Fairy Tips for Banished

[Rynea]

Hi all,

I am posting here some random tips that came up during Cohh's streaming .. as Twitch was eating messages I'm posting the collected stuff here. Most if not all is from my own personal experience. I'm currently close to 1700 townfolk and some students and kids myself and so far everything is pretty stable with my first settlement and at about 300700 + kids with my second one in harsh climate, 200 with third and fourth each with small and mountainous maps. Maybe it helps you a little, I might add more when I think of them.

Ryn

Game Version: 1.0.0 Build 140210, 23rd February 2014

Herbalists and Forest Ressource Buildings

As for the herbalist, it counts the mature trees in an area and I just tested it with forestry (including felling trees) as long as you keep other buildings outside and just have 1 barn and a medium sized stockpile as well as 2 or 3 houses in the area, you can put all 4 forest buildings (herbalist, forestry gatherer and hunting cabin) in one place in the middle and the yield is still decent enough to justify it instead of splitting it up and wasting double the forest space.

What you will likely want to do is take 2 or 3 of them, add 3 houses a barn and stockpile and use it that way, because efficiency for using the forest to its fullest does not make up for longer traveling times. An example of a forest expansion is in the posted image below.

Mines and Quarries
For some more information see the post further down

Mines and Quarries are a waste of space and time imo ..
1) stoneworkers have a high chance to die early of rocks,
2) the ressource income is horrible , not enough stone or coal or iron to make it worthwhile
3) there are a lot of iron and stone ressources around just farm them while expanding at the same time and expand earlier instead of taking the time to make these huge mines that net you just a lot of wasted space.
Get more forestry places early and a trade hub and just buy your iron and stone that way. This is way more efficient and won't leave you in trouble once your mines run out and you have no more room to make a new one fast.

Limits

One of the most important limits is the one for firewood, because if you don't set a limit your logs get eaten up and your building gets slowed down considerably. Another important limit is on your tools, as you don't want all your iron get used if you have enough tools.
Don't forget you can also use limits as a notification tool. It's very easy to see buildings on the map that are at the limit with the big yellow icon. If you are working for a specific amount of ressources and just wait for it, you might use limits as a way to make you aware of certain tasks being completed.

Expansions, Centralized or De-centralized?

This comes mostly down to preferred playstyle so please see all below as my own opinions and personal way that I like the most.

Localized autarkic housing places normally work better than huge centralized cities. They are more resistant to desasters, villagers are less likely to die when one main production route got a problem and won't cause a wave of collapsing your whole population like you've seen with Cohh's last city. They do take longer to setup yes, but in the end a slow and steady growth is normally better in the long run than rushing things and end up with dead people.

Also with the current maps, there is rarely if ever one huge big plain. Mostly its split into many many valleys making one big cluster of houses hard to realize. If you centralize all you will end up with production buildings far away and people have to run forever just to get to their workplaces.

As a personal suggestion: All your places should have a barn, a stockpile or a few, some stone houses (4-10) 1 forestry 1 gatherer 1 hunting lodge 1 school 1 hospital 1 woodcutter.
If theres any remaining space around thats not in the wood radius place your other buildings there (fields and orchards and pastures primary), second barns and more stockpiles as necessary for those, 1 blacksmith and 1 tailor normally does fine for ~ 5 of such housing areas but at some point a second one of each will prevent you getting issues is something goes haywire with the first one or if there is a huge distance between them.

Use the main river and flood it with trading hubs as soon as possible (2 should do for a start, more later on). If you go the above mentioned route you will have a huge surplus of firewood to trade.

Take a break! Your old stuff will fall apart otherwise while you're not looking!

