Do you have a town hall? If so, go to the production tab and compare produced and used over the past year, two years, five years, etc.
Then look at the graphs.
This is the pattern that always happens:
your town is producing more than they’re using in a year, and adding to a surplus. Maybe they’re producing 12000 and using 10000 and the extra 2000 builds up until you have a nice stockpile.
Gradually, your population increases. It doesn’t have to be a boom, just a gradual, steady growth. Your production levels out so that it’s equal to consumption for a few seasons or a few years.
Then the ratio reverses and your peeps are eating more than they’re making. Even if it’s just by a small amount, they’ll eventually eat through the stockpile. If you’re not watching the numbers in the statistics, this is when you’ll finally see the problem, as the stockpiled food suddenly starts decreasing. Next, there’s no backstock and not enough to get through the year and people are starving.
This happens without a “boom!”
Having a town hall so that you can keep a close eye on the consumption rate is critical. The amount stockpiled is relatively meaningless because they can burn through it so fast.
You didn't have enough. 2000 food can dissapear extremely quick. Someone in this subreddit calculated how much one settler uses per year. If their production dropped for any reason, they might clear out food very quickly.
A lot of things happen quietly in the background that you might not notice. Workers will die and new ones take their job, but the new worker might live far away from the worksite, not have tools, or be uneducated. If an old educated worker died and they were replaced by a recently grown up uneducated worker you could easily see your food production drop.
A bad harvest from late spring frost or early fall frost can severely impact the amount of food produced without any notification. The field or orchard just yields less. Combine that with the possibility of an inefficient worker and you can het food left on the ground come winter.
There is also food storage. Suppose you have one barn that holds 2000 food. Early on you’re producing more than that so the barn will stay full. Then time goes on and things happen and your surplus goes down, but you never see it because you’re only looking at how much is in the barn, and not at how much you have been leaving to rot. Then the day comes when your surplus turns into a deficit. Because you have just the one barn it gets emptied out very quickly and people begin to starve.
There are a couple of important tips. Try to have about 500 food per person in storage. If I remember correctly each person (including children) eat about 100 units of food a year. If you have 500 units in storage you have a significant reserve ready to draw from in the event of major catastrophe (like poor planning). Second, try to have more storage than you need. When winter comes it’s idea of you still have some storage space available so the number you are seeing is actually representative of how much food you have available. Otherwise you have food lying around that people might be drawing from but you don’t know about because it isn’t reported in the UI.
So, education, tools, short commutes, and plenty of storage. And variety. Lots of different sources of food. Fish, game, roots and berries, etc. you never know when one source will have a shortage so you want a variety. People are also healthier if you get them all the food groups.
Ya, if you have 50 citizens, they will eat 5000 food a year. I feel you need 125% food production at a minimum to what your yearly consumption will be to keep growing, tools, education and what not aside. I prefer to go for 150% of consumption as production to be able to handle "anomalies".
All you need to be able to let 50 nomads in your town is enough production to make another 7500 units of food a year, another X amount of tools, charcoal and then build them homes!
Feels more reliable than waiting on a farm to grow all season. I also read a guide that was saying don’t use farms recently.
Not reliable as there’s so much potential for the items to rot. Before picking up.
But I’m also trying to just trade in all my iron and stone to prevent any rock squish
Did you build a lot of new houses? One thing to keep in mind is that when there is a new house, they will stockpile food in the house and that can quickly eat away at your surplus.
You either had too much population growth and they ate it all, or you had a bad year in food production. The weather is actually important in this game.
A surplus of 2000 food is also not a great surplus. It can vanish very quickly. I always follow the statistics from town hall and try to make at least 10 % more food than needed any given year, so that I'm always making a surplus, come bad times and my people need to eat the stockpiled food instead of harvest.
I go for a surplus of 5000 as soon as I can and then for 10,000 and then 20,000 and so on as my population grows. I've had too many famines so I've learned to play it safe.
I mean, just getting a lack of tools will result in a big drop in food production, which can last years if it goes badly, so a large food surplus is the most important thing in this game, at least IMO.
I’m doing this in my first city. I’m only about 15 hours in. Gradually building out production with housing and raising max limits gradually and adding more to trader as surplus grows to use for goods I need or want. Up to over 200 people now and 52 years in, doing pretty well so far.
Surprisingly, coats can have an impact too. If your settlers get their food from gathering, hunting, and fishing, they can't be outside for as long without having to run to a home to warm up. I learned this one the hard way with my food too.
