What I Learned After 50+ Hours of Only Farming In Manor Lords

Link to ALL Manor Lords Databases: melodious-entree-b4a.notion.s...
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00:00 - Intro
00:16 - Farming Method #1: Manual Farming (Best)
13:23 - Farming Method #2: Automated Farming
25:25 - Example of my farming setup from challenge run
28:23 - Word of caution regarding databases: Rounding Error
28:52 - Farming Speed Database
29:58 - Farming Yields Database
32:50 - Quick Tip: How to get higher fertility percentages

[@jayroo71]

Thanks for all these helpful videos. With families assigned to the farmhouse, can you click “pause” to temporarily send them to the unassigned pool and then when you have enough to harvest, unpause and they all come back? Is that what the little spinning family symbols mean when you have them assigned and hit pause?

[@Strat-Guides]

I actually missed that, thank you for pointing it out! I'm going to pin this comment.

[@jayroo71]

@@Strat-Guides there are so many mechanics to this game. It’s hard to figure it all out. Keep digging Strat. We appreciate all the help with your guides.

[@Strat-Guides]

@@jayroo71 I'm working on it! Trade post coming next :)

[@GoldenAura32]

This is amazing, I always forget about that button.

[@KobraKaK]

No. The spinning symbol means they are preoccupied in another profession

[@ThePeachgaming]

Jesus christ, you do like a doctoral thesis for every game you learn. I admire your work ethic

[@Strat-Guides]

Lol that made me laugh out loud a bit! I do enjoy this type of work :)

[@martinr7386]

That’s Doctor Jesus Christ to you

[@paulsernine5302]

This is how men actually work

[@kanrakucheese]

Crops 30% mature Manner Lord’s AI: It’s almost harvesting season!

[@Strat-Guides]

Lol!

[@robqwert2696]

Lol exactly this.

[@Mazapine]

Can't trust those peasants to do anything

[@coltoncyr2283]

Seriously, 100% growth and the land is covered in snow LMAO.

[@SamIverson]

I'm glad you talked about how broken the AI is when it comes to working the fields. Everytime harvesting season hits, all my villagers start wandering across the entire region for no reason. It's bugged right now.

[@Strat-Guides]

I'm telling, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why that was happening and how to fix it. Alas, after dozens of hours I couldn't solve it.

[@pingudinhoextreme6975]

It is happening to me aswell and I think I got what It is, altough I didnt do proper testing. Everytime a field gets harvested, the workers will try to instantly move the harvested crops to the farm house. Whenever one of the many small fields I had got harvested, every farm house worker from the entre region walked over to try and store the crops, so they would just keep moving back and forth everytime one of the fields got harvested and I would lose 2/3 of all my crops. After some trial and error I made a few huge fields and it reduced the amount of times a field finished getting harvested, so the workers wouldnt wander around as much and got much better harvesting. I got really frustrated when 7 farm houses filled to the brim with workers couldnt finish harvesting half my crops, but now everything gets harvested.

[@OnlineKenji]

Hunters do that as well when you enable the trapping perk. I cannot wait for future patches when my hunters stop walking to the other side of the region for 1 meat while the hunting grounds has 40 prey just waiting for some hunting attention. I've stopped going that route and just use the policy for that reason.

[@CubeInspector]

​​@@OnlineKenji even better is when my hunters wander into u claimed regions and trap rofl meanwhile I'm sitting at 40/40 animals

[@alexrobert0]

I have this for my sawpit as well, nobody wants to make planks in my saves

[@Raptorsified]

One important thing to note about removing farm workers during the growing season. Wheat/rye is only processed into grain at the farmhouse so I like to keep one family on it even during the winter. Same idea as moving your berry gatherers into the dye workshop during the winter.

[@alessandrobicocchi9186]

Just a note for people watching, this game can be played also by just roleplaying without looking at a single number, enjoy the game as you prefer without feeling wrong

[@crunkers_]

One thing I found out is you can actually plant right after harvest like the AI wants, stuff will survive through the winter and you can harvest even earlier

[@kingsford6540]

Yeah that's the intended pattern for farming. Harvest in september, plow and sow in October November.

