Archmage Update: Keep Your Land Workers Fed

Greetings, Battle Mages!

This update is for everyone who uses Land auto-harvest. It comes straight out of our own Land experiment on the Courier blog, where a new plot started with no grain at all.

Keep My Workers Fed

Workers on Land eat grain, and they eat from the grain you hold in their own region. If a region runs short, the harvest produces less. Until now, Archmage auto-harvest only harvested. If your plots make wood, stone or iron, keeping each region stocked with grain was your job.

Keep My Workers Fed is a new option that does this for you. Before each automatic harvest, the bot:

1. works out how much food the workers in that region have eaten since their last harvest,
2. checks how much grain you hold in that region,
3. if it is not enough, swaps some of that region's own wood, stone or iron for grain on the Trade Hub,
4. and then harvests as usual.

What it never does:

• It never spends your DEC. Only resources your plots made in that region are swapped.
• It never touches other regions. Each region pays for its own food.
• It does nothing when the grain you hold is already enough.

A swap goes through DEC in two steps, and the Trade Hub takes a fee of about 5% on each step. If a region holds no grain and nothing to swap, the bot can't help there. Add some grain once by hand, and the region looks after itself from then on.

How to turn it on

1. Open the Land page at archmage.app/land.
2. Turn on Auto-harvest Land if it is not on already.
3. Turn on Keep My Workers Fed.
4. Save with Hive Keychain.

It is off until you turn it on. Only your Land settings change.

Land Optimiser: three new checks

The Land Optimiser further down the same page got three new checks:

• Old worksites on the wrong land. Some old Grain Farms stand on land that only allows wood (or stone, or iron). They keep producing grain until a worker changes, then turn into the land's own worksite. The optimiser now warns you about them, shows what the plot makes today and what it would make after the change, and never suggests changing their workers.
• Runi. A Runi you hold that is not on a plot now shows up, with the plot where it adds the most and the DEC stake it would free there. Every plot also shows what a Runi would add to it.
• Food. Each region now shows how many hours your grain lasts, today and after the suggested changes. Regions with less than a day left are marked.

It also lists plots with no power source and every plot it could not analyse, with the reason. As always, the optimiser only reads public game data. You make any changes yourself in the game.

Where these came from

Every one of these comes from a mistake or a surprise in our own Land experiment. In this week's round we bought a second plot with an old Grain Farm on it, put a Runi on it, and watched the farm turn into a Logging Camp the moment we added workers. The full story, with every number, is in Our Land Experiment, Round Three: A Runi and a Second Plot on our Courier blog.

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Chapter XIV · The Keeper's Errand

By the second evening the woodcutters in the new clearing had worked so hard that their bread was gone, and Wren lay awake worrying. At dawn she found the stone keeper walking slowly down the miller's road with a bundle of timber on its back. It came back with a sack of bread and set it by the hut, all on its own. "Hungry hands work badly," said the Archmage. "Now nobody has to remember." Then he opened the brown-ink book at a page Wren had never seen. In its margin, drawn by the same careful hand, was the stone keeper.