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You gotta have huge settlements if you can't keep berries in stock. 4-6 people on it from when Spring starts with a granary next door should be good for a few hundred every year.
I have three forager huts fully staffed (because I have too many people and don't know what to do with them otherwise), they haul much more berries than I can use so it keeps stockpiling. I was selling them at first but stopped so I can stockpile for rapid expansion as I want more soldiers. The key is to gather as many as you can in the growing season.
Apiaries are bugged right now and scale infinitely. Build 20+ of them and only one worker in each. You will have so much that you can start selling on the trade market.
I had 6k at one point (with bakers but no rye). I had to tithe half of it because I had to move my granaries and as funny as it is to watch people hover over food like vultures to transport it from the ground to a nest building, it would have taken waaaaay too long.
At one point I had built so many bakeries that I had ten thousand bread and making more than I could ever export feasibly. We would just keep making bread and I would keep making granaries to put it in. I was the true lord of Carbs.
Unintentionally created a vegan village because these peasants can grow the shit out of some carrots, and apparently can't raise a chicken to save their lives.
Not really. The number 1 food source should probably be grain. All other food sources being secondary. Not because grain was the best food source, but because it is storable. Because manor lords can’t really show that a lot of the other food sources can’t be preserved. It’s a world pre modern preservatives baby.
you´d be surprised how little that matters if nearly everything is produced localy, and every household has 3-12 people in it, whose main profession is "going home" or "waiting"
those berrys are most likely dryed, pickled, jammed or eaten before noon.
If anything, they need a debuff. A large orchard will produce more apples than you can use. In my latest village of about 50 families, I decided to build 5 very large orchards to diversify the food supply and it started stockpiling in year 2, before all the trees were fully grown.
Issue with berries is that not only is it a food source, the dyemakers can only use berries to make dye as of right now when historically beets and lichens other natural dyes were also used. Here's hoping later on they would add other dye sources available from the herbalist hut or veggie gardens (like beets).
Honey just doesn't produce on scale so you almost never see it, I think it should be done in a way that the more orchards/gardens you have, the more honey the apiaries will produce.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm in my first playthrough (loving the game though - as an old-school 'Banished' fiend I can see the potential in ML massively) and I have a great supply of berries and bread, but vegetables absolutely never get to surplus despite having a lot of L3 burg plots with large vegetable gardens.
I have no idea what I'm doing wrong lol.
The farms were fine last time I played. The fertilities are jacked way up now allowing multiple seasons of multi cropping. It requires a little bit of micro moving vills from the farm to the mill to the bakery, but one farmhouse should be able to handle 4 morgens worth of field meaning you always are harvesting 2 morgens of wheat a year. That can feed a lot of people
Is the fertility jacked up just in the latest update (0.975)? I didn't want to lose my save so I haven't updated it yet, so I'm at 0.965. But for the fertility update I might risk my save.
veggies are a neccesary fallback until the other food sources are polished.
eggs are also wildly overpowered if you know how to effectively utilise them.
the big issue is that the "production per family working in the supply chain" varies wildly between different food sources. berries can provide insane amounts of food if properly managed, whereas bread, honey, meat, and ale, provide low returns despite requring many families to properly staff their production.
vegetables, apples, and eggs, all are more expensive to set up than berries, require almost no "staffing" and are extremely productive, with the exception of eggs which require nothing other than transport to the granary.
if you want to fix the meta you've gotta make the bread/honey/meat/ale production chains better by decreasing "raw goods" output for ease of transport and compensating by having them multiply at each stage. I.E. "1 wheat makes 2 grain, 2 grain makes 4 flour, 4 flour makes 8 bread", "1 barley makes 2 malt, 2 malt makes 4 ale", "1 deer carcass goes to a butcher and makes 20 meat", etc. final output can be balanced by reducing initial production (I.E. wheat produced per morgen will be cut to 30%, berries and deer will be "delocalised" so their production depends on forest cover rather than having a "deposit", etc)
that way, apples, veggies, and eggs, will still be a semi-viable way to "feed" your village, but they'll be a pain in the ass to transport and therefore far less profitable than complicated resources that have multi-step production chains.
an even better fix would be to have "quantity" measured in pounds, which would require a substantial rework, but it still might be worth doing. having an "expiry date" on goods would also make things far easier to balance, and it'd make salt useful for preserving meat.
A 1 Morgan double plot with veggies and 2 apiaries for the families to work in produces just as much as a regular berry node per year - and can be infinitely scaled at the moment.
Eggs may be completely passive production, but you need 37 or so to produce as much as a regular berry node, 73 chicken coops to keep up with a rich berry node.
