Food

Berry bush

Kind	Food source
Found in	forest edge (8), deep forest (4)
Holds	about 25 meals when full
Regrows	to full in about a third of a day
Since	Phase 1
Status	designed · Phase 1
Technical	GrowthSystem · ActionSystem

In Phase 1 all food is berries, and all berries grow on the twelve bushes in the forest. A villager eats by standing at a bush and taking a meal from it; the bush is left a little emptier and grows back.

The numbers

• A villager goes from fed to starving in one day and a meal restores a quarter of that, so each person needs about four meals a day — two hundred a day for the village.
• A full bush holds about 25 meals. Stripped bare, it regrows to full in roughly a third of a day. Twelve bushes can supply the better part of a thousand meals a day. The village is meant to be comfortable.
• Eating takes a tick. Getting there is the hard part: the storehouse is four steps from the nearest bush.

Finding food

A villager eats what they can see. If they can't see food, they walk toward the best food they know of — a bush they remember being full, or one the village knows about — along places they know. The closer they are to starving, the more that walk outweighs everything else. See What villagers know for how a remembered bush can turn out to be empty.

Scarcity

The design is deliberately generous so that there is something to watch other than starvation. If you want the other story, turn regrowth off at Tinkerer: twelve bushes' worth of berries feed fifty people for a few days, the forest empties, and the village starts to die. From Phase 2, that pressure is where sharing, hoarding and rationing come from.

History

Phase	Change
1	Introduced: berry bushes that hold meals and regrow; meals and hunger paced per day.

See also

Needs · What villagers know · Death · Riverside Village · Technical: GrowthSystem