If you’re having problems with overcrowding in your Elder Scrolls castle after breeding too many subjects when the game was released on September 10, 2024, you’re not alone. Many players on Reddit find themselves in the same boat, so here is a guide on how to manage food in the game The Elder Scrolls: Castles.
Be sure that excessive food consumption is caused by having too many subjects in your castle for your Kitchen to handle. If you only have one Kitchen, you should try not to exceed 50 adult themes in total. As the children in the castle grow, they will add to your food storage, so you will need to take this into account and prepare your castle in advance.
A level 10 kitchen produces 675 food every cycle – the time it takes per cycle depends on what decorations you have on your castle, but it’s usually just under four minutes without any decorations affecting it. In a castle with 50 adults, the food consumption is 258 per minute without decorations.
That means a level 10 Kitchen will be able to handle feeding all 50 adults without running out of food before the next cycle ends. However, if you want more adults in your castle – or you have children who are aging to adulthood – you will need to produce more food.
Here are the best ways to produce more food in The Elder Scrolls: Castles:
- Upgrade your Kitchen. Each upgrade adds 75 more food to each cycle of your Kitchen.
- Build more Kitchens. This option won’t apply to free players without a lot of effort because Kitchens require quartz (which are only available after completing advanced quests). At level 70, I still haven’t found a quartz. Instead, you will need to purchase the Imperial Kitchen from the in-game store, which costs 1000 Gems.
- Use Blessing of Production. These special items reduce production station miles by 50% for 15 minutes.
- Place Green Banners. Green Banners increase your castle’s Blessing of Production by 2%.
- Use special tools. There are some tools in the game that have extra production perks attached to them, but you can’t buy these. They sometimes appear as quest rewards. For example, there is a level 3 Steel Spoon that x
- Have a Chief in the Kitchen. Leaders have a special ability where they can sometimes speed up the current cycle of whatever workstation they are on. It happens randomly, but having one Chief in the Kitchen should be a goal of yours.
If producing more food using the methods in the previous section doesn’t help enough, there are several ways to reduce how much food is consumed in your castle.
- Buy a Golden Garden. Golden Gardens reduce food consumption by 2% for all nobles in your castle. It unlocks at Dynasty Level 64.
- Buy a Garden Corner. Garden Nooks reduce food consumption by 2% for all commoners in your castle. It unlocks at Dynasty Level 134.
- Have fewer children. As fun as it is to try to get the best of the available features in The Elder Scrolls: Castles, having too many children will increase your food consumption as soon as they turn 16.
- Remove subjects with bad features. Some traits are just a huge headache to have in your castle, and while some have their benefits, you don’t need multiple themes with those traits to reap the benefits.
Choosing which topics to delete
There are several negative features in The Elder Scrolls: Castles that you really don’t want hanging around. Stubborn, for example, often means you’ll have to constantly deal with two contending castle themes. Usually, if you put them on the same workstation as another subject, that subject will eventually come to see you butting heads with the stubborn subject.
In the table below, I have written the undesirable features in Castles and why they are not worth keeping:
| feature | Description | Why Expel |
|---|---|---|
| Bossy | Bosses co-operate around, making them efficient but miserable. | There are other ways to make subjects more effective that don’t diminish their happiness either. You can outfit them with clothing and tools that suit their workstation and have a Chief on the same station to increase productivity. Keeping Bossy topics just means you’ll have to spend more time dealing with discourses and trying to bring up unfortunate topics. levels of happiness. |
| Sly | Prone to assassination. Disturbingly skilled with Daggers. | Although having one or two Devious subjects around for battle may be a good idea, keeping several around is just asking for trouble. I prefer to remove Deviation rules to negate the possibility of my subjects or ruler being accidentally murdered. If you want a dagger user, you don’t need a Devious theme. Any combat minded subject is fine, just take them out with a high level dagger. |
| Envious | Hate it when co-workers are more productive than them. | There is absolutely no reason to keep Envious subjects in your castle. It is no benefits placing them on any workstation, and letting them take up space in your castle means they will reduce your food stores. |
| Stubborn | Best at the Oven and Workshop. Proficient in using Shields. | Be careful having Headstrong subjects in your castle. It doesn’t matter which station you put them on, they will get in eventually arguments. If you want the benefits that come with placing them on the Furance or Workshop stations, be sure to have the extra cash to bribe both them and the subject they’re bothering with when they inevitably come to complain to you (usually between 50- 80 gold). |
| heartless | Miserable to work with. Clever with Frost. | Don’t remove all your Heartless rules as their Freeze abilities are useful in battle. Keep between one to three Heartless themes and have them unemployed/roaming around the castle until you need them. Only when you need them to fight should you attach them to the War Table or the Gauntlet of Sheogorath. |
| pyromaniac | Best at the Kitchen, Oven and Forge. Skilled with Fire. Prone to arson. | I personally have never experienced a pyromaniac setting anything on fire, but other subjects they work with sometimes come to the Throne to complain about them. Keep your Pyromaniacs in the Kitchen, Furnace and Forge, but don’t have too many of them to minimize the inevitable Throne visits. One or two per workstationdelete the rest or keep them unemployed just for battle. |
| volatile | Fueled by anger. Skilled with Shock. | Similar to Heartless subjects, keep one to three Volatile subjects around the castle for combat reasons only. Make sure they are unemployed avoid the negative effects of any subject working with a Volatile one (arguments, which means they end up at the Throne for a decision that will probably cost you money). |
While it is best to avoid killing family members or friends in Elder Scrolls: Castles, it does not affect a subject’s happiness. too a lot
Want to read more about The Elder Scrolls: Castles at Pro Game Guides? Check out How to keep your rules happy in Elder Scrolls Castles.
