After 4+ solid and sincere hours of playing this including & beyond ALL the tutorials with many & constant reloads, unfortunately they all died of starvation despite all efforts - even a brief look at walkthroughs whereby you may as well give me all the cheat codes and be done with it once and for all. Yes?

Even after many years at 10Xspeed & when the children grew up to labourers (the school was even shut down to save at least 1 worker), gee, they were royally frakked & worth nothing more than digital dust as there was no recuperating the civilisation from any previous saves - all was a lost cause when they progressively and constantly died of starvation.

Gee, I love a game that wastes hours and hours of game play just to prove it can make fishing and hunting resources magically vanish reagrdless of season or demand. The houses all had both meat and fish & the beginnings of fruit & veg, yet they all died of starvation.

What a cute game to show that they all die of starvation. Nuclear holocaust would have been so much more fun to watch though - seriously. However, once I finally mastered the constant juggling of the few survivers of starvation for the many and various chores that needed to be done to prevent their starvation (presumably based on season), they starved to death, yep, no matter what.

I choose not to claim a refund because it's such a pretty way to watch everyone die of starvation. For now, I'm SO over it.
But, I might just keep replaying it when I'm drunk enough just to enjoy watching them all die of starvation - there is after all, a bit of fun to be had with that ;)

Did you checked the production stats?
I've been playing this game for years and I know these situations, there's always an explanation like having more mouths to feed that food is being produced.

This game's tutorials introduce you to how to do what you want. They don't tell you what you want to do. Even the in-game manual (help), while telling how much wood and stone it takes to make a hunting cabin or a fishing dock, and how many workers can work from each, doesn't say how many people a hunter or a fisherman can feed. That we have to find out for ourselves by trial and error. 4 hours isn't much trial and 10x speed doesn't help careful observation.

I think the developer got the start options wrong - "easy start" would be better called "fast start" and "hard start" called "basic start". I learnt my trade at the game on the latter. Valleys/mountains is the real easy/hard choice.

Lots of YouTubers have posted "Lets Play Banished". Some post their fails for the entertainment value. Lots have succeeded, not all of them the same way. Many do things I don't agree with.

There are seven ways to get food (including by trading) and all work differently - each has its pros, cons and quirks. With fishing, you see the water but not the fish in it, which I hope means fish are always there. Unlike fishermen. And unlike deer. Hunters can only kill the deer that are there to be seen.

Left to themselves, trees fall and vanish over time. Wild food plants and herb plants vanish over time. Deer disappear over time (also, they wander around). You can watch this happen. New trees sprout and grow over time, new wild plants appear and grow over time, and baby deer appear beginning of each year to fill gaps in the herds. Constant hunting, coupled to natural wastage, might reduce a herd faster than it can replenish its numbers; also, take away too much of a herd's grazing land and you'll limit its reproduction, eventually wiping it out. All part of the game.

Fishing's quirk is that some places to fish are much more productive than others, but distance to storage is also crucial.

Fruit and veg (from a Gatherers' Hut) is what I go for first if I possibly can. On a medium start I'd use my two extra founding adults as crop farmers. Unlike many YouTubers, getting the crops started would be the very first thing I'd do - unless the weather turned cold - and I*d have them in the already cleared space right in front of the barn.

Thx for the replies - I was having a good'ol rant wasn't I!?

I've since figured out the walkthrough's are for older versions. So based on your feedback & some walkthroughs, as you mentioned the Gatherers hut seems best - along with a forester hut set to plant only to solidify a forest area for the gatherer. And much patience for the buildings to complete construction in proper sequence before laying the next building (unless I pause the next one in advance). Also having 1 or 2 extra builders to lay the roads at the same time. Then having to really meticulously juggle the "professions" until the children start to develop into workers - finally I was able to get a town off the ground. My next challenge was everyone dying of old age - requiring a constant'sh building of houses. I'm getting there! It was a buzz to finally beat the food issues tho...

BTW, does an orchard still work ok if I only assign farmers to it during harvest time?

Glad you've made it.

Orchard trees start dying - one at a time - after way too short a productive life (that's my opinion), so we need workers in orchards to plant new ones. Otherwise, if we leave orchards untended except at harvest, will the fruit/nuts ripen just as well? - I don't know. Same with crop fields - can farmers be removed between end of planting and start of harvesting? If they can I won't take advantage because it would feel like cheating.