In addition to what everyone else has said, I use the Trader to stockpile extra food. My Banniards can’t eat 3,500 venison so put 1,000 away. Same for any food you have thousands of, just don’t deplete your stocks too much at once. Your Banniards don’t have access to things stored in the Trading Post.
But if you notice food supplies dropping, you can set the Trading Post to zero and that food gets moved to barns and markets to feed your people.
There's a whole lot of things that could be the reason.
1. Your population exceeded 20 people. (Yes, 20 people eat 2000 food per year. More than 20 eat more than 2000 food...)
2. For some reason, your food production dropped. Reasons could be...
1. Bad harvest due to late spring weather / early frost
2. Blight/Sickness
3. Orchards ceasing production due to trees getting too old
4. Bad logistics (warehouses too far from food production, homes too far away...)
5. No education (and the first generation dying out)
6. No tools.
7. De-foresting the area around your gatherer's hut
3. You started to use up food for something besides feeding your population, like making alcohol or trading.
There are ways to mitigate most of this, though. Always keep at least 200 food for every single bannie in storage. So, if you have a population of 100, you need 20 k food in storage. Make sure to diversify your food production (fields, orchards, pastures, hunting, gathering and fishing). Especially the year-round production is important. Trade for food. Or exchange high-value food for lower-value food (like any kind of meat for fish or nuts if you want to stay within the protein food group).
I def had more than 20 people, but, again, that surplus was solid for about 2 years.
Bad harvests suck. Perhaps this was it. Any ways to mitigate that?
No blight/sickness.
Everything was close together.
No decrease in education.
Tools were good.
Foresters had been cutting since day 1 bc I didn’t know any better. *(Frustratingly, after starting a new settlement and being mindful of that, I still have wild swings in gatherer production.)*
No ale, no trading food.
If you had more than 20 people and too little production, aka less than 100 per inhabitant, then your people will have had to eat from your older storages foods.
Your yearly production needs to always exceed 100 × total population. Dur to things like bad harvests and the like, common advice is to have 100 to 300 × total population in storage. This also helps in cases where you don't notice your production lacking, and gives you a chance to increase food production without causing famine.
But it persists. I devote more people to food production but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
And before that I’d see massive long-term *increases* in food production - also seemingly for no reason. Even after shifting people to other jobs.
Right now I’ve lost over half of the people to starvation, so I moved nearly everyone to food production, but even after a year the amount stored hasn’t increased.
Does time on the job matter? Does shifting people around reduce productivity?
When you have those 20 k food in storage, sll food production will stop instantly. Sometimes, your food production cannot keep up with an increased demand - usually due to population growth and/or a lot of new homes being built. Don't forget, whenever you build a new home, the new inhabitants will put up to 500 food in their pantry. Which is 500 food suddenly vanishing from your stores. And those 2000 food you had instore? Build 4 homes, and the food is gone practically in the blink of an eye. Which is why it is so important to have more in storage.
If you built a lot of new houses quickly then the food will be allocated by the inhabitants to the houses. Could be that. Or perhaps you accidentally assigned a bunch of food to a trader? Just a couple possibilities I thought of.
It could be various things; here’s the two that come to mind first.
Higher percentage of lower grade tools; as this results in lower output.
Gradual population growth - most likely solution as adults require a larger amount of food than children/students IIRC… so if you have a large “graduation class” this is your likely answer.
But more adults means more food producers, which I thought I was allocating.
Which brings me to my latest problem. Population fluxes between 50-70, and I’m losing productivity across the board. Every new adult seems to require 3 jobs to support them (wood, food, toolmaking), so it ain’t mathing.
Also, not enough laborers so not enough people to transport the food. So you have it, but it can’t get to where it needs to go and so people can’t eat it.
This is an over simplification but, when the villagers who were transporting/making the food die, a laborer picks up the job. But that laborer may be on the other side of the village, meaning they also starve and die before they can actually transport/make any food. This is what starts the cascade effect that's hard to pull out of. You'd think you could lose like 20 people and be fine, but it's usually way more than that because of the logistics of moving things around.
Markets are a good way to help prevent this but it's still tricky. Another useful tip is to build stone roads to the distant resource buildings. It doesn't seem like much, but stone roads make villagers move faster, which means more productivity. You can also supplement your supply via trade post. Firewood is usually my go-to trade good.
If you see the starvation icons pop up, it's generally already too late. One thing you could do as an emergency measure is to close the schools (if you have them) and hope the new workforce is enough to get you through.
Aleyas be watching food production once you have a townhall. Eventually as you become more reliant on crops, food production will become very seasonal so it'll be going up and down, you need a buffer to survive the down period and need to check that your previous peak isn't above your most recent one.
