Farthest Frontier: Complete Food And Farming Guide (2024)

Getting enough food for your Villagers is how you'll spend a large portion of your time in Farthest Frontier. Consumption, spoilage, and animals all constantly chip away at your stores, so your town needs to be producing food at all times if your people are to stay healthy. There are many ways to get food, and each has its own gameplay system.

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This guide contains everything you need to know about keeping your Villagers fed. It covers every food source and explores strategies for maximizing each. We know you've got several dozen mouths to feed, so let's get started!

Food Basics

Villagers need to eat in order to remain happy and healthy. If they're unable to do so, they may get into fights, leave your town, or die. They also need proper nutrition from a mix of foods if they're to avoid diseases like scurvy.

Each Villager will stop what they're doing and look for food if they get hungry. They're smart enough to stock their homes and workplaces with food ahead of time, so usually they can grab a bite and get right back to their tasks. Villagers who have to travel to a Storehouse or Root Cellar to eat will reduce your town's overall efficiency.

Food that goes uneaten will eventually spoil. Spoiled food is deleted automatically and cannot be recovered. It takes a heavy investment of time and resources to create long-lasting food, so the majority of your Villagers' diet will consist of items with a short shelf life. The red number next to your total food storage indicates how many months' worth of food is expected to spoil over the next year.

Each Villager eats about thirty-five to forty units of food per year. This is a rough average gained by tracking annual consumption per population over the course of a playthrough. Since your food stores will constantly be going up and down and different food types spoil at different rates, this number is best used as a guide for judging your overall production capacity rather than a hard-and-fast target.

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Protein

Meat and eggs form the cornerstone of most towns' diets in Farthest Frontier, especially early in the game. Eggs can be gathered from birds' nests by Foragers, while Hunters and Fishers provide meat and fish, respectively. Meat and fish can both be cured at a Smokehouse to increase their shelf life. Try to have enough active Smokehouses to preserve your full yearly production of both food types, as this will extend your food supply.

Fishing

Fishing Shacks each employ a single Fisher, who gathers fish from nearby bodies of water. The more shore tiles there are in side a Fishing Shack's work zone, the higher the building's production will be. A shoal of fish exploited by a Fishing Shack increases the building's overall production by fifty percent.

Fishing is a solid cornerstone for early settlements, but as the game goes on it will fall into a more supplementary role as there are no real ways to increase production. Having multiple Fishing Shacks exploit the same body of water will cause the fish population to decline, leading to periods where no fish are produced. Small bodies of water can only support a single Fishing Shack, while even large bodies of water usually can't handle more than two.

Hunting

Using a Hunter Cabin as their base of operations, a Hunter will attack animals in the wilderness, butchering each kill into mean, hides, and tallow. Deer are the most common game, but Hunters can get meat from wolves, bears, and boars as well. A Hunter Cabin can eventually be upgraded into a Hunting Lodge, which allows the resident Hunter to set traps for small animals as well.

Since Hunters rely on nearby wild animals, they should be situated at the outskirts of town. Avoid chopping trees or building roads in hunting areas, as too much human traffic will cause deer to leave. It's also best to have only one Hunter per herd of deer, as otherwise you risk depopulating the herd too quickly and being left with nothing.

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Vegetables

Vegetables are grown from Crop Fields and are the game's first renewable source of food. Vegetables don't keep for very long and are very labor-intensive to produce, but have the highest yields of any food type. Vegetables are divided into three categories:

• Greens (cabbages and leeks) take the longest to grow and spoil the fastest, but produce huge yields as long as crop conditions are good. They're best for feeding a large population year after year, and can also be used for cattle fodder.
• Beans and peas keep longer than most vegetables and don't take too long to grow, but are sensitive to environmental factors. They're also the least damaging to the soil, making them a good choice for low-fertility maps.
• Root Vegetables (carrots and turnips) require sandier soil than other crop types; try growing them on maps with a drier climate. They don't have a great yield but are durable while growing and can be used as cattle fodder. Root vegetables are adequate replacements for fruit when it comes to keeping your Villagers safe from scurvy, and are the only vegetable type that can be preserved.

See the Crop Field Guide further down to learn more about harvesting healthy veggies!

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Grain

Grain is the only food group in Farthest Frontier with just a single edible item. Baking bread has a long, labor-intensive supply chain, but managed correctly it can create a baseline of food.

