A fan-made companion · patch 0.8.100 notes
What a burgage plot checks before it upgrades, and what your families get through while it does. Food variety, drink, clothes, shoes, fuel, water and the spoilage that eats the difference.
A family eats one food a month. Any food. Bread, berries, mutton, it makes no difference to the stomach.
A burgage plot asks a different question. It counts how many distinct food types a market stall can reach it with, and it counts them by group. Fill the granary with nothing but bread and every family eats. No plot upgrades.
Level one is loose: two different foods, any two. From level two the groups start to matter.
| Plot level | Foraged & vegetables | Grains | Fruit & animal produce | Meat & fish | Foods in total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | any 2 distinct foods | 2 | |||
| Level 2 | 2 | — | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Level 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 7 |
| Level 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 10 |
Cheese is the cheapest permanent answer. A cheesemonger turns milk and salt into food that keeps almost indefinitely, and it counts in the fruit and animal produce group. Backyard vegetables and a chicken coop cover two more pips without a field.
A food only counts once a stall carries it and the plot sits inside that stall's range. One stall serves about 40 families and costs one granary worker to run. A worker carries one item a trip. A hand cart carries 10.
When a plot shows an empty pip and your storehouse is full, the problem is distance or staffing. It is almost never production.
Berries · Mushrooms · Carrots · Cabbages · Beetroots
Rye Bread · Wheat Bread · Oats
Apples · Pears · Quinces · Eggs · Milk · Cheese
Sausages · Pork · Beef · Small Game · Chicken · Mutton · Chevon · Carp · Eel · Smoked Fish
Required from level 2. A family drinks 4 a year, roughly one every 3 months.
Ale, cider and mead all satisfy it. Ale needs barley, a malthouse and a brewery, which is three buildings and a field. Cider needs an orchard. Mead needs apiaries you probably built for the pollination anyway. A region with fruit or bees can skip the malting chain outright.
Then it becomes a coverage problem. A small tavern serves 15 families and a large one 50. Brewing enough and serving enough are different failures with the same symptom.
Clothing is required from level 2, at 2 a family a year. Footwear waits until level 3, at 1 a year.
Both travel through a common goods stall, which also carries fuel and holds 20 of each. Linen clothes come from flax. Woollen clothes come from your flock. Shoes come from hides, which come from the animals you were butchering anyway.
Shoes sell at 7 gold, the highest of any clothing good. Sell the surplus, never the supply.
Every occupied plot burns 1 fuel a month. So does every production building that needs heat, and there are more of those than people expect: Bloomery, Smithy, Malthouse, Clay Furnace, Lime Kiln and the manor.
Firewood covers it. So does charcoal, and a kiln turns one firewood into two charcoal, which doubles what a tree is worth in the fire. Kilns are the cheapest fuel upgrade in the game.
One caution on this figure. Our own fuel calculator assumes homes burn twice as much through winter. Nobody has measured that doubling, and the figure above carries no season at all. Two people have now looked at fuel and come back with different shapes. Watch your own woodpile through one winter before trusting either.
A small well covers 15 families, a large one 50. Each family fetches water about once a month, so a well shared too widely shows up as walking time rather than thirst.
Churches gate the upper levels. A wooden church serves level one. Level two wants stone or better. Levels three and four want the large stone church, which is a stone bill worth planning a quarry around.
Food rots on a monthly check. Where it sits decides how much survives, and the difference between a pantry and a large granary is most of your winter.
| Where it sits | Taken off the spoilage roll |
|---|---|
| Pantry (backyard) | −5% |
| Granary | −7% |
| Large granary | −8% |
Each food carries a spoilage band. The band sets the share of a stack lost per check.
| Spoilage band | Share of the stack lost |
|---|---|
| None | nothing |
| Very Low | 1–4% a month |
| Low | 5–8% a month |
| Medium | 9–12% a month |
| High | 13–16% a month |
| Very High | 17–27% a month |
Two rules that catch people. Spoilage rolls per stack, so many small stacks rot faster than one large one. And food sitting in a market stall does not spoil at all, which makes a well-stocked stall a storage decision as much as a supply one.
| Food | Pantry | Granary | Large granary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honey | Very Low | None | None |
| Spices | Very Low | Very Low | None |
| Cheese | Very Low | Very Low | None |
| Animal Feed | Very Low | Very Low | None |
| Mead | Very Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Oats (grain) | Very Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Wheat (grain) | Very Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Rye (grain) | Very Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Barley | Very Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Malt | Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Oat Sheaves | Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Wheat Sheaves | Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Rye Sheaves | Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Beetroot | Low | Very Low | Very Low |
| Carrots | Low | Low | Very Low |
| Herbs | Low | Low | Very Low |
| Cider | Low | Low | Very Low |
| Wheat Flour | Low | Low | Low |
| Rye Flour | Low | Low | Low |
| Cabbages | Low | Low | Low |
| Pastries | Low | Low | Low |
| Quinces | Medium | Low | Low |
| Sausage | Medium | Low | Low |
| Apples | Medium | Low | Low |
| Ale | Medium | Medium | Low |
| Pears | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| Eggs | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| Wheat Bread | High | Medium | Medium |
| Rye Bread | High | Medium | Medium |
| Beef | High | Medium | Medium |
| Mutton | High | Medium | Medium |
| Eel | High | High | Medium |
| Pork | High | High | Medium |
| Chevon | High | High | Medium |
| Milk | High | High | High |
| Mushrooms | High | High | High |
| Small Game | High | High | High |
| Berries | Very High | High | High |
| Chicken | Very High | High | High |
| Carp | Very High | High | High |
Honey, cheese and salted goods barely move. Berries and mushrooms are the opposite, which is why a forager surplus is worth selling in the same season you gather it.
The requirement tables, consumption rates, coverage numbers and spoilage bands on this page were measured in game by Chuckw44 and published with his community tools. We did not measure them. Our own tips supply the strategy around them, and where his figures and ours disagree, both are on the page rather than one quietly replacing the other.
How we use his data, and why we link to his site rather than copy it.