Harvest time for crops (independently for each field) is when we say so (press the button), when the crop reaches full yield or start of early autumn, whichever comes first. Harvest time for orchards (independently for each) is when we say so (press the button), when the orchard reaches full yield or start of autumn (the middle month), whichever comes first. So if you've taken farmers away you'll have to watch the yield so as to take advantage in good years when the fruit ripens early. With trees the developer didn't quite think it through, because once orchard trees start dying and their replacements are too young to be productive, the yield% isn't corrected for this so can never reach 100%; this prevents automatic early harvesting. At least all orchard fruits and nuts ripen at the same rate (I believe) so when we see one orchard is ready to be harvested, we know all are.

Field and orchard yields increase towards 100% only when the weather is neither too cold nor too hot. Frost and snow at planting time kills seeds in fields: this is a problem we can do something about (hold back farmers until it is safe to plant). Orchards we may not have to worry about. Frost and snow in autumn we can do something about (plenty of farmers and a short walk to storage should take care of the fields, but with orchards harvesting later the risk cannot be completely eliminated), A hot summer stunting growth we can do nothing about - I've had fields yield only half what they should in a bad year. I think of this as a drought, though the amount of actual rain may not enter into it. Each crop has its own temperature range as well as its own speed.

The deer you see on the map are entirely cosmetic, and do not relate to the hunter efficiency.

The efficiency of the fisherman depends on the amount of water that is covered by the building's "range". You'll get higher efficiency if you place the fishing hut where the river bends so that you cover more water.

Gatherer's huts are definitely best for early game food, but they become annoying because the amount of forest you need to leave around, which prevents you building.

To start the game your priorities should be

1. Housing
2. Firewood & Food (you should be doing sorting out both at the same time).
3. Tools (you need to beat the tool shortage disease, once your tool maker has no tools, he can't provide others with tools fast enough before they run out)
4. Some clothes
5. Education
6. Medicine
7. Trading
8. Sustainable farming


*** Spoiler warning - following this build order makes the game easy, you may want to experiment to find it out yourself ***

to achieve this I tend to build

1. Wood houses (I expect you worked that out :))
2. First get a wood chopper, and gatherer, hunter, forester cluster about 30 or 40 squares out into the forest.
This will probably max out your people, but keep a builder to hand to make sure that you have houses for fresh couples as they reach adulthood, and are building store houses etc. The gatherer and hunter will provide enough food, though a fisher hut should be introduced later
3. Get the tool maker built and ready, your tools run out sharply, you need to anticipate it and be making new tools before the rush.
4. The clothier should be able to make a few clothes out of the hides from hunting. You won't be able to full time occupy him so stock up occasionally and assign a clothier, then unassign when he's idle.
5. At about 20-25 workers, you should start sending the kids to school. This seems counter productive as you want your workers there contributing to the settlement, but the productivity of an educated worker is so much higher that it more than makes up for the initial delay in workers. However be aware that initially as you start educating, you're going to have 8 years or so with no fresh workers coming through, so have the core resources in surplus to accomodate a growing population.
6. Add a herbalist to your gather, hunter, forester cluster.
7. Build a trading bay, and a few more wood choppers, firewood is a sustainable resource that you can trade at a good price for lots of resources.
8. Do not rush to farming, it's labour intensive and takes time to get all the infrastructure in place. Basic food methods are good enough for a while. You do eventually want to be farming some cattle for the leather (then you can make sure everyone is wearing clothes), and then start farming crops. I found it useful to build little hamlets around my fields to reduce journey times.

That order builds you a stable settlement in a few hours. Your problems then move to ensuring a stable supply of iron & stone, and keeping you population demographic stable (you can easily find yourself with a large retirement community and nobody making fresh babies).

Often hunters can be seen walking past deer, or even into them, without killing them, which is fustrating. But plenty of times I have watched a hunter stop next to a deer, go through some arm motions, then the deer vanishes and there are slabs of meat and a leather hide on the ground. So the deer are NOT cosmetic.

