Frequently Asked Questions

Six months of food banked by October, for every family you have. Each family eats one food per month, so a 20-family village wants roughly 120 food in store before the collection season closes.

The deadline matters more than the number. Most gathered sources shrink from around October and don't restart until March, so a shortfall discovered in November cannot be fixed that season. You watch it happen. Run your own figure instead of estimating, and remember that mass starvation carries its own explicit approval penalty on top of the population you lose.

Hitching post → ox → logging camp → granary → storehouse → first burgage plot. It holds up even on the highest difficulty, because each step exists to unblock the next: nothing gets built without timber, timber doesn't move without an ox, and stored goods don't rot.

Staff it two families on logging, one on the granary, one on the storehouse, and leave the last family free to build. The full build order guide covers the staffing and what to avoid spending on.

Almost always food variety rather than food volume. Plot tiers gate on how many types of food your marketplace supplies, not the total amount. A town swimming in bread and nothing else stops upgrading.

That cap cascades further than most players expect: plot tier gates your armour tier too, so a settlement stuck at tier 1 is also a settlement that cannot equip a real militia. Adding a second and third food type is usually cheaper than adding more of the first.

Three reliable sources. Clearing a bandit camp pays roughly 350 influence per group, which makes early militia one of the best investments in the game. Settlement-level milestones grant 100 influence and scale as you level, and a Wooden Church grants 100 on completion.

For claiming: a neutral region costs about 1,000 influence and an enemy one about 2,000, so plan two or three bandit clears per claim.

Two usual causes. First, fields that are too large. Keep each one to roughly 0.5–0.7 morgen. People can't work a field while an ox is plowing it, and sowing waits for the whole parcel. Several small fields let labour and oxen run in parallel. Total yield over the same area is identical, so splitting costs you nothing.

Second, a rotation that pairs crops from the same fertility pool. Wheat and rye draw from one pool, oats and barley from another; pairing either couple craters the second crop. The farming guide has the safe rotations.

Sell two or three goods in real volume per region, not six small ones. Trade posts get hopelessly inefficient across many goods, and route-opening costs will drain an early treasury.

Bread is the most reliable everywhere. Produce it in every region regardless of soil quality. 10–12 families harvest 400+ bread, and at 5g a loaf that is around 2,000 regional wealth a year. Wool is the other steady earner, and sheep sell at 20g at a price that never drops.

Three families and two oxen comfortably work about 3–3.5 morgen. If you run more than one farmhouse, restrict each one's work area. Left unrestricted, everyone drifts to the same corner and the outer fields miss the harvest.

Never assign families working vegetable plots or orchards to a farmhouse. Those share the same harvest season, so they compete for the same hands at exactly the wrong moment.

This is a Beta 0.8 change that catches returning players. Pasture animals now eat animal feed through every winter month or they die. Feed comes from oats at a 2:1 conversion, roughly six feed per adult cow and three per sheep across the season.

So a flock is now a farming decision months before it is a livestock one. The livestock guide covers the feed chain and the rest of the Beta changes to breeding and shearing.

Beyond food variety, the most underrated lever is staffing your distribution. Fully staffing the granary, storehouse and marketplace workers boosts approval directly. Having enough hands to move goods to the market is its own noticeable bonus.

Then avoid the big penalties. Mass starvation applies an explicit approval hit on top of the normal drift. One bad winter can stack a double-digit satisfaction penalty you spend a year recovering from. The approval guide has every lever and the growth thresholds they feed.

Keep each field to 0.5–0.7 morgen, and size the total by farmhouse rather than by family: one farmhouse with three families and two oxen comfortably works about 3–3.5 morgen. That works out to roughly one morgen of worked field per family.

Several small fields beat one large one at the same total area. People can't work a field while an ox is plowing it and sowing waits for the parcel to be 100% plowed, so small parcels let labour and oxen run in parallel. Oxen also waste the most time turning at row ends on an oversized field, and harvesters have to carry crops to the field's centre. A narrower field beats a wide one on both counts. Size it for your own village.

Pasture animals (cows, calves, sheep and lambs) eat animal feed every winter month or they die. Feed is made at the Livestock Farm from oats, where one oat becomes two animal feed. Consumption runs to roughly six feed per adult cow and three per sheep across the season.

Two traps. Plant the oats before you import cattle, because a herd that arrives without a feed chain is a herd that dies in its first winter. And cap feed production. Left unlimited, the livestock farm will convert your whole oat stockpile into feed and leave your people with nothing to eat.

Turn it into clothing rather than selling it raw. One worker at a sheep farm produces 700+ wool a year, which becomes 700 clothing at the tailor. Enough to supply a sizeable share of your population from one staffed building. A wool shortage is almost never a sheep problem; it is a tailor-throughput problem.

The layout trick that matters: build a storehouse that accepts only wool and yarn with the tailor next door. That keeps both out of the general storehouse queue, so the tailor never waits behind unrelated goods for a cart. Note that sheep are sheared once a year, in summer only, so plan wool contracts around that. Selling the surplus works too. Processed goods just pay better.

They pay twice but cost roughly 60g each to import, about double a sheep, and they only come from the Livestock Trader. The return is passive milk plus beef and hides at the butcher. Butchery improved in the current patch: beef went from 4 to 6 per cow, and 2 to 3 per calf.

Milk output scales with regional meadow value: roughly 9 a year at baseline, climbing to about 13.5 around 50% meadow. Note that cows no longer produce milk in autumn, spring and summer only. Don't buy to resell, since adults resell for less than they cost; the profit is in bred offspring and milk. And let calves grow, because they yield half of an adult.

Subdivide rather than consolidate. Several small pastures have historically held far more animals than one large pasture of the same total area, with reports as high as 3× the sheep on the same land.

One honest caveat: at least one source reports that this subdivision advantage has since been patched out, with capacity now scaling with total area regardless of how you split it. Treat the 3× figure as pre-patch and re-test it in your own game. Two things are certain in the current Beta. Pastures now cost planks on a scale that grows with size, and the same effective space needs about 2.2× the area. Budget planks and land before expanding a herd. Work out your flock.

Quince is the fastest orchard fruit to pay back, roughly 2 years to maturity against about 3 for apples and 4 for pears. It also yields the least once mature. Pears out-yield apples, which out-yield quince.

So quince is the right choice when you want an orchard producing sooner and can accept a smaller harvest, and the wrong choice when you are short of food right now. Two years is an eternity in a crisis, and a fast vegetable like beets beats any orchard in that situation. Plant orchards from a position of surplus, not scarcity. The orchards guide covers sizing, the September harvest window and the cider chain.

Enough that older guides are actively misleading. Livestock now needs winter feed, breeding runs on seasonal windows, shearing happens once a year in summer, and pastures cost planks and want more land. Cows arrived as a new option paying out in milk and then beef. Influence became cheaper to farm through settlement milestones and the Wooden Church. Advanced buildings now need professional builders and a Construction Yard.

The field book keeps a dedicated chapter of 43 tips covering only what this Beta changed.