Food and Nutrition Guide in Going Medieval

From seeing one of the comment on this post I set out on a little investigation. Jake had questions and I wanted to give the answers.

This guide will try to explain how hunger works in Going Medieval. There are three mani questinos that I want to answer with this guide.

1. How do nutrition and hunger levels work in Going Medieval?
2. How much food does a settler need in a day?
3. How many crops do I need to plant to feed one settler for a year?

To find out how many crops you’d need to plant in order to seed one settler I first had to find out how long it takes one settler to become hungry. Hunger is based on factors in Going Medieval which only really include traits. At the base level, everyone has the same hunger level. As far as my research had shown, doing construction, hunting or other actions does not make a settler hungrier at a faster rates.

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How Does Nutrition Work in Going Medieval?

How does it work? How long does it take a settler to starve? To find out these questions we had to look into the stats of the settler. Find out how I did this (and how you can too), below.

You can view the appetite of any settler by going to their stats screen. This is done by selecting them and choosing the Percentage Sign menu. As Gwen in the image above doesn’t have any traits which change the hunger rate, she is at the regular 1x appetite level. This guide will focus on this level to begin with.

I had started by making some redcurrant stew from crops that I’d grown. I wanted to test how many of a crop it would take to feed a settler for a day and this was the perfect way to kill two birds with one stone. To begin with, I fed my settler Ositha a redcurrant stew until she was 100% fulfilled. Then, I disallowed her to consume food and watched her until she was at 0% hunger again. I know that settlers can survive under 0% hunger but this was a good point to base my data on. The nutrition a settler gets from a redcurrant stew is 95%. You can see this nutrition value when selecting the meal.

It took 21 hours for my settler to go from 100% hunger to 0% hunger. As my meal was providing 95% nutrition, we can take roughly 1 20th away from this value and say that if my settler was to eat a meal every 20 hours they would be fine. This will help later on when deciding how much of a crop I need to plant in order to keep my settler fed.

Nutrition and Appetite Exceptions

There are exceptions to the math here, however. This is due to the fact that there are some traits in the game which change the hunger value of a settler. Luckily this is done in multiples. By this I mean the base level of hunger is 1x. With the Gourmet trait as seen in the image below, the settler will need food more often. This particular trait makes the hunger loss 5% faster. Thus we have an appetite value of 1.05x.

Of course once we know how often a settler has to eat every year and how much they need, we are able to multiply these numbers by the appetite multiple to get the values needed for each settler.

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How Much Food Does One Settler Need Per Year?

In order to find out how much food a settler needs in one year of Going Medieval, we have to figure out some other things. We know how long it takes a settler to get hungry now, so we can try to use this value to find out how much food they will need. Using the information found above, we can use math to find out how much food a settler needs in one day. As 95 nutrition lasts a settler 20hrs, we can easily use these figures to find out how much one needs in a day. If you multiply 20hrs by 1.2 you will get 24. Now we just have to multiply 95 by 1.2 and we will get the answer to how much nutrition a settler needs to consume per day. This value is 114.

	HOURS	NUTRITION NEEDED
Base Findings	20	95
1.2x (For a 1-day period)	24	114

We know how much food a settler needs in nutrition value but how does this relate in the game? Well, as far as I can tell at the moment, every stew pile is 95 nutrition, not just redcurrant. I’ve seen carrots and redcurrant and meats used as ingredients and all the meals I’ve created and it always ends up at 95. The problem with this math is that a settler will automatically try to eat when they have a food level under 35%. They will generally get to the food and eat it around 30%.

One average, a settler will go from 100% food to 30% in 14 hours. This means they will eat a meal every 14 hours if not assigned not to eat.

How Many Days Are There in a Year in Going Medieval?

We can see further details on how the days work in Going Medieval by hovering over the date on the top right. As we can see in the image below, the year is split into 4 seasons mirroring real live seasons. Each of these seasons will have 12 days each meaning that a year in Going Medieval lasts 48 days.

This is going to be all the information we need in order to find out how much a settler needs to eat in a year. We ca now do the following math on settler nutrition based on a year:

• (Settler nutrition need per day = 114) x (48 Days in a year) = 5,472 Nutrition.

Based on the calculations made above the average settler needs 5,472 nutrition per year to survive. This value can only be reached if the settler eats when they reach 0% hunger value. This means you will have to turn off their ability to get themselves some food and manually allow them to do so. This is a lot of micromanaging.

As we discovered earlier, as settler will eat a meal every 14 hours if assigned to freely eat. As there are 1152 hours in a Going Medieval year, we can divide this but how often a settler eats a meal. 1152/14 = 82.28 meals.

• Each settler will eat roughly 82 meals per year in Going Medieval.

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How Many Crops Need to Be Planted to Feed a Settler For A Year?

We have all the information based on how many meals and how hungry a settler gets in the game. Now using this, we need to find out how many crops it will take in order to feed your hungry settlers all year round. There is some more information that is going to be vital in figuring out this information. Luckily a lot of the math involved is already present in the game.

In order to make 1 Meal in Going Medieval, you will need 12 units of a resource. Meaning, 12 carrots, currant, cabbage, whatever. Now, we will have to figure out how many of these products we are going to need to plant based on the yield of each plant and how long they take to reach maturity. We will base our math at this point on Cabbage as it’s a pretty easy-to-grow basic crop.

Firstly we can look at the base stats of Cabbage crops. Cabbages take 5 days to grow to full maturity. At this point, when a cabbage is harvested you are able to get 6 cabbage from each plot harvested. When cooked at the kitchen stove, 12 units of cabbage provide the colony with 3 stew. This means that each plot of cabbage will provide 1.5 meals every 5 days. A settler will eat on average 1.7 meals per day. This means every 5 days a settler will 8.5 meals. To keep a settler fed all year it would take 5 and 2/3 tiles of cabbage. Averaging up, we will need 6 squares of crops in order to feed 1 settler all year round with cabbages.

One thing this doesn’t take into account however, is the quarter of the year where cabbages don’t grow. (winter). You settler will need an extra 20 meals in stock to last them through the 12 days of winter. We will also have to take into account the extra 5 days after winter where we will wait for the first crops to grow. This means we will need another 29 extra meals grown over the Spring-Autumn period to keep the settler fed over winter and the initial cabbage growing time. We will need an extra 2 squares to have enough stock to feed the settler over the winter.

Conclusion:

In order to feed one settler with meals made from cabbages all year round you will need 8 tiles of cabbages.

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