How big should you build your farms and crop fields in Banished?
Are you into farming games? Do you enjoy planting and harvesting crops, caring for them as they grow and get ripe? If so, then Banished is just the game for you. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a city building game from Shining Rock Software, in which you’ll build your own community from scratch, with their own architecture, economy, and agriculture. Crops will be an important part of your community and they have the potential to become the major source of food for your citizens, so how to plan your farms wisely? What should they be like to provide the biggest amount of food throughout the harvest season?
One important factor is the size of your farm. When you build a crop field or an orchard, it’s always up to you to decide how wide and how long you’re going to make it. Perhaps it’s going to be square and small, or rectangular and huge? It’s entirely up to you. Of course, different sizes can achieve different results. The size impacts whether all the crops growing on a given farm will be harvested on time before winter strikes and ruins whatever crops have not been gathered yet. That’s why it’s important to make sure that the ratio between the size of the farm and the workers assigned to it is accurate for the crops to be gathered just in time. Another factor is that different crops grow at a slightly different time of the year: some are ready to be harvested by the end of summer, while others won’t be ready until late autumn, so once they are ready, your farmers will have to work quickly because winter is right around the corner.
So what farm sizes do we recommend? Let’s have a look.
5. 8x14, with 1 worker
Don’t dismiss small farms - they will prove useful in the right circumstances.
You may want to use this farm size somewhere at the beginning of your game, and either leave it as it is forever or replace it with a bigger farm later. You’ll notice that the crops will be harvested from an 8x14 farm somewhere by the beginning of the autumn (the end of early autumn or the beginning of autumn at the latest), which is a great deal if you’re nervous about frosts damaging your unharvested crops.
What is great about this farm size?
- It’s undemanding in both size and workers required. If you can’t spare too many farmers or if you have a relatively small patch of land that you can’t decide how to occupy, this is your answer.
- Sometimes, you’ll need to fit a farm in between buildings or roads that leave only with a long and narrow space, let’s say, somewhere 8x14. City planning isn’t always easy, so you’ll need all the flexibility you can master, and that comes with experimental farm sizes such as this one.
- Who said farms must all be square? If you care about looks as much as about efficiency, you may actually like the way farms of different shapes look on your map. Embrace diversity!
4. 10x10, with 1 worker
Watch your crops growing and getting ripe under the care of the farmers.
This is the smallest farm of those that you can be sure of serving you well. It’s an amazing option if you’re just starting a new game and your population is still very, very low. There are only so many workers you can spare to work at your farms, so you have to choose wisely, especially if you’d like to use all your 4-5 seeds given to you at the beginning of the game. That’s why a 10x10 farm is your go-to option.
What is great about this farm size?
- It’s so small it’ll prove useful for occupying small hills that can’t be used for placing buildings on them.
- They don’t need more than 1 worker, which is great for when your population is low and you can’t spare many laborers to work on farms.
- The crops growing on such a small farm will never die in early frosts because your farmers will always harvest them early enough.
3. 15x10, with 2 workers
Plant different seeds on your farms. Your citizens will thank you for a rich diet.
A slightly bigger farm than the previous one, it has its advantages, which I’m sure you’ll want to explore. Obviously, since it’s bigger, it’ll provide more food, but that also means it’ll require more workers to harvest its crops. They will not harvest themselves, are they?
What is great about this farm size?
- It provides more food. As your population is growing, it might be a safer bet to start building bigger farms, so 10x15 will prove useful to your city expansion.
- It’s still convenient in case you still don’t have many laborers. After all, 2 workers are only slightly more than 1.
- You may decide to replace a 10x10 farm with a bigger one later on when your body count is higher, but a 15x10 farm is much more likely to stay without changes.
2. 12x12, with 2 workers
Building houses close to farms prevents farmers from going too far when they need to eat or get warm.
The size of one farm doesn’t have to be very different from the size of another to make all the difference. Sometimes it’s a matter of only a few tiles: make it too big and your crops will go to waste. Make it too small and your farmers will stay idle for half a season. The 12x12 farm is a terrific alternative to a 10x10 farm if you feel like that 1 farmer you assigned to the smaller farm does their work too fast and then rests all autumn. You can make a bold move, replace your 10x10 with 12x12 and see if now that worker will have as much time to be idle.
What is great about this farm size?
- It’s better than 10x10 for some crops that grow fast, such as beans.
- It’s an alternative worth exploring if the 10x10 farms prove to be too small for 1 worker, depending on the seeds planted there.
- Potentially it can also be replaced by a 15x10 or 15x15 farm if you decide to change your strategy or clear some space around the 12x12 farm.
1. 15x15, with 3 workers
You can never have too many farms! When it comes to food, excess is better than shortage.
This farm size is especially efficient for orchards, where you’ll be growing fruit and nut trees such as walnut, pecan, chestnut, apple, cherry, etc. I personally used this farm size all the time, for all occasions, when I was just starting to play Banished until it occurred to me that there are other sizes that I can use if the situation requires it. That is not to say that I was disappointed in 15x15. On the contrary, after hundreds of hours of playing Banished, 15x15 is still the most frequently used farm size for me. It’s also a great option if you don’t like the idea of having many small farms with the same type of food in every neighborhood and would rather have fewer of them and have your food travel around from market to market.
What is great about this farm size?
- Having bigger farms means having fewer of them. Decide which you prefer more, or which bothers you less, if you will: having to create new farms frequently enough because you make them small, or building larger farms, assigning more workers to them, and being able not to worry for a while about new sources of food.
- It can be easier to plan the infrastructure of your city with bigger farms. Finding a flat patch of land is all you need to build a 15x15 farm. You can just build everything else around it. Some players prefer that option instead of spamming smaller farms on their maps and having to fit houses, storage barns, and markets in between.
- Some crops, such as beans, grow really fast. Observe your farms and I won’t be surprised if you’ll find that some of them can do just as great with 2 workers instead of 3.
Remember that there are other factors that will determine the success of your harvests:
- Equip all your workers with the best, most long-lasting tools you can.
- Try to keep a few residential houses and storage barns as close to your farms as possible to reduce the time your workers spend taking the harvest to the storage and going home to eat and rest.
- Keep your citizens happy! Unhappy citizens are more likely to idle, which will reduce the income of food.
Don’t be scared to experiment with different farm sizes and decide what works best for you, and most importantly, have fun!
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