Where does food go?
#1
This is frustrating as mass starvation has killed all my settlements so far. So I'm doing some research and this confuses me.
I have about 300 peeps all included, 100 below the adult level so 200 workers.
Lowest tool is iron most have steel and some carbon steel. Everybody is healthy and happy, 5 Hearts and  4.5 stars.
100% educated and 49% clothed.

So at the beginning of a year I have 171,919 food stored.
I let a year run. I neither buy nor trade for food. None of my traders are hoarding food. I have only 1 bakery, that is my only food processor, all the other food is from farms, orchards, pastures and dredgers.
I have about 75 10x10 farms with 1 farmer each. 14 10x15 orchards 1 farmer each and 4 30x30 pastures with 2 herdsmen each.
At the end of the year my food produced reads 60,363 and my food consumed says 38,296.  A gain of 22,067 for the year. I'm happy with that.
So why then does my total food stored read only 168,934, it went DOWN?!?!
WHERE DID IT GO?

Is there a mod that provides full details on production? How many of each product produced, how much of each consumed by the population and how much is processed into what?

I still have 161K food so this settlement isn't doomed yet but if I produce a 20k excess food and lose? it won't be long.
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#2
Sadly mods can't add details on the info stuff, but you could check the tabs in the townhall. The inventory one lists things stored in general storage, but also in houses or in trade posts.

What I suspect is that on the year you really wrote things down, most people had almost no food left at home and all hit the market for house restocking, or you opened new hosues and couples moving in each took the max amount of food home. If it happens every year, there's a clear issue somewhere though.

Are you playing at super high speed? Or did you get a massive wave of deaths? I think inventory is lost on death, so if you had vendors / farmer deaths while they had full inventory, or people dead on their way back from the market while carrying food home, that could account for a bit of loss, but you'd need a large wave of deaths for a food loos in the tens of thousands.
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#3
(01-22-2021, 12:39 AM)Vrayna Wrote: Sadly mods can't add details on the info stuff, but you could check the tabs in the townhall. The inventory one lists things stored in general storage, but also in houses or in trade posts.

What I suspect is that on the year you really wrote things down, most people had almost no food left at home and all hit the market for house restocking, or you opened new hosues and couples moving in each took the max amount of food home. If it happens every year, there's a clear issue somewhere though.

Are you playing at super high speed? Or did you get a massive wave of deaths? I think inventory is lost on death, so if you had vendors / farmer deaths while they had full inventory, or people dead on their way back from the market while carrying food home, that could account for a bit of loss, but you'd need a large wave of deaths for a food loos in the tens of thousands.
Hi Vrayna.
Thanks for the hints, everything helps.
I found my food, it isn't counted if it is lying around. As soon as I built a huge warehouse it was all counted. Up over 400K stored now.

My next question is about processed food, tined food, soups, bagels, salted and smoked meats. Are these worth more nutrition than unprocessed food? If not, why bother?
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#4
There's a production chart somewhere around.
In short, very often you might get a little bit more food out than what you put in, BUT you'd get more food if the workers you assigned to that food processing chain were assigned to fields for direct food production.

In the end the main reason for making fancy food is often "because I feel like building that stuff in this city". As a cake addict, I usually set up a bakery chain, and sometimes some butchering because it feels right to have that in a atown, but I rarely bother about the rest. Big Grin
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#5
(01-22-2021, 04:00 PM)Vrayna Wrote: There's a production chart somewhere around.
In short, very often you might get a little bit more food out than what you put in, BUT you'd get more food if the workers you assigned to that food processing chain were assigned to fields for direct food production.

In the end the main reason for making fancy food is often "because I feel like building that stuff in this city". As a cake addict, I usually set up a bakery chain, and sometimes some butchering because it feels right to have that in a atown, but I rarely bother about the rest. Big Grin
OK.
Next question.

I'm now seeing a couple of starvations even though I have food, vendors even soup and BBQ kitchens. I watch these people walk right past fully stocked food vendor and the soup kitchen yet they keep on walking and die before they get to wherever it is they are going. This isn't a mass starvation just a bother.

Most of them are labourers but the last one that died was a vendor ....... at a full food market!!

Is there something I can put on their route (it always seems to be the same each year) to make them stop and eat?
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#6
People who have a home will only eat at home. So when they get hungry they either start walking directly home if there's food there, or to a market/barn to pick up food to bring home. They won't be able to eat until they get there.

