Food preservation question

I don’t think that food preservation generally reduces value. The only thing I can think about is bread compared to grain, that loses trade value but the baker increases the amount quite well, so if you have the manpower, it’s worth it. But it’s not as profitable as in many other mods. You can actually increase the value of some food if you want to trade it away, like making cheese or salted meat but here you need to import salt.

The simplest way to process meat is smoking, but you must always make the decision, what’s more important; food or fuel. Often it’s easier to assign another hunter than to increase the firewood production.

Yes, I find too that gathering food manually gives more and gatherers huts are indeed useless in a harsh climate. But in a mild climate I often use them, especially if I can locate one close to a streem where I can catch crayfish. Gatherers prefere crayfishing and if I set a handful of crayfish spots in late autumn, they catch a lot of crayfish and will automatically go back to gather first firewood and honey, then berries and mushrooms when the spots are depleated.

Yes, you do need to set the spots manually. I´ll show you a screenshot from my present game how I make it. It´s Ironman, so they need a lot of food but the climate is mild.

The gatherer´s hut is located in the forest together with the goahti, a hunter´s hut and a storage. Now it´s Sun Month (June), the gatherer is back in the forest. At the moment he will mostly pick deadwood but firewood is needed too, so that´s fine. But as soon as the berries are ripe, he will start to pick blueberries and some mushrooms and roots. For good and bad, it´s one difference between gatherers who only pick fully ripe plants and labourers who pick everything that´s marked, also the smallest bushes that give almost nothing. When frost comes he will go back to pick deadwood until I remember to set new crayfish spots. Then he catches crayfish until all spots are depleted, mostly sometimes in spring-early summer when he goes back to the forest automatically. Works well, give a lot of food and some firewood without all too much micromanagement.

You can also see the size of my fields, orchards and pastures that was discussed in that other thread. Here, in the beginning, it´s rather finding a suitable spot than to optimize the size. The orchard is 10X13 a good size in the North if you are rare on workers. A side of 4, 7, 10, 13, 16…. doesn´t spoil area. I would have made it smaller if I had more workers. The orchard hasn´t given any fruit yet but also when it does, it will be closed until harvest where I guess I will use 2 farmers.

I have beans and barely, the weight and growing properties are similar in this climate. One field 8X10 is too small the other 8X16 maybe a bit too large but you can see, they fit on the spots. I use to switch crop between the two fields. I have 1 farmer at the small and 2 at the large.

The pasture is 10×20 but will be rebuilt to 20×20 when the herd grows. I simply don´t have enough workers to clear so much land at the same time. I primarily want the wool.