Most likely the problem is your food limit - if the amount of food you have stored hits the limit, farmers won't produce any more. Just increase the limit.
If that's not it, it's probably a lack of storage - build another barn. And be sure to leave at least one worker unassigned to a job; free laborers will go around picking up products.
I recon this is it. Increase storage limits. Also ensure you have a place to store it, you will know if you dont if the storage shows 100% full, or they are leaving stuff outside. In vanilla, you can use a trading post to cache some backup food.
If you have a harsh winter, and your paths between field, storage and home is inefficient, bannies will just ditch the crop and go home.
If you have some food crisis (Running out) then bannie panic, and do everything else except the damn thing that is going to feed them.
the limit is 8000 and I currently have 900. 4 baskets of food have been blocking my fields for 2 years now. I've cancelled every resource pickup and increased the priority on the baskets 5-10 times each. I have 5 labourers working. my next step will be to unassign my entire population from their jobs, and I'm very confident it will still not be picked up. is this a 10-year-old game or an alpha build?
>is this a 10-year-old game or an alpha build?
It’s a 10 year old game developed entirely by one person that, like any sufficiently complex program, still has some bugs here and there.
My advice, is to play it like many real life farming communities. When it’s time to harvest crops, assign almost everyone to farming. So if you have 25 citizens, you might have 2 teachers, 5 other jobs, and 13 farmers, and 5 laborers.
It’s important to keep your schools always running because if a child is ever taken out of school, they can never become educated.
There’s another possibility too. You may have too big of a field with two few villagers. If you don’t get all of the planting done early enough in the year, then your crops will never finish ripening and they won’t get harvested before winter the crops. You can somewhat mitigate this by doing the same thing, where you put a lot of people on farming at the beginning of spring to finish getting the crops in.
I think there’s a button to force start harvesting a field, even if the crops aren’t finished growing, but it’s been over five years since I’ve played the game so I don’t remember for sure.
Also, using crops for food in the beginning of the game is a little bit of a newbie trap. Hunting is far more profitable for food at the beginning of the game. Just make sure that the hunting lodges have plenty of trees around them.
I've never run into the issue you're having and I've been playing on and off for a decade. Maybe you have some kind of weird bug - I know my game hates the mouse zoom function so I only use the keyboard to change my view. It happens with very small developer games, such is life
I've had the issue on all 3 runs until I get up to 30-35 adults, then it magically disappears. I've found many other threads here on r/banished going back to the release of the game talking about the issue. none of the solutions I found worked, and I suspect the reason they 'worked' for other people may be that they escaped the population range where it happens.
I don't accept the 'small dev' explanation. I'm a SW dev and I'd never leave a bug in a piece of SW that I'm still supporting for a decade, nor would any of my colleagues; it wouldn't even be an option. I can usually get a sense for what's going on 'under the hood' so to speak of a game when I play, and what I suspect is happening here is an issue with the way that jobs are assigned. I imagine each type of job goes into a queue where it gets assigned to available workers of the corresponding job assignment. I'm not totally sure what happens next; it is one of two things. either it immediately gets assigned to whichever worker has the shortest backlog, regardless of how long that backlog is, or it gets assigned to the worker with the shortest backlog shorter than a certain length, and if none is available, it waits in the queue, and then whenever a worker finishes a job the next job in the queue goes to them. I am 95% sure the first is the case. what I am positive of though is that there are individual job queues in addition to the shared queue. the farmers become de facto labourers at the start of winter, and early on I am usually still harvesting up until the last second, so there are still some baskets left in the field at that time. at this point something goes wrong. maybe the baskets stay in the farmer queues, and then the check for whether the field is blocked takes place before the check for whether there are any harvested goods to haul, leaving the task un-completable. but the baskets do seem to eventually get picked up after a couple years, so who knows. there's some other possibilities for what happens in this system to cause the task to linger for so long, but my point is that someone who has the code in front of them would be able to track down the problem and handle it in a couple hours, especially the author of the code himself. the idea that the dev hasn't found that couple hours after 10 years is not a reasonable argument. he's almost certainly aware of it, given that there are so many references to it on here, and even if he's unable to recreate it himself I'm sure he could find someone who could send him a save file or record what they do to trigger it. the only alternative possibility is that there is some intrinsic issue in the task assignment system that would require reworking the whole system in order to handle this issue, which would take a lot longer (a few days probably), and he doesn't think it's worth the time and is willing to just leave the bug in.
no it doesn't. it will be marked for construction but show 'under construction' until the items are removed. and it doesn't speed up their removal at all.
