Forum Multi-Challenge #2: Vegetarian Village

[salamander]

A question I would like to know the answer to, too.  (did I spell the to/too/two's right  )

[rkelly17]

@rkelly17 You use orchards a lot; is it necessary to have a farmer assigned to each one the entire time the trees are growing, or can you reassign the farmer to something else (professional, not as a laborer) for the years between planting and the first harvest?

I'm not really sure. Lately I have been making orchards that only require 1 orchardist (15 wide by 4 high or 9 wide by 4 or 5 high in the 9X9 block farms) and he/she seems pretty busy weeding, etc. even when not harvesting. Personally I don't want to spend the time micromanaging them,  so I set the 1 and wander off to build something else. In most of my farms I build just enough housing to house the requisite farmers plus a barn for them to use. I'm not sure whether or not the orchard farmers become laborers in the Winter like the field farmers.

If I have a East-West boulevard/avenue I'll also plant a series of 15 wide by 4 high nut tree orchards for decoration in the middle (I don't do North-South orchards since I can never remember the right width to get two rows of trees) with a house for farmers at the mid-point of two. In my vegetarian settlement this gives me plenty of protein.

Now that I am trying to learn trade I'm planting blocks of 4 15X4 orchards of the fruit for ale-making with 2 houses and a barn and a near-by tavern--built after the trees start bearing. It appears that the 4 orchards can't quite keep the brewer working full-time all year, so I'm thinking about a fifth orchard using the second adult from the brewer's house. If the space allows it, of course. One of these blocks seems to keep two trading posts stocked with c. 1000 ale each.

[Bobbi]

I have been unable to decide on the efficacy of using ale as trade good. Seems like I am always trading venison, mutton, and mushrooms for fruit to make ale no matter how many orchards and taverns I have. I will try your set up to see how well it works. In this challenge all I have to trade is mushrooms and firewood.

[slink]

One year my husband and I almost exclusively ate meat we had killed ourselves, and it changed my attitude towards store-bought cuts of meat.  I found myself wondering how fresh was the meat, and if the animal it came from was healthy.  After I gave up breeding rabbits, and then we moved out of state for my husband's family's deer-hunting camp, that outlook receded, but gradually I became more and more disenchanted with store-bought meat in general.  The chicken is bloated like something several days dead, and everything has been soaked in saltwater.  Yes, they call it broth, but it's saltwater.  Some chirpy people on a cooking forum told me that I should consider it a service that the suppliers were pre-tenderizing the meat so well for my cooking.  Meat that hasn't been soaked in saltwater has cooked perfectly well for me for more than half a century, and anyway, their only reason for doing it is that saltwater is cheaper than flesh.  Right now I am paying supermarket steak prices for grass-fed, specially slaughtered, stew meat, but that is fine with me.  I don't know as much about the turkey as I do about the cattle, but the salt content of the meat is consistent with only 2% added saltwater, instead of 6%, or even 15%.  Apparently federal regulations require that poultry be soaked in cold saltwater as a part of the butchering process.  The federal regulations don't limit the amount of water you can leave in the product when you sell it, however.  Bad, bad regulators.   

[rkelly17]

@Bobbi, the only merchant who won't take ale is the seed merchant, so for that one you need firewood. The food merchant gives full value for ale, but not firewood (3 instead of 4). Firewood is a necessity and ale is not. All this went into my decision to trade ale. In the early going I do trade firewood and continue until (a) I get all the seeds and (b) ale production is sufficient to supply two trading posts with 1000 units each. Now that I'm learning to trade I add ale production (orchards and tavern) for every two trading posts I build and that seems to keep everybody fully stocked.

@slink, besides the salt water they "immerse" red meat in carbon monoxide to keep it red. Yuch! We get meat and poultry at the local farmers' market from vendors we know. That is an advantage of living in Mennonite country: Farmers' markets and organic methods before they were trendy.

So, I should also update on my vegetarian settlement, Steel. It is now year 52 and here are some shots.

[RedKetchup]

wow nice @rkelly17 it is really looking good. the 03.jpg really reminds me real town, real communities. did you worked for town planning in RL ? 

[mariesalias]

wow nice @rkelly17 it is really looking good. the 03.jpg really reminds me real town, real communities. did you worked for town planning in RL ? 

I know, right? @rkelly17  seems to have a knack for making his towns look authentic.

[canis39]

My towns look like a tornado came through and just scattered buildings randomly around markets.

[irrelevant]

Another really great thing about Ale is it only takes one citizen to run a Brewery. Very high trade value per worker.

[RedKetchup]

oh ya, definitly but dont we have to count the farmers who make sure to have fruits to brew ?

[irrelevant]

I don't. In this challenge anyway I'm making far more food than my guys can eat. I'm putting beans and corn into the TPs just to free up storage space, and I end up trading it. Might as well trade it for fruit and add value in the brewery.

[rkelly17]

Thanks for the complements, folks. I am not now nor have a ever been a town planner--though my daughter has a degree in planning. Does that count? I do plan things out in Banished and enjoy the aesthetics of it. On this map the locations of the trading posts are dictated by the fact that the river runs on a diagonal for much of its path, thus making TP placement difficult, though I didn't have to worry about fishing docks. The original start point is the barn just South of the tunnel. The rest sort of flowed from those two parameters. I also got lucky that there was that long East-West flat space where Chestnut Boulevard is which allowed the three market squares. Once the settlement was established enough around the original start point I could dig the tunnel and go crazy. Planning and building the forest villages without hunters offered new possibilities as well.

I've also gotten lucky that the traders are bringing what I need to make warm coats and pave the roads (I hope I'm not breaking the rules by buying leather and warm coats from merchants). I did have to accept more than the usual number of nomads on this map as, for some reason, I was running labor shortages for many years even with keeping the number of houses pretty close to the number of "families." But there seems to be a big supply of nomads who are willing to be vegetarians. Who knew?

[slink]

@rkelly17 : I am uncertain about the use of carbon monoxide to enhance the red color of meat, but I believe that is better than sodium nitrite.  In a sense, anything that makes meat more red is concealing the age of the meat, making it appear as though it has just been cut from a freshly killed animal.  Is this not misrepresentation of the product?  As for store-bought chicken, why would anyone feed something to their family that they are advised not to handle with their bare hands?

@salamander : Yes, you got the too/to/two aspect correct in your sentence.   

[canis39]

Strange, I have "eggs - 0" showing up in my town hall inventory list. I have never had chickens, and never knowingly traded for eggs. Not entirely sure how they showed up.

This is a good challenge, I am enjoying it! I'm up to 5 market circles and about 550 citizens at the moment. Just planted about 87000 walnut trees.

[irrelevant]

87,000?! That's nuts!