> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://thrones-reforged.gitbook.io/thrones-reforged-docs/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://thrones-reforged.gitbook.io/thrones-reforged-docs/food-storage.md).
# Food Storage
## What Is Food Storage?
Food Storage is a reserve of food your kingdom builds up during times of plenty and draws from during times of shortage. It functions independently of your turn-by-turn food balance. Even if your kingdom produces enough food to survive, maintaining healthy stores protects you from sudden deficits, bad seasons, and the pressures of war.
Your stores are not infinite, they are capped by the granary buildings you have constructed across your territory, and they decay every turn through spoilage and theft. Managing them well is an ongoing balancing act between accumulation, consumption, and loss.
***
## Who Uses This System?
Food Storage applies to every human-controlled faction in the campaign, regardless of culture. All factions build up stores, suffer spoilage, and draw from reserves during deficits.
***
## Your Storage Capacity
Your maximum storage capacity starts at a base value and grows with every granary-type building you construct across your regions. Each qualifying building adds to your total cap, and the more of them you build, the more food you can hold in reserve. The absolute ceiling across all buildings combined is 2000 units.
If you lose a region that contained granary buildings, you lose a portion of your stored food proportional to how much of your total capacity that region provided. A region that contributed 20% of your storage cap will take roughly 20% of your current stores with it when it falls.
> **Protect your granary regions.** Losing a food-producing settlement does not just cut your income, it physically removes food from your reserves.
***
## How Stores Fill
Every turn that you end with a food surplus, a portion of that surplus is automatically added to your stores. The base rate is 22% of your net surplus per turn.
However, this rate is not fixed. It is directly tied to your tax level. Higher taxation means more food is requisitioned from your people and directed into storage. Lower taxation means your people keep more of their harvest, and less reaches the granary.
| Tax Level | Requisition Rate |
| ------------ | ---------------- |
| Minimal | 8% |
| Low | 14% |
| Normal | 18% |
| High | 22% |
| Extortionate | 26% |
> **The tradeoff is real.** Minimal taxation nearly stops your granaries from filling. If you plan to keep taxes low, understand that your food reserves will grow very slowly and leave you exposed when winter arrives.
***
## How Stores Are Spent
When your kingdom runs a food deficit, your granary automatically draws from stored food to cover it. The draw covers only what is actually needed. If your deficit is 30 and you have 50 in storage, 30 is consumed and 20 remains. If your deficit is larger than your stored food, the granary covers what it can and the remaining deficit still affects your kingdom as normal.
No food is drawn during turns where you have a surplus. Stores only deplete when they are needed.
***
## Spoilage and Theft
Every turn, a portion of your stored food is lost to spoilage and theft. This loss is not flat. It scales with how full your granaries are.
Fuller granaries attract more theft and have more surface area for rot. The loss rate ranges from roughly 3% when stores are nearly empty, up to 10% when they are completely full. There is always a minimum loss of 0.5 units per turn regardless, reflecting the baseline theft that occurs year-round.
In winter, cold temperatures cut the spoilage component roughly in half. However, the theft floor remains unchanged. People still steal food in winter, often more desperately so.
> **This creates a deliberate pressure.** Keeping your stores completely full is inefficient. The closer you are to your cap, the more you lose each turn. Aim to maintain a healthy reserve rather than hoarding to the maximum.
***
## Winter
Winter is the most dangerous season for your food balance. The game calculates food before your granary draw can respond, which would normally cause a food shortage warning to appear on the very first winter turn even if you have plenty in reserve.
To prevent this, the system applies an estimated granary draw at the start of winter before the engine evaluates your food. It uses two figures to calculate how much to draw: the worst food reading from last winter, and your current reactive deficit this turn. It takes the larger of the two to make sure the full expected shortfall is covered.
The practical result is that if you enter winter with food in storage, your granary responds immediately and the shock of the season transition is absorbed before it hits your kingdom.
> **Your first winter in a new campaign may still show a shortage warning.** The system has no previous winter data to work from yet, so the prediction falls back to the current turn's reading only. From the second winter onward it operates on a full year of reference data.
***
## Reading the Food Tooltip
Hovering over the food indicator at the top of the screen shows an expanded breakdown specific to this system:
* **Net Food This Turn:** your raw food balance before the granary is involved, shown in green if positive and red if negative
* **Current Stores:** how much food you currently have in reserve and what your cap is
* **Surplus or Deficit:** how much food will be added to or drawn from stores this turn
* **Spoilage and Theft:** how much will be lost to decay this turn
* **Requisition Rate:** the percentage of your surplus being directed into storage, coloured by tax level (red for low rates, yellow for medium, green for high)
***
## Summary
1. **Build granary buildings across your regions.** Your storage cap only grows through buildings. More capacity means more protection against deficits and a larger buffer for winter.
2. **Understand what your tax level does to your stores.** Minimal taxation fills your granaries at less than a third of the rate that extortionate taxation does. If you want strong reserves, you need to requisition food from your people.
3. **Do not expect full stores to stay full.** Spoilage and theft scale with how much you have stored. Chasing a completely full granary costs you more each turn than maintaining a moderate reserve.
4. **Prepare for winter before it arrives.** The system estimates and applies a draw at winter onset, but it needs last year's data to do it accurately. Let your stores build up during summer and harvest so that when winter comes, there is something to draw from.
5. **Protect regions with granary buildings.** Losing them costs you stored food immediately, proportional to how much of your cap they provided.
6. **Monitor the food tooltip.** It gives you a live picture of your requisition rate, your current stores, and what you stand to gain or lose this turn.
7. **Understand that the system is inherently imperfect.** Wars, territory losses and riots all contribute to the food storage system, your kingdom cannot always prepare for all situations so you will suffer food shortages and famines unless you maintain stability.
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