In Pharaoh: A New Era, farming is vital to sustaining your population. Having a steady supply of food and water is the cornerstone of your city and nothing will thrive without it. While there are a couple of other ways to generate food, on most maps farming will be a core industry you'll need to get right.

Related: Pharaoh A New Era: How To Keep Your City Safe

Farming isn't just useful for food either, it can also generate some raw materials you can sell or use for crafting, although these will be covered in another guide. Here we take a look at all the options for farming food, and which ones you should prioritise.

Food Farms

There are five core food farms: Chickpeas, Figs, Grain, Lettuce, and Pomegranate. In order to build them you'll need a meadow - indicated by the presence of white, pink, and yellow flowers. Alternatively, they can be built on a floodplain in the river, which we'll cover later.

Meadow farms will need six workers, while farms on floodplains require a work camp to provide labour.

Often you will have limited farms available, and in many ways, it doesn't matter which you use. However, some have the advantage of producing two smaller harvests instead of one large one. This can be especially helpful if you are building on floodplains, as you will lose less if a flood comes early and wipes out your crops. Here are the details for each farm.

As you can see the months in which harvests can be gathered vary from crop to crop. This means that if you have the choice of more than one it's worth varying what you build. This will allow you to have a more steady flow of food, and also to provide multiple food types, something citizens will ask for later in the game as your housing evolves.

Water Lifts And Irrigation

If you are building on a meadow you may notice that your crops aren't growing well. Often this is down to irrigation. While worker shortage will also affect production if the land is not fertile your yield will be reduced.

In order to irrigate the land you'll need to build a water lift next to the Nile. This must be connected to a road and requires six workers to operate at full capacity.

Once this is operational you'll want to build irrigation ditches around your farms. If you click the farm you can see information about if the irrigation is working, and how fertile the land is.

Irrigation ditches can be up to two tiles away from a farm.

Your ditches will need to link together and be connected to the water pump. You cannot build them directly underneath a road in a line, but they can cross under a road. Simply build them over the road, making a crossroads, and a bridge will be added.

Related: Pharaoh New Era: How To Keep Your Citizens Happy

Farming On A Floodplain

If you have no meadows available you'll need to build your farms on a floodplain. To do this, place your farms on the fertile land by the riverbank and connect with a road as usual. You'll also need to put a work camp nearby to train workers each season.

We recommend placing one work camp per four to five farms.

Each season the floods will come in, and the land will be unusable for the duration. Workers will be sent back out after the floods recede to prepare for the next harvest.

Flood Changes

The floods naturally change and if you check the Nileometer, at the top of your screen you can see how strong they will be. The higher the waves the further in the flood will come, and it will last for the duration of the icon.

If you build Temples and Shrines to Osiris and stay in her good books by holding frequent festivals dedicated to her then she will reduce the severity and duration of the floods. Likewise, if you anger her then expect the floods to be fiercer and more unpredictable.

Other Food Sources

There are three other sources of food: Cattle Ranch, Fishing Wharf and Hunters Lodge. Each one has different requirements in order to operate. Cattle Ranches need a supply of straw from a grain farm, a Fishing Wharf will require a boat and access to an area populated with fish, while a Hunters Lodge can only be used if the map has live game animals for them to hunt.

If you have game animals on your map building a hunters lodge close by will net you a lot of meat very quickly.

Hunters Lodges seem to be the quickest way of generating food, with just one or two able to provide for a decent sized city. The closer they are to prey the more efficient they are. Fishing Wharfs come next, although their speed is hugely dependent on how close to shore the fish are.

Farming Tips

Here are a few quick tips for efficient farming and food distribution.

• Always build an Architect Post and Firehouse by your farms and Granary to prevent losing food to fire or collapse.
• If you have a Grain Farm then adding a Cattle Ranch will prevent you stockpiling straw you have no use for.
• If you build a Fishing Wharf you will also need a Shipwright to build the boat.
• If you can build a Hunter's Lodge then do.
• Keep an eye on your food stocks using the Overseer Menu.
• Food should be your first priority but try and get a set-up of around four to five farms working before you expand.
• Place a Granary by your farms and another closer to your Bazaar. Set the one by the Bazaar to "Get" items. It's much quicker for the Granary workers to transport the food to another Granary than the Bazaar workers to come and collect it from further away.

Next: Everything You Need To Know Before Playing Pharaoh A New Era