Massive food requirements?

Hi, I’ve just come back to Stonehearth alpha 15 after a bit of a hiatus (last time I played was alpha 13). Anyway, I’ve noticed that the food requirements for new settlers seem to be increasing way too much. I’ve currently got 12 villagers, but the food requirement is way up at 306 - way more than my settlers could ever get through, and therefore a lot more than is worth farming. Do I really need to make a load of food that I know is going to be wasted, just to get my population up? And is there any way to edit the amount of food required, to fix it in the short term? Thanks

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It’s the reason why you need a Cook.
Cooked food rots slower and takes less place, so it’s much easier to hit the required amount. I got as much as 25+ villagers without much trouble.
Also food is required for cattle feeding and pets (the latter currently only eating meat), so if you have these, it’s only natural for you to have a more extensive food production.

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Yeah after a certain point you need a cook and higher value cooked food to reach the target values.

Ahh, I knew cooked food didn’t rot so quickly, but I thought it was mainly for increasing morale with variation. Thanks :slight_smile:

I want to up this…

having 1000+ food items for 22 villagers is just plain silly. The food requirement should be removed entirely as it is redundant to the happiness requirement. 20-30 villagers do not need 1000+ food. If they ate twice a day ( I don’t know, have not stopclocked them :P) the requirement would be 40-60 food. Not 100/500/1000. Having that much food just make it rot away.

It’s my understanding that food has a value, meaning that 1 item of food does not equal 1 food value in terms of getting new hearthlings. As others have pointed out that’s why you get a cook and start producing food with a higher value.
I will agree though that currently you end up with a huge stockpile of food regardless, so the values would probably need a bit of tweaking, because right now it just seems a bit silly having massive amounts of food for 40 hearthlings or so.

In general the food system could do with some improvement, especially production of it. The crafting interface is probably the weakest when it comes to food (in general it’s pretty weak, but I hope we’ll see a huge improvement of it at some point :slight_smile: ).

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finding it hard to get your food value up? what the? im always WAY over the amount needed, that is until i hit villager 26 or so then not so much. but thats late late game and i need to just start making new farmlands and cooks and hearders and yatta yatta yatta.

I’ve stopped using stockpiles for food, now I go straight to crates or stone chests (depending on how quickly I get my mason set up to produce the stone chests). Crates can be stacked to create very compact storage for huge amounts of items, and it gives a great feel of “just look at how much food I have stockpiled in case of a famine!”

I find the trick is not to produce tons and tons of food, but to store tons and tons of food by building a large amount of storage and producing only a little more than you actually need at any point. Once you have 300+ food in storage, you can basically guarantee that any food you produce past that will go into storage too.

One of the key things, though, is to get that food off the ground and into a container ASAP. It seems to prevent the food from rotting, and means that all your food is where you want it; so your hearthlings don’t waste time with running to the farm to grab raw food because it’s slightly closer than the cooked food you have stored.

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anybody else finding this food level thing very artificial?
I’m not saying that it is not good (for a game), but kinda awkward for a simulation (anybody know the semantics this “level” is trying to represent? and what is for formula/function?)

Hopefully, this migrant system is temporary. And be replaced by a more immersive one eventually.

e.g.

  • option to advertise whether the settlement is accepting migrants.
  • the appeal of the settlement (food, shelter, protection, fun etc) is factored into how often migrants will come as well as the number and quality (higher stats, skilled, belongings)
  • the settlement can get advanced notice/news of migrant groups (e.g. some ui that shows the expected arrival of a migrant group confirmed to come, roughly the number, and give the player a chance to prepare the settlement and even put out a squad in the general direction to welcome them)
  • migrants don’t necessarily comes as unskilled workers.
  • migrants can arrive in families/groups (once relationship is in)
  • migrants will not come empty handed (a small storage of food, possibly tools if craft-trained. even weapons for combat-trained acting as guards for the group)
  • excludes special events (e.g. a visitor that is being chased by something, and offered protection and later have the chance to join/be invited (rimworld))
    (insert other ideas, as this is very sparse and unorganized).
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I too have moved on to crates, it does not seem to rot in crates? Have not checked.

