First: About how much food does a villager eat per day? It seems they take ten food per meal, but I'm not sure how many times they eat per day. Nailing this figure down would really help planning.

Also: Exactly how much food do the beehive and the fruit trees regenerate per day? No matter when I look at them, the hive is always down to zero, and the trees are always seven to eight, so it's hard to nail this down, too.

These are questions that keep nagging me, when I try to figure out how long my village can last.

I don't know if anyone has sat down to calculate this. A lot depends on the speed setting. The faster the setting the more the villagers eat. To make up for that, the food has more value per item harvested, although the maximum available for honey is still 500 and 1000 for each fruit tree. That means that the food available will be used up faster on the faster settings. I don't know, but it is possible that the difficulty level might have some bearing, too.

Regeneration is also difficult to quantify. I think it occurs once an hour, but I'm not sure. It also depends on the faction chosen; Nature means that the food regenerates more than Magic. Certainly the hive only seems to regenerate a couple of points a time. The trees seems to regenerate around 200 a time (in Nature). Often, unless you are watching the villagers closely, they will start emptying the hive and the trees as soon as the food regenerates, even if you have fishing.

It would be nice if I could keep it running with zero villagers . . . most games, being an avid modder, I can just crack open the files for answers like this, but here, alas, it seems only the visuals are accessible.

The problem is, it's not possible to calculate exactly; I expect there's a random element in how frequently they eat, and without sitting there constantly clicking on a tree, it's not really possible to monitor that. I don't think it's possible to keep a log of what time it changes, but I'll see what I can find out.

EDIT: I can at least say with assurance that it does not occur once per hour, at normal speed.

Apart from at the beginning when the village is getting sorted out and at the end when all the puzzles have been completed, I run on Fast speed. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.

Well, my original post was at around 10:30. It doesn't seem to have increased in five hours. Does fast run in double-time, or triple? (Someone mentioned that the pregger countdown drops in increments of three minutes, so I suspect it's triple-time, for VV3.)

Update . . . automated procedures aren't working. Using a memory-address monitor tries to tell me that in 48 hours, the value on the beehive hasn't risen once, and for some reason the feature that tells me what code is trying to alter the value isn't behaving. I'll try some other stuff, but it doesn't look like I'll be able to do it the easy way.

I know that when I place my villagers at the food bin when they do not have full health, it goes down by one or two. I also know that usually when my behive is replenished it shows 12 honeycombs available. The trees I would imagine are different. I'll keep a look out for you!

Nah, I'll just exert cruelty to find the answer. I think I'm going to save my save files, blow up all my farmers in the alchemy lab, then record food values and check up every hour or so.

The SPCV may assassinate me, but knowing how much food is produced per hour, and how many villagers each tree/comb can sustain, and how long a village beyond it's capacity can last, are all going to be very useful in planning ahead.

CFII tells me that she cannot give me the values as they represent proprietary information, but I'm hoping she can at least tell me if my approximations are in the ballpark.

I tried to break the program down to find out the values for everything and all events and what they outcomes were, (Like The Sims with the program SimPE) but alas was unable to do so. The Nature Faction obviously gives a boost to food because they come from nature. I have figured that if you set your game to regular speed, when the tree or comb runs out, you should reset the fire (add grass and wood) that way you have an in-game timer to keep track.

Here's a code question....do particular combinations of characters create a particular child character ala Plant Tycoon? If this were true then that would give me something else interesting to do with my completed tribes.

I'm fascinated by the generation of the collectibles...I would love to know if they generate randomly or if there's a formula as to how often they will appear.

I'm pretty sure collectibles are random, with a bias towards the commons and a lesser bias towards the uncommons. The percentages though are unknown; I gather you'd have to ask Lady CFII, but she may tell you that it's proprietary information.

I did some work earlier, since on one village I just have a single villager: she ate 18 pieces of food in an hour, in increments of 2, usually a few every 10 or so minutes. the game was on easy for difficulty, and normal for speed. I think the timing might have been skewed whenever I added a mushroom, but I did keep track of what the mushrooms added: before I added the first mushroom, the numbers had been steady for 30 or so minutes, but afterwords, they got a bit more erratic, but still not very.

Well, I found one part of the puzzle. I had eight villagers, (one infant) and over 25 minutes they ate in amounts of of 26, 24, 22, and 26. (Then the game crashed.)

26 and 22 can't be divided by eight evenly, but the median value 24 divides by eight to get 3; awaiting further testing, I'll make the assumption that Villagers eat every six minutes, at approximately three food per villager - more or less. Villagers also walked to the bin to eat, taking one food each time, twice during this period.

EDIT: Further data. The beehive regenerates every 2 hours, and regenerates 2 food per hour. I've only tested this over a period of two hours, and don't intend to keep testing it more.

This means though, that the beehive alone cannot sustain even a single villager indefinitely. I'll have to do more observing to figure out if the tree's output is identical; if it is, that means even the hive and four trees couldn't sustain one villager, who eats 3 food every 6 minutes - 30 food per hour. So I think the tree's output must be higher.

Another edit: The trees produce 111 fruit every 3 hours.

• The honey can't sustain a single villager; it's not even worth including in calculations, and is really useful only as an initial food source, waiting for the first tree to grow.
• Villagers, at the time this was written, are estimated to eat 30 food per hour - more or less.
• Each tree, if the estimate of food eaten by villager per hour is accurate, should support 3.7 villagers indefinitely. This means a full orchard can sustain 11.1 villagers indefinitely.

I'll verify the amount villagers eat per hour tomorrow, and come up with a calculation for determining how many hours your food will last.

What was I smoking? I looked at my numbers again. 111 food sustains a villager 3.7 hours, that's what the numbers say. Long enough for food to regenerate. So the orchard can BARELY sustain a minimum population of three; if you stagger births carefully (With these randy villagers?) you should always be able to keep a breedable pair, assuming you get the right gender. However, they can still sustain a population of five for quite some time, assuming the initial boost of 1000 per three, and 500 from the comb.

I still have to finalize a few numbers; particularly, ensuring the amount they typically eat is accurate, and re-checking all my math.

this thread is win. that is all.

I don't know about the numbers but I have found that you can sustain a village of about 12 with just the trees, the honey and mushrooms as long as you keep the kids collecting mushrooms fairly regularly. If you keep an intense eye & consistently double or triple up kids on the mushrooms, and pause when you're away (even for a short time), a village of 15 to 17 is possible, but anything higher than that and you'll start running out of food.

There are so many variables though; like how many red mushrooms you get, whether you have a chief make food & what events happen I had an event wipe out all of my food early in one game and it was very hard to get the bin looking healthy again, in another game my hive was completely refilled just as it had started running out, so there was almost 500 more food available in one instant.

You're exactly right, that's pretty well the numbers I strive for too. I don't usually add a chief either, till I have 15-17 villagers!

Heck . . . you can sustain even more than that, if you rain-dance a lot. You can sustain a healthy village without ever preparing the comb or the trees, if you have no problem unpausing the game only when you're at the machine, scanning fiercely for mushrooms.( I'd say a village of 10-12 villagers on mushrooms alone isn't inattainable, but you'll never be able to rain-dance for mushrooms if you don't farm. I miss the farm. Even if it was the only source of food, it gave your farmers 'practice' tasks.

All of my numbers are for the sake of planning and predicting a village's food supply during the time you're away; therefore mushrooms are no part of my assumptions.

Thanks for your data, I'll test it when you finished all puzzles soon

When I finished all puzzles? I'm working on completing them a second time, with a second tribe.

Oh, I meant "me".