If people are starving on their way home, it's usually a sign that your housing/job distances are too long, often because you tried to make a residential area on one side, and a work area on the other.
There's the Paths tool in the Reports and Tools section of the toolbar that lets you check where the people of each house go to work, or where the people at a workplace live. The game tries to globally reduce the walking distances on average for the whole town, but if you don't have enough workers living close enough to workplaces, you'll end up with people going a very long way from home, potentially too far.
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#7
Thanks again, I'll check the pathing tool on the dying guys.

It's very strange. Every winter and only in winter I see the hungry people sign. So I have followed a couple of them. They walk across the map, all to the same house where they do not live, and there they die. Now maybe the timer just happens to run out at that house, but for every one of them? And I think I checked, they are not going to their own house but I'll have to verify that. I've tried store house, cooks, vendors and even added cellars to some of the other house on their route. Nothing has worked so far.

I have notice that the game "tries" to put people near their jobs. Of course if I move the job? Well.......

An example is building when you don't have a lot of spare guys. You do a nice little project somewhere and when it's done you decide the other side of the map needs some work. It will take for ever to build anything because of the travel required. Then the worker shows up, drives in one nail, and goes home for lunch.

I've been thinking. If the game tries to match locations, what if you fired every one. Removed all the jobs, made everyone just a labourer, for 1 season, then put them, all back to work. Would the game then reassign the workers to the jobs closest to their homes?

I did find the market near where the worked was filled with non-edibles. Thank goodness for the strictly food vendors. I now build one of those near every general market.

I'll let you know how my route tracing works out.

Oh BTW, I'm over 1300 people now and clearing 25 to 35K extra food each year. I have about 600K food stored. Best I've managed so far. I have so many people not working should I do anything with them? Can't put them all on construction as that is too much of a strain on resources at one time. So I usually have 100 - 200 labourers?

Oh, I remember a good question. What do you consider a healthy ratio between adults, students, and children? It's intreating to watch it fluctuate and foretell if you are going to have a labour crunch soon or an adult population boom. I currently have about 800/300/300. It's fun to build a dozen houses and watch the resulting baby boom.

Right now I'm keeping the number of houses almost equal to the number of families. I find that gives me very good growth, almost dangerously good in the early game as population can outrun my food production when they are all in school instead of working.

I hope I'm not boring you with what are probably noob questions for you. But if I'm going to invest hundreds of hours in a game I really like to understand it as much as possible. Your help has been invaluable so far. As I said I now have my biggest population ever,

I did learn one thing on my own. Nomads will kill you almost every time. My population this time is 100% home grown. I have refused all nomad requests.
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#8
That one house attracting people is a sign that there's something going wrong with pathing calculations. It being flagged as "closest home" when it's really not is like people going to the edge of the map to refill a bucket of water during a fire. It'd seem you got one of the rare maps with a pathing issue somewhere. There's not much ou can do other than destroying the house and checking that you have several bridges across all rivers/streams for more pathing options. And make sure each bridge has at least a square of road on each side, so you never have something growing right there to block pathing.
Only oher option would be to restart on a new map...

Manually making everyone a laborer and reassigning jobs won't do much. Jobs get re-shifted several times per season anyway. What you can do is help the game assign everyone in time before it has to start recalculating everything again: at high pop, avoid running the game at high speeds. Remember to regularly save, exit and relaunch the game. That helps to clear out old cached stuff and forces the game to refresh all pathing/jobs calculations. It's a good idea to remember to restart the game entirely every couple of hours, or a bit more often if you feel that things are not going "as they should".

There's nothing wrong with having lots of laborers. Gives the game more options when assigning jobs because you'll have people available basically everywhere. As long as you're still producing enough food/tools/clothing, you can have as many people just randomly carrying stuff around and not doing much.

I don't really have a ratio for adults/students/children either. I rarely have enough houses for everyone in the first couple of years. People can live homeless for a bit, as long as there's at least 1 house to warm at during the winter. Once food production is good enough, I'll get my houses/families ratio around 1/1 for a while, but after that drop to roughly 3/4 once I feel that I have enough people (aka all jobs filled and enough laborers to replace them if a wave of deaths happens).
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#9
Hello

I'm still out here and going strong.

