Is bread not as efficient as a food (in-game) as meat and fish?

[wyrdplace]

I thought my village could survive the winter on grain, but they don't. I have to keep the meat stores up, or they starve. More annoyingly, when they don't have enough meat, they refuse to make bread!

[FireShorts]

Bread is intended as more of a supplement than a staple (which is basically meat and fish in this game). What kinda ticks me off is that humans don't seem to eat the bread very quickly and it sells for absolutely nothing to traders which makes the hydropower tech completely useless since you'll never need to make enough flour to justify it.

[Gorby]

Originally posted by wyrdplace:

More annoyingly, when they don't have enough meat, they refuse to make bread!

Sounds like you either don't have enough mortars and hearths, or your workload is too high. Or both. I usually have one mortar and hearth for every 5-6 houses.

When you get around 100 population I like to start planting pulses too, the offset planting and harvest seasons help keep your food up and workload down.

[Peyhah]

The thing where villagers work slower when their stats are low is a bit weird, but you can absolutely make bread a staple, mostly because hunts aren't always available.

Increasing bread limit is good, but more important is to build multiple hearths and mortars, since that means more of that task being queued at any time.

Mid-to late-game bread is absolutely the main food of my village, but I don't sell the bread - other things like wool or flax (esp. compound bows) are a much better resource to trade with. Only until very late game when I have a large cow herd (30) can it be said that bread is not the main food. And cows need straw in winter, so still, bread.

Having too much of something is just as bad as not having enough of it: too much bread and it decays, wasting both the resource and the work done to produce it. The hydropower tech has its place, though you will need enough free transport to make full use of the water mill.

[Gorby]

Originally posted by ICA_pH_level:

other things like wool or flax (esp. compound bows) are a much better resource to trade with

I have flooded the markets near my villages with so much wool and flax that it should be worthless... but no, they keep paying 5 money units each until the end of time. I had to make myself stop trading it for techs just so the game wouldn't be so fast.

[Peyhah]

How to express evolution 101: flax and wool (and derivative products).

:D

[Mk Z]

to make 1 flour your dibble, harvest and grind -- that's 3 actions per unit of flour
then its baked, that's 1 more actions to the total of 4. but baking creates 2 breads from 1 flour, so per bread its only 2 actions.

to make meat, you feed and water an animal in the stables for 3 years, that's 6 actions per animal. Butchering is another 1 action, for the total of 7. It yields 3-4 meat iirc, so 2 actions per unit of meat. With drying and cooking its total 4 actions per unit of meat, so meat is 2x more laborious than bread.

And its not counting for the effect of large ovens and watermills.

[Mk Z]

fish is better than meat (3 actions vs 4) but worse than bread (2)

[wyrdplace]

The thing is, eventually bread HAS to become the staple, at least historically speaking. By the middle ages, most people survived on grain and vegetables and perhaps fish. But meat wasn't something many people could afford - not in the cities. I hate to rely on quotes from Quora, but this guy is at least an archaeologist: https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-diet-of-peasants-in-medieval-times

[wyrdplace]

On a more practical level in-game, we simply don't have any animals left to hunt. The map is nearly clear, except for a few reindeer and wolves, and the occasional bear. Chasing them usually isn't worth the effort. I keep slaughtering animals in the stables (I have 46 animals currently, not counting dogs - which I only allow them to eat if they die on their own), but I need to keep the populations above 5 for each type of animal, or they don't reproduce fast enough to compensate.

[whanzephruseke]

Bread is the most resource-efficient and grain has the longest shelf life of all foods in the game, making it the most stable option for large populations.