Every few minutes of playing, at the least every quarter hour, take the time and pause the game and just click through your existing, especially older buildings. Check 1) If your barns have enough space left 2) If food sources are allocated properly among your barns 3) If your markets have enough people for the population around them and if the workers live in houses close by. also if barns are close to the markets so they can be restocked 4) if you have any big surplus of any one ressource (venison is a good example that at some point quickly floods barns) you might want to move this to tarde hubs for selling for other more required ressources

A primer on food production

Very Early Game / After a desaster: Hunting Cabin
Early Game: Hunting Cabin, Gatherer Hut
Mid Game: Farm Fields, Orchards
Late Game: Pastures

Thoughts behind it:
You want to get a lot of food quickly at the start of the game or after a desaster that caused major problems among your food production because you don't have enough or none, Hunting Cabins net you the best food income per worker and time, even though at the cost of a big area they require to operate properly.

Similar to hunting cabins, Gatherer Huts have a very good efficiency per worker and are a very good follow up building after hunting cabins, because you can stack them into the same wooden areas.
You want to build fields and orchards in mid game because at this point you will likely already have a stable food supply and don't need more food but instead would like to make enough room for other buildings and/or want to give your villagers more variety in their diet. Every different type of food increases the people's health a little. While just one food type will keep them alive, it won't keep them very healthy. Orchards take years to grow and be used properly, fields only provide food once a year, so these are more long term solutions for food.

Fields and orchards can be very efficient. They all vary a little bit depending on the exact type of seed you use, but they average out at about 3-4 times the amount of food per single square compared to a gatherer, not as efficient per worker if you just compare one gatherer building with 1 field, but a lot more space efficient. Make sure you don't overwork a field, 10x10 fields and orchards can all be harvested fully by a single farmer if his home is close by even though the game might offer you to place a second one. Turn the number down from X of 2 to X of 1 so when you raise the number of farmers from your overview you don't assign unnecessary people to already worked fields. Numbers of necessary farmers depends on climate, tools and way from their home to their workplace as well, you might have to tweak it a little depending on your tools and your climate setting.

Pastures can be very expensive for you first have to buy the animals from traders and then already need to have or quickly establish a pasture before the animals die in the trade hub. The rate of food they generate is also not really awesome. The main reason to make these is even more variety and materials you can't get otherwise like wool for clothing. If you have the choice and have to pick one always get sheep first, they provide wool for better clothing. You get some leather from hunting cabins and eggs are just another food source so not as valueable.

Forestry and the different options

By default a forestry will both fell and replant trees with the replanting rate slightly higher than the felling rate. Meaning that if you leave both options set to on, your forest will get thicker over time.
What many are not aware of however is that the tree planting option also gathers stone and iron, making room for new trees. This is useful when you have a new area and don't want to get all your laborers to do the job and are not in a hurry to gather the stone or iron.

[Rynea]

Farms & Orchards

There are many different things to keep in mind about farms and orchards.

"Climate" settings affect how much time you have during the year for you to plant, grow and harvest your crops. The fair climate setting is the average, mild usually gives you more time with cold weather setting in later in the year, harsh makes your timeframe to farm shorter.

For orchards it is the same, but usually less important as they can be harvested faster than crop fields in general.

To farm you need a field and farmers to harvest it. What you can plant depends on your avilable seeds. Depending on your starting settings you might start out with some seeds from the beginning. On "Starting Conditions" set to hard you wont have any seeds. You can get seeds, or get more seeds if you started out with a few, by building a trade post and trade for them. Once you have acquired 1 seed you will be able to plant as many crops of that sort as you like. It is the same for orchards, both orchards and farms require farmers.

You can define the size of your farms and orchards yourself. Bigger fields and orchards will have more trees or plants to harvest each year, but will also take longer to maintain. The bigger the field or orchard the more people you will need to gather all the ressources in time before winter hits and your crops are destroyed from the cold.
The game gives you a pretty good idea of how many farmers you will need to always gather all of your crops in time. The maximum number of workers is usually a good idea for your field. For some situations however you might want to reduce the number of workers for your fields and orchards, because they will still be able to do all the work with less workers.

