Farthest Frontier firewood and fuel calculator

Enter how many houses you heat and what your workshops turn out in a year. The calculator adds up the firewood, converts it to logs, and tells you how many logging camps it takes to keep up. Your inputs are saved in the page link.

Where the firewood goes

Firewood has two main kinds of users. Homes burn it to get through winter, and a set of workshops burn it as a production input. (The Charcoal Kiln also burns it; the wiki gives two different ratios for that, so it is left out here.) The workshop numbers are fixed recipes from the wiki:

• Bakery: 1 firewood per 10 bread (with 10 flour and 2 water).
• Brewery: 1 firewood per 8 beer (with 8 grain, 8 water and 2 honey).
• Smokehouse: 1 firewood per 15 smoked meat or smoked fish.
• Preservist: 1 firewood per 8 preserves or preserved vegetables (plus 1 glassware).
• Candle Shop: 1 firewood per 4 candles. Soap Shop: 1 per 5 soap. Potter: 1 per 4 pottery.

Put those next to each other and the pattern is clear: workshops are cheap on fuel. A bakery making 240 bread a year burns 24 firewood, which is under two logs. Candles are the hungriest: 1 firewood per 4, so 200 candles a year burn 50 firewood. Heating is the number you have to measure yourself, which is why the calculator has a separate line for it.

Why you enter the heating number yourself

We could not find a published or measured figure for firewood per house. Rather than guess, the calculator asks you for it. Open the Annual Report from the top-left of the HUD; it lists production and consumption of each resource by year. Take last year's firewood consumption, subtract what your workshops used, and divide by the number of houses. Put that in "Firewood per house per year". Once you have it, the calculator can plan for a bigger town.

Logs and logging camps

A Firewood Splitter turns 1 log into 15 firewood. (One older line on the wiki says 20; the Firewood item page says 15, and we use that.) A Saw Pit turns 1 log into 2 planks, so add your plank needs if the same camps supply both. The default of 256 logs a year per camp is the best result one player measured (in version 0.9) from a single forester camp with 6 workers cutting mature trees only. Your camps may do less if workers walk far or trees are young, so change that number to what your own camp delivers.

The buildings themselves are cheap. A Firewood Splitter is a tier 1 building costing 15 work and 8 logs with 1 to 2 workers; the Firewood Splitter Workshop upgrade (Town Center tier 3) costs 20 bricks, 5 iron ingots and 10 planks. A Work Camp costs 30 work and 20 logs, holds 1 to 4 laborers and needs a Stockyard and Wagon Shop. Both have negative desirability, so keep them away from houses. Full numbers are in the buildings list.

Worked example: a 40-house town

Say last year's Annual Report shows 1,300 firewood used. Your bakery made 300 bread (30 firewood) and the smokehouse 450 smoked meat (30 firewood), so homes used 1,240, or 31 per house across 40 houses. Planning for 60 houses, 400 bread and 600 smoked meat: 60 x 31 + 40 + 40 = 1,940 firewood. At 15 per log that is 130 logs, half a camp at the measured 256 logs a year. If the same camp also feeds a Saw Pit making 200 planks (100 logs), you are at 230 logs, which is still one camp, but only just.

Keep a buffer. The official guide suggests production limits for exactly this: they keep a set amount of firewood in stock for winter without you having to watch the stockpile. Firewood keeps 96 months in storage on Vanquisher, so a big stockpile does not rot.