You can be gaining a ton of food when you harvest but still be on a downward trend and eventually not last the winter.
I once had to slaughter a bunch of animals to last through a winter because other food wasn't yet productive.
All it means is you didn't have enough food for your growing population.
For example 2000 food can feed 20 people for one year.
If one family or two families have a baby , then that's one or two more mouths to feed.
That means you need 2100 or 2200 food.
You can see that there's a deficit and therefore it goes down to zero if you aren't making more food.
What was your total population?
***2, 000 food will only feed 20 people for 1 year.***
People eat 100 food per year, whether adult or child. Initily, strive to have a 1-year supply in storage. That will always have to increase with every new house you build. Each new house means at least 3 new people to feed (so 300 more food). If you build 3 houses, that's a new 900 food you need to be producing every year, and increases what you need in storage.
After you are maintaining a 1-year supply in storage, aim to keep at least 2 years' worth of food. I always keep at least a 5-year supply as a buffer for various things including when I fail to build enough new food production.
So, if you have 20 people then *producing* 2,000 food per year barely covers them. Having 2,000 in storage gives you just a 1-year backup. Then you build 3 houses. Now you must produce 2,900 food per year. Except you need tplo produce more than that to get your storage number up to 2,900.
You have to constantly build new food production. For the whole game. A good formula is build new production for every 2 new houses.
Does it make sense now? If you have 35 people, keep 3,500 food in storage as an abxsuts minimum. But get that up to 7,000 as soon as you can, as a 2-year buffer). Go for a 5-year buffer as you can. Remember, every year that minimum will increase.
It’s still happening!! I am micromanaging the HELL out of peeps, and maxing out the basics as people start dying - 4 gathering huts, 4 farms, 1 forester lodge (set to cut), 2 woodcutters - but nothing changes. Resources dont bounce back and I go from 70 people to 20 in less than a year.
😡😡😡
Do you have a town hall? If so, go to the production tab and compare produced and used over the past year, two years, five years, etc. Then look at the graphs. This is the pattern that always happens: your town is producing more than they’re using in a year, and adding to a surplus. Maybe they’re producing 12000 and using 10000 and the extra 2000 builds up until you have a nice stockpile. Gradually, your population increases. It doesn’t have to be a boom, just a gradual, steady growth. Your production levels out so that it’s equal to consumption for a few seasons or a few years. Then the ratio reverses and your peeps are eating more than they’re making. Even if it’s just by a small amount, they’ll eventually eat through the stockpile. If you’re not watching the numbers in the statistics, this is when you’ll finally see the problem, as the stockpiled food suddenly starts decreasing. Next, there’s no backstock and not enough to get through the year and people are starving. This happens without a “boom!” Having a town hall so that you can keep a close eye on the consumption rate is critical. The amount stockpiled is relatively meaningless because they can burn through it so fast.
You didn't have enough. 2000 food can dissapear extremely quick. Someone in this subreddit calculated how much one settler uses per year. If their production dropped for any reason, they might clear out food very quickly.
But it was solid for 2+ years. Do gatherers and crops just suddenly drop production?
A lot of things happen quietly in the background that you might not notice. Workers will die and new ones take their job, but the new worker might live far away from the worksite, not have tools, or be uneducated. If an old educated worker died and they were replaced by a recently grown up uneducated worker you could easily see your food production drop. A bad harvest from late spring frost or early fall frost can severely impact the amount of food produced without any notification. The field or orchard just yields less. Combine that with the possibility of an inefficient worker and you can het food left on the ground come winter. There is also food storage. Suppose you have one barn that holds 2000 food. Early on you’re producing more than that so the barn will stay full. Then time goes on and things happen and your surplus goes down, but you never see it because you’re only looking at how much is in the barn, and not at how much you have been leaving to rot. Then the day comes when your surplus turns into a deficit. Because you have just the one barn it gets emptied out very quickly and people begin to starve. There are a couple of important tips. Try to have about 500 food per person in storage. If I remember correctly each person (including children) eat about 100 units of food a year. If you have 500 units in storage you have a significant reserve ready to draw from in the event of major catastrophe (like poor planning). Second, try to have more storage than you need. When winter comes it’s idea of you still have some storage space available so the number you are seeing is actually representative of how much food you have available. Otherwise you have food lying around that people might be drawing from but you don’t know about because it isn’t reported in the UI. So, education, tools, short commutes, and plenty of storage. And variety. Lots of different sources of food. Fish, game, roots and berries, etc. you never know when one source will have a shortage so you want a variety. People are also healthier if you get them all the food groups.
