Songs of Syx – How to Maximize Food

In the game, one of the most important factors for good production is your employees. The race, mass, and climate conditions of the employees can vary depending on the food you produce. For employees to be able to produce well, they need to eat well. According to the detailed information in this guide, you can learn how to maximize the amount of food per employee and its impact on your production.

Maximizing Food Efficiency

To increase the productivity of your workforce, your employees need to eat well. This is determined by the amount of food produced per employee. In this guide, you will learn how to obtain food and reach maximum levels.

Food Consumption vs Food Production

Your plebeians, of any race, consume exactly 0.5 food per day. However, there is some consumption per day that does not depend on your population. When you start the game (with 10 plebeians) this extra consumption is 0.5, so your consumption is 5.5 a day. This number increases as the game goes on. I am not sure what causes this, but I suspect it increases either when you pass certain population thresholds or increase in level. If you know please comment and I will update the guide. This number is always far smaller the consumption from your population, so your total consumption will be somewhere between 0.6 and 0.5 per day per plebeian.

Your production, however, varies depending on factors such as the race of your employees, the climate, fertility, and what kind of food you are producing. Food produced per employee varies extremely from 0.5 to 2.8, and typically 1 to 2. The difference between 1 and 2 food produced per employee is the difference between 50% and 25% of your total population being dedicated to food production, a massive difference. If you want to be self-sufficient (i.e. not rely too much on trade for food) then you will want to minimize the percentage of your population dedicated to producing food.

This guide gives you the numbers on how labor efficient the various foods are in various scenarios. Labor efficiency is determined by the number of food produced per employee. Labor is not the only way to acquire food, you can also forage, hunt, or trade, but this guide does not take that into account.

Factors Affecting Food Production

Base Production

When you mouse over a building to construct it you will see its base production per employee. This number takes into account some factors, such as climate, but not others, such as fertility (they assume 100% fertility) or employee skill.

The table below shows the base production per food building per employee.

How to See Your Multipliers

When you select a food production building you will see a menu such as the one below.

The number under PRODUCTION next to the icon of the building’s output shows the building’s current total output per day. If you mouse over it you will see a submenu that shows all the multipliers affecting output, such as the one below. Note that this breakdown will sometimes show the output per year and sometimes the output per day. There are 16 days in a year.

If you see a number labeled “Skill” you can mouse over it and see a submenu such as the one below. Note that “skill” takes into account not just the skill of your employees but the climate as well, which can be counter-intuitive. Some buildings do not have a number for skill you can mouse over, and instead it will be broken down when you mouse over the number under PRODUCTION as mentioned previously.

How Multipliers Work

The submenu when you mouse over the number under PRODUCTION shows all the relevant multipliers, (remember that skill takes climate into account). These multipliers are multiplicative. This means that if your base output is 100, your skill multiplier is 1.50, and your fertility multiplier is 0.75, your output is 100 * 1.5 * 0.75 = 112.5.

Species

The different species have different skills at different jobs. This skill serves as a multiplier and is one of the most important factors that determines which foods you should focus on.

Climate

Different climates also apply different multipliers to different food buildings. Your map’s climate and modifiers can be seen when selecting where to place your capital during world generation as seen in the screenshot below. During world generation, cold climate tiles will tend to be towards the top of the map while warm climate tiles will tend to be towards the bottom of the map, with tiles in the center tending to be of temperate climate.

Fertility

Fertility greatly affects all crops and pastures. Note that when selecting the location of your capital during world generation you will see the average fertility as well as your climate. These numbers vary greatly, from around 80-85% in forested areas near rivers to 10-40% in rocky areas near mountains.

Fertility doesn’t just affect output of farms, but also the size of your stables. Fertility, unlike with farms, is not actually a modifier that directly modifies your stables’ production. Instead, it affects capacity, which is a similar but slightly different factor. With lower fertility, you will require larger stables to have the same output and same number of employees as a stable on higher fertility. Because of this, you can think of fertility as affecting the size of your stables rather than its output per employee. The output per employee will stay roughly the same, regardless of fertility.

Other Factors

The following multipliers also go into production, but are not used in the calculations in this guide. These numbers are nonetheless extremely important, it would just not be feasible to show numbers that cover every scenario.

Work Value: The default value of this multiplier is 1.0 and it goes down if your farm is understaffed or if your workers are not putting in enough work for any reason.
Moisture: The default value of this multiplier is 1.0. It goes up after rain and goes down with high temperatures.
Event: Events such as blights or blessings can help or hurt output.

There are also the following ADDITIVE values. These are Experience, Tools, Indoctrination, Religion, Nobilities, Technology, and Titles.

Effects of Species In-Depth

The table below shows the skill of every species at every food-related job.

The bottom line per species is as follows:

• Amevias: They are efficient with globdien and fish. Amevias prefer warm climates which further boost globdien, making this a particularly good choice for them.
• Argonosh: As their description says in-game, do not put these guys to work at anything.
• Cantors: They are somewhat bad at all forms of farming and husbandry, being slightly less bad at husbandry. They actually have a decent boost in bakeries.
• Cretonians: These guys are very good at all farming. They also do not have any food they are particularly bad at producing, making their food options particularly diverse.
• Dondorians: They do not have a positive modifier for anything outside of bakeries. You will need to rely on either mushrooms or fish. Mushrooms do much better at cold climates (and fish do slightly better as well). As Dondorians prefer cold climates, you should consider placing your capital there.
• Garthimis: They are bad at pretty much everything except balticrawler breeding and fishing. Neither of these get a large boost from any climate.
• Humans: These are much like Cretonians in that they are have a boost at all farming, but the boost isn’t as extreme.
• Tilapis: They are very good at auroch, entelodont, and onx ranching. They are somewhat the opposite of Cretonians/Humans in this regard: being generally better at animal husbandry but having no penalties to farming.

