Read this if your village is starving to death.

[Dai Atlus]

I see a lot of people running into issues with people starving despite having tons of food. Here are some tips to prevent this.

1. Press F4 and check your production limit. Bread and flour are defaulted to 20 pieces. Change it to however many you need based on your population. Otherwise you'll have a ton of wheat but people are still starving. I know I've had over 100 bails of wheat and the bread almost never goes above 20. That's cause I didn't adjust the limit.

2. You are overworking your people. Yes, the AI isn't perfect, but you have to manage your workload too. Too many tasks will make the AI neglect its well being. Too many fields can also be counterproductive since your people will go crazy planting and harvesting during Spring, Summer and Fall. I personally like to just have 3 full fields (one for each crop). It can sustain a population of up to 80+. This is in conjunction with having animals and hunting. I also don't grow many pulses. Maybe a two rows from two different pulse crop and that's it. Grow your crops based on your population. I try to keep my normal workload over 100%. Only during planting of harvesting does it ever get close to 150% workload. Even then I try to eliminate some tasks to bring it down closer to 130%.

3. Your fields are too far away or your village is spread out too much can also cause issues with workload. I have experimented with two villages in one if the river maps, and an improperly managed workload will cause people to lose moral and overwork.

4. Manage your animal population as well. Use the F4 key just like the others. Animals produce food and goods. Too many animals will also overload your workers. Especially come planting and harvesting time. I keep around 40-50 total for an 80+ population. I get rid of goats and pigs when I have cows. Only sheep, cow and horse/donkey. Horse and donkey are low maintenance. Grow your livestock based on your population.

4. When you know an intense amount of work is coming next season, plan your work ahead the season before. Don't set up big building projects if you know it takes time to finish and interfere with field work. Make your crops the priority!!!! For example, I don't setup long hunts or even set up a work area to harvest tannin in the Spring until AFTER all the fields are taken care of. I practically cancel everything save for mining and a few other tasks. This is a strategy game/city planning game. Plan ahead!

5. Use the 7 key to look at your workload. If you have trouble canceling tasks, it's because you set up a work area before hand. Every time you cancel, it comes back. Instead, find the work area and remove any you feel aren't urgent. You can find work areas by pressing tab and going into primal vision, or click on a work area sign, them look at the lower right corner of your screen. There are several icon. The last two cycles you through all the areas you've set up and you can cancel them. One thing that sucks if that even after you cancel a work area, you might still need to cancel tasks individually if they are in progress. So say you cancelled a logging work area, you still see the tree chopping icon on top of a few trees. Click on the trees to cancel the task to full clear it. If you cancel the task without removing the work area, it keeps coming back.

6. Again, try not to keep your tasks over 100% constantly. If you just keep assigning tasks and putting down work areas, your people will work nonstop and neglect themselves. It's easy to get carried away because you don't really have to micro-manage tasks. Think about the time it task to complete the task and plan around it.

[Dai Atlus]

Oh, I forgot to mention. If you don't want to waste time and workload, don't build wooden walls. They might as well be made of paper. They also don't add to your knowledge. I've seen people screw themselves over with a big wooden wall project that dominated their workload and made it hard to focus on other things. People were inefficient, overworked, and died from starvation cause they don't have time to eat. Think about it in real life how you have too many tasks at work and can't find time to eat. This happens.

[Draken]

Try to spread out your houses, wells and spiritual buildings, so that your people don't have to walk to far when they need someing.
I'm doing the same thing with all my storage buildings.

[morph113]

Regarding the bread amount, I found 20 to be totally sufficient. If you produce bread at a high enough rate, then it will always stick around 15-20 which is totally fine and can still feed everyone if you produce faster than you use it. I tried a much higher limit once because I thought why not overproduce but then after a while I got the message that bread perished because it got too old. So before adjusting the bread limit too high, one must make sure that the people can eat all the bread before it becomes bad. While grain and flour never seem to go bad.

