Hungry citizens

Gameplay
1

im italian and for this post im using google translator
I have a problem with my citizens.
after I have 20 citizens they start to starve despite the fact that I have plenty of food
i have 3 farmer and 2 cook
this happens even if I play a new game

2

possible causes:

  • poor quality food, so they get hungry while they’re busy doing “big” jobs which take a long time

  • can’t find the food because access is blocked

  • your computer is working too hard, and doesn’t have enough “brainpower” left for the hearthlings to find the food (although this is unlikely – if it happens, you’ll see lots of other problems like lags and jobs not getting done)

One thing you can try which should help in any case: make sure your crop fields are close to the kitchens, and have storage containers for raw food plus different containers for cooked food. Check whether one set of containers is too empty or too full, this will tell you about any imbalance in production.

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3

this is the one i suspect, 20 hearthlings is a relatively “normal” break point unless you have an overclocked CPU

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4

can i fix this problem using some cheats or mods?

5

well there are some things that help. keeping a clean town, not using storage zones (just chests and things) and bruno’s extra map options mod (play on a small map) all help quite a bit. but usually when you hit the point of no return there is little you can do, there just is a maximum amount of hearthlings your pc can handle. beyond this, look if your CPU supports overclocking some do, some dont.

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Also, be careful if you are altering the water in lakes, and making waterfalls, or using the Geomancer to add water to places. If it doesn’t get balanced with its flow there can be lag that is so bad, that the citizens will not be able to calculate what they should do, and can end up being unable to even get something to eat.

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7

If you find you can’t have many citizens working in your town because of computer limits, then golems (especially the cricket golems) can help a lot too because their AI is a lot simpler than a worker’s AI – golems don’t need to sleep or eat, so they will just keep doing their one job in the background. It’s a lot “cheaper” on your PC to use golems because of this; they won’t have to “decide” very much compared to a worker.

I’d suggest you have a couple of mining golems do all your mining, and disable the mining job check-box on the workers panel. Unfortunately you can’t disable the hauling job check-box altogether, but you can tell some of your workers individually not to haul (do this for ones whose jobs already have them walking around a lot, such as trappers or shepherds) and let cricket golems do that hauling instead.

Golems are available via the Geomancer, but you can also get autonomous cricket golems from an explorer who trades with your town. There’s also a mod which adds a bunch of new golems that don’t require a geomancer to craft.

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