{"id":1718,"date":"2026-01-24T12:12:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T17:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=1718"},"modified":"2026-01-24T12:28:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T17:28:58","slug":"farmville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/?p=1718","title":{"rendered":"Farmville"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I recently received a reader question regarding the systems I use in Kaserne on the Borderlands for tracking the agricultural and infrastructure projects that the Ponikla PCs are undertaking. I was about to write something, but the topic sounded like something I might have written already. A bit of sniffing around my own internet backtrail led me to a three-year-old post on Kato’s forum<\/a>. In the interest of having a backup, I’ve replicated the original post here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Originally posted by Adm.Lee<\/strong><\/em>:

I've finally caught up, and I am enjoying the read, thanks for these!<\/em>

What are you using for the village's farming and food rules?<\/em><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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An overly-complicated spreadsheet.  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 4e rules for food production aren’t deeply simulationist, but it seems to me that hunting and foraging are short-term solutions. The real sustainable way to keep a team (or community) alive is the cropland base facility (p. 134). Because “cropland” feels awkward when I type it a lot, I’ll use “field” to refer to the basic unit of agricultural production (without trying to figure out what “one cropland” or “one field” means in actual land area).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I set up the village, I decided it had about one field per permanent resident, three dairy cows, and about a dozen pigs. Hand-waving this worked for a while, but when I mentioned harvest season was coming, my players got a lot more interested in food supply (I told you I had an atypical group). A bit of math that I didn’t record, along with some arbitrary decisions, gave me the village’s current food supply. I then did some cursory research into the Polish planting and harvest cycle for major crops. This let me allocate the fields by crop, and from that, I could determine the amount of effort needed for planting and harvesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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My ultimate goal here was to make food a background concern but not the dominant issue facing the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I maintain a separate spreadsheet for tracking downtime activity (and some other daily events and logistics). Unless a PC is on light duty or otherwise unavailable, I assume they have three shifts of activity each day. My players give me varying levels of input and I roll for anything requiring it (a high level of player\/ref trust and a strong social contract at my [virtual] table are helpful here). Here’s an example from earlier in the campaign:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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You’ll note that some of the downtime tasks have fractional completion notes. For tasks that the book says require “one week,” I require 20 shifts of work; for tasks measured in days, I convert each day’s effort to 3 shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This brings us around to the harvest spreadsheet (told you it was overly-complicated!). When I set this up, I ran some numbers on how many of the villagers were able-bodied enough to contribute full effort to working the fields. Based on this, and assuming that most of the village is involved in daily farming, I figured out how thin they’d be spread each month. Further assuming that each villager has INT d8 + Survival d8, this gives me what the NPCs are actually rolling for each month’s harvest, including assistance bonuses. If a PC puts in the 20 shifts of harvesting a field, I roll their INT + Survival rather than those of the NPCs. Here’s what July’s results looked like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2026 and looking at this, I see I completely failed to include the animal fodder in the harvest math. Enh. I may or may not re-work that – it’s not as critical as human food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, as I worked on this, it became evident that 4e has no rules for food preservation. Under rules as written, any food produced without industrial means will spoil in a week. I’m assuming that by 2000, surviving communities have figured out such arcane technologies as canning, curing, smoking, salting, and pickling, so the villagers are doing a great deal of food preservation off-screen to ensure everyone makes it through the next three seasons\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently received a reader question regarding the systems I use in Kaserne on the Borderlands for tracking the agricultural and infrastructure projects that the Ponikla PCs are undertaking. I was about to write something, but the topic sounded like something I might have written already. A bit of sniffing around my own internet backtrail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,112],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-1718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaserne-on-the-borderlands","category-mechanics","tag-t2k-4e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1731,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions\/1731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}