[Dai Atlus]

Just keep your bread at 75 - 100%. It'll scale based on your population.

[Draken]

Eh, I keep both at 50%.
As i have 100 pops, that exatly 50.
I would probably manage with 25%, but a little bit of reserve is nice. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket.

[H2O]

Morph is correct about the bread, you dont need to raise the cap unless it's getting close to 0. I got to 150 population with a cap of 10 sheep 10 pigs and 10 cows plus 10 horses but they didnt reproduce very fast. I was still hovering around 50-70 meat by then and I had no need to go hunting which keeps everyone near town. Pigs reproduce like crazy so that was most of the meat.

[Draken]

@H20
I would suggest rising the animal limit to 15 each.
With 10 you risk them dying out. Happend to me.
Horser and/or donkeys, you should set to a number equal your carts. If they are in front of a cart, you don't have to feed or house them, so you can go to really high numbers.

[Dai Atlus]

To be honest, I do think it's possible to keep bread to around 20 since even if you have 200 people, it's not like all 200 will be hungry at the same time. I'm going to experiment with lower amount of bread and flour to see if I can free up more tasks to do other things.

[MischiefMadnessFPS]

Yo Here In 2020 Day 4 Of Starting.

You've been a big help for me in understanding the AI Mechanics of it all...I was wondering why my people were starving to death When they had 80+ cured meat and about 20/30 bread with like 40 Veg in storage with plenty of leftover ingredients. (only 60 people in a 63 population limit)

I've been clever enough to make it to 60 as I took my time and made the max population 20 for the most part as I was gathering supplies to feed 60+ people then created more homes...was even planning an expansion but now I know I'll have to put that on hold and create a pathway with food and storage. Possibly shelter as it's a bit of a way up. Make a Tiny town half way up before I make the Big City. Would love to know/See what you're villages, towns and population levels are now. Great Game (even more of a surprise: I didn't know this game existed till 4 days ago!)

[iDieAlot]

My current play through - peaceful and lots of resources in the Chesapeake Bay Thrive map. On my way towad 800 + population, hopefully.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1662355105905457562/4BF2A0D84448A627E5059560434E4994BD2BDF66/

[threethreethree]

Good post...

I quite often have workload under 100. Stuff gets done pretty efficiently and quickly.

I don't even hunt anymore. Got my livestock going.

My pop is heading towards 400. Will ultimately have 24 stone stables. Grain and straw are each climbing over 500 more every year, and other stuff coming out of my ears...got my safety margin going.

MANAGE THAT WORKLOAD, AND PLAN AHEAD FOR TASKS.

[threethreethree]

correction -

[ Grain and straw are each climbing over 500 more every year ]

Have been over 500, and inch slowly further above that each time. (I'm not making that much every year, that would be crazy. Until of course I find out later that I'm doing even that.)

...and manage production limits too.

[Calico-Jack]

Originally posted by Illiterate Scholar:

I see a lot of people running into issues with people starving despite having tons of food. Here are some tips to prevent this.

I add also add

- make sure you are producing enough scythes which as the game progresses also means ensuring there are no bottlenecks in wood for charcoal, and ores for metals. A combination of population growth and not making enough tools to replace the ones getting worn out will fizzle away in the background before becoming a major issue when you have enough crops but not enough people equipped to harvest them before the season ends.

-look to scale production one person in a water mill can do the same work as three people working grind stones. Likewise one oven can produce more with less manpower. than several hearths.

[threethreethree]

Am I correct that a plow does about 2 for a person doing one by hand? The few times I tried to watch I can barely catch one of each starting at the same time.

This one time...hehe...had to get everyone to something else, a raid I think, and was waiting for them to get back to the bitter vetch and peas and such. They seemed to be taking forever. Then I yelled OH SH--!, and went to raise my limit. Had just barely enough time in the season left for them to get the rest of it. Whew!

[Dai Atlus]

Wow, surprised to see the sudden bump. Happy to see it was helpful to new players even in 2020.