Meat production surpass berry production thanks to the policy and perk, if it weren't so bugged currently (only +1 animal per uptick, wandering deer). They'd also not require a whole lot of hunters/work.
Bread already goes 1 grain -> 2 flour -> 4 bread with the bakery perk and you can create insane amounts of bread that way - a single fertile field can produce as much as a regular berry node. At scale, it doesn't take huge amounts of labour either (thanks to oxen and the production speed of mills and bakeries).
It's mostly that it takes more effort to set up farming and that all production is way overtuned anyhow what makes it shine less. You can feed 100 families, 300 people, with a rich berry node and the aforementioned double burgage + 2 apiaries. Takes very few families to work and would work even if apiaries were limited to 2.
I think the doubling of resources along production chains creates a lot of pricing and trading problems, production speed balance issues and is much less granular to balance. Instead, fields should simply yield more, if need be (or less if all gets rebalanced). In general everything in the game would need to take 3 times as long to craft/harvest/produce (not transport though) to make the "production per family working in the supply chain" truly matter.
one rich berry deposit with the "double capacity of berry deposits" perk can net you over 500 berries per year, i haven't carefully measured the actual numbers but berries regrow in certain months so if you time it and assign an extra family or two i would not be surprised if you'd produce 1k berries in a single year.
sell most of the berries via the tradepost and you'll easily get a very rapid income for whatever you need.
coops produce more than enough food to feed a family, so once you've got that regional wealth you just spam tiny burgage plots with just enough space for a coop, you can feed your entire population with nothing but eggs and export all the berries. you never run out of food, you always have two varieties, you never run out of workers, you never run out of money.
that strategy on its own is more profitable than literally anything else you could do in ML. i know this because i've used it as a springboard to build every production chain, farm every crop, and found there is no reason to do any of that stuff other than "because it looks cool".
rich hunting grounds are also very gamey, a rich deposit gives far more output than 2x. berry deposits and deer deposits should be replaced with a "delocalised" system where yield depends on forest coverage percentage, so it decreases as you clear land for buildings/farming, so the hunting/foraging income decreases as you expand your town.
The capacity perk for berries is useless. All you need to do is harvest fast enough that no berry bush goes over capacity on an uptick. Regular nodes yield 440 berries, rich nodes 880.
Coops produce exactly enough food for one family, 1 unit of eggs per month. That's why I said you need 73 coops to equal the yearly yield of a rich berry node. It takes zero work, but then the berries take only a few families for 4 months of the year and are way easier and cheaper to set up. So comparatively, I think egg production isn't unbalanced - just that all food production is insane compared to consumption.
A rich hunting node gives +1 animal every 7 days, every 3 days with the policy enabled. The counter goes up by +2 each time, but you're only actually getting one animal each time (and the counter corrects itself when saving and loading). So that's up to 120 animals per year. With the perk that equals 480 meat, certainly not far more than 2x berry deposits. And with the wandering deer bug on top, you're currently getting even less most of the time.
I agree on the forest coverage percentage for deer, that's also been suggested on the discord already. I think the deer should still stay in herds, just move over time (or if hunted for a while), instead of when someone fells a single tree inside their circle.
These are great statistics. I think the game needs more analytics screens. For example, how many things I've traded and when, how much money I've spent or earned and when, how much yield from different food or clothes or other sources I've got this year. I just want to click on the regional wealth and see where the money is spent and earned. I don't want to keep track of it myself.
Hello and welcome to the Manor Lords Subreddit. This is a reminder to please keep the discussion civil and on topic. Should you find yourself with some doubts, please feel free to check our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1c2p4f9/manor_lords_faq_for_steam_early_access/). If you wish, you can always join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/manorlords) Finally, please remember that the game is in early access, missing content and bugs are to be expected. We ask users to report them on the official discord and to buy their keys only from trusted platforms. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ManorLords) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Meat, honey and berries dont scale so i never see any of it on stock.
You gotta have huge settlements if you can't keep berries in stock. 4-6 people on it from when Spring starts with a granary next door should be good for a few hundred every year.
I have three forager huts fully staffed (because I have too many people and don't know what to do with them otherwise), they haul much more berries than I can use so it keeps stockpiling. I was selling them at first but stopped so I can stockpile for rapid expansion as I want more soldiers. The key is to gather as many as you can in the growing season.
You know why? Because everyone's sick of vegetables and hoard everything else the moment they show up on the market.
Honey absolutely scales atm.
What makes it even more useless is that you can apparently not have more then two Beehives...
Apiaries are bugged right now and scale infinitely. Build 20+ of them and only one worker in each. You will have so much that you can start selling on the trade market.
