Farthest Frontier food and crop field calculator

Set your villager count, the share of food you expect from crop fields, your field size and a three-year rotation. The result updates as you type and the link in your address bar keeps your inputs, so you can bookmark a plan or send it to someone. Crop numbers are the wiki's 1.1.0 values.

How the math works

Demand. The wiki's food article puts consumption at 24 food items per villager per year. 100 villagers eat 2,400 food a year. If hunters, foragers, fishing and an orchard cover part of that, lower the "share from fields" input.

Harvest per field. Each crop has a nominal output per field tile per harvest: 8 for beans, 16 for wheat, 14 for cabbage, 17 for leeks, 5 for turnips. Multiply by the tiles in the field (a 12x12 field has 144) to get one harvest. That nominal number ignores fertility, weeds, rocks, soil mixture, disease and weather. The crop field window shows your field's estimated yield as a fraction: the top number is the forecast, the bottom number is the nominal. Divide the two and type the result as a percentage into "Expected yield vs nominal". A player test on a perfect 12x12 field (100% fertility, no weeds or rocks) got about 139% of nominal on beans and wheat and about 125% on turnips, so high-fertility land beats the nominal figure by a wide margin.

Rotation average. Fields run a three-year rotation. The calculator adds up the food from every slot in the three years and divides by three to get average food per field per year. Clover, flax and hay grow no food, so a year of clover lowers the average even though it helps the soil.

Fertility. Each planting moves the field's fertility by a fixed number of points: wheat -8, rye and leeks -6, flax -5, cabbage -4, carrots and turnips -3, buckwheat and hay -1, peas and beans +1, clover +3. Compost adds +6 per load. Gains are scaled by the field's Environment Fertility Factor (EFF), which you can see when you place the field and cannot change. Losses always apply in full (or at 75% once you research Sustainable Farming, which the calculator does not apply). A field at 70% EFF only gets +2.1 from clover but still loses the full 8 to wheat. The default beans, wheat, clover rotation comes out at -4 per cycle on perfect land, so it slowly drains the soil.

Days. The days column adds planting, growing and harvest time. Farmers do no field work in the three winter months, so two long crops will not fit in one year. Pair a fast crop like peas or turnips with something else instead.

Worked examples

A 60-villager start. 60 villagers eat 1,440 food a year. With foragers and two hunters covering half, the fields need 720. A 10x10 field (100 tiles) with turnips then beans in year one, clover twice in year two and carrots then clover in year three grows 500 + 800 + 800 = 2,100 food per cycle at nominal, or 700 a year. That is just over one field, so build two small ones for margin. The rotation gains -3 +1 +3 +3 -3 +3 = +4 fertility per cycle at 100% EFF, keeps the frost-shy beans in summer and the heat-shy roots at the ends of the year, and follows the wiki's disease spacing rules.

Switching to grain. Once the Windmill and Bakery are up, a heavier rotation from the wiki's late-game examples is peas, clover and turnips in year one, leeks then clover in year two, clover then wheat in year three. On the same 100 tiles it grows 600 + 500 + 1,700 + 1,600 = 4,400 food per cycle (1,467 a year), twice the starter rotation, but the fertility change is +10 - 17 = -7 per cycle. That is the trade: double the food, and a compost load or two every cycle to pay for it.

Checking the shelf life. Set the difficulty select to your game. On Vanquisher the comparison table shows 6 months for greens and bread; on Pioneer the same foods last 15. If your plan leans on cabbage or leeks, the harvest has to be eaten before that.

Reading the comparison tables

The second table shows a single harvest of each food crop on your field size and how many villagers that harvest feeds for a year. Grain counts at full value because a Windmill and Bakery turn grain into bread one for one, but you need both buildings and some firewood first. The shelf life column shows how many months each food lasts in plain storage on the difficulty you picked. Leeks and cabbage feed a lot of people but rot in about 6 months on Vanquisher, so a big greens harvest has to be eaten through one winter.

The last table lists the best annual output a player measured from one hunter, one forager shack, a full large barn and an orchard. Treat these as best cases for comparison, not as what you will get on a hard map.