Winter Food Security
The answer
Formula
One food per family per month; six months banked by October. 1 flour → 4 bread at a level-2 oven.
Food kills more Manor Lords settlements than bandits, weather and the Baron combined, and it kills them on a schedule you can see coming months in advance. This tool exists to turn that schedule into a number before it turns into a funeral.
The arithmetic fits in a line. Each family eats one food per month, so a 20-family village burns 20 food a month and wants roughly 120 banked to clear a six-month winter. The calculator does that multiplication, then converts the target into flour. Bread is where most of it will come from.
Why the deadline is October, not December
The number matters less than the date. Berries, most hunting and fishing in a frozen pond all shrink from around October and do not restart until March. Six months is the target for that reason, not three. You are not stocking for the coldest months. You are stocking for the whole window in which your collection economy is switched off.
A shortfall discovered in November therefore cannot be fixed that season. There is no emergency lever. You watch it happen, and mass starvation carries its own explicit approval penalty stacked on top of the families you lose. One bad winter can leave a double-digit satisfaction hit that costs you the following year as well.
Volume is not the same as variety
The commonest way to be food-secure and still stuck is to bank plenty of one thing. Burgage plot tiers gate on how many types of food your marketplace supplies, not the total amount. Tier 1 wants two types, tier 2 wants four, and higher tiers want real range. A town swimming in bread and nothing else will hit its stockpile target and stop upgrading.
That cap cascades further than it first appears. Plot tier gates armour tier, so a settlement stuck at tier 1 on food variety is also a settlement that cannot equip a real militia. Adding a second and third food type is almost always cheaper than adding more of the first.
Where the food should come from
Bread is the backbone. Produce it in every region regardless of soil quality. A level-2 oven turns one flour into four bread, and 10–12 families on the chain can bring in 400+ bread a year. The calculator reports a flour figure for that reason: your fields and windmill have to hit it.
Around that, specialise your granaries as the town grows: one for bread, one for vegetables, one for fruit, one for meat. Lean on the food types that never deplete. Cheese, milk and beef from the livestock chain are the cheapest variety in the game once the herd exists. They keep producing without a collection season at all.
Reading a shortfall before it happens
The number to watch in-game is supplies, months of food remaining, not the raw total. A total that looks healthy against a family count that grew last month is not healthy, and the supplies figure already does that division for you.
Two traps distort it. First, total is not surplus: five units with a five-unit order queued reads as five in stock and zero available, and plans made against the wrong one come apart quietly. Second, gathered deposits can run down or migrate. Hunting grounds move off without the map icon following them, so a hunting camp that produced reliably all summer can be feeding nobody by the time you check.
Run this calculator once when you place your last summer plot, and again in September. If the second run is short, you still have the collection season to fix it; a third run in November is a post-mortem, not a plan.