Any how… I think it still redundant. What makes it strait out silly is stocking up 1000+ foods for 15-25 villagers. It makes little sense given their consumption. And food is already tied in to their happiness which is a part of the requirements in addition to net worth and food count.
That amount of food rot, and looks disgusting - so there why I put it in crates.

Given happiness is already measured (where hunger is a part of this!!!), and addition to net worth, I dont see the point of the food count.
The last time you moved, did you check the local area McDonalds count? Or the number of Wallmarts? No, you probably did it for work maybe but reputation (“net worth”) and impression (happyness) was a part of the equation.

Food might be part of the requirements, but not as is right now. Its already part of it as hungry villagers arent happy.

I think that what you are looking at with the food is actually intended. The devs have plans that incorporate many things that aren’t currently in the game and just because this is in the game in preparation for the other content doesn’t mean its bad.
All this food will be required when seasons are introduced and you have to stockpile for winter when you can’t grow food and all your hearthlings have to eat more to stay happy/not starving.

2 meals a day for 40 hearthlings for 3 months, 90240 = 7200 food, will be slightly offset by your trappers but yeah stop complaining about 1k food when you’re going to need like 7k to actually survive.

In contemporary Western society, food availability isn’t really a concern for most people…

but outside of contemporary Western society? Right now, in at least three continents I can think of off the top of my head (parts of Africa, parts of Europe, and parts of Asia), food accessibility or lack thereof is one of the major factors driving migration. Of course, many of those factors are linked… but migrants don’t head into countries with food shortages, they generally leave from such places.

Having a food supply to feed your growing population is important before accepting new townfolk – otherwise, they’re just going to come along and starve and be replaced by new ones who will starve just as quickly. Put yourself in the position of a leader/ruler having to make the decision, not knowing whether food supplies will hold out… it may not be that there are no immigrants waiting to come; but rather that the leader is forced to turn them away because there’s no way to feed everyone and accepting those immigrants would just compound the problem.

Of course, as a human player we can see that there’s plenty of time to throw in some extra crops and have food for everyone; but the game isn’t thinking of that. It’s simply running the scenario where, in some hypothetical worst-case scenario, immigrants won’t be accepted unless there’s enough food to feed everyone for X number of days. Of course, this scenario itself is flawed since all that food might rot the next day if left in stockpiles…

As @Freedom pointed out, this is not the final version of the system. I can understand that the current math doesn’t make a lot of sense, but at the same time, working too hard on “balancing” food requirements at this stage doesn’t really help anyone. It’s like painting a perfectly rendered mural on the side of a temporary window-covering, which will be torn down as soon as the glass arrives for the window. It might seem like it makes everything more comfortable in the short term; but that same mural could be created on a completed part of the building or simply be done on surplus materials, so it becomes a permanent addition. In other words, taking time out to balance food requirements for immigrants only gives players an idea that the new balance is closer to the final version; when in fact the final version might be nothing like the current version.

Being able to stock up massive amounts of food is one of the things players will need to be able to do in order to have “mastered” the gameplay. There are, like, only a handful of situations where the player ever needs that amount of food (the big one is a really long-running siege, where the player might have to lock all their hearthlings into a bunker for a week or more while the enemies are slowly killed from range)… but if the player wants to attract more citizens, they need to be able to look after them. Thousands of units of food in a stockpile may be overkill, but it means that the player clearly doesn’t have to worry about a food shortage snowball.

It’s important to remember that Stonehearth isn’t trying to be a “hardcore” management game. Where games like RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Towns and so on are more than happy for you to take on immigrants you can’t feed, and will sit back and laugh maniacally at you while everything slowly implodes because of the snowballing effect… Stonehearth doesn’t do that. Stonehearth is all about gradual progression, and even the “hard” mode has a linear difficulty scale you can predict. So, the goals for immigration are set high; not just to make immigration more challenging (although that is a factor), but also to ensure that the player isn’t just creating a tombstone farm.

