventory. What do they have in stock and what's available at the market stalls nearby. They won't buy food types, they already have at home.

And just to make sure we don't overlook something: how much money do they have?

[CantStopTheComf]

Originally posted by Claybot:

Do you have other food types as in fish, dried fish, buckwheat etc other than what is in their gardens?

I think so? I cluster my market stalls so that there are at least 2 stalls and 8 different types of food (mostly stuff from settler gardens, but also beef, flour and sunflower oil).

Originally posted by kiska87:

Are those people, who live in a house with garden also complaining about no food variety?

Yes

Originally posted by kiska87:

If so, do you use the default size for the gardens when building these houses?

I try to build them as big as possible

Originally posted by kiska87:

Are the market stalls functioning? (= Do they have a worker)

Yes

Originally posted by kiska87:

Are there enough market stalls near those houses? (= More than 1 market stall in the range of a house)

No idea how big the range of a house is, but as I said, everything was fine a year ago, I didn't demolished any market stalls and even even 2 market stalls were right infront of a house, the people inside it complained.

Originally posted by kiska87:

If the amount numbers in the market stall are written in red, that means that everything is already reserved by families (a family buys 10 units per food type). You can also hover with your mouse cursor over the amount to see how much of it is already reserved by families.

Gonna check that out.

Originally posted by kiska87:

Also check the households inventory. What do they have in stock and what's available at the market stalls nearby. They won't buy food types, they already have at home.

Often: Nothing. They sit infront of their empty table, but refuse to buy food from the market stalls direktly outside of their window.

Originally posted by kiska87:

And just to make sure we don't overlook something: how much money do they have?

More than enough.

[kiska87]

That's strange.

As you have built houses with big gardens, at least they should be able to grow enough food to provide food variety for themselves. It's weird, that they also complain.

I assume that you use the sunflower oil also for export? Is there still enough sunflower oil available in each of your clusters for your citizens?

And what about flour and beef? Is there also enough of it available at your market stalls in each cluster? (Also keep in mind that beef spoils real quick)

It is possible to survive the first years only on the garden produces, as long as the gardens are big enough and there are enough houses that have a garden. But when you start building houses without gardens or apartment buildings, at some point there will be not enough of these food types anymore. So you need to have other food sources.

You do have other food sources, as you said you have sunflower oil, flour and beef, but I suspect that there is not enough of it.

As you produce sunflower oil and flour, I assume you have a farm?
If so, I recommend to also grow potatoes and buckwheat.

Buckwheat fits very well in a crop rotation with sunflowers and also it doesn't perish, so you can easily overproduce it and create food reserves for bad times.

Potatoes have a medium shelf life, they have a good yield and don't need to be threshed, so they are ready for sale after they have been collected from the field.
You can put them in a crop rotation with your wheat.

After your first harvest, put the buckwheat and potatoes in each of your clusters for sale.

Also keep an eye on your market stalls. 100 units of food may look like a lot, but as I said, each family will buy 10 units per food type, so 100 units are just enough for 10 families.

Even if there is more food in your granaries, note that the restocking will take some time, as the market stall worker have to walk all the way to the next granary.

If you build your market stalls near a granary, the granary workers will also help restocking nearby market stalls. Depending on your logistics, you can also enable laborers or carters to help restocking the market stalls.

[juliejayne]

Perhaps a screenshot of some of these families that are sitting at home starving, might make things clearer.

[CantStopTheComf]

iirc I'm in year 15 with around 250 settlers. I get beef and milk from cows and sheeps, fish, grow potatoes, buckwheat and some apples. I have some sunflower oil and flour for export but make sure there is a reserve in my town.
I guess the amount I produce is too small to meet the needs of my settlers at this point.

Anyway, I loaded an old save and so far everything seems fine, so maybe I just ran into a bug? I also postponed my lime production to build a chickenhouse and additional plantations. Lets see how it works.

[kiska87]

Originally posted by CantStopTheComf:

iirc I'm in year 15 with around 250 settlers. I get beef and milk from cows and sheeps, fish, grow potatoes, buckwheat and some apples.

Oh, I didn't know that. That sounds different know. Although... beef, milk and fresh fish spoil fast. Do you also turn the fish into dried fish and the milk into butter, cheese and smetana?

If you think, that you are not producing enough food, do you think a chicken coop is a good idea then? The chickens also need food, like wheat or buckwheat. You can also feed them linseed, but from my experience, the yield from flax is not that much, so I usually have to feed them additional buckwheat.

I suggest you open your resource tab and check how much you produce and how much you sell (and how much perished). Are you really not producing enough, or are you?

Next step would be checking your granaries. How much food are stored there?
If there is sitting too much food in your granaries, I would check the market stalls next.

See it like a chain, that goes from your food production buildings (farm, houses with gardens, fishing dock, animal buildings, etc.) to your storage buildings (granaries) to the distributors (market stalls) and then eventually to the households.

If you're producing enough food, then there must be a bottleneck somewhere in this chain, that prevents the food from reaching the households quickly enough.

If there is not enough food, then you need to produce more (e.g. build another farm).
Also make sure to preserve the food types that have a short shelf life, so that you don't lose too much of your food through spoilage.

Originally posted by CantStopTheComf:

Anyway, I loaded an old save and so far everything seems fine, so maybe I just ran into a bug?

Possibly?

[CantStopTheComf]

I feed barley to the chickens and they don't need as much food anyway. And yes, I always turn milk into butter and cheese.
I find the ressource tab a little confusing tbh. I shows only stuff in my warehouses and granaries, right? Not what is stored inside building or market stands? For example, I have everything I need to produce warm clothes, but they don't appear in there. Not even as produced or sold.

Originally posted by kiska87:

Originally posted by CantStopTheComf:

Anyway, I loaded an old save and so far everything seems fine, so maybe I just ran into a bug?

Possibly?

Now pretty sure it was. I build more farms, hired another fisherman, added dried fruits to production and made sure to have potatoes and buckwheat at every market cluster. No problems so far.

Thanks for your help.

[Bjørn]

Nice that it got sorted

Originally posted by CantStopTheComf:

I find the ressource tab a little confusing tbh. I shows only stuff in my warehouses and granaries, right? Not what is stored inside building or market stands? For example, I have everything I need to produce warm clothes, but they don't appear in there. Not even as produced or sold.

There is a way to see resources directly on the map. It was recently added.

On the Info Overlay screen there is an option - 2nd from the top - called Find resources. There you can select a specific item, and it will show you were there are those items, also those reserved in buildings, and those in transit (on carts and such).

The resource tab does not show these items like you say, so it's a handy feature.

It sounds strange that you can't find the things used for warm clothes, so they could be stuck in transit somewhere.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/773790/view/4155212408102042958

[kiska87]

Originally posted by CantStopTheComf:

I find the ressource tab a little confusing tbh. I shows only stuff in my warehouses and granaries, right? Not what is stored inside building or market stands? For example, I have everything I need to produce warm clothes, but they don't appear in there. Not even as produced or sold.

I'm not 100 % sure if the resources, that are stored in production buildings also count as 'stored'. But when it's used for example for warm clothes, it shows up under 'spent'.

Seems like you have everything under contol now.

If this happens again and you think it was a bug, then you might want to send a bug report and let the dev have a look at it.

[kiska87]

Originally posted by Bjørn:

There is a way to see resources directly on the map. It was recently added.

On the Info Overlay screen there is an option - 2nd from the top - called Find resources. There you can select a specific item, and it will show you were there are those items, also those reserved in buildings, and those in transit (on carts and such).

The resource tab does not show these items like you say, so it's a handy feature.

That's a good tip