Up to over 4 K Bannies now and food production is not a problem. Two things helped out.

  1. Discovery of the instant flatten tool.
  2. The realization I was being stupid. Here I'm sitting watching production vs consumption very closely. If the net gain falls below 20k I worry and throw on 8 or ten new farms. But I have 300 labourers. Why only try and keep barely above water? Use the flatten tool and add 100 farms!!! So food production isn't a problem anymore. 
Doesn't solve my frustration with the accounting system though. I create a profit of 50K food. buy 25k more and watch my "total food stored" decrease? I realized it is disappearing into the houses. For which there is no report on how much is stored. No I an NOT going to add everything from avacados to zucinnis on the "stored in homes" report.

I faced a good sized "freeze to death" every winter until I realized it was lack of clothing not fire wood that was the problem.

Is clothing other than "warm" any good to have? There are so many different clothes I can make, but which ones are good protection?

Traders?
I have three or four of the smaller specific traders built. 1 for seeds, 1 for food, 1 for building supplies and a general trader. I have trouble getting the correct goods to each one. I am wondering how the game determines what goods the traders will pick up? for example if I tell them get 100 of A and 100 of B, but there is no A for them to pick up, does that stall them and they do not proceed to B? I find that if a trader is not loading a product I know I have, if I delete some other product(s) from their inventory list they will they go get what I originally wanted.
What are expensive products to sell other than the trade animals? I have found statues they are good, anything else you recommend?

Builders?
I probably cause this myself but (no matter how I try not to) I always seem to end up with a hundred building sites going at once. And sometimes I can sit with all the sites little windows open to watch progress and not one of them moves all year. How can all the builders end up living so far from their work site, if that is the problem. With a hundred sites I haven't been able to really analyze where the individual buliders for each site are.
  1. Is there an order that building get built? I seem to notice houses first, decorations last. If there is an order it would be good to know.
  2. If there are 100 sites going to they all get materials delivered before work gets done on any? For example if I cannot deliver all the stone for one house, will that stop construction on the house next door that already has the stone delivered?
  3. Or should I just stop ordering too many building at once?
As I'm not too worried about starvation now I can afford to look ahead. And a question comes to mind. What is the end game here? Can you achieve a large stable population where births basically match deaths without new housing? I can't expand food production forever, the map has edges. If you build multiple food traders can you afford to import enough food for a growing population?
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#10
you can use a townhall inventory to check what is being stored ijn houses and trade posts as well.

based on what you have typed, it sounds like you tried to build a huge city too fast. need to play the game on a smaller map and learn how the bannies behave before taking so many nomads. we all have our own playstyles and you will find yours. start slower, learn the basics 1st.

food- 1st thing is stop clearing work, so the farmers get back to those fields in spring. otherwise they will fail to plant and you will have a huge food loss. CC is balanced based on trade value not the amount of food produced. because of this , bakeries and other processors can use up food while creating other foods. for instance- you send 100 wheat to be ground into flour and then to a bakery to bake bread. you will not have 100 bread. you will have lost food in total since the bread or pies do have a higher trade value.

1 thing that helps keep ahead on food- set 1/5 workers to food production. if you have 100 adults,20 should be producing food. this should get you plenty for the bannies and nomads that might arrive.

nomads arrive with almost nothing. you need to feed these for bout a year before you get a return from their new workplaces. iron tools or higher don't wear out as fast as rough iron ore tools or lower. mines use and break tools faster. so place a blacksmith near production areas.

the townhall has charts and graphs to show you how much is being produced each year compared to used. it also shows the inventory in storage ,houses,or trade posts.can also be set to show this in quantity or alphabetical.

also remember your limits. if you do not increase these, work will stop as they are hit. then you have less in stock than you might need. the blacksmith might stop at 50 tools,when you need 100. you won't know this til they all break at the same time.

i build a start village with tailor,blacksmith,and wood cutter.plant crops or setup a forester. as this village grows and the population increases, i expand further away and build another town with its workshops. this way there are tools and clothing being made n more spots on the map. this does save the bannies having to walk all the way back to the center start village for stuff. the more time the bannies spend walking is time not working. lowers the outputs. i do similar tactics to scatter laborers. that way they too scatter items.

as far as population being stable, there are players who have done that. there are maps that go 1000's of years. check some of the older town blogs at WOB.
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