hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to be taking a deep dive into Lumber
camps if this topic sounds familiar then it might be because this is a long overdue revisit and
expansion of what was actually one of my first video attempts ever on the Channel that I never
thought I did particularly well of course on top of that everyone knows the optimal time to refresh
your Lumber camp videos is once every eight years this time we'll be touching on everything from how
often is best to rebuild them the degree that multiple villagers on the same camp impacts
their efficiency how to avoid getting Lumberjacks trapped or idling and and on the classic question
of one Lumber Camp versus Two in Dark Age to see how much of a difference it makes obviously
there's lots to look at so let's get started we'll begin with what generally happens with a
lumber Camp over time to develop some intuition and give a slightly different perspective than
you're probably used to here I have five villagers working on a pretty nice Woodline when you might
get on Michi or black forest for example obviously the longer I leave them chopping the farther the
Woodline is pushed back leading to inefficiency from all the extra walking the first question
I would pose to you then is how long do you think until the villagers lose say 10 of their
efficiency is it immediate once the first row is cut or does it take quite a long time now first
of all the answer sort of depends on upgrades as wheelbarrow and hand cart can have an impact here
I've given the villagers wheelbarrow and hand cart as well as the first two wood upgrades what I did
next was look over the next hour and 15 minutes at how much wood had been dropped off at every minute
and we get this graph notice there's a slight curve to it which simply reflects how over time
our villagers are getting less efficient on this one camp now while the graph directly shows us the
total wood collected at any given time it doesn't tell us the collection rate so we can't just look
at this and know for example when our collection rate is down 10 percent the figure that out all
we have to do is find a trend line and grab its equation do a bit of simple high school calculus
and now we can find The Lumberjacks rate at a given time just by plugging in some numbers for
example from this we can work out our villagers right beside the lumber Camp are collecting about
32 wood per minute and likewise it tells us at this point shown we've lost 10 percent of our
collection efficiency which for contacts took our five villagers a little over 17 minutes to happen
jumping ahead to 43 minutes you might think this is an absolutely terrible looking wood line and be
ashamed to ever see yours get this bad yet maybe surprisingly it's only a 20 loss in efficiency
again hand cart is helping out here by letting them move faster and carry more wood per chip
but these five villagers here are still working about as quickly as four right beside a camp which
is better than I thought they'd be doing as one last example here an hour and five minutes into
the test these villagers are now 25 less efficient than they started notice the efficiency drops have
slowed down quite a bit as we lost 10 percent in the first 17 minutes but only five percent in the
most recent 22 minutes this is basically because there are a lot more trees at this distance so it
takes longer for the villagers to work their way to the next row now I think we can all agree that
this Lumber Camp should have been replaced long ago so the next obvious question then is what's
the optimal distance before refreshing your camps it's appealing to assume that the more camps the
better but it's not quite that simple as you have the build time to make a camp which is 35
seconds a villager isn't otherwise working plus the 100 wood cost of the camp now admittedly I'm
not the first to investigate this as I found three other YouTubers at least who have done a similar
test but I do like to confirm things myself when possible Define the optimal refresh time we're
going to run a series of tests on one extreme we're gonna have blue which is just a baseline
where I don't build any additional Lumber camps and On The Other Extreme we have orange who's
going to replace their Camp every time they're able the flags here are just outlining for me
where to put the next camps in case you're curious in contrast for purple it's a similar idea but
there will be a one tile gap between the camps and then the same thing with a two-towel gap for cyan
three for yellow four for green and a five tile gap for red what we'd be expecting to see is that
the extremes do quite poorly but that there's a magic sweet spot that ends up balancing the
cost of new camps with keeping a certain level of efficiency I ran the test for 90 minutes in
game pausing every minute to evaluate whether any camps need to be rebuilt and tracked how much wood
each of the players had at that minute which I personally like better than how much wood they
collected since it captures the cost of the lumber camps and we are factoring that in doing it this
way also gives us an idea of what's happening over time instead of just the final result so what did
we find coming in as the worst was obviously not replacing camps for 90 minutes and there was then
a steady Improvement seen by adding more camps right up until the end as others have found the
best results were when leaving a one tile gap between your camps or in other words placing a
new one when the Woodline has moved 3 Miles Ahead admittedly this is significantly more
often than I had concluded in my first stab at the topic in 2015. that said there are a
few things to highlight here first of all the differences here are relatively modest and for
example the difference between the ideal one tile Gap and yellow's three-tow GAP is a drop of only
about two and a half percent the other important caveat is that while a one tile Gap is eventually
the best if we look just at the final total there are many points along the way that it's not to
see what I mean let's take a look at where things are 20 minutes into the test at this point purple
and cyan have built a new camp whereas yellow green and red have not and at this point in
time the new camp has not paid for itself so in fact purple and Cyan are behind in Wood despite
doing the theoretically optimal strategy likewise we can jump ahead to 30 minutes of chopping and
purple using the quote ideal distance is only 20 wood ahead of green who has been far less
meticulous about Camp placement this is an idea that we'll come back to when we get to the one
versus two Lumber camps in Dark Age debate though the big conclusion here again is just that a one
towel Gap is eventually the best even if there are various points along the way that you're
temporarily behind now that we've started though there's actually a lot of other interesting Lumber
Camp questions the next that jumps to mind is how multiple villagers on one Camp can impact
all of their efficiency