Basically, Stonehearth is throwing a challenge: “if you can’t organise a fail-safe food supply for more hearthlings, how can you be expected to deal with all the other challenges that come with them?” It may be an unrealistically high bar to meet, but believe me I’ve seen what happens in other games where the bar for getting new immigrants is set too low. There is nothing players hate more than realising that they’re stuck in a starvation spiral – it means they have to wait for that spiral to end, and then start building up again; with the constant threat that some random calamity will wipe out everything… assuming that anyone survives the initial spiral to begin with. Stonehearth prevents that situation by forcing the player to accommodate for the immigrants before they arrive.

And, as I’ve pointed out a few times, as long as you have a gradually increasing surplus of food (i.e. more than your citizens eat, and getting more of a surplus over time thanks to improved recipes) and plenty of storage, your food takes care of itself. You don’t need to farm tons and tons of raw ingredients all the time, just enough to keep your cooking orders filled and then an extra 25% or so. The idea is that the hearthlings eat the cooked meals, and put the surplus ingredients into storage. You slowly increase your orders for cooked food, keeping the level stable, and if your cooking orders outstrip your ingredient production then you expand just enough to get back into surplus. That way there’s no food lying around on the ground, your haulers can pack it away immediately and everything runs like clockwork.

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Was about to start a thread like this but guess I will just try to breathe more life into this. Been at 29 citizens for probably an in game week or more. I have more than 400 food items in crates/chests/vaults but I still don’t have enough food for a 30th citizen I guess.
Another big thing I’ve been doing wrong is selling my food when I have an abundance of it to try and stop it from rotting. Why am I pushed to horde so much extra food?

Finally just sat down and looked at my cook’s recipes and how much the items were worth to notice that corn bread is the most expensive (besides lamb chops). Melons which I got in a trade which I thought was cool, are near worthless, and turnips have near no value in cooking either. Time to turn everything to corn, wheat, and a few carrots. With min/maxing I should be able to reach the threshhold, but I shouldn’t have to use so much storage just to meet that requirement. At least when meeting the wealth requirements, I can just sell the things and not have to horde them until they expire.

I have several rotten things in crates, so they do expire in crates. May take longer, but it still happens.

The more I think about it the more I agree with [quote=“lars_fagerbakke, post:5, topic:21193”]
The food requirement should be removed entirely as it is redundant to the happiness requirement.
[/quote]

The morale requirement should be raised though. Never have I even been close to not having the morale. I’m just not a hoarder at this game and like to sell excess stuff, and being required to hold much more food then I need just seems dumb.

Sure, if more expensive cooking recipes come to the game, it might not be so bad, but until then, it seems bad to me.

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Hmm, reading this thread it seems the main issue is that it’s never explained in game (or I’ve never seen it) the benefits of having prepared food, storage space/time to rot and “value” seemingly being the benefits.

Ya, not showing the value of items is personally annoying. Once I really looked into this I guess the food requirement isn’t that bad. I was at 29 for about an in game week, after doing this research, I’ve gained someone 4 days in a row and it caught back up to my town’s value. My cook just stays on auto craft now mainting 300 cooked sheep, 15 chicken foods, 15 sheep foods, 30 flour/cornmeals, 300 cornbreads, and 300 cooked chicken. Changed my food fields to all corn/wheat.

Without making at least 1 of each thing, then going to a vendor, you don’t really know the value of anything. Same could be said with any of the crafts. With so much importance placed on the value of everything, the items should really tell the value more easily.

Edit: Have now went from 1900 food worth to 4k food worth with the above formula without having additional people.

Is there anyway to automate shepherd slaughtering yet? It would be really nice if every system in the game could “scale up” as your town progresses to become more like a traditional city builder game, with fully automated supply chains instead of needing constant player intervention.

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