[@kishirisu1268]

But you must have different sorts of wheat. But devs dont know about such fact, they think it all the same…

[@taylormccauley860]

for real i was pulling my hair out trying to get some good crop yields planting in the spring. apparently they had some GMO freeze resistant wheat back in that time lol

[@thinkingVariety]

Emmer is a very winter hardy crop, traditionally sown in September or October and the young shoots can survive very cold temperatures under snow cover. It's of course very rarely cultivated these days, but today's hard red winter wheat (the reference produce for CME wheat futures) is similar in the sense that it's sown in the fall and survives throughout the winter as a seedling. Most grains do this actually, though you do need a soft variety for spring sowing.

[@ClanHawkins]

@@kishirisu1268 it is emmer. Which is an old variety of wheat from Europe. I imagine this game represents farming in a rather milder climate than my home in the snowy Canadian prairies. I like to just pretend it’s one of those places that kids get a day of school when there is light snow and temperatures drop below freezing … not like my home where you can see your breath in the fall and your spit freezes before it hits the ground In January.

[@maxzachry9277]

I really hope they rework farming soon because with the current game, berries + vegetables + hunting are the clear optimal food source and if you want to get beer, pretty much the best option is to take the tariff-remover perk and just get good enough at trading so you can import the barley you need. Game is still awesome though and building a trade empire is still pretty fun.

[@taxag1134]

You don't even need the tariff remover perk for importing barley, if you have some other exports. I was able to import Wheat and Barley by just exporting warbows, shields, and shoes. One burgage for each export, and I still was net-positive in region wealth.

[@tiestofalljays]

Yeah, then add Apples into the mix and your food is all but sorted.

[@DesertCookie]

*he - it's a single dev that is working on this game. Sufficed to say, it'll take a while for things to change. However, the modding community is already working on many of the issues the game has; there's probably someone working on farming already too.

[@slavplaysgames]

Bro its alpha ? Pre pre release wtf do you want . The game is obv gonna be polished and fans opinion seems to matter to the one dev so I'm sure he will take info from youtubers just like this guy and others to make the game as balanced as possible lets hope for online one day . That would be so sick

[@kiiwii9718]

@@DesertCookie he has a small team and a publisher… definitely not 1 guy sitting in an office doing everything lmao

[@danielrziha6381]

"How you do anything is how you do everything". Your channel reminds me of that particular quote. Lucky me finding your channel.

[@Strat-Guides]

I love that quote! One of my favorites :D I believe in cleaning under the couch where nobody will ever notice because it's a good habit that can spill over into other, more important areas - that quote was what got me on that path

[@Staravora]

It appears farming definitely requires more thought and involvement than I was giving it (my people are always on the verge of starving)

[@Strat-Guides]

Hopefully this helps!!

[@dukkiegamer1733]

Yeah same for me. But sometimes I've got TONS of food, but it's not on the market so my people arent dying but my approval is suffering. Got 6 people on the granary but they're just not fast enough. I thought people in the granary could transport like 10 items with a cart, but I always see them walking without one. Same thing with firewood actually 11 months surplus, but 4 families are cold because it's not getting transported to the market quick enough.

[@flusck]

@@Simon-gv4md I have a smaller town with like 30 families and 5 firewood stalls of which 4 are serviced by the storehouses right next to them. 2 of the stalls are usually empty and 2-3 have less than 2 firewood each. I don't get why they just keep an inventory of 10+ in their stalls if I'm swimming in supply. If they would actually use the market inventory space 1/2 of my storage workers could do their actual work more quickly. This system of market distribution is not very mature yet, like 1/6 of my town is directly managing a huge supply of firewood and people are still cold.

[@flamepheonix933]

I've seen so much manor lord guides that the first video when i open youtube is a manor lord guide. Safe to say I was the most pleased with your videos as they are detailed and precise. Keep up the good work. All hail efficiency!

[@Akabane101]

I couldn't ask for a better explanation on Farming in the game. Thank you sir.

[@theorca3893]

Its actually insane how much work you put into these videos, but they are much appreciated! I think I'll stick to automated block farming, but even for that there was a lot of great advice, like rotating 2/3 fallow instead of the 1/3 that is normal for 2 crops. Keep up the good work! Your channel is one of the only ones I've found that puts in the effort to gather this type of data in games.

[@Strat-Guides]

Thanks for watching! I'm glad you found something useful here :) I really do hope they make some changes for the automated farming system, because it's much more fun to expand to many towns, but if you have to run farms manually in each, it would kill the fun for me.

[@theorca3893]

@@Strat-GuidesI agree, the automation could use a lot of work. But it seems like the dev its quite dedicated so I have high hopes for future updates!