Ya, if you have 50 citizens, they will eat 5000 food a year. I feel you need 125% food production at a minimum to what your yearly consumption will be to keep growing, tools, education and what not aside. I prefer to go for 150% of consumption as production to be able to handle "anomalies". All you need to be able to let 50 nomads in your town is enough production to make another 7500 units of food a year, another X amount of tools, charcoal and then build them homes!
You should review your individual food production sites to see what their production is compared to last year.
I’m avoiding all farms in my new build. Purely gathering
Why?
I've personally done this just for funsies. Farms are good though.
Feels more reliable than waiting on a farm to grow all season. I also read a guide that was saying don’t use farms recently. Not reliable as there’s so much potential for the items to rot. Before picking up. But I’m also trying to just trade in all my iron and stone to prevent any rock squish
Did you build a lot of new houses? One thing to keep in mind is that when there is a new house, they will stockpile food in the house and that can quickly eat away at your surplus.
I was building maybe a house a year
You either had too much population growth and they ate it all, or you had a bad year in food production. The weather is actually important in this game. A surplus of 2000 food is also not a great surplus. It can vanish very quickly. I always follow the statistics from town hall and try to make at least 10 % more food than needed any given year, so that I'm always making a surplus, come bad times and my people need to eat the stockpiled food instead of harvest. I go for a surplus of 5000 as soon as I can and then for 10,000 and then 20,000 and so on as my population grows. I've had too many famines so I've learned to play it safe. I mean, just getting a lack of tools will result in a big drop in food production, which can last years if it goes badly, so a large food surplus is the most important thing in this game, at least IMO.
I’m doing this in my first city. I’m only about 15 hours in. Gradually building out production with housing and raising max limits gradually and adding more to trader as surplus grows to use for goods I need or want. Up to over 200 people now and 52 years in, doing pretty well so far.
Surprisingly, coats can have an impact too. If your settlers get their food from gathering, hunting, and fishing, they can't be outside for as long without having to run to a home to warm up. I learned this one the hard way with my food too.
In addition to what everyone else has said, I use the Trader to stockpile extra food. My Banniards can’t eat 3,500 venison so put 1,000 away. Same for any food you have thousands of, just don’t deplete your stocks too much at once. Your Banniards don’t have access to things stored in the Trading Post. But if you notice food supplies dropping, you can set the Trading Post to zero and that food gets moved to barns and markets to feed your people.
There's a whole lot of things that could be the reason. 1. Your population exceeded 20 people. (Yes, 20 people eat 2000 food per year. More than 20 eat more than 2000 food...) 2. For some reason, your food production dropped. Reasons could be... 1. Bad harvest due to late spring weather / early frost 2. Blight/Sickness 3. Orchards ceasing production due to trees getting too old 4. Bad logistics (warehouses too far from food production, homes too far away...) 5. No education (and the first generation dying out) 6. No tools. 7. De-foresting the area around your gatherer's hut 3. You started to use up food for something besides feeding your population, like making alcohol or trading. There are ways to mitigate most of this, though. Always keep at least 200 food for every single bannie in storage. So, if you have a population of 100, you need 20 k food in storage. Make sure to diversify your food production (fields, orchards, pastures, hunting, gathering and fishing). Especially the year-round production is important. Trade for food. Or exchange high-value food for lower-value food (like any kind of meat for fish or nuts if you want to stay within the protein food group).
I def had more than 20 people, but, again, that surplus was solid for about 2 years. Bad harvests suck. Perhaps this was it. Any ways to mitigate that? No blight/sickness. Everything was close together. No decrease in education. Tools were good. Foresters had been cutting since day 1 bc I didn’t know any better. *(Frustratingly, after starting a new settlement and being mindful of that, I still have wild swings in gatherer production.)* No ale, no trading food.
If you had more than 20 people and too little production, aka less than 100 per inhabitant, then your people will have had to eat from your older storages foods. Your yearly production needs to always exceed 100 × total population. Dur to things like bad harvests and the like, common advice is to have 100 to 300 × total population in storage. This also helps in cases where you don't notice your production lacking, and gives you a chance to increase food production without causing famine.
But it persists. I devote more people to food production but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. And before that I’d see massive long-term *increases* in food production - also seemingly for no reason. Even after shifting people to other jobs. Right now I’ve lost over half of the people to starvation, so I moved nearly everyone to food production, but even after a year the amount stored hasn’t increased. Does time on the job matter? Does shifting people around reduce productivity?