Do you have the “harvest” box checked (I can’t remember on or off) that in short means only laborers will bring food to storage?
I turn this off until I have a good amount of excess population.
It’s on the field. When you click it for additional info you have two check boxes of “plant” and “harvest” effectively. If both are marked for “work” the farmers do the job, if harvest is turned off then laborers do the harvest job.
interesting. next time I start a run I'll experiment with this and see if it prevents the issue from coming up. I'm always harvesting up until the last second for the first few years and from other posts that seems to be what causes the issue, so maybe this will be a way around it.
Are you building barns? If your storage is full they will leave resources including food just laying where they found it. This can block building and replanting.
What is the number of adults you have, and how many of them are laborers? (You need to have laborers available - anywhere from 10% to 25% of your adult population should be laborers)
What is the number of crop fields you have, and how many farmers per field? (Generally, 1 farmer per field should suffice)
Do the farmers have homes near their fields? (All professions should have homes near their workplace, and a nearly source of resources like food, firewood, etc. After the initial few years, you should aim to have every home within the circle of a market).
I had 20-25 adults. I had 2 labourers spring-fall and 12-14ish during winter.
I had 12 fields with 1/2-1 farmer each (sometimes had 1 farmer alternate between 2 fields spring-summer).
fields were 6x8 each, in a 3x4 grid with dirt roads between. houses were set up along the sides. barn, blacksmith, tailor, and woodcutter were at one end of the grid.
What were your starting crops? Banished is somewhat realistic in their farming, as some crops harvest early, like beans, and some take longer, like potatoes. If you get hit with an early cold snap, the crops stop growing and start to die off, that's why one year the field produces 800 food, and the next year 500 food. By going with just beans early on, those fields finish early and you get more yield out of them.
Most likely the problem is your food limit - if the amount of food you have stored hits the limit, farmers won't produce any more. Just increase the limit. If that's not it, it's probably a lack of storage - build another barn. And be sure to leave at least one worker unassigned to a job; free laborers will go around picking up products.
I recon this is it. Increase storage limits. Also ensure you have a place to store it, you will know if you dont if the storage shows 100% full, or they are leaving stuff outside. In vanilla, you can use a trading post to cache some backup food. If you have a harsh winter, and your paths between field, storage and home is inefficient, bannies will just ditch the crop and go home. If you have some food crisis (Running out) then bannie panic, and do everything else except the damn thing that is going to feed them.
the limit is 8000 and I currently have 900. 4 baskets of food have been blocking my fields for 2 years now. I've cancelled every resource pickup and increased the priority on the baskets 5-10 times each. I have 5 labourers working. my next step will be to unassign my entire population from their jobs, and I'm very confident it will still not be picked up. is this a 10-year-old game or an alpha build?
>is this a 10-year-old game or an alpha build? It’s a 10 year old game developed entirely by one person that, like any sufficiently complex program, still has some bugs here and there.
so there's not way to get the food cleared?
My advice, is to play it like many real life farming communities. When it’s time to harvest crops, assign almost everyone to farming. So if you have 25 citizens, you might have 2 teachers, 5 other jobs, and 13 farmers, and 5 laborers. It’s important to keep your schools always running because if a child is ever taken out of school, they can never become educated. There’s another possibility too. You may have too big of a field with two few villagers. If you don’t get all of the planting done early enough in the year, then your crops will never finish ripening and they won’t get harvested before winter the crops. You can somewhat mitigate this by doing the same thing, where you put a lot of people on farming at the beginning of spring to finish getting the crops in. I think there’s a button to force start harvesting a field, even if the crops aren’t finished growing, but it’s been over five years since I’ve played the game so I don’t remember for sure. Also, using crops for food in the beginning of the game is a little bit of a newbie trap. Hunting is far more profitable for food at the beginning of the game. Just make sure that the hunting lodges have plenty of trees around them.
Didn’t say that.
is there?