[@isserdigan2835]

What works for me. I think the best one is 3 1.5 morgen fields on the high fertility land per farm house with an oxen. 3 farm houses. 1 Wheat, 1 Barley and 1 Flax. Right now there is no need to fallow for 1 full season. Once harvesting is done. Put the farms into fallow. By next year, your fertility is back to what it was. So i get a stable supply of emmer barley and flax for my region that is enough for it to function every year. The cycle crops is broken because as soon as you harvest they start plowing again and you have to stop them manually and burn the field as the crop will go to winter. Also start with 1 farm house with 3 fields. Until you can fill the whole 8 families. You might get away with 6 each. So its a yearly micro managing for me.

[@ThePrimeMinisterOfTheBlock]

Really appreciate your looking into farming mate. Comprehensive and well researched. If you find the time, perhaps consider investigating how food is consumed at the market place. We know that it 'teleports' every month but what I noticed in a test I set up is that food seems to be consumed in a certain order. First meat, then berries, bread, and so on. I did it by measuring changes in the amount of food stored every month and also by watching the numbers in the market ticking down. Over 12 months, the only food being consumed was meat, so I think it's unlikely to be RNG..

[@my936586]

No BS, straight to the point. Holimoly, how come I just found you, where have you been all my life!

[@JakeMakesMusic711]

Thanks, this was really informative. I was doing a farming run on stream yesterday and was losing my mind trying to figure out why I was getting such bad yields. I think you just showed me exactly why lol. I think I'll probably hold off on farming until it gets some kind of overhaul or patching love. There are so many great options for food that give high yields and don't require so much micromanagement that I don't really see the need (not to mention how infrequently I end up in a region with good fertility).

[@Strat-Guides]

Agreed - it's probably not worth it unless you have rich soil. Barley is the biggest need, but it's really only an issue if you're on the hardest difficulty since the pops don't mind not having ale at level 2

[@hummingbird9149]

Excellent video Strat, thank you for doing all this research for us :) This is esp. useful as it's post release, so we know all the data is relevant to the current version :)

[@fullsendtictic]

28:43, the plowing pattern there spooked me lol. Love and appreciate all the work you've been doing putting these videos out Strat!

[@Kodiac]

the part that surprised me the most was that i was more excited and happy to see your take on this then i was before. also i can comfortably watch 30 minutes of video from you and not get bored, love your work keep it coming !

[@marine4gaming721]

great video. I applied these strategies to my own gameplay and i found myself more engaged with my city with micromanaging and not automated and it also reassures that the farmers are doing what they should to maximize crop yields.

[@PyroMancer2k]

Fertility for curtain crops on ground sounds like they completely miss the whole point of crop rotation. Crops rotation was done to manage the fertility of the soil and I think would be a better mechanic than the generic fixed fertility spots common in most games.

[@flusck]

I agree, it would be a lot better to have a base fertility per region that isn't as punishing, like low fertility 90% base yield, normal 100% yield and high 110% yield. And then make the challenge to actually manage the farming rotation or use fertilizer. I'm very curious how effective the fence up perk would be for example.

[@TheMjollnir67]

Ostriv (look it up, if you don't know the game) does it really nicely with all the values shown in regards to crop rotation and fertility. Highly recommended game, if you just want to builf a thiving community, even though there is no fighting and armies and stuff.

[@vocalcynic2953]

Excellent video thank-you for all of the work you put into this! It's amazing that you need so much barley compared to the other crops!

[@isimperialist]

Bro in my notifications the title cropped perfectly to say, "What i learned after 50+ hours of Only Fa...." I thought farming was going to be fans lol.

[@Strat-Guides]

Lol only fans edition video coming soon - farm themed with corn and livestock!

[@Denek_23]

You need to start threshing the wheat instead of meat my man ;)

[@Schnarchnase]

@@Strat-Guides Kinky.

[@Kessra]

@@Strat-Guides And I wondered where the 2nd sheep came (initially only had one) from when selecting the perk :D But as "Only Fans" is now involved in it and corns are used for unnamed activities, it all makes sense now :D

[@I_ML7]

Man i really appreciate the effort you put into these guides. Thank you strat

[@christopher2866]

Excellent stuff Strat, thanks for this! One bug to mention: If you choose to fence fields for grazing, REMOVE THE OX from all farms, or someone will use said ox to take away the planks your builders are bringing for the fence! It's actually quite funny to watch 😂

[@Chupogi]

This was bugging the hell out of me, I couldn't figure out why the fence wouldn't complete.

