Food
Food is the collection of many consumable resources that can be consumed by citizens, and can be acquired in many ways.
Overview
As one would very obviously expect, food is one of the most important things to manage in a settlement. Food can spoil, with each food item having different levels of how fast they can spoil, therefore it must be stored in a warehouse to greatly slow the spoiling process. Food consumption can be further controlled by specifying which species can have which foods.
There are nine food items in the game: fish, rations drinks, bread, eggs, meat, mushrooms and vegetables. Each species in the game have unique preferences of food. Cretonians are vegetarians, as they prefer fruit, vegetables, bread and eggs. Dondorians are somewhat of the opposite, as they love meat, fish and mushrooms. Cantors prefers meat fish and eggs. Garthimis prefer meat and fish. Humans prefer bread, fish, mushrooms and eggs. Tilapis prefer meat, bread, fruit and vegetables. When food is stored, there is a number that appears above the list of all resources, which shows how many days of food is stored.
Because of the different preferences of food between species, it's in the player's interest to keep as many types of food stored as possible, as to cater to every type of citizen and maximize the chances of making everyone happy.
Acquiring
There are many ways that food can be obtained. One way is for citizens to make it or find it themselves, which ranges from collecting it from wild plants to constructing buildings with the purpose of creating or farming for it. For example, this could be a brewery making drinks, catching fish from a fishery or making a climate-appropriate farm which can grow a variety of crops, provided that the seeds to these resources are already obtained beforehand. Another way of obtaining food is through trading. Lastly, animals can be hunted for meat.
When starting a new game and choosing a location for your settlement, every location has a distinct climate: cold, temperate and warm. Some temperatures disallow certain farms to be made. For example, temperate and warm climates deny mushroom farms to be made, as the heat of the sun would damage them.
When hunting animals with the help of a hunter building, hunters will always be able to get meat from any animal they manage to kill. All animals provide meat, while most provide a secondary resource alongside that. Wild plants can also be harvested for food, but only during certain seasons. This is a good way to obtain seeds for certain farms, because - as mentioned before - farms cannot be made if the matching resource's seeds are not in a settlement's inventory in any way.
If citizens are hungry enough, they will eat food straight out of a stockpile on the ground or from a storage area.
Preparation
The best way most foods can be enjoyed is if they are eaten from an eatery or canteen, because any food stored in those buildings can be made into meals. Both of those buildings provide more happiness to a citizen if food is eaten from there than if they ate food from anywhere else. Though a canteen provides this in a better, higher quality way. Taverns also work the same way, but only with drinks. The player can choose which foods are allowed at an eatery or canteen, though serving all of them is recommended, so that all possible preferences of citizens are being catered to.
However, it might be best to not serve a certain type of food if there's a low amount of it in your settlement, or if it's best used elsewhere.
Supplying armies
- Main article: Army supply depot
There are two food resources that can be sent to campaigning armies out on the world map. These are rations and drinks. If an army is not supplied with these resources (including clothes), they will lose morale and eventually disband their divisions/armies. This is done by stockpiling these in an army supply depot. Anything stored in a supply depot will be sent over to all campaigning armies evenly.
Note that each supply depot can only store one resource at a time, meaning that multiple depots need to be built to send multiple resource types.
Breeding
- Main article: Breeding
After building any of the following buildings: Cretonian breeder, Garthimi hatchery, Human hatchery or Tilapi nursery; vegetables, meat and fruit (for both the Human and Tilapi variants) respectively will be required to feed the children inside them, otherwise they will starve to death.