Effects of Climate In-Depth

The table below shows the multiplier due to climate on food production. The foods not shown have a multiplier of 1.0 for all climates.

The bottom line per climate is as follows:

• Temperate: This is your default climate. Aurochs and entelodonts get a strong boost but nothing else is affected.
• Warm: A few foods are negatively affected but globdien, notably, are positively affected. Amevias prefer warm climates and are efficient at globdien husbandry, so are suitable here.
• Cold: Entelodonts get a slight boost while onx and especially mushrooms get large boosts. Dondorians prefer cold climates and mushrooms are the only foods they have a decent multiplier for, so are suitable here.

Scenarios Overview

What follows are sets of numbers for various scenarios showing the food production per employee for the various kinds of food taking into account species skill, climate, and fertility. Each scenario is for a specific species on a specific climate. The foods that species prefers will have an asterisk() before them, e.g. “Fruit” will be listed as “Fruit” in the table.

If you want to know how these numbers are derived, the derivations are self intuitive in most cases: the base output per employee (from the beginning of the guide) * the fertility (if the food is a farm) * the skill of the species at producing that food.

If you do not care about how the numbers are derived, skip the rest of this section.

Some numbers are more complex to derive. Most notably these are the numbers for the various pastures and bread. The number for bread takes into account not only the labor required to produce the bread, but also the labor required to produce the grain used to produce the bread.

Pastures, on the other hand, depend on a multiplier called “Capacity.” Capacity depends on the size of the pasture and the fertility, but it is unclear how exactly it scales. In my experiments I was not able to determine an exact formula for capacity. This is the bad news. The good news is that the amount of workers also depends on the size. The bottom line is this: when you are placing a pasture, you will be able to see the number of workers the pasture will require. Your capacity will be roughly 90% of this number (according to my experiments). The lower the fertility is, the larger your pasture will need to be to staff the same amount of workers, and thus the larger your pasture will need to be to have a higher capacity. If anyone knows the exact formula for capacity let me know.

The numbers I show for pastures assume that the capacity multiplier is 100% the number of workers required.

Scenario: Cretonians in Temperate Climate

Bottom line: Their significant boost to all forms of farming makes them incredibly efficient at baking bread. This is probably the most efficient any race is at producing any food on any climate. They are also very good a producing fruit and vegetables, especially fruit when raised in orchards. Their efficiency with the various animals are decent.

Scenario: Garthimi in Warm Climate

Bottom line: Their numbers are almost universally bad here. Garthimi are bad at producing every food except baliticrawlers and fish, but these are not incredibly efficient food sources to begin with. This is the only starting race that isn’t most efficient with bread.

Scenario: Humans in Temperate Climate

Bottom line: Humans are much like Cretonians in that they are decent with animals but good with all forms of farming, except that they are less good at farming as Cretonians. Of note, however, is that their food preferences are different. They prefer meat so you may want some entelodont stables despite the low efficiency, and they also prefer mushrooms which they are just not particularly efficient at producing except in cold climates. In cold climates you can double the numbers listed for mushrooms which makes it a very good food source for them. Like most species they maximize efficiency with bread.

Scenario: Avemias in Warm Climate

Bottom line: Like most species, they are decent with bread. They are slightly less good, but still pretty good, with Globdien, which is ostensibly their specialty. They also get a decent boost to fish and fruit (from orchards), which they both prefer.

Scenario: Tilapis in Temperate Climate

Bottom line: In addition to being labor efficient with bread, like most species, they are also very efficient with entelodonts and fruit orchards, which they both prefer. In temperate climate, they are the most efficient species at aurochs husbandry, but aurochs are not food efficient to begin with, which is offset by the fact that they also produce leather with the same labor efficiency.

Scenario: Dondorians in Cold Climate

Bottom line: All the numbers here are bad except bread and mushrooms. Even though Dondorians are bad at farming grain, they are good in bakeries, so bread is still a more efficient food source per same level of fertility than mushrooms. Dondorians also like to eat bread, which is a plus. They also like fish, which is absurdly easy to set up and receives a small bonus in the cold climate, making it a decent early food source.

A Note on Space Efficiency

Space efficiency is important too. Luckily, it is much more simple to consider.

• Farms: All farms require 1 employee per 96 tiles.
• Orchards: Orchards require 2 employees per 7 trees or 1 employee per 3.5 trees. Each tree requires 16 tiles, meaning 56 tree tiles requires 1 employee. This makes fruit orchards not only more labor efficient than fruit farms but space efficient as well.
• Stables: I can’t offer you a formula for how large a stable needs to be to sustain any number of employees. On a map with ~80% fertility, I notice I need something like 100 tiles per employee, roughly equivalent to a farm. On a map with ~10% fertility, a stable that was 1051 tiles required 1.45 employees. So assume stables will be slightly less space efficient than farms on high fertility maps and absurdly poor on space efficiency in low fertility maps.
• Bread: Obviously bread doesn’t just require grain farms but bakeries. Bakeries can vary in size depending on how good you are at designing rooms. My personal 24 employee bakery room setup that I default to requires 351 tiles. At 100% fertility, this requires 3072 tiles of grain farm, so the space required by your bakeries is probably going to be negligible compared to the space required for the grain to sustain said bakeries.