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.