Like vegetables, raw grain is grown on Crop Fields. There are three different varieties of grain that allow you to choose the right plant for your climate, but at the end of the day they all produce the same good. Grain can be used as cattle fodder or sent to a Mill to be ground into flour, which is then sent to a Bakery to become bread. It's also a key ingredient in beer, which is necessary for Pubs to operate.

Grain has one of the longest shelf lives of any perishable in the game, allowing you to store large quantities long-term. Extremely large fields are required to get the most out of it, and even then buying out a merchant who comes into town with grain isn't a bad idea. Granaries exclusively store grain and flour, preventing these goods from cluttering your other storage buildings.

Bread spoils very quickly, but a large supply of grain means your Mills and Bakeries should be constantly working year-round. By keeping enough grain on-hand that you're always producing bread, you ensure that there's always something to eat even when times are lean.

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Fruit

Fruit doesn't last very long before spoiling, but it's the best way to prevent scurvy. Arborists grow fruit trees which, when fully grown, produce a moderate amount of fruit each year. You won't be able to build your entire food economy around fruit, even once you've gained the ability to make preserves, but the health benefits are undeniable.

Arborists can grow apples, pears, and peaches in whatever combination you like. Once the trees are planted, they take time to reach full maturity. This means you won't get an optimal harvest from an orchard until several years have passed. When a tree's lifespan is up, you'll need to chop it down and plant a new one, restarting the cycle.

Peach trees reach maturity very quickly compared to apples and pears, but have a much shorter lifespan. They also harvest earlier in the year, extending the amount of time annually that your Villagers have access to fresh fruit. Apples, conversely, take a very long time to mature but stay at full productivity for years and years once they do. Pears are somewhere in the middle.

The best approach to fruit orchards is to divide your Arborists' land into quadrants. Have one quadrant each for apples and pears, planted right away so they start growing. Plant peaches in the thrid quadrant, and leave the fourth quadrant empty to start. When the peach trees reach full maturity, plant a new grove of peach trees on the empty land. That way when the first generation of peach trees die your production won't be impacted as much.

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Dairy

Barns allow your Villagers to raise cattle, producing milk year-round. You'll need to purchase animals from the traveling merchant Ander Plainsrider initially, but once you have two or more cattle they'll start bearing calves annually.

Each Barn has a set grazing area where the cattle will feed during the spring, summer, and winter. The fodder quality is tied to the overall fertility of the land, but it doesn't need to be perfect - any quality higher than seventy percent will keep your herd healthy. In the winter, cattle need to be fed with grain, root vegetables, or greens.

The herd's milk production is tied to its overall health. As long as your cows have enough to eat, they'll produce milk at maximum capacity. If the herd's health drops, it will slowly recover as the animals eat. You can speed up the recovery process by instructing your ranchers not to milk the cows, but remember to turn milking back on afterward!

If a herd reaches maximum capacity, their health will start to decline unless you reduce the population, as the animals will compete for limited fodder. You can either send the extra cattle to another Barn or slaughter one or more to get a large amount of meat, hides, and tallow. Slaughtering one or two cattle a year per Barn is normal once you have a dozen or so. Try butchering one in the summer and one in the winter to keep any of the meat from going unused.

Cheese

Milk doesn't last very long in storage, but once your Town Center reaches Tier Three you can build a Cheese Maker. Converting milk into cheese dramatically increases its shelf life, letting your Barns support larger populations. Producing large quantities of cheese is the end goal of your cattle-ranching operations in Farthest Frontier.

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Crop Fields Guide

Crop Fields are the most complex buildings in the game and among the most essential. Once completed, each field lets you set a three-year rotation, producing yields or maintaining the field for the future. Each plant has several stats; here's how to make sense of it all.

Soil Quality

Each field has three stats; Fertility, Weed Level, and Rockiness. A crop's base yield proportional to the field's Fertility, and inversely proportional to Rockiness and Weed Level. Some crops are affected by these stats more than others, as explained below.

Some crops increase their field's Fertility, but most reduce it. To keep Fertility up, you'll need to occasionally grow clover, which doesn't produce anything but helps the field recover. Weed Level and Rockiness can only be reduced by performing Field Maintenance.

By adding clay or sand to a field's soil, you can moisten or dry the soil. Each crop has an ideal soil type, and getting the soil into the "green zone" for a crop increases the yield by ten percent. Try to keep crops with similar soil types together in the same field so that you don't have to constantly adjust.

Crop Stats

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