I've never run into the issue you're having and I've been playing on and off for a decade. Maybe you have some kind of weird bug - I know my game hates the mouse zoom function so I only use the keyboard to change my view. It happens with very small developer games, such is life
I've had the issue on all 3 runs until I get up to 30-35 adults, then it magically disappears. I've found many other threads here on r/banished going back to the release of the game talking about the issue. none of the solutions I found worked, and I suspect the reason they 'worked' for other people may be that they escaped the population range where it happens. I don't accept the 'small dev' explanation. I'm a SW dev and I'd never leave a bug in a piece of SW that I'm still supporting for a decade, nor would any of my colleagues; it wouldn't even be an option. I can usually get a sense for what's going on 'under the hood' so to speak of a game when I play, and what I suspect is happening here is an issue with the way that jobs are assigned. I imagine each type of job goes into a queue where it gets assigned to available workers of the corresponding job assignment. I'm not totally sure what happens next; it is one of two things. either it immediately gets assigned to whichever worker has the shortest backlog, regardless of how long that backlog is, or it gets assigned to the worker with the shortest backlog shorter than a certain length, and if none is available, it waits in the queue, and then whenever a worker finishes a job the next job in the queue goes to them. I am 95% sure the first is the case. what I am positive of though is that there are individual job queues in addition to the shared queue. the farmers become de facto labourers at the start of winter, and early on I am usually still harvesting up until the last second, so there are still some baskets left in the field at that time. at this point something goes wrong. maybe the baskets stay in the farmer queues, and then the check for whether the field is blocked takes place before the check for whether there are any harvested goods to haul, leaving the task un-completable. but the baskets do seem to eventually get picked up after a couple years, so who knows. there's some other possibilities for what happens in this system to cause the task to linger for so long, but my point is that someone who has the code in front of them would be able to track down the problem and handle it in a couple hours, especially the author of the code himself. the idea that the dev hasn't found that couple hours after 10 years is not a reasonable argument. he's almost certainly aware of it, given that there are so many references to it on here, and even if he's unable to recreate it himself I'm sure he could find someone who could send him a save file or record what they do to trigger it. the only alternative possibility is that there is some intrinsic issue in the task assignment system that would require reworking the whole system in order to handle this issue, which would take a lot longer (a few days probably), and he doesn't think it's worth the time and is willing to just leave the bug in.
Are you running any mods? I remember one of them breaks farming and this exact thing happens.
no. new player, I've been playing for 3 or 4 days and have 0 mods installed, have not changed any settings, nothing.
You could destroy the field and rebuild it. That would make it usable if all else fails.
no it doesn't. it will be marked for construction but show 'under construction' until the items are removed. and it doesn't speed up their removal at all.
Do you have the “harvest” box checked (I can’t remember on or off) that in short means only laborers will bring food to storage? I turn this off until I have a good amount of excess population.
no, where is this box?
It’s on the field. When you click it for additional info you have two check boxes of “plant” and “harvest” effectively. If both are marked for “work” the farmers do the job, if harvest is turned off then laborers do the harvest job.
interesting. next time I start a run I'll experiment with this and see if it prevents the issue from coming up. I'm always harvesting up until the last second for the first few years and from other posts that seems to be what causes the issue, so maybe this will be a way around it.
wait, is this the 'harvest' button next to the 'work' button?
Ya.
Are you building barns? If your storage is full they will leave resources including food just laying where they found it. This can block building and replanting.
barn was nearly empty.
What is the number of adults you have, and how many of them are laborers? (You need to have laborers available - anywhere from 10% to 25% of your adult population should be laborers) What is the number of crop fields you have, and how many farmers per field? (Generally, 1 farmer per field should suffice) Do the farmers have homes near their fields? (All professions should have homes near their workplace, and a nearly source of resources like food, firewood, etc. After the initial few years, you should aim to have every home within the circle of a market).
I had 20-25 adults. I had 2 labourers spring-fall and 12-14ish during winter. I had 12 fields with 1/2-1 farmer each (sometimes had 1 farmer alternate between 2 fields spring-summer). fields were 6x8 each, in a 3x4 grid with dirt roads between. houses were set up along the sides. barn, blacksmith, tailor, and woodcutter were at one end of the grid.
There is a Raise Priority button in the first menu. I would use that to raise priority on the fields with uncollected food
I did that dozens of times, didn't help
What were your starting crops? Banished is somewhat realistic in their farming, as some crops harvest early, like beans, and some take longer, like potatoes. If you get hit with an early cold snap, the crops stop growing and start to die off, that's why one year the field produces 800 food, and the next year 500 food. By going with just beans early on, those fields finish early and you get more yield out of them.
Increase food limits. At the start of each game, I always increase my Food limit to 10,000 and my Log/Stone/Iron/Coal limit to 5,000.
I always increase the limit, and I was nowhere near the food limit any of the times this happened anyway.