[@tiestofalljays]

I made the mistake of taking the sheep multiplying bonus as well as the pastures upgrade. I got all excited and fenced up all my fields. It was great for awhile - my sheep were spreading out and helping the fields regain fertility….Then I realized I had 60,000+ Wool (sixty-thousand). The game just tanks to 1 fps every time I get raided (it honestly just freezes, making every raid a 10-15 minute affair). All my storehouses are full, I can’t sell the wool fast enough, and my logistics efficiency is getting wrecked. I will not be choosing the sheep bonus again lol. I have 15 Weavers Workshops….but now I just have a ton of Yarn, 2000+ Sheep, and cannot sell off either stock fast enough. Wish I could just “discard” stock. It’d save me so much headache. Also, having multiple Trading Posts seems to have next to zero effect. All the traders just go to one, even if both are connected to a road in the exact same spot. I think it’s time to discard this save and restart haha.

[@americanboy1332]

I just saw it at Overcharged Egg's gameplay recently and it was hilarious :D

[@thereal_onelargemammal]

THANK YOU for all your time and effort to put this together. Easily you are the best ML tester and creator (closely followed by Tacticat) on YT. ML needs to have a farming system like Ostriv where you can assign fields/farmhouses/plows/workers and they only take care of their assignments. Can't wait for your next playthrough using ALL the data you've collected.

[@hawk7381]

Exactly the vid I needed to see to startup my medieval farming sim empire.

[@MIM0991]

Finally, I found a video about farming that is not misleading. Thank you very much.

[@jimbomcgee7498]

Thanks for all the helpful and enjoyable videos you make. Keep up the good work

[@jesselauch]

I'm subscribing to your onlyfarms.

[@Strat-Guides]

Haha that should totally be a thing

[@michup86]

I do what I've learned from school. I build 3 fields for the same type of crop, and i put them on rotation: 1st crop, faul, faul 2nd faul, crop, faul 3rd faul, faul, crop So, you not only rotate on crop but also between fields. You can scale 3-pairs of fields. You do in threes, so 3, 9, 12 etc

[@0btuse]

Excellent video. thanks for the all the work!

[@TheNutteloos]

great stuff, i learned alot from this, i was using huge fields but still not getting the flow of crops going right now ill be able to make changes that will make it work, thank you!!

[@XemawthEvo2]

Outstanding video breakdown once again. Having someone put in the time to test all this is highly appreciated to avoid stumbling through the arcane sience that is farming in this game. With regard to crop rotation; if you stagger the crop choices in the rotation like how you showed in the video, you actually never have to use fallow, and can expand linen, and bread industires (helpful if trade is allowed) while keeping barley flowing for ale. This is especially effective on rich farmlands, as all yeilds are relatively high.

[@iroh6170]

Wait, growing a crop does not prevent the replenisment of the fertility of the other crops?

[@dadda9264]

This is the first of your videos I've seen. Well done! I hope the devs take a look at this video and figure out some fixes. Making medieval farms is way too fun to be bugged. Now off I go into the Strat gaming rabbit hole.

[@Strat-Guides]

Thanks for watching! Lol I hope you enjoy data and analysis :D

[@josefstalin8069]

remember, this applies to build 0.7.955 this will not apply forever

[@guygalaxy420]

thank goodness he says that towards the end of the video, what would we do without you saying it again :)

[@josefstalin8069]

@@guygalaxy420 ohp, I didn't finish through the whole thing lol

[@tdotfun]

Great stuff! Thank you. More on the automation would be great; and/or specifics on small operations like:

[@Ulathar]

You dear Sir are nuts! I would never have the passion to figure these details out! Thank you for that!

[@BillysFingers]

This is brilliant, thank you for all the hard work!

[@CatChrist]

Glad to see you put it into a video :) Cheers for the work man!

[@daveberndt3197]

It’s great all the hard work you put into the and other videos. Thank you.

[@exosproudmamabear558]

Ostriv has a great farming set up. In cycle it has 4 slots so you can go for crop,fallow,crop,fallow. Some crops has similar fertility zones so you can choose 2 high fertility for that farm and cycle it. You can put 4 oxes in a farmhouse which is great. Also you need to leave one person in the farmhouse to look after oxes used in the farm. Plus you need to build ox plows not just buy oxes. In general although you still beed to be involved automation still worked pretty good.

