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