Food kills more settlements than bandits do. Each family eats one food per month, and the collection season is not the whole year. Most gathered sources shrink from about October and don't restart until March.
That gives you one hard deadline: six months of food banked by October. Miss it and you are not slowly short. You are watching families starve through a winter you cannot fix mid-season, and a mass starvation event carries its own approval penalty on top of the lost population.
Variety matters as much as volume. Burgage plot tiers gate on how many types of food your marketplace supplies, not the raw amount. A tier-1 plot needs two types, tier-2 needs four, and higher tiers need real range. A town swimming in bread but nothing else stops upgrading, which caps your tax base and your armour tier alongside it.
The most reliable engines are bread (produce it in every region regardless of soil quality) and a granary dedicated to collecting meat once the town is large. The current Beta adds cheese, which turns a renewable milk supply into a food type that never depletes.
Before any of that, gathered food carries your first two years. A regular deposit yields about 150 food a year and a rich one 300 to 350, which is roughly a dozen families against two dozen. Wild animals pay under half what fish and berries do. Price the deposit you are thinking of settling beside, and read the rule for working it without collapsing it.
Food & Population
This is the ceiling case: two rich deposits worked before winter locks the food supply and population climbs every month instead of plateauing (contrast #13).
Most sources shrink then, and the stockpile has to carry you to March
10–12 families harvest 400+ bread. At 5g/loaf that's ~2,000 regional wealth per year if sold.
100+ fish can vanish in one bad season. Drought hits the standing population, not just your harvest rate.
Treat a drought as a hit to your whole non-grain food chain, not just the fields.
Below 50% a whole month can pass with nobody moving in. Above it, one 0.8.100 stream saw two a month land steadily, and crossing 60% pulled a family in mid-month. Streamer observation, not our measurement
Read all 17 Food & Population tips in the field book →
New in the Beta — food
Cheesemonger (unlocks at burgage Lv3) turns Milk + Salt into Cheese at 1,1:2. A food type from a renewable source that never depletes.
Fruit fell ~10% too. Backyard veg is no longer a free food engine, so diversify into cheese, fish and bread earlier.
Read the full Beta chapter in the field book →
Read these next
Farming & Fields
Bread starts as a field. Rotation and field size decide how much you actually bank before winter.
Sheep & Pastures
Milk, cheese and beef are food types that never deplete: the cheapest way to buy variety.
Warfare & Militia
Plot tiers gate on food variety, and armour tiers gate on plot tiers. Feeding the town is arming it.