[@TubeTAG]

So to collect the take-away numbers, and correct me if I'm wrong... 0.65 morgen harvested per month per farming family (with only one relevant harvesting month on auto) 2% fertility per month is consumed while in the growing stage, even if it's done growing 4% fertility is recovered when not growing that crop (either fallow or a different crop) Roughly 6 Wheat per family per year, assuming only bread, and thus 1 morgen will provide for roughly 11 families Roughly 1 Flax per family per year, assuming only linen, and thus 1 morgen will provide for roughly 70 families Roughly 8 Barley per family per year, assuming level 2+* and thus 1 morgen will provide for roughly 9 families

[@Strat-Guides]

Everything looks accurate - just to clarify one thing: 0.65 morgen for automated farming only. If you're handling it manually you can go much bigger since you don't worry about losing everything in October.

[@TubeTAG]

@@Strat-Guides Updated to make it clear that it's the bounds of what a family can harvest in a single month, and auto only gives you a single month to do the harvest.

[@Yooyop]

I found you recently bro and you have been a life saver and eye opener. I voted in your last pole and I’m interested in seeing that video. Please make it happen

[@rosstepher9642]

Appreciate the hard work you put in 👏

[@maddahy]

That kind-of-equal yield nomatter fertility really smacked me, wasn't expecting it. But now that pasture on fallow perk really makes sense, if feritlity is just "field usage left" so to say. Thank you for this.

[@Burak_Bayir]

This, my friend, is probably the ultimate farming guide for quite a long time. Thank you, well done!

[@rgda3rd]

thanks, as someone who loves simulations but has no patience to break down data like this, I thank you sir.

[@cannabisscience8969]

You make the most informative content. Thank you so much and I appreciate your attention to detail. ❤

[@Somber.Killer]

This video should be sent to the dev. Very valuable info here regarding workers not staying in their limited work area among other things.

[@crusheergaming7345]

The most broken way to play and have literally infinite food is to make huge plots for the houses then add the vegetable gardens.

[@wittynewt610]

Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to test this and create the video. What was most surprising for me in this video was when you said that fertility had no obvious impact on yields. I clearly had the wrong idea on what Manor lords land fertility actually meant and that it had very little bearing to the real world :)

[@batrflajgaming6276]

20:40 they walk all over the place because you probably did not manage them to live in a burgage plot nearby the farm. they don't just work.., they go home to burgage plots to get some food and water from time to time... and if your burgage plots are far from their work place, they will walk around like they do here... you can manually assign families, to live as close to their work place as possible and also, have a multiple water wells placed nearby burgage plots, not just a single well for the entire region...

[@Strat-Guides]

Watch the video again - I gave specific instructions to build a burgage plot near the farmhouse, make sure there are no workers in the farmhouse, then click on the burgage plot people tab, reassign them to the farmhouse. I think the issue is they roam to get other things like you mentioned - water, church, firewood, etc. Even so, they shouldn't be wandering across the map to gather crops from a farm outside of their designated area that I placed. That's certainly a bug.

[@HeyItsMax]

Fantastic work as always! Any live streams / long form / unedited runs coming up? Don't dig too deep into the depts of editing despair . Thanks!

[@Strat-Guides]

Yeah I've got a run already prepped and good to go for this weekend! I haven't decided if I'll livestream or offline let's play just yet. It's the campaign I showcased in this video actually - no trade allowed, max difficulty

[@edcho6865]

Thanks! This was SUPER informative!

[@Strat-Guides]

Thank you for the support!!

[@sobzuk]

That some excellent and detailed work. Thank you.

[@ImKombo]

In my experience I have been able to verify (in fact I have checked it again before commenting) that the area selection what really selects is a specific field. In fact, if you look closely, it stands out when doing so. And I think it is designed for you to send them to the fields one by one to be able to do perfect micromanagement regarding rains, etc. The rest of the fields will not be attended. You have to change the selection or release it. It is much more convenient than raising and lowering priorities and can be managed with each building separately.

[@Nakai_the_Wanderer]

I usually did the inefficient method, a farm with 6 to 8 workers, 3 fields of 2 Morgen each and one oxen. They always manage to get the work done easily and even if one or two workers wander to another field, you still get it done. I have never seen one of the workers farm a field they were not assigned to, but I never really looked for that. My farmers also live right next to the farms, so they will never have to walk far to get to their work. The place where I noticed my citizens wander off to different areas of the map is when they set up market stalls on the furthest away markets for no reason. You can manually re assign them, but I would like to set some workers to "do not run a market stall", because I need them working. I once had many houses without access to fuel and noticed that the charcoal burners had set up shop all across the region and spent more time walking to the market stall than actually making coal. They even chose to make those stalls on the far away market, although there were 3 stalls from a different charcoal place already. This left one market without any stalls for firewood or coal.

