News:

Welcome to World of Banished!

Main Menu

gatinho's various questions thread, first question here about forests/herbs

Started by gatinho65, November 03, 2019, 02:31:14 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

gatinho65

I think brad3 might be right lol, maybe just start a thread where I can post a question regarding a mod or mod interactions as they come up, especially as I get used to the forum again and figure out how to find answers easier.

So my first question here might be: does anyone know how various foresters affect herb production? Right now I use mostly necora's foresters, the pine forester, the maple forester, and the vanilla forester just in case that is the one that only produces certain things. I also use kid's foresters from his tiny and workplace mods, its mostly about size of the forester. I have not yet used any of DS specialty foresters for birch etc. I am trying vanilla herb gathering (the huge one lol), EB's, kids', DS', necoras herbalists, all of them have the same issue, they gather ridiculously tiny numbers of herbs in old growth forests with no cutting.

So for the first time ever playing Banished, I seem to have a serious herb problem. I basically only plant in all my forests until they are super thick, then only cut and plant both, usually only one forester per forester station. That way I usually get mostly old trees and better gathering production for food and herbs and the various hunters from necora, kid, EB's mods. At least always in the past, not now in this latest town where I'm using DS mods, EB unified mod, and necora's maritime mods for pine and maple, as well as natdiv2 and new flora. Is all this diversity actually hitting some universal limit so I get more variety but less of everything overall?

What I've seen over the 40 or so years of the town is that wild honey is super down, flax gathering is super down, herb gathering is so low that although I have now 5 herbalists in different locations and forests types, each one on their own as to not over harvest, I get almost no herb gathering. Totals of 12 per year or even lower. I have to buy herbs or just debug menu herbs during the yearly disease outbreaks DS added to the game lol. I have almost 5 hearts health consistently, I focus very much on food production and variety so health is always good until I run out of herbs, which is now yearly. My town seems to be addicted to herbs instead of ale or mead and I can't keep up.

I've seen some comments that herbalists are a bad idea anyway but what are the alternatives? I have one hospital in a location that requires as little interaction with the rest of the town as possible, so sick citizens can walk there without infecting most other citizens. My outbreaks never last long, mostly just kids, those filthy little beasts. I never put a clinic anywhere central, as I always thought hospitals are basically disease vectors in the game. Is that false?

I don't know why flax and wild honey gathering are down so far as well. Do they dislike old growth forests? Of only some types or all types?

Vanilla forests seem to still offer the best herbs, flax and honey, although maple and pine forests offer the best production otherwise, I suspect the blueberries is almost a cheat lol, I basically run a blueberry/cranberry economy in the early part of the game until I can get more advanced products like booze, shoes, fur coats etc. My mining is basically just to support building the beautiful DS housing and other fine buildings.

So after the ramble lol, has anyone noticed that some foresters/forest types produce more or less of certain products? Does old vs a more mixed stand of trees affect any of this?

brads3

   i read somewhere a while back that the original vanilla spanws depend on the type of tree. a birch tree spawns fruit and a pine spawns different items. i couldn't locate the post where i had read that the last time i did search for it. i use a variety to the forests.this adds a realism to the game since not every forest will produce the same items.

     if you are short on herbs and do need more there are other options. CC has a dock set that comes with a herb grower.this is a small building that can be placed on dry ground and grows herbs without a radius.handy for fort areas or towns.KIDs garden bakery od has a herb grower as well. you could also add herb seeds and grow them in a field.

  i shoud note that i am using a safety mod that does cut down on the diseases. the herbs and texties limit setings, i  increase at the game start.set the herbs to 1000. this gives the bannies time to stockpile them before the popuation grows.

   your overall total output from the forests shoud not decrease but you will have a variety of items. this can varry depending  on the mods. not all modded gatherers will collect everything.even the pine mod comes with 3 caches. if you were to place a maple gatherer in a KIDs forest,it would collect. if you used a KID gathering hut in a pine or maple forest, it will not pick up all the items.  so mixing mods does give a variety but also varrying results too.

   are you using the new flora patch with the pine mod? Necora made the patch for the pine and flora mods to work together. i actually use the flora patch without the flora mod and have some bees.without a pine forester,i don't get a lot of flax. flax is touchy since we have a few varieties of it. tailors are very specific about which flax they use.not all flax will work for all tailors.

  i should look at the DS mod and try some things with it again.problem i had was a drop in production.no matter what i seemed to do i could not increase happiness, and therefore my production kept falling. NILLA does have a village blog on using the DS mod.

Nilla

I think the herbalists are more efficient than the growth of herbs. That means the first years after you´ve put a herbalist in a forest, they pick most of the old herbs after that it will be less. Sure, it will help a bit if the trees are allowed to be old but you will never reach the output of the first years. I think some mods have increased this problem when they introduce more other resources or higher output of something else in the forest. It´s simply a competition; only one resource can spawn from the same tree.

