Ensuring your citizens have enough food is one of Romestead’s biggest early challenges. Hunger affects both productivity and morale, so setting up a steady food supply should be a top priority right from the start of your settlement.
Luckily, you don’t need complex systems to keep everyone fed. With the right strategy, even small settlements can manage food without constant oversight. In this guide, we’ll highlight the best early food sources, explain how to develop a bread supply chain that grows with your population, and point out a citizen trait you’ll want to avoid at all costs.
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### Best Early Food Sources
In the early game, the easiest food sources are hunting game and finding apple trees. Both are available immediately and don’t require building any structures. They are your first defense against hunger as you get your settlement up and running.
Remember, you need to cook game before eating—it’s not edible raw.
A key caution: not all fruit is worth stocking. For example, olives and blackberries provide zero food value, but your citizens will eat them regardless. These fruits disappear from your storage but don’t help reduce hunger, so it’s better to save them for recipes that require them.
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### How To Make Bread
After completing the “Fruits of the Harvest” quest, which involves offering a lot of fruit and cabbages at the altar, you unlock the Bakery. Bread becomes a highly scalable food source, easy to produce in large quantities, making it a practical way to keep your citizens fed over time.
Before you start baking, you need to set up the full production chain:
1. Harvest wheat from your farms.
2. Grind the wheat into flour using a Manual Mill.
3. Bake the flour into bread at either a campfire or the bakery.
The campfire option becomes available earlier but needs more wheat to produce the same amount of bread, making it less efficient. The bakery, while slower and limited to ten loaves at a time, is the better long-term choice. Keep an eye on your stockpile and fill the queue before it runs out to avoid shortages.
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### Important Citizen Trait to Watch Out For
Be aware of citizens with the “Gluttonous” trait. These individuals require ten extra units of food to feel satisfied, which puts a heavy strain on your supplies, especially early on when resources are tight. Before accepting a gluttonous citizen, think carefully—one can destabilize your entire food system and cause shortages.