Things that have an effect on how fast your crops get planted and harvested are the following:

1) How many farmers are working on the field or orchard
2) How far each farmer lives away from a field, effectively how far away their home house is
3) How far the next barn is for the farmers to store the crops, sometimes this can also be done by laborers, but then you need free laborers around the place.
4) What tools your farmers use
5) If your farmers are educated or not
6) How happy your farmers are
7) What type of crop you are planting, each crop type has a different grow rate, with some crops being harder to grow than others.

As a good average guideline, a 10x10 field in harsh climate, can be maintained by a single farmer, as long as the barn and his homehouse are very close by and he is using steel tools, is educated and has 4 or more happiness. Its normally a good idea to check your farms for a few years to see what size your fields should be. Keep in mind that at some point all of your villagers should be educated and have steel tools, so it might be better to leave less farmers even if they do not manage to harvest all of it with iron tools and uneducated .. if they leave about 10% of the field, you might be better off in the long run to leave it as it is, waste 10% of your farm that will be gathered later on with better equipment. Otherwise you assign a second farmer for these 10% .. a farmer that can (if they have the same equipment) net you another 90% of another field.

Orchards are very similar to farms, require less time to harvest, but have a few years where no fruits will be produced and all that happens is the trees growing.

Also for both farms and orchards, try to not have the same type of crop next to each other and don't make huge huge fields or orchards. It's not uncommon that insects ruin a full orchard or field, and as long as the same type of orchard of field is not next to each other they cannot jump over to the next field/orcherd. Keep a good variety of at least 2 types of ressource and you can avoid having more than a single field being destroyed

[Rynea]

Forestry Expansion Example

http://postimg.org/image/i6bbgk8e7/

[itsZdan]

is there a way i can give you a prize? a medal? something? this is alot of good information, very well done Rynea

[Rynea]

Mines & Quarries and the problem of gathering iron and stone and coal

You might think a mine or a quarry is a good idea at some point. After all you can use mountains for mines, that are otherwise hardly useful for anything, and at some point the iron might run out.

Now in general it is a good idea to have one or two mines and quarries around to be able to produce some stone and iron on your own. However the real issue with them currently is the tragically low outcome of ressources / worker.

A single miner will only gets you 40 iron or coal in a full game year cycle with steel tools. Unless you have a serious o9verabundance of people that you can't use somewhere else anyways, then its likely better to use them elsewhere. Don't forget that mines need stone and quarries need iron, so a lot of your gathered ressources is likely spent on the building itself and it takes several ingame years till they are worthwhile again, the 40 income is not even real net income because some of it will be spent on the tools.

On top of that they are, even though they last long, at some point running dry, leaving you with a big building you can't get rid of properly. As surface stone and iron will run out quickly at some point, the only alternative (and a really good one at that!) is trading for these materials. Use the people you would otherwise place into mines for foresting and woodcutting and sell firewood. This will with 2 or more trading posts net you more iron and coal for your workers time than having them mine.

Trading

In order to gather the necessary stone, iron and coal you will want to trade. At the beginning this can be a little bit worrysome.

First of all there is a limited number of merchants for your world, likely somewhere between 5 and 10 (I never took the time to actually count).

One of those random merchants will be picked and will visit you each year. One merchant per year per trading post building. This means if you have one trade post, you can trade once a game year with a merchant. If you have two trading posts you will get two merchant visits each ingame year (one per trade post)

Every merchant has a set of goods that he/she sells. Normally each merchant has a type of stock, like a food merchant, a seed merchant, a livestock merchant, a tools and raw ressource merchant etc.

The first you want to do is to build 2 or more trading posts. It also works with one, but will likely not be enough to get enough variety of merchants, the more trading posts the higher the chance is that one stops by with something that you might need.

