How to Feed your Goblins

Now that the Farming Update is out, it’s a good time to take a comprehensive look at how to feed your goblins.

One of the basic facts of Goblin Camp is that your goblins need food. They’ll eat if left to their own devices, but to make sure that your goblins get regular and balanced meals, it’s good to build kitchens.

While eating any food at all will keep goblins on their feet, if they don’t get all the necessary nutrients, they’ll suffer penalties to their stats.

The nutrients are protein, fat and fiber. In addition, goblins also need a little bit of fresh food in their meals, or they’ll suffer from scurvy. Kitchens will automatically prepare meals with all available nutrients.

To fulfill your goblins’ dietary needs, there are a variety of food sources that can be exploited in Goblin Camp.

Gathering

A food source that’s always available to a camp is gathering. Historically, this was by far the most important food source for people before the invention of farming. Mushrooms are a good source of fiber, and many useful plants grow in the forest and can be harvested for food: hazelnuts, blackcurrants, raspberries and apples are all available in the woods around the camp.

The meadows by the river are swept by floodwaters most years, which stops trees from growing there and makes them absolute treasure troves for goblin gatherers. If you want to get a head start on farming, meadows are a very good place to find stinging nettles! You can even find wild turnips and rye in the woods, especially around ruins.

You can gather different foods in Goblin Camp by finding the plants you want to harvest on the map. The food items will then show up in the Stock Manager, and if you order more of them, the goblins will try to find them around the camp and maintain a stock of them at all times.

Fishing

Another food source of great antiquity is fishing. Early settlements were almost invariably by lakes or rivers, for drinking water, ease of transport and very importantly, food. Fish and other marine life were vital and plentiful resources.

Fishing is available to your goblins from the very beginning of the game. To start fishing, build a fisher-goblin’s shack, and a fishing workshop to make fishing spears and fish traps. Each fisher shack will provide fishing jobs for one goblin, and each fishing trap will occasionally catch a fish. The map has a fishing number, which represents the amount of fish your goblins can catch without upsetting the local ecosystem: if your catch exceeds the fishing number, it will drop and only recover very slowly – and only if you stop overfishing!

Animal meat

If your goblins or your crops get attacked by wild animals, and your goblins manage to kill some of them, their corpses can be butchered into meat.

Animal meat is an excellent addition of protein to your goblins’ diet, but it isn’t a reliable food source. Both fish and meat can be smoked to make them last longer.

Farming

A small camp can get by entirely on gathering and fishing, but to support larger populations reliably, your goblins will need access to one of the most transformative inventions in history: farming. Your goblins can start farming once you discover seeds: this unlocks the Farming technology and lets you build farm plots. Seeds can be found in wild plants on the map, and in ruins.

Initially, your goblins can only farm the lighter sandy soils on the map, and will deplete the fertility of the tiles they farm. Slash-and-burn cultivation allows the burning of trees and bushes to create ashes, which will enhance the fertility of the soil. The Farming Update added several new technologies that make farming even more productive and sustainable, extending it to clay soils and adding fertilizers. This allows you to permanently farm large fields and feed a larger camp with well over a hundred inhabitants.

Turnips are the simplest food crop, as they provide directly edible food. Nettle plants need to be processed at a nettle building, after which they provide both edible leaves and nettle stems, which can be retted into fiber and processed on into thread and cloth. Rye seeds need to be ground in a mill to make flour, and baked into bread. Flax isn’t an edible plant at all, but provides fine fibers that can be made into thread.

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Ideally, all these food sources complement each other, and provide your goblins with a healthy and varied diet. Now that there’s a fairly robust system for feeding goblins, we’re looking forward to providing more for them to do in our next updates. Until then, happy camping!