How to Deal with Hoarding

Are your citizens starving or freezing? Do you have houses with lots of supplies while other houses are nearly empty? This guide talks about how to deal with it.

Intro

If you have a town where citizens are starving or freezing and some houses have far more food or firewood than they need, you have a situation people often call hoarding.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=427991658
The underlying problem is often one of three things:

• Food/Firewood production needs to be increased.
  
• Food/Firewood is high, but distribution needs to be improved.
  
• Homes are poor quality and burn too much firewood.

As far as I can tell, this is seen more often in towns that are based on an Easy Start than on other starting conditions. Whatever the case, the situation can usually be resolved.

This guide has a handful of suggestions you can try:

• Some are quick fixes to resolve a potential population collapse.
  
• Others, are geared towards improving the situation over the long term.
  
• The first few suggestions assume an existing game.
  
• After that, the suggestions are for how you can avoid hoarding when starting a new map.

Slaughter Farm Animals

Obviously, this is only a short-term fix intended to prevent an immediate collapse due to starvation.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=462896753
This is one of the fastest ways to get food as well as leather for clothing (assuming cattle or bison). For long-term needs, you'll likely need to add more hunters for your food and clothing needs while you grow your farm animals to maximum capacity. Once there, you should be doing much better.

Don't worry, if you slaughter all of Easy Start's starting animals, you can look to buy more farm animals from a merchant later in the game.

Demolish Houses

This is a short-term fix intended to prevent an immediate collapse due to freezing. It is probably best suited for towns where you only have a few houses affected by freezing or starvation. Why does it work? Citizens do not need their own houses to eat or warm themselves. Instead, once their house is marked for demolition*, they will get their food and warmth from a neighbor's house.

If you are really desperate for warmth and have a small town, you can mark all but one house for demolition since your town only needs one house to survive the winter. For example, say you have one Wooden House with 36 firewood and 5 other houses that don't have any. If you mark all but that one for demolition, you will not run out of firewood that winter. Why? The amount of firewood the town uses will be based on the type of house, not by the number of people using the house.

*If you do not have any builders, the houses will not actually be demolished. However, no one will live there unless you press the Reclaim button. If it is torn down, a percentage of resources will be returned to you.

Maximize Hunters and Gatherers

The goal of this suggestion is to improve your food and leather production within 1 season (e.g., Early Spring).

If you don't have hunters and gatherers, build a hunter's cabin and gatherer's hut as soon as possible. Keep them fully staffed at 4 citizens each. They produce plenty of food quickly and produce it year round. However, for maximum yield, make sure the radius of each building is on land and that the hut's radius is wooded:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=449119507
If you already have these buildings, make sure each is fully staffed at 4 each (the cabin needs to be updated to allow 4 hunters). You can build more if you need them. Also, make sure the buildings are out of town. You can see a huge production difference between in town and in the woods:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426464560

Use Medium Start, not Easy Start

Really? Yes. If you are a new player, the Medium Start may be easier because Easy Start gives you the following disadvantages/traps not found in the Medium Start:

• 6 Wooden Houses - these burn much more fuel than do Stone Houses:
  
  http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=462084431
  Since they burn so much, your town will not have enough starting firewood to make it though their second winter. You will have to build a Wood Chopper and cut down trees for firewood. This is likely a time you need to be focused on food production. Compare that with the Medium Start - you can build one Stone House* before the first winter and have enough starting firewood to survive 3, maybe 4, winters. Even if you build a second Stone House, you will likely still have enough firewood to make through 2, maybe 3, winters.
  
  
• Farm Animals - their existence in Easy Start may make you think you need to build pastures immediately. However, don't. They are not quick producers:
  
  http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=461942864
  You have a wait 2 or more years for pastured animals to make a useful contribution to your town. The number of years depends on the size of the pasture and number of animals. You are better off building a Hunter's Cabin first and letting the farm animals roam free in town for 5 five years instead of using your citizen's initial time and resources to build a pasture.
  
  
• 6 paired couples in houses - they will have 5 newborns in the first year and more in subsequent years. This adds to your food production requirements. As they become laborers, you may think you need to build more houses. However, don't until you've thought about how much this adds to (1) your firewood load and (2) food consumption when newborns are added to the new house. With a Medium Start, your initial population growth tends to be slower since you don't start with any houses. This means food needs grow slower which can be easier to manage.

