About Orchard Spacing (A Simple Guide)

Welcome, governor. In the beautiful but unforgiving world of Banished, a stable and abundant food supply is the absolute cornerstone of a successful town. While hunters and gatherers can feed your first few families, **orchards are your key to long-term prosperity**. Think of an orchard as a food savings account for your village. It takes a few years of investment—your farmers' precious time and a good chunk of land—but once those trees mature, they provide a massive, reliable bounty of fruit, year after year. This is the food that will see you through the harshest winters and allow your population to boom.

But there's a catch that trips up many new players: **tree obstruction**. Unlike neat rows of cabbages, you can't just plant fruit trees right next to each other. Every single tree needs a clear, open space around it to grow to its full potential. If you plant them too close, their growth will be stunted, and they will never produce a single piece of fruit. All that land and all that work will be for nothing! This calculator is designed to be your town planner's best friend. It takes all the guesswork out of laying out your orchards, instantly showing you the most efficient, space-saving pattern to squeeze in the maximum number of healthy trees. It's about turning your land into the most productive, food-generating asset it can be.

How to Use the Calculator

Planning your perfect, high-yield orchard is incredibly simple and gives you instant visual feedback:

1. Set Your Orchard Dimensions: Use the "Width" and "Length" sliders to match the size of the orchard you're planning to build in the game. The maximum size for a single orchard is 15x15, but you can plan for any size up to 20x20.
2. See the Optimal Layout: The visual grid will instantly update to show you the perfect, staggered planting pattern for your chosen dimensions. The green circles represent where your farmers should plant each sapling.
3. Check Your Yield and Labor: The summary cards at the top will tell you everything you need to know: the **maximum number of trees** you can fit, the huge amount of **food** that orchard will produce each year, the **recommended number of farmers** to work it, and the crucial **food-per-farmer** efficiency rating.

Tips for a Bountiful Harvest

• The 4-Tile Rule is Law:** The game's logic requires a 3x3 tile area of clear space around each tree's trunk for it to grow. This means the trunks of two trees must have at least **4 tiles** of space between them to both grow successfully. This calculator automatically uses the optimal staggered pattern to achieve this, so you don't have to count the tiles yourself!
• **One Farmer, 15 Trees:** A single, educated farmer can typically handle an orchard with about 15-20 trees (for example, a 10x15 plot). For a full 15x15 orchard, it's always best to assign **two farmers** to make sure all the fruit is harvested in time before the first frost of winter. This calculator does that math for you.
• **Location is Everything:** A beautiful orchard is useless if your farmers spend all day walking to it. For maximum efficiency, place your orchards as close as possible to your villagers' homes and, most importantly, **right next to a Storage Barn**. The less time your farmers spend walking, the more time they spend working, and the more food ends up in your barns.
• **Don't Put All Your Apples in One Basket:** A blight can be a devastating event that wipes out a specific crop type. It's a wise strategy to have a diversity of food sources. Instead of building one giant 15x15 apple orchard, consider building three smaller 5x15 orchards, each with a different fruit type (apples, pears, cherries, etc.). This way, if a blight hits your apples, you'll still have your pears and cherries to feed your people.