I might be known as the most herbalist hostile person on WOB, so I will explain why I seldom build any. First, if you have a balanced diet (all food categories available everywhere on the map) the Bannis will be perfectly healthy and you will not need one herb. That`s my main goal in every game. If you are short on one food category or if the goods aren´t perfectly distributed, a Banni loses one or several hearts. If you have a herbalist this Banni will go to a market and pick up one herb, bring it to the herbalist and regain one heart. This walk may take a very long time and if you can´t support this Bannis with all food categories his health will soon drop again and the same march will restart; a never-ending loop. If you have no herbs/herbalists, the same Banni just stops work for a brief moment as he feels the need to visit the herbalist then back to business as usual.

There is a slightly higher probability to get a disease if you aren´t healthy but in settlements that aren´t very dense, your strategy of building a hospital works very well.

I also think your observations of more and less different products on old and young different trees/grass with different mods are right. Some modders have played with the spawning of resources. I´m no expert on mixing mods but I´m pretty sure that the output from one type of forest may be different depending on your load order of the mods.




gatinho65

Thanks for all the info, very helpful. I will be more careful about matching gatherers with forest types, and use more vanilla forest/type stations just in case. I wanted to compare different modder's wild food gathering huts in the same forest types but I suspect it isn't that straightforward, kid's tiny hunter and gatherers do really well, and have a small footprint, I like to use them. All of necoras forager tents do well too, in the right forest. I like to use the ones with smallest footprints, over the gigantic vanilla ones, that has been my motivation rather than production, until production seemed to decline.

I think it is only the huge vanilla herbalist that consistently gets good herb harvests for me over time, and they always increase collection in old forests and then stay high. If I plant only in a vanilla forest, after a few years my herbalist harvests are very high and stay high. I rarely cut any forest near herbalists. However this has not been true of modded herbalists even in vanilla forests. Vanilla forest stations always do really well, other forest stations with the same big range do less well. I usually over produce on everything, so getting maximum efficiency isn't the aim, but it has been frustrating to see production decline and not be quite sure what causes it.

I'm playing a North game now and the herb drop off was very steep so I bought the herb seed from the trader and grow it as a crop, very low production still. The North herbalist in the old forest where I don't cut any trees, only plant, still saw a steep decline in herb gathering after the first couple of years.

@brad3: I almost always use the new flora, flax patch, new pine flora, and pine set all together, its a great combination. I'm so used to the multiple flax tags and types that I just figure I have to build two different flax production chains until I finally remember to just take notes on which ones complain about lack of resources when I have huge reserves of flax lol, that way I can try to match which building matches which type of flax. There is also the cultivated flax, which seems to have yet another button, making three flax buttons in my city hall inventory.

In my North game I built the flax and honey huts and got absolutely nothing, although the North gathering hut collects honey, so I just demolished those buildings. I bought flax seed and will be interested to see if I grow it, and then use resources to build yet more buildings, which ones will reject this new flax lol. Its a bit tedious but oh well.

I also have multiple copper and tin ore buttons on most games, I'm sure its because I'm using two mods that use those ores, EB unified and DS mods I'm guessing.

DS games do seem to have a really steep reduction in herb production, plus happiness never gets very high, even with traders and wells and lots of alcohol, I think I remember reading a post that suggested he did that on purpose, happiness will be much harder to achieve?

DS and North both seem to include a lot more disease outbreaks, almost every year, would that be mitigated by a safety mod? Which one are you using? I have not played any games yet with CC or megamod, probably because I'd have to start over with all the mod lists and load orders to make sure I don't have duplicates from those mods already installed.

@Nilla: Even when I have almost full hearts and all the food groups including the bread chain and a tavern selling purchased alcohol from the trader, if I don't have a stock of herbs, each disease outbreak spreads much faster and lasts much longer, and the hearts drop very quickly as well. In my North game now, hearts have dropped for several years down to a steady 1 to 1 and half despite all the food groups, very frustrating to try and figure out. I had very low herbs during those years, maybe a connection?

I seem to remember reading a post that there are actually more food categories with effects than just the basic ones we learn early on in the game?  Is there a population/year trigger where they demand more luxury foods/alcohol to maintain high hearts? Would that be something mod specific, people have altered in various mods? I never encountered this before. Once I have crops, orchards, plenty of hunters and a pasture that produces each year, plus massive wild gathering and at least ale/mead, hearts have always been very high in a very steady and consistent way for decades in the same game. Maybe DS and North have altered the base game in some ways re: health as well as happiness?

