Plenty of Food and Starvation

[viperwolf02]

I have plenty of food, more than enough, yet the idiots wont go and eat? Anyone experience this? they are not over worked.

[Oakshield]

Several players experienced this, so you may consider checking the various topics about it you can find at the first two pages.

Thorin :)

[Aieonae]

Have you upgraded any of your huts to straw huts?

[Data-7]

I had the same problem, I built more fire for cooking, this worked for me

[SPC.Reuvil]

I have over 100 people and only 3 camp fires and have never seen a starvation message.

You need a mixture of food sources; meat, fish, fruit, milk, grains and finally bread when available. Do not expand too fast and outpace your ability to supply your village with clothes, tools and food.

I only have about 35 domesticated animals and I rarely ever manually hunt and my village takes care of itself.

See my profile for pictures of my 1st village.

[Gabbysdad]

Livestock don't have any hey because almost every building in town is taking it for repairs, things that are for food should not be used for repairs. Also I noticed that when low on food there is are around a dozen goats running around town needing milking.

[viperwolf02]

I have everything upgraded, I only have two fire places but they never seem to be full. My population is around 70. The era I have not unlocked is the last. I was waiting until I had everything under control. They are starving themselves for no reason. I reloaded an earlier save just before the starvation started, I did not change anything other than building more stone wall and gathering some wood. The starvation was not there this time. I reloaded the same save point again, and boom instant hunger everywhere. People where dropping dead. I reloaded again, and the same starvation, and reloaded once more and then nothing. Everything was normal, something is not right.

[StillGruber]

I think I have the same issue. My population hit close to 120 and out of nowhere people died of starvation or dehydration when in town or even next to a storage. I have over 100 meat, 30 fish, ton of fruit and even more bread and everyone is dying! Now my population dropped to 70 and I don't have enough workers to maintain the farms. If you look at the pop graph, from a slight steady increase to a steady drop.
I saved the game and will go back to it once this is fixed.

[aohirsch]

Yeah, I dont see a reason, I tried several things like building more fireplaces, I dropped from 120 to 60 people now and the messages of food decaying is mixed with ppl dying of starvation. Really strange.

[Jon]

The only problem I've had with starvation [or dehydration] is when my people have to travel a distance. It would make sense if they would stop and eat along the way. Hunter/Gatherers should be able to hunt a small animal or eat fruit when hunger has reached a set level.

[pdoan8]

People will eat berries, fruits, and nuts during Summer and Fall if they need to.
If I remember correctly, people can also eat raw meat/fish if they must. There is a morale penalty for eating raw meat and fish. There is no mechanics for making campfire to cook food other than using hearth.
For water, you can build well in area far away from lake and river. Remember to turn off water collecting for those wells.

If your people die of starvation when there are plenty of food available, the most common cause would be constant high workload. If this is not true in your case, try to post a screenshot so people don't have to guess.

[Tribe11]

Without screenshots, it's hard to tell, but there are a lot of possible factors. You mentioned something about wood, and if you run out of wood, people can't make bread. If you're trying to upgrade your walls, people could be focusing on that instead of food. If you're sending people too far out to get resources, some older people could be starving before they can get back to town. Even if your workload isn't red and 150%+, it could still be too high. Ideally you want to keep it around 70%. Make sure you have sledges, plows, and carts. Your animal population could also be causing too much work, and depleting your grain stocks.

In general, every single resource is vitally important (except for ones that become obsolete when you unlock new technologies) and you need to make sure your population balances the workload you give them. The game is about maintaining a very fragile balance between having enough population to do all the work and having enough food to feed them and tools to keep them productive and happy. If you lose a 5-10% of your people to hunger, dehydration, raiders, etc., it's enough to throw your workload completely out of balance and people will prioritize unimportant tasks. If your workload is high, but you have extra food, try building more housing to attract more people and balance your workload before trying to take on big tasks like upgrading walls.

The more you play, you begin to realize that a shortage of leather, wood, stone, or even linen can just make everything spiral out of control and cause mass starvation out of nowhere. It's easy to just fast forward and sit back or just focus on one or two tasks, but if you're not paying attention, you could run out of leather, which then means you can't build any sledges or carts, and then people have to carry one rock or log at a time, and suddenly your workload is too high, people become demoralized, and starve, then you run out of burial space and people start dying of disease, which makes the workload even higher and suddenly your population of 300 people is down to 30.

A lot of people seem to think that these are bugs or errors, but really you just have to get used to the mechanics of the game. Of course it's frustrating to play for 10 hours and then have your population get decimated in 5 minutes, but that's what makes it challenging.

[Beebs]

Of course having plenty of resources, well laid out village, low workrate etc etc are all important there is certainly something wrong with the AI at times. I had a villager die of starvation while carrying berries back to the village today which made me chuckle and I do occasionally see villagers die of dehydration while walking alongside a river.

[dragonne]

I had this happen as well, in a previous game and now my current game. Within 1 year I went from massive amounts of food for over 300 people to people starving to death in large groups and down to 100. I scrapped the game the first time it happened. This time I had several saves about 30 minutes apart. I started stepping through them backwards until I found the one just before the problem. I had neglected queuing sickles manually, slowly ran out of them, and without grain for bread all the other food sources quickly used up. Start the save again, set the sickle level to 100%A and let it go. The same thing happened. Reloaded the same save game. Workload only topped 80% in Early Spring and Fall. They just weren't making sickles, even with plenty of iron ore, charcoal, and steel available. I made a few more workshops and dedicated them to sickles at high priority, then made sure to manually fill the queues every year or so and suddenly I had plenty of sickles to harvest with and maintained the grain/bread cycle perfectly.

It feels like there should be an improvement on sickles for harvesting like there was on planting with plows. There wasn't much before machinery, but maybe it's time to introduce the scythe with a significant efficiency improvement (and maybe the Roman age? :) )

[pdoan8]

Better scythe does increase harvest speed, but I'm not sure by how much.

[Tribe11]

@dragonne I've had occasional problems with this too, with sickles and clothing. I think it stems from tools & clothing degrading in set time periods, which means that if you have a big population growth or switch over to a new resource, the production rate for a certain item will be very high for a short period of time, and then once you reach the limits, it just stops. Then a few years down the road, everything that you made in that period of time will degrade all at once, and your blacksmiths will also be working on making axes, spears, swords, etc. When several tools or resources drop below the limit, there doesn't seem to be a way to prioritize just one item over the rest, unless you manually do what you said. Because sickles are so important, I will have a crafter just making flint sickles until I unlock a blacksmith, and then a metal smith just making bronze sickles for the rest of the game, just as a backup.

But it also happens with clothes, where I set production to 125%, have 160 warm clothing for my 120 people, and then the next winter I only have 90 warm clothing and people die of hypothermia.

I think an easy solution would be making degradation times more random. For example, if clothing always degrades after, say 2 years (I don't know how long it actually lasts), instead, an item of clothing that you make right now should last a random period of between 1 and 3 years, that way if you make 60 wool clothing (or sickles) in one season because you're running low or you get a big jump in population, you won't end up with all of that wool clothing degrading in just one season in two years, it will be randomly spread out and mix in with the rest of the clothing that has already been made, which *should* keep the rate at which you need to produce that item more constant.

Also, it's more realistic. Tools can break at any time, or clothing can be damaged, or if they're taken care of, they'll last longer.

I hope that makes sense lol