My start-up priority order is different. On a large valley map, school first (unless going for the uneducated achievement, which I haven't tried yet). On a small mountainous map, school first at all costs. Because uneducated workers are so wasteful. Even on a "hard" start (8 adults only) one can be afforded as teacher. There are subtle benefits (1) students don't grab houses meant for their (foster) parents, which also means (2) they share their family's food and fuel hoards (3) they don't need tools until they graduate (4) both by not having babies themselves, and by leaving less room at home for their (foster) parents to have new babies, they inhibit overexpansion of population.

(Check children's ages - maybe the school can be delayed. I hate it when a map starts with a child already age 9 approaching 10.)

Students do not stay in school for 8 years: at the 5:1 age:years ratio that would mean them not becoming adults until age 50 ! They start at age 10 (2 game years after birth) and leave when they finish their course work, which can be age 16 if they live close enough to their "job" (the school) to waste little time going home for lunch.

Houses are not needed in summer, so initial food production second (usually gatherers' hut), houses third and woodcutter a close fourth.

First thing a new-born baby does is go the the barn/cart/market for a coat! If there are none, so the growing child cannot play outdoors for long in winter, so what? Spot how long the founders' first coats last before they need replacing. That's how long before a tailor is desperately wanted.

Established wisdom disagrees:

https://banished-wiki.com/wiki/Deer
https://banished-wiki.com/wiki/Tutorials/Tips#A_few_common_myths_debunked

But Reddit agrees (or at least contends):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Banished/comments/1z16in/deer_are_not_cosmetic/

Good point on the years for schooling, I meant "age" years rather than winters, and thought it was 8 rather than 6. I'm surprised you can manage with a school so early. That means you're able to keep your settlement going with just 8 workers. I assume that's 1 teacher, 4 food, 1 firewood, 2 labourers harvesting resources / building? Don't you run out of tools though?

EDIT: I think I'll have a go at that build today. Thanks for sharing it.

My deer observations are all on later versions of the game (1.0.4 to present). I agree that deer are cosmetic in the sense of not affecting crop fields, but hunting is another story.

I've seen that deer come in herds, each moving about strictly within its own territory. I know the size of each territory (how many territories to each size of map), the max number of animals in a herd, and how many baby deer each early spring. I can report that hunters on their way to the hunting grounds - the circle around the cabin - are allowed to kill before they get there. (Where it is a long way round by bridge to part of the circle across a river, kills can be a long way outside the circle.) I can confirm that when a hunter kills a deer there is a two-month ban on further kills by any hunter FROM THE SAME CABIN. (It would have been better programmed as "kills from the same herd".) The one thing I haven't worked out is how many tiles of grazing land each animal needs (because the max cap means a territory must be well short to affect numbers).

The game allows more than one family member at a time to go for firewood, each bringing home 25 (and for vendors and traders to use their wheelbarrows to take home 125 firewood at a time, that is 4-5 winters' supply in one go!). An important part of my starting build is to set a low firewood limit, only 50, so that my woodcutter can spend most of the time laboring, not over-provisioning greedy households with fuel. This leaves more logs for building. During the second summer I'll unallocate the woodcutter for an extra builder: that's when I build the blacksmith's.

I don't run out of tools, but if I did, can a worker without a proper tool be any worse than one without a proper education?

With only two or three people laboring early on (because everybody else is working on food), and uneducated workers having to break up twice as many rocks for the same amount of stone or iron, I don't want the uneducated having anything to do with collecting 55 stone and 32 iron for the blacksmith's.

Though gathering works year round, I got into the habit of gathering for eight months of the year and hunting for the other four (the cold months), partly for variety and partly to build up a stock of hides awaiting the tailor. My build order between hunting cabin, fishing dock, forester lodge and extra barn depends very much on the map. (One let me stay with just a cart until I was ready for a market.)

I....
I agree, this has occired over and over again. Now I remember I delete it and come back after I rather "forgot" it for a bit. Ridiculous for the develoers to put so much work into a beautiful and otherwise great game juist to throw a huge snafu into gameplay. Thumbs down, developers, FIX please!!??

I've just completed Uneducated and Isolationist together, from a hard start - which puts me three quarters of the way to One With Nature. Large map, valleys, fair climate, and despite losing 32 citizens and about a third of my then buildings to a tornado in year 10.