V0.5: Food Harvest & Geographic Constraint

Orbis cities feed themselves in three ways: farms on flatland, hunters in forests, and fishing ports on rivers.

Farms are seasonal and explosive. They produce an entire year's food in ninety summer days (July through September), then shut down for autumn and winter. This seasonality frees farmers to produce goods for nine months of the year, giving plains cities a surge in manufacturing capacity that forest cities can never match. Hunters work year-round and fill the gaps where farms fall short, smoothing the feast-famine cycle.

But harvest is fragile. Drought or cold during the growing window destroys crops before they mature, and the city must survive on whatever was already stockpiled. Spoilage adds another risk: food stored too long decays, whether frozen in granaries or rotting on shelves. A weak harvest followed by spoilage can starve a city that felt adequately provisioned months earlier.

Cities that can't cover annual food needs through farming alone watch reserves decline year after year. This creates geography-driven crises: the landscape has limits, and those limits carry risk. A city can address this by expanding farmland or hunting grounds, maintaining larger stockpiles to buy stability with storage and labor, or accepting that it must trade for food instead of growing it.

The worker allocation system handles this automatically. It calculates how much farms will produce at harvest, then assigns hunters to fill whatever gap remains. The result is emergent: cities naturally find the balance between farming and hunting that matches their landscape.