[@ohleander02]

Try micromanaging so that your store houses and granaries are the people running stalls and NOT the people working the industry, etc.

[@Nakai_the_Wanderer]

@@ohleander02 I would have to limit the number of stalls, because an empty spot on the market will be filled quickly. Maybe getting two granaries and two store houses right next to the market instead of one of each could do the trick.

[@ohleander02]

@@Nakai_the_Wanderer You want to limit the number of stalls anyway. Or add additional workers to your granaries and store houses. Or add additional of both. Ideally, only granary and store house workers should be running stalls unless there aren't enough workers.

[@ohleander02]

@@Nakai_the_Wanderer You can effect which industries and things run stalls and by building smaller markets and by some micromanagement. You should also control how many stalls there are. 🙂

[@o_O29866]

Love it! thank you man!

[@AlteredgamingTV]

Great video as always

[@gnollman]

Great guide, very informative.

[@iDuelZzz]

I do a middle ground. I use the Crop Rotation, manually set the "force harvest" as soon a field is ready so i only need very few families for harvesting as they can spend ~june to september on it. In Oktober i add a bunch of families so they acn plough and saw until november. I usually leave one families per farm but mainly for ease of use. That worked great so far for me with my village of ~140 families. But i have to say that i have a rather good spot for farming. The area is ~8 Morgen with ~50-60% Emmer fertillity and ~50% for Barley and Flex I use 4 Farmhouses each with an Ox.

[@mr.benchmarkkitchen9806]

Experienced the same issues. So I just do a combination of both methods. Pairs of three 0.4-0.6 morgen fields (6-7 in total) with crop rotation AND I set them them to force harvest in July when they reached >95% growth to ensure harvest of all fields before crop change. Have enough people, so I let them stay in the farm house, they also operate market booths … and I am too busy in building other towns… So a manual pre-harvest in July saves m output and minimize the micro management.

[@Strat-Guides]

It's just a shame we even have to micro that. Imagine if we had a drop down for "Harvest Month Start" and "Harvest Month End"? We wouldn't have to deal with all the mess lol. I'm pretty sure this will get fixed in the future as it feels more like a place-holder than a developed system

[@mikeb3553]

Great analysis. Thanks! In regards to the Limited Work area issue; I’m sure that’s a bug (aka feature) that will be patched in a future update. Once it is patched I think AI farming will be a lot more practical.

[@user-qy6zf6ge4g]

Thanks for going through the tests and sharing the results. The actual impact of fertility being that small is quite surprising, at face value, going from unfertile (red) to fertile (green), you'd expect to double output (~ 25% - 50%). Though we don't know what the percentages actually represent, so eh. The "ox crossing the width" is surprising at first glance, but not so much if you think about it. With every length plowed, the useless width gets smaller, until it reaches 0 after the last plowed length. Since this decrease is linear, the average wasted travel per length plowed is only half the width. Meaning for a square field, only 33% of the total distance traveled is wasted. Still less, but a good bit less than what you immediately see when you watch your ox at the start of plowing. On top of that, it would make sense that the ox is faster when crossing the width, since he's not dragged down by the act of plowing. Meaning the lost time crossing the width might be even less (and this is the kind of detail Greg could have implemented).

[@HristoskoBG]

About your point at 24:08 - you should still use oxen(plowing stations) even in case you're automating the farming, because they not only help with plowing, but also assist with the collection of harvested crops(at least according to the in-game info). (I'm assuming farms without the plowing station upgrade don't use oxen for transporting goods)

[@Esben90]

WOW I haven't even bought the game yet, but this video is so awesome! Earned another sub :)

[@bumblewoot]

Great work and Great video! And this isn't meant to be negative just an observation that your speech patterns sort of line up with a certain spectrum and are very interesting =)

[@Sirconnor9292]

The most surprising is in 2 parts. #1 how difficult it would be to maintain fertility, and just how many morgens of wheat/rye needed to feed a town

[@martinez206045]

I am amazed by how much barley the village can eat / drink per year :)) Awesome job - thank you very much for all the hard work you put in! .

