How to Prepare for Winter – Going Medieval

The biggest threat to your settlers in Going Medieval isn’t raids by bloodthirsty cannibals, or wolves, or the plague — it’s winter. When the temperature drops, crops won’t grow, and you’ll have to rely on stored food and hunting to fill your larder. Without proper preparation, your settlers will grow unhappy at best, and die of starvation at worst.

What to Research

The following list contains all the research you’ll need to prepare for winter. Some of these technologies may seem obvious, but for the sake of completeness, they are included here as well:

1. Architecture – Required to unlock all other research.
2. Agriculture – You’ll want to start growing food ASAP so you can turn it into meals, which can then be stored in a cellar.
3. Brewing – While it doesn’t actually keep away the cold, it will keep your settlers happy to have alcohol on hand during the long winter, and you’ll need to start stockpiling it — you won’t be able to harvest the crops you need to create more during the winter.
4. Tailoring – Crafting high quality winter clothes isn’t a top priority, but it will help keep settlers happy.
5. Decorative Structures – This research allows for wall torches, which can be placed in sleeping quarters to keep settlers warm.
6. Preserving Food – It may seem strange for this technology to be so far down the list, but for now, Stew doesn’t appear to degrade during the winter while stored in a cellar. As long as you’re storing your food underground, you won’t need to worry about creating smoked meat for the winter — though if you want to, it certainly will add to the realism of your settlement.

What to Craft

You’ll need to make sure you’ve created the following items for your settlers before winter comes:

1. Meals – Settlers seem to need approximately one meal a day , though they will sometimes eat more frequently depending on activity. Winter lasts for 12 days, so a minimum of 12 meals per settler, and ideally more like 16, is what you should aim for. You will be able to get some food from hunting, but it isn’t guaranteed, and it isn’t enough.
2. Winter Clothes – You’ll want to create a Sewing Station and make enough winter clothes for all your settlers that don’t already have some.
3. Wall Torches – Put one in each bedroom to keep your settlers nice and warm while they sleep. These can be tricky to find in the menu Furniture menu [F3]: they are variant of the Wooden Torch.
4. Alcohol – As with food, you won’t be able to harvest the ingredients for alcohol, so make sure you have enough alcohol and/or materials required to make more. Sober settler tend to be unhappy settlers.

Alternate Stategies/Options

If you’re not into farming, or don’t want to build a cellar, or just think bows are cool, there’s another way to try to survive the winter — hunting! Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Research Wooden Weaponry (and Fletching if you can get it).
2. Create a Bowyers Table, and craft bows for all of your settlers.
3. Build a Butchering Table if you don’t already have one.
4. Research Preserving Food, and build a Smokehouse. Queue infinity production of Smoked Meat.

A single hare carcass yields 8 raw meat, so you’ll need 1.5 hares per day, per settler to keep them fed, which is an achievable hunting goal. Deer yield 37 raw meat, which is enough to feed 1 settler for 3 days. That being said, there may not be enough wildlife to feed your settlers through the whole winter this way, so you’ll need to have started hunting and smoking meat before winter begins.

You should now know everything you need to do in order to be ready for winter in Going Medieval. We hope this guide was helpful! Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.