In specific you are looking for the traders that sell you stone, iron and coal. Once one of those merchants sets anchor in your trading post, switch to the orders tab and then select iron, stone and coal and hit the dropdown menu, selecting "every year" from it. The next time this specific merchant visits your trade post he will bring you some or all of these goods, even though at a higher price. Do this with every single merchant that stops by and at some point all of the merchants that have raw ressources for sale will bring you coal stone and iron each time they stop by.

With enough other goods stocked (I normally produce a big surplus of logs and firewood and then stock up my trade posts each with 2000 firewood permanently) you can trade for the stone, iron and coal.

Important to note is that the more goods you buy, the more this specific merchant will bring with his ship next time he visits. You might only get 20-100 of one ressource at the beginning, but if you regularly buy all of their ressources that you ordered they will soon stop by with a lot more of the ressources, more than you might ever need.
You can then basically trade 2 firewood for 1 stone or 2 firewood for 1 iron or for 1 coal. With each trade post you have about a 1 out of 3 chance to hit a merchant with these raw ressource goods. Meaning you can trade for hundreds of stone/iron/coal at least every other game year. As for the other 2/3rd chance they normally bring you seeds livestock and food, which is likely only interesting in the beginning, till you have all seeds unlocked, but might be useful at some point if you have a problem with your food chains or if you don't produce a specific food type yet and want to offer your villagers more variety

For my 300 population village in harsh climate, I'm currently using 1 stoneworker and 1 miner and that only because I don't want the yellow sign to show up as it distracts me from other things. I'm not using miners or stoneworkers at all, getting all my stone/iron and coal ressources via two trading posts and have more surplus of it than I could ever wish for, on top of that my traders can never run out of ressources.

Obviously you can do the same with food, although the trade hubs have a limited capacity, so don't store too many things to sell, because otherwise you won't be able to buy a lot and always get annoying messages telling you that you don't have enough capacity for the trade. High value items like warm coats are good for trading as well, if you manage to get a surplus of these they will use up way less storage space.

[Rynea]

is there a way i can give you a prize? a medal? something? this is alot of good information, very well done Rynea

You're welcome, it's just my view on things really. There are a multitude of other possible ways to go about it, but sometimes its good to know what might be working.

[Rynea]

Market's and the Starvation of the Villagers

Lets take a closer look at Markets and this dreaded question of why those poor people die even though all around them there are enough ressources.

The answer to this question is actually not what I would have believed in the first place.
In general people gather food on their own from barns and transport it to their homeplaces, then eat the food in their homes. The only thing a Market is supposed to do is prevent the people in the houses in the Market area to collect the food from Barns and have them collect it from the Market instead.

That by itself it does, so far so good. But it also does something else and here is the part that will totally get your population killed one by one as soon as your settlements grow or expand farther.

Markets make people in houses in their area unable to switch homeplaces under most conditions.

Sounds wierd so why would that kill our nice villagers? Simple enough, during their daily tasks villagers switch not only jobs, but also homesteads all the time. Imagine a farmer. When it gets winter, a farmer acts similar to a laborer, cutting down trees and rocks that you want gone, helping carry materials to new buildings and so on. How this normally works is that the farmer temporarily switches homesteads if his new workplace is far away, basically making his home temporary somewhere else and also making him able to pick up food wherever he currently works.

Without this being possible our farmer travels all over the map to cut down that tree on our new plot for, lets say the new hospital .. only to find out that because of our Market he cannot switch home, is stuck with a home on the other side of the map and suddenly gets hungry. Instead of going to a home close by as he would normally do when he switched homes, he has to travel all the way back to his original house, likely getting himself killed in the process.

The answer to this is simple enough. Don't use Markets as nice as they may appear. With enough supply you will be surprised how easy your population redistributes ressources and keeps every place stocked up properly as long as you have some free laborers all the time.

I see this as a logical flaw in the game, we will likely see a patch at some points so that people can eat food or grab ressources in every available house. Or perhaps there will be options to designate houses as temporary homes .. whatever it is, for the current version I would strongly advise not to use markets at all.

