Because you will be relying on foraging to supply your town center with the food it needs to create villagers, it is important to place the granary and start your foragers carefully.
Villagers will forage optimally from a bush as long as they do not need to travel outside of the square that they are in. Hence, they will forage optimally from a bush one square away and can do so from a bush immediately adjacent to the granary.
Two villagers can forage optimally from a bush immediately adjacent to a granary provided that they you place them on opposite sides of the bush. Two villagers can also forage optimally from a bush that is exactly one square away from the town center. Furthermore they will do so without micromanagement on your part.
Hence, if there the berry patch includes a row of three or more berry bushes, place the granary one square away from these bushes. Assign one villager on each of the bushes in the row. (If the row has only three bushes, put two villagers on one of the end bushes.)
If there is no row of three consequetive, you can probably get away
with using a row of two consequetive, but instead I place the granary
as close to the center of the patch as possible, thus having it touch
two berry bushes. I then make sure that the two villagers on each
bush are working on opposite sides and hence don't have to
walk around anyone to drop off their berries.
The computer will not make this adjustment for you,
you must micromanage to make this happen. The easiest way that I have found is
two assign two villagers to each of two bushes each of which
are touching the granary, then after they are foraging force them to
forage on opposite sides. Often the optimal foragers are on the outside
of the berry bushes (where the inside is defined to be the area between
the two berry bushes). In this case, all that one needs to do is to select
the non-optimal foragers and click on the other berry bush. They will
both become optimal foragers on those berry bushes![[*]](foot_motif.gif)
. The one added hitch is that villagers cannot slide between
diagonally adjacent berries bushes. Hence, you should not place the
granary adjacent to two berry bushes unless you can get villagers
to both sides of the berry bushes.
By placing the granary as close as possible to the center of the
bushes the foraging operation
remains relatively efficient even after the first bushes are consumed.
Sometimes bushes offer no easy access. In that case, do the best you can and start with an extra forager.
Place your first storage pit along the edge of a forest, one square away from the trees.
Don't think, don't explore, just build.