One of the fun parts of this game is getting to do the research into different period-level technologies.
For example, the other night I was interested in what an iron smelting "building" might look like in case I could easily create one for my little AI tester. This led down some interesting searches and I eventually ended up at medieval blast furnaces. Incredibly low-tech (but high on lore) way of extracting iron from ore. It's very interesting and apparently there are some places where people still try to run one of these for education/research... they even had some pictures/video.
It was also reassuring that my numbers on how much iron a basic smelter can produce from ore was not too far off... and the labor involved was at least Mythruna-realistic.
That brings us to the farm. I spent some time googling trying to come up with some nice numbers for how many people a Mythruna farm can feed. There are no straight answers and anyway I have the right to throw them out. I only have to be Mythruna-realistic.
One guy was doing some similar research and had posted a blog about it. He'd heard a quote that it takes 2 acres of wheat to feed one person for a year. That's not a good number for me because 2 acres is about 8100 blocks... the equivalent of about 8 strongholds. Just to feed one person.
On the other side, I looked up how a modern farm produces and came up with a number that a modern US farm can produce 9000 lbs of corn per acre. This works out to be about 1 kg per square meter... 1 kg per block.
This sent me to the local grocery store web site where I could read about corn packaging and "serving size". (Just yet another strange site to hit on my quest.) 2 lbs of corn would have 10 "servings" according to the box. If we pretend that a "serving" is a meal to a Mythruna villager than that means that 1 block serves 10 meals.
If you have a town of 30 people that need 3 meals a day... that's 90 meals per day. 2520 meals per mythruna-month... so 10080 per mythruna-year. So if a farmer only grew one crop a year then that means the farm only has to be 1008 blocks. That's smaller than a stronghold (1024).
Obviously none of the above is "realistic" to real life. Heck, a Mythruna year is already only 1/3rd of a real life year and trees will grow to maturity in only one year. But this was my sort of "minimum logical bound".
The "minimum logical bound" is basically fudging to the most fantasy-extreme while still having a logical progression for getting there. In this case, the lower bound premise is that a 32x32 plot of land could feed a village of 30 for a year. We need these lower bounds because the reality is that to feed those 30 people you'd have to farm all available land you could get your hands on for more than the size of a city. 30 x 2 acres is 243000 sq meters. That's twice the size of a city plot. At max clip, you couldn't even see it all.
What's fun for the game falls somewhere between these extremes and I figure out the "minimum logical bound" just in case it also turns out to be too big. If I fudge every step in my favor and I still have city-sized farms just to feed a village then I'm in trouble.
Anyway, with the understanding of bounds firmly in hand, I approached from a different angle. For my own aesthetic sensibilities, what would a 30 person town farm look like. So I built one.
Now, in another post I've already described that this is using middle-ages style crop rotation... so one fallow field and two working fields (you could up to 3 but I like the 2 and 1 layout). So a farm can produce from two different crops.
The sections are (from left to right), 169, 146, and 177... and could easily be made to match.
Mythruna life would be extremely boring if it took a full season to grow anything... so I will do shorter growing seasons. After all, if a tree grows to full size in a year then crops can turn over pretty quickly. So I think crops can produce once a week. This is 168 hours in "real life" time... and I think that's reasonable. Some plants may produce more often but 1 week is my baseline.
There will also be three months of growing and only the winter month means no planting. So you get a full 12 weeks of growing, or 12 harvests per Mythruna-year.
This means that whatever one block is producing, it does it 12 times a year. Our town needs 10080 meals per year. I don't know if you're already starting to do the math in your head... but it means farms don't have to be very productive.
However, I will throw an additional wrench in the works.
Even at this modest size, there is no way that a city would be able to farm all of its food. It would just end up being too sprawling and unfun. So a city may have one local farm (and of course the citizens may have gardens) but the bulk of a cities crop-related food will be imported from the surrounding towns. So it may be a good idea for towns to produce 2-3 times what they need to eat and then export the excess.
So now we crunch some numbers...
2 crops of 170 squares each... 340 producing squares. They produce 12 times a year: 4080 yields per year.
The town needs 10080 meals to feed itself and we'll double that for exports: 20160.
So, IF a town is ONLY eating crops, a square needs to produce 5 meals a harvest... given the farm that I built and the desired output.
I can live with that. In reality, Mythruna diets will be more varied than that... heck, two of my test towns already fish for more than half their food. Also, that full output implies a significant application of labor... though most of my towns so far seem to have a lot of idle citizens just waiting to work the farm.