It should be noted that even without Markets your villagers will die more often the more expansive your settlements become. Especially during big building operations and reassigning professions be careful!

EDIT: Ok we have several reported bugs of townfolk running off for no good reason. Sometimes off to parts of the maps that are empty, sometimes to other production buildings.

Markets makes the problem more apparent for some reason as it probably does something to home and profession reassignment, but even without them the Problem is somewhat manageable even though it will really make your overall grow rate much slower as it kills several villagers per year with larger settlements.

[Rynea]

Why setting your Food Limit to 500.000 might be problematic ...

Because you need a lot of Barns. A LOT of barns! ALL THE BARNS!
http://s11.postimg.org/vmhs84hhv/fairybarns.png

[itsZdan]

following some tips on your guide i made it to year 8 with not a single death

[darkrat61]

This guide is amazing. The only problem I have right now is that I don't know where to expand since I have an abundance of everything using firewood to trade.

[lowco2525]

Rynea- these tips are simply amazing! Thank you so much. I have a question about hospitals- is it worth having a doctor employed all the time, even if there is no sickness? Are there any benefits?

[Rstamper01]

A tip for Pastures. Have a few large ones and multiple smaller ones, so refilling them is easier.

I so far have 2 large pastures. One with 25 sheep, and the other with 60 chickens.
Then on the other side of town i have two other pastures that are half the size with 12 sheep and the other with 30 chickens.
I had a disease ravage the 30 chickens, so i slaughtered them all, split the 12 sheep to it, so i had 6 and 6, then "emptied" it so the sheep went back to the 12 pasture and it removed the disease.
Then I went back to my main with 60 chickens and split that one so it immediately refilled my secondary pen to 30 so it could continue producing food.
The main chicken pasture then took about a year to fill back up to 60 and my losses were undone.

So far i had my first death of old age around year 18 or so. The only time i've lost people "not to old age", was a few miners got crushed by rocks, and a tornage tore through town and killed 1/5th of my population (lost 9 people), which hurt but i had enough left to farm and keep the rest alive to rebuild.

[Rynea]

Rynea- these tips are simply amazing! Thank you so much. I have a question about hospitals- is it worth having a doctor employed all the time, even if there is no sickness? Are there any benefits?

If you grow your village slowly and steadily you should have enough villagers to keep the physicians permanently at place. The real problem with plagues is that it gets harder and harder to get rid of them once they spread. You want your villagers to directly go to the hospital as fast as possible. If you have no one who is taking the job of physician, then it will take a while after you assign someone to go to his working place and start his job, and during this time your patient won't go to the hospital, often spreading the sickness to 2 or 3 more villagers.

Also jumbling around jobs can often confuse the AI in bigger villages and cause a major wave of switching homesteads, that in most cases delays production and might cause some people to run around uselessly.

Unless you have no other option, leave the people with professions other than builder where they are once you assigned them. Other than that, as far as I know, an active hospital gives no other benefit and it is not really necessary to keep someone at that job if you want to take the risk to have a little delayed healing for a possible plague.

[Rynea]

This guide is amazing. The only problem I have right now is that I don't know where to expand since I have an abundance of everything using firewood to trade.

There comes a point when all there is left to the game is working on the achievements and trying out new ways to do something. I'm not sure if I will start another village myself any time soon, as I've already invested like 60-70 hours into it and currently setting up some mods for Skyrim to play that one again, but if I do, I would like to see if it's possible to play with a very small population (say 10-15 houses) by switching professions all the time.

I mean, I'd try it with just trading and houses .. but there is no slavery implemented in the game yet, so newborn babies as a ressource are not that valueable

[originalsin17]

Thanks so much for the posts, you don't know how much I wanted to play this game but died so often I put it down. After reading your posts I am doing great in the game. Thanks for restoring my fondness for this game.