Gathered food carries most settlements through their first two years, and the deposit you settle next to sets the ceiling on how fast you can grow. Here is what one is worth.

The yearly numbers

A regular deposit runs about 150 food per year. A rich one runs 300 to 350. Use the pair as your scouting baseline: a rich tag is worth roughly double.

One food feeds one family for one month. Divide by twelve and a regular deposit carries about a dozen families year-round, a rich one about twice that. The arithmetic explains a rule experienced players repeat constantly. With no rich source in the region you will stall around ten families until the deposits refill in spring. With two rich sources worked before winter, population can climb every month of the year.

Wild animals are not in the same class

Rich wild animals pay less than half what rich fish, berries or mushrooms pay. The tool applies the discount when you pick them. Hunting is worth having for pelts to sell. Planning population growth around it is a mistake.

Working a deposit without killing it

Each resource fails in its own way, so each has its own rule.

Berries and mushrooms: put the hut close to the deposit and staff it from March. Keep the deposit near zero. Counterintuitive, but a deposit sitting at maximum capacity spills that year's overflow and the surplus is gone permanently. When the readout says shrinking and the stock reads zero, pull the worker off until spring. A family on a spent deposit produces nothing at all.

Fish: leave a breeding buffer. Set a minimum stock on the hut so the population can recover instead of collapsing. On a rich deposit, hold the limit around 100. Pushing lower slows regeneration more than the extra catch is worth.

Wild animals: cycle the worker. Hunt the herd down to roughly 10, pull the family off, let it rebreed, then reassign. Leaving a hunter on a spent herd crashes it to zero and it does not come back on its own.

Things that will surprise you

Winter is not a bug. Ponds freeze over and berry and mushroom gathering goes dormant every year. A gathered-food graph that flatlines in the cold months is working correctly. Bank the surplus in autumn.

Droughts hit stock, not just rate. A drought can erase a fish deposit's entire population even in a year you never fished it. Over 100 fish can vanish in one bad season. Droughts also halt mushroom and berry regrowth and hurt vegetable gardens, so treat one as a hit to your whole non-grain food supply.

Herds move. Wild animals migrate off a node silently and the map icon stays where it was. Settlements have been built around a rich hunting node whose animals had quietly relocated three regions away. Give a hunting ground a look before you plan a town around it.

Never build on a patch. Placing a building on a berry or mushroom deposit destroys it outright. The deposit is not pushed elsewhere. Check the forage overlay before you place, because a small patch hides easily under a build ghost.

Where this leads

Gathering & Deposit Planner