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 will simply stop 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), a granary dedicated to collecting meat once the town is large, and — in the current Beta — cheese, which turns a renewable milk supply into a food type that never depletes.
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 food sources shrink then. That stockpile carries you to March, when collection restarts.
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.
Read all 15 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 — diversify into cheese, fish, and bread earlier.