[@Tiger4ever89]

Outstanding Work Strat! i am doing so many runs.. i hate to get greedy and sloppy following Banished or Life Is Feudal.. or even Farthest Frontier style it doesn't really work with Manor Lords.. mainly due to Early Access Family instead of individuals.. Market Stalls... Population Likeness and more

[@MrNiton_]

Thank you very much. This is very helpful and now I know the math behind my constant lack of ale

[@arthurzwachte5537]

The main thing i learnt is that it isnt worth it

[@AC-hj9tv]

Low yield, fertility tanks. Found it better to built up an industry and import crops as of rn

[@alliezah]

Thank you so much for explaining. I have like 10 hours in the game, so not much experience, but farming was beyond my understanding. I turned on crop rotation cause on paper is sounds great, but I ended up having 0/0 fields for years and had no idea what even causes this.

[@AlkaloidMushrooms]

Glad to ear fertility ,is a thing i alredy notice when i play but now is confir is only a longevity stuff , Grat Work ...u put so many effort in this video i ever put in something in my life ehhehe

[@270Parker]

great video mate

[@corbinthorne8009]

I think I have a fix for the villagers wandering around rather than farming. They will need to do tasks at their home residence in between working. So if the families assigned to a given farmhouse live too far away they will spend all their time walking between those locations. To fix this issue build localised houses and you can directly assign those families (through their burgage plot) to the adjacent farmhouses.

[@wizlon6757]

Great vid, yet again. Have you also worked out how/if pasture affects yields?

[@kaidaniel1346]

nice videos. just watched you live stream after this one. i never noticed that the spawning point of the mercenary is right above the cost in hiring menu.

[@russell7995]

Fascinating and informative. Thank you for sharing. I wonder if you looked at weather settings and considered how this and the actual terrain might have affected your outcomes. Variable weather should give variable growing/harvest/yield results. I am also wondering if terrain factors account for variable fertility across yield zones? Looking forward to more content!

[@bombidil3]

Oh hell yeah! City building meets Mount and Blade, and Strat's got the stats to explain what is actually going on.

[@einarcgulbrandsen7177]

Great work there.

[@Sapnom24]

This is weird in my play through I havent had any problems with my automated farms. Also one thing I think you might be wrong about is not adding oxen to automatic farm houses because the bottle neck is harvesting. - the oxen will also help the harvest by being a pack mule for gathering up the harvest in the middle of the field which allows workers to only harvest and lets the oxen carry back the yield to the farm house. This dramatically helps the harvest!

[@bilalsyed8550]

Wow! No wonder why I could never keep up with the ale requirement. I thought wheat is more important and should be in abundance. Thank you for this PHD in farming man.

[@Strat-Guides]

Glad it was helpful!

[@hankrearden5460]

I just make it a habit to check my farms a couple times in my main town. I found what works best is set it to grow crops in January. They start working when the spring hits It's all planted by March, leave it alone from there. I get 100% harvest by September. Once they are done i turn the fields to fallow. Move onto my next set of fields the next January. It's a bit annoying esp when you are busy doing other things but i end up with large yields.

[@evulclown]

THIS!!! Thank you for making this with the actual nitty gritty data so we can all see the quirks, bugs and simple stats. The dev seems to want things vague to put off min maxers but resulting in people not understanding a clearly malfunctioning farming system via guesswork. All farming tutorials have been Google top result churning trash articles like ign waffling an intro followed by regurgitating ingame tooltips and pointing out the obvious. So again thank you. Does having wheat followed by flax not drive down fertility? I'm curious what the results are with rye over wheat in the same scenario (drought resistance aside) its mesnt to be easier to farm on worse land so does that translate to higher yields? If so how much better? Also grazing sheep on lands, sheep over lambs? How many per field what benefit it brings and how that scales etc.

[@Strat-Guides]

So fertility does not increase yield for any 1 harvest, but it will produce the same yield more frequently. If you start at 60 Fertility and use 24 per year, then you can harvest twice before going to fallow. If you start at 30 fertility, you'll have to go fallow every other year instead. Rye is functionally equivalent to wheat and produces the same yield, but you'll get higher fertility with Rye on bad soil. So basically it's like farming wheat on rich soil, but using Rye on poor soil. Hopefully that makes sense, hard to explain in a comment lol *I need to spend some time testing the sheep enclosure and fertility

[@evulclown]