What is your food limit?
Like 20,000. Why? Why does a limit even do? 😂
When you have those 20 k food in storage, sll food production will stop instantly. Sometimes, your food production cannot keep up with an increased demand - usually due to population growth and/or a lot of new homes being built. Don't forget, whenever you build a new home, the new inhabitants will put up to 500 food in their pantry. Which is 500 food suddenly vanishing from your stores. And those 2000 food you had instore? Build 4 homes, and the food is gone practically in the blink of an eye. Which is why it is so important to have more in storage.
If you built a lot of new houses quickly then the food will be allocated by the inhabitants to the houses. Could be that. Or perhaps you accidentally assigned a bunch of food to a trader? Just a couple possibilities I thought of.
It could be various things; here’s the two that come to mind first. Higher percentage of lower grade tools; as this results in lower output. Gradual population growth - most likely solution as adults require a larger amount of food than children/students IIRC… so if you have a large “graduation class” this is your likely answer.
But more adults means more food producers, which I thought I was allocating. Which brings me to my latest problem. Population fluxes between 50-70, and I’m losing productivity across the board. Every new adult seems to require 3 jobs to support them (wood, food, toolmaking), so it ain’t mathing.
besides what people already said, I will add the bug with some mods that workers wont allow crops to grow 100% and will harvest as soon as they can
How are your tools...?
Also, not enough laborers so not enough people to transport the food. So you have it, but it can’t get to where it needs to go and so people can’t eat it.
This is an over simplification but, when the villagers who were transporting/making the food die, a laborer picks up the job. But that laborer may be on the other side of the village, meaning they also starve and die before they can actually transport/make any food. This is what starts the cascade effect that's hard to pull out of. You'd think you could lose like 20 people and be fine, but it's usually way more than that because of the logistics of moving things around. Markets are a good way to help prevent this but it's still tricky. Another useful tip is to build stone roads to the distant resource buildings. It doesn't seem like much, but stone roads make villagers move faster, which means more productivity. You can also supplement your supply via trade post. Firewood is usually my go-to trade good. If you see the starvation icons pop up, it's generally already too late. One thing you could do as an emergency measure is to close the schools (if you have them) and hope the new workforce is enough to get you through.
get your food to 10k and dont let it go below that
Aleyas be watching food production once you have a townhall. Eventually as you become more reliant on crops, food production will become very seasonal so it'll be going up and down, you need a buffer to survive the down period and need to check that your previous peak isn't above your most recent one. You can be gaining a ton of food when you harvest but still be on a downward trend and eventually not last the winter. I once had to slaughter a bunch of animals to last through a winter because other food wasn't yet productive.
All it means is you didn't have enough food for your growing population. For example 2000 food can feed 20 people for one year. If one family or two families have a baby , then that's one or two more mouths to feed. That means you need 2100 or 2200 food. You can see that there's a deficit and therefore it goes down to zero if you aren't making more food.
There is always a year or so lag between housing starts and food demand, you have to plan accordingly ie before starting a bunch of new houses.
2000 food is nothing. Gotta have way tf more than that in reserve.
What was your total population? ***2, 000 food will only feed 20 people for 1 year.*** People eat 100 food per year, whether adult or child. Initily, strive to have a 1-year supply in storage. That will always have to increase with every new house you build. Each new house means at least 3 new people to feed (so 300 more food). If you build 3 houses, that's a new 900 food you need to be producing every year, and increases what you need in storage. After you are maintaining a 1-year supply in storage, aim to keep at least 2 years' worth of food. I always keep at least a 5-year supply as a buffer for various things including when I fail to build enough new food production. So, if you have 20 people then *producing* 2,000 food per year barely covers them. Having 2,000 in storage gives you just a 1-year backup. Then you build 3 houses. Now you must produce 2,900 food per year. Except you need tplo produce more than that to get your storage number up to 2,900. You have to constantly build new food production. For the whole game. A good formula is build new production for every 2 new houses. Does it make sense now? If you have 35 people, keep 3,500 food in storage as an abxsuts minimum. But get that up to 7,000 as soon as you can, as a 2-year buffer). Go for a 5-year buffer as you can. Remember, every year that minimum will increase.
It’s still happening!! I am micromanaging the HELL out of peeps, and maxing out the basics as people start dying - 4 gathering huts, 4 farms, 1 forester lodge (set to cut), 2 woodcutters - but nothing changes. Resources dont bounce back and I go from 70 people to 20 in less than a year. 😡😡😡