I always build small cemeteries near housing hubs, they spend more time there than anywhere else, I never see bannies going to the beautiful churches I build lol. At least the sauna in the North actually seems to get lots of traffic. Wells too seem to attract bannies, I build them anywhere I want to look like a park or public place, keeps the idling from spreading bannies all over the map too much maybe. I love to follow my bannies, but its hilarious that even educated workers, with full hearts and happiness, spend most of their time idling lol, its a good life.

brads3

depending on the mods and forests,i will sometimes overlap 2 foreests with a larger gatherer or hunter huts. one of the reasons for your production drop off can be education level and that colder climate of the north.

      the DS and North combined will be challenging. not sure how things will go with the happiness. without getting the happiness up the production decline is huge. the mine safety mod would slow down diseases but how much else it offsets,i  can't say. i tried the DS on the map prior to the one i am on. never saw any movement to the happiness level. sometimes in mixing mods we get bad results.the safety mod i got from NEXUS but i do think the name has been changed recently.

   the North on a mild setting is close to the climate here in the northern mid-atlantic states. any  harder and you are into Canada and food crops have issues. they like to grow best at 70+ degrees farenhiet. any year that hits 70 and  keeps it for a onth will have better outputs.

      are you using the North above the DS? glad to hear they are working together well. congrats on keeping the health and happiness up.

gatinho65

Yeah I tend to overlap my foresters too, and I'd much rather have 5 foresters working in 5 different forest stations rather than in just 2 with multiple workers, a big reason I use kid's tiny ones rather than the huge ones, so the forest looks more like forest and I can grow them over time before population needs mean I have to cut more logs. Plus I want the map to look like forest and not like circle tree farms lol. I like kid's tree circle orchards though, they produce really well compared to a normal orchard and mix in with a regular forest station.

If I use various specialty foresters, especially when using necoras pine set, I overlap all the various kinds to get a mixed forest, not weird tree circles again. The gatherers are ones I try not to overlap, so if I want to I can add extra workers to them and they still harvest well, rather than take harvest away from a neighbor. I never had an issue with herbalists and gatherers sharing a forest, at least in vanilla forests, I haven't noticed herbalists taking harvest from gatherers so far but I will have to check. I haven't used DS foresters yet with their specific forests, mostly because of resources to build them, I have to be very lean in my style of multiple foresters, can't build the big expensive buildings.

I'm using North as my top mod above DS in my North game, only the tree mod and the usual UI mods up top. Whenever possible I'm using the North's buildings for iron and production, to get a sense of how they work, and yeah I've been wondering about the combination of hits on happiness and health with DS. I built the DS workyard, the one that makes everything for the early game like glass and bricks, right next to the charcoal burner and bloomer and the North blacksmith, so its a little black hole of health hazards lol. I only run them on alternate years to give the workers a break, but I'm not sure yet where the health and happiness hits are really coming from, low herbs or food or something else.

I'm using the mild setting to get crops to grow, and using multiple farmers even in 11x11 fields, its a lot of micromanagement to fill all the needed jobs, but that is my style. I almost always just play on 1x speed, sometimes 2x. I want to think that by careful planning and attention, I can keep ahead of challenges and make smarter decisions, but it gets hard when I'm not sure what is happening to bring happiness and health down.

Something really obvious occurred to me though now, does living in tents lower health and happiness over time, even with good food? I had 4 happiness and almost 5 hearts for several years, most of the years in fact, while everyone was still living in the tents and having multiple kids over several generations. I still can't figure out why everything was looking really good and then wasn't. Why would tents lower happiness in the later generations lol? It will be along time yet before I can build everyone a beautiful izba.

My main DS town is on hold now, I wanted to take a break from feeling frustrated by the herb situation, although it is also an issue in my North town now, so something about herbs is giving me issues lol. I will have to find that mod that allows for buying herb seeds since I have the DS seed trading dock built already, then I can buy the herb seeds and grow them in that town.

Has anyone put together a flax spreadsheet, identifying which type of flax from which mod goes with all the various flax using buildings from all the various mods? That would be a great tool, so I know what to build from the start, rather than 3 different gatherers, weavers, clothing makers, taylors etc. So far it seems EB, DS, natdiv, necoras, and likely kids and RK buildings all prefer only some kinds of flax, I just don't know which one until I build it.

In the North so far I'm just sticking to furs, parkas and leather, although that seems incredibly wasteful given how much money those things bring in the trading docks in my other non North towns. Selling pelt and fur clothing when I play with necoras mods is a fantastic way to have huge spending power without filling up the dock with food and timber products. I'm not sure what North prices are since I absolutely need every single clothing item produced to keep up with even my tiny town needs so far. They really go through the clothes and stone tools like crazy lol.