Perfect thanks! Essentially, this blows my mind, fertility is irrelevant... 3 seperate crop patches doing 1 year on 2 off each on the worst soil is identical to the best soil. Only benefit is being able to replant the same patch more but .. crop patches are free and space is plentiful. Wish the dev was more open and the closed beta guys actually tested stuff rather than blind praising. Also I have the solution to the automated running accross the map to harvest game breaking bug! Essentially trapping them in a prison which can be done with houses around it since peasants wont cross a house fence (careful some models have a crack). Workers dont need to sleep and their house eats the food, if you position farmhouses facing out everyone outside can take their stock. Or... the way i preferred which is using a manner wall, not the towers and not the mannor enclosed. You can place the fences entirely seperate and it not bug out. You can then have a second joined fenced section for farmhouses or again their bums poking out. Delete the road once your slaves are in to seal the wall. Ensure no militia peasants, can have houses in there if need be and simply re-add a road for a gate back should you need access for w.e I just wanted a chill middle ages farming and building sim and it suddenly got dark and I've ended up creating some medieval slave forced labour concentration camps 😅😢

[@OnlineKenji]

I haven't had so much luck with the ox plowing. I've made squares, but it always seems that just having 8-16 people hit a one 1-2 morgen plot at a time was faster and got me those 1000+ yields much more consistently when using priorities so that they only have one choice at a time seemed to help with the bouncing around from field to field (drove me crazy 😄) The ox was useful for out of season re-plowing after a early harvest when the lot was a small square or rectangular, but a bunch of people still seemed to work best (anecdotally - just a perception. I did not do any controlled testing)

[@Strat-Guides]

Yeah the oxen really excel at multiple field farming - they do it at roughly 3x the speed of a single family doing it by hand (ox is 1 person from a family, not the whole family so 3vs1 and still 3x faster). As long as you have more fields than you have oxen to plow, it's a pretty big increase in efficiency but otherwise it can actually slow your overall rate down with the idle pops

[@MrMichaelBCurtis]

new subscriber, very impressive work. Thank you for your post. Question: does soil fertility affect vegetable gardens?

[@AGSx37]

I really love this channel for such tests and math)

[@OffMetaProfessor]

My workers literally refuse to sow the fields until October this is with all the fields fully plowed from August, it's like they were programed not to start sowing until October started, Idk if it's a bug but it's weird, also found a bug where if you place a field down right as the oxen are arriving back to the farm house to remove the plow equipment after they've just finished all the fields, the new just placed field could sometimes automatically be plowed almost instantly by itself. It's like the game is programed to believe all fields are fully plowed before the plowing equipment can be removed from the Oxen, so if you place a new field right when the equipment is being removed it fills in the new field as it believes all fields should of been completed already.

[@fergiepicachew]

BRO .. for optimizing material transport could you TRY ASSIGNING FREE WORKERS TO STABLES? Then you can limit grainary and waregouse to industrial areas only. It should help make things go all over the map 10x faster

[@Denek_23]

Very impressive work, respect

[@MrNajsman]

First time viewer, very good information and video!

[@Strat-Guides]

Glad you liked it!

[@MrNajsman]

@@Strat-Guides This is the first video I've watched of this game, I restarted my world after watching 😁

[@StrategosXenophon]

Great video, thanks for the hard work! I'm going to try this out now too, farming with a worker and an ox. :-) Just one question, how big do you make the individual fields? I think you said in the video that 1 worker can work 0.36 acres?

[@Slanderbot]

Is there a playthrough of that challenge no trade campaign at the end? That looks like an incredible watch!

[@galaxxy09]

This is excellent! Are you able to do a small one of these for the gardens in the burgage plots?

[@zoidsj]

Incredibly helpful and insightful, however it'll be a cold day in hell when I micromanage 15 fields and remember when they need to be harvested, fallowed or planted. I'll just wait until the AI around the farming is balanced and improved.

[@phineasgage8252]

No one gets close to as good as you in my opinion. So thorough

[@bobmcbobbob2391]

Can you make a video explaining all the weirdness surrounding apple orchards, and why the apples rarely make it to market?

[@pavelperina7629]

They seem to make it to the market via granary only when capacity of building overflows, which may take maybe 4 years. It also seems that some type of food which has lower ammount in granary is consumed faster as it's taken to market randomly, so when there is 70 apples, 30 honeypots and 250 breads, you run out of honey first, apples next and in the winter, food variety won't be satisfied. When house can't satisfy food variety from other sources, they seem to consume stored apples. I assumed that products are collected by carts from granary, but it does not seem so or apples have lowest priority. It's "fun" to have 600 apples in cellar of four L3 buildings that can feed village for 3 months, but are never distributed and because these buildings are close to market, they are getting variety of food while others are starving.