Some people recommend you build a boarding house and let your citizens get all their food and warmth from it. However, my understandig is that its firewood consumption is greater than the Stone House's (I haven't had a chance to verify this myself).

Hoarding - What Really Happens?

What really happens depends on whether you have a market:

• If you do not have a market, citizens restock their own houses. One house can run out of something before another due to one of three things - the different number of people living in each house, the timing of restocking, or the fact that citizens can carry varying amounts (e.g., 25 firewood or 50). If citizens go to restock and don't find an item in storage, they simply go about their business and wait for more to arrive in storage. Moreover, citizens don't return stock to storage unless their house is being demolished or upgraded.
  
  
• If you have a market, houses are restocked by vendors. Houses can run out of firewood or food if storage or markets run out. However, they can also run out if you have too few vendors since that leads to poor distribution.

Updates to this Guide

I plan to provide a few more screenshots and gifs. I'll also update the guide based on questions or comments. However, no guarantee when updates will happen... I'll get to them as soon as I have time.



--

[maiden4meldin]

I never run out of either. Once trading commences, I will buy Berries Before I buy other fruits, So they get overstocked as well. Ensures All my stone houses have four food groups. I sell off all the mushrooms as fast as possible, as they consume Barn space at a rate of 3 to 1 in the Vanilla game. Using the Marketplaces as quickly as possible, means I can build dedicated Barns to my farms, pastures, tool and clothing makers, And I maintain even food distribution via Vendors. By building Blacksmith, Tailor, School, Farms, Woodcutters, in Every Market Zone, means my Vendors do not spend forever to stock one thing, Instead, they will find everything they need to stock up with handy within their own radius. I also Build Churches in Mining and Quarrying villages, to keep the Happiness up.

[maiden4meldin]

Aside from my first two games, learning the ai system, I haven't faced Hoarding, or starvation situations. I like the Easy Start, for a few reasons. First, extra food. Second, tearing down all those wooden houses, gives me a stock of Wood quickly for building, And third, the Pasture Animals. I typically will put the smallest sized farm together for the farm animals. I do not plant any farms until I have Two Gathering Posts fully staffed, and chugging along. Then I strategically Only Plant the seeds I started with, and trade for the other Foods later on. This means I will overstock Beans, And I have enough Grains to keep my population Healthy all of the time. By keeping only two seeds, one veg and one grain planted,

[ShamelessFNGRL]

Heya OP, it's been a while since it's been updated so I was hoping if you had gotten to this yet?
>my understandig is that its firewood consumption is greater than the Stone House's (I haven't had a chance to verify this myself).
TY~~

[Agnar]

Not to mention that this game was made by one guy, start to finish. It's really impressive.

[Wandering Mania]

ΩLeroy Jenkins,
Lazy developer? That couldn't be farther from the truth. Yes this a 'bug' with the AI package that never got fixed. But I have seen worse, much, much worse. I mean would you rather have a compleated game like this, or a crap half assed game like StarForge? And don't get me started on the asset flippers crap.

[VoteDonaldDuck2024]

It saddens me that these are all problems caused by a lazy ass developer, hes got our money and now he dosen't give a <^>... this game shouldnt have even been greenlighted.

[rottandartist]

Thanks for the Guide! I play this game a LOT (too much, I should sleep more.) But I often have the problem of collapse by starvation or cold, and this had some great suggestions for dealing with that! I was not aware the number of vendors, for example, could really help this. Tested it out and it's true... awesome job!

[Wandering Mania]

@Shalax [Necgaming] I usually build the market right off the bat. It may not seem like such a priority, but it does help imensely with even distrabution of goods.

[Wandering Mania]

@♚Gþþdk¡ll3r♚ That is easy, build more houses. If you need more population, build houses, or pray that a band of nomads comes knocking on the door of your town hall. But if the nomads come knocking, you still need more houses, and also a hospital. The hospital is needed, because when you accept nomads into your town you have a higher risk of the population suffering from an outbreak of some sickness.

[Kaya]

My village is suffering of well how do you say...i am running out of children :\ some villagers seem to have died without me getting a notification and lost all my builders and hunters...how can i prevent my village from running out of offsprings?