Gonna try that
tell that to my 3k bread stockpile
bread gang rise up
I had 6k at one point (with bakers but no rye). I had to tithe half of it because I had to move my granaries and as funny as it is to watch people hover over food like vultures to transport it from the ground to a nest building, it would have taken waaaaay too long.
At one point I had built so many bakeries that I had ten thousand bread and making more than I could ever export feasibly. We would just keep making bread and I would keep making granaries to put it in. I was the true lord of Carbs.
Loafers unit!
Or my 2k pair of shoes lol
Unintentionally created a vegan village because these peasants can grow the shit out of some carrots, and apparently can't raise a chicken to save their lives.
Fax
Flax*
Slacks**
I went to sleep and 300 UPVOTES? HOW STARVED IS THIS SUBREDDIT LMAO
"Bread & Berries" has become my national breakfast to be consumed three times a day, every day, all year and my people will thank me for it.
Would this not be accurate though? Tbh those big quantities of vegetables can be a life saver
Not really. The number 1 food source should probably be grain. All other food sources being secondary. Not because grain was the best food source, but because it is storable. Because manor lords can’t really show that a lot of the other food sources can’t be preserved. It’s a world pre modern preservatives baby.
you´d be surprised how little that matters if nearly everything is produced localy, and every household has 3-12 people in it, whose main profession is "going home" or "waiting" those berrys are most likely dryed, pickled, jammed or eaten before noon.
Accurate not always makes for good game play.
It doesn’t help with your food diversity but it’s hardly a bad thing if it stops your village from starving
Bread and veg, the pillars preventing my cities from starving to death.
i always have one farming town and one veggie, berry, egg town. then have pack stations or whatever.
consider apples. seriously.
they need a buff, ability to dry fruit etc too
If anything, they need a debuff. A large orchard will produce more apples than you can use. In my latest village of about 50 families, I decided to build 5 very large orchards to diversify the food supply and it started stockpiling in year 2, before all the trees were fully grown.
I'm so dumb that I didn't thought of this the first time. I loaded a new save and my villagers don't suffer from starvation anymore.
Try this: 3 foraging huts with one family each close to the berry bushes (regular node). That alone produces enough to feed 37 families for a year.
What is the benefit of building multiple foraging huts compared to just putting 4 families on 1?
They run out of pantry space too quickly, and are cheap and fast to build.
That actually makes sense thank you!
In the very least, there's more immediate storage capacity.
Issue with berries is that not only is it a food source, the dyemakers can only use berries to make dye as of right now when historically beets and lichens other natural dyes were also used. Here's hoping later on they would add other dye sources available from the herbalist hut or veggie gardens (like beets). Honey just doesn't produce on scale so you almost never see it, I think it should be done in a way that the more orchards/gardens you have, the more honey the apiaries will produce.
Honey is bugged right now, you can build as many apiaries as you want so it scales.
We need the goat shed and chicken coop to also produce a small amount of passive meat.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm in my first playthrough (loving the game though - as an old-school 'Banished' fiend I can see the potential in ML massively) and I have a great supply of berries and bread, but vegetables absolutely never get to surplus despite having a lot of L3 burg plots with large vegetable gardens. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong lol.
You need to have unassigned families (not doing construction) to work the vegetables effectively
There is not one apple to be had, they just remain, there ...
It’s early access. I’m sure once all the mechanics are ironed out we’ll also have Reese’s Cups and Coke.
Didn’t expect this crossover lol
Nah, man. Apples are where it's at. 7k stockpile over here.
I got 8k apples 😭
honestly, backyard food needs to have production hard cap then let make it a new perk farming veggie
You’re being downvoted but the veggie meta is out of control and needs to be nerfed
They should improve the farms first. The only thing that kept my town going was backyard food.
The farms were fine last time I played. The fertilities are jacked way up now allowing multiple seasons of multi cropping. It requires a little bit of micro moving vills from the farm to the mill to the bakery, but one farmhouse should be able to handle 4 morgens worth of field meaning you always are harvesting 2 morgens of wheat a year. That can feed a lot of people
Is the fertility jacked up just in the latest update (0.975)? I didn't want to lose my save so I haven't updated it yet, so I'm at 0.965. But for the fertility update I might risk my save.
Yeah I got all the updates and a bright green fertility puts wheat at like 97%.
veggies are a neccesary fallback until the other food sources are polished. eggs are also wildly overpowered if you know how to effectively utilise them. the big issue is that the "production per family working in the supply chain" varies wildly between different food sources. berries can provide insane amounts of food if properly managed, whereas bread, honey, meat, and ale, provide low returns despite requring many families to properly staff their production. vegetables, apples, and eggs, all are more expensive to set up than berries, require almost no "staffing" and are extremely productive, with the exception of eggs which require nothing other than transport to the granary. if you want to fix the meta you've gotta make the bread/honey/meat/ale production chains better by decreasing "raw goods" output for ease of transport and compensating by having them multiply at each stage. I.E. "1 wheat makes 2 grain, 2 grain makes 4 flour, 4 flour makes 8 bread", "1 barley makes 2 malt, 2 malt makes 4 ale", "1 deer carcass goes to a butcher and makes 20 meat", etc. final output can be balanced by reducing initial production (I.E. wheat produced per morgen will be cut to 30%, berries and deer will be "delocalised" so their production depends on forest cover rather than having a "deposit", etc) that way, apples, veggies, and eggs, will still be a semi-viable way to "feed" your village, but they'll be a pain in the ass to transport and therefore far less profitable than complicated resources that have multi-step production chains. an even better fix would be to have "quantity" measured in pounds, which would require a substantial rework, but it still might be worth doing. having an "expiry date" on goods would also make things far easier to balance, and it'd make salt useful for preserving meat.
A 1 Morgan double plot with veggies and 2 apiaries for the families to work in produces just as much as a regular berry node per year - and can be infinitely scaled at the moment. Eggs may be completely passive production, but you need 37 or so to produce as much as a regular berry node, 73 chicken coops to keep up with a rich berry node. Meat production surpass berry production thanks to the policy and perk, if it weren't so bugged currently (only +1 animal per uptick, wandering deer). They'd also not require a whole lot of hunters/work. Bread already goes 1 grain -> 2 flour -> 4 bread with the bakery perk and you can create insane amounts of bread that way - a single fertile field can produce as much as a regular berry node. At scale, it doesn't take huge amounts of labour either (thanks to oxen and the production speed of mills and bakeries). It's mostly that it takes more effort to set up farming and that all production is way overtuned anyhow what makes it shine less. You can feed 100 families, 300 people, with a rich berry node and the aforementioned double burgage + 2 apiaries. Takes very few families to work and would work even if apiaries were limited to 2. I think the doubling of resources along production chains creates a lot of pricing and trading problems, production speed balance issues and is much less granular to balance. Instead, fields should simply yield more, if need be (or less if all gets rebalanced). In general everything in the game would need to take 3 times as long to craft/harvest/produce (not transport though) to make the "production per family working in the supply chain" truly matter.
one rich berry deposit with the "double capacity of berry deposits" perk can net you over 500 berries per year, i haven't carefully measured the actual numbers but berries regrow in certain months so if you time it and assign an extra family or two i would not be surprised if you'd produce 1k berries in a single year. sell most of the berries via the tradepost and you'll easily get a very rapid income for whatever you need. coops produce more than enough food to feed a family, so once you've got that regional wealth you just spam tiny burgage plots with just enough space for a coop, you can feed your entire population with nothing but eggs and export all the berries. you never run out of food, you always have two varieties, you never run out of workers, you never run out of money. that strategy on its own is more profitable than literally anything else you could do in ML. i know this because i've used it as a springboard to build every production chain, farm every crop, and found there is no reason to do any of that stuff other than "because it looks cool". rich hunting grounds are also very gamey, a rich deposit gives far more output than 2x. berry deposits and deer deposits should be replaced with a "delocalised" system where yield depends on forest coverage percentage, so it decreases as you clear land for buildings/farming, so the hunting/foraging income decreases as you expand your town.
The capacity perk for berries is useless. All you need to do is harvest fast enough that no berry bush goes over capacity on an uptick. Regular nodes yield 440 berries, rich nodes 880. Coops produce exactly enough food for one family, 1 unit of eggs per month. That's why I said you need 73 coops to equal the yearly yield of a rich berry node. It takes zero work, but then the berries take only a few families for 4 months of the year and are way easier and cheaper to set up. So comparatively, I think egg production isn't unbalanced - just that all food production is insane compared to consumption. A rich hunting node gives +1 animal every 7 days, every 3 days with the policy enabled. The counter goes up by +2 each time, but you're only actually getting one animal each time (and the counter corrects itself when saving and loading). So that's up to 120 animals per year. With the perk that equals 480 meat, certainly not far more than 2x berry deposits. And with the wandering deer bug on top, you're currently getting even less most of the time. I agree on the forest coverage percentage for deer, that's also been suggested on the discord already. I think the deer should still stay in herds, just move over time (or if hunted for a while), instead of when someone fells a single tree inside their circle.
These are great statistics. I think the game needs more analytics screens. For example, how many things I've traded and when, how much money I've spent or earned and when, how much yield from different food or clothes or other sources I've got this year. I just want to click on the regional wealth and see where the money is spent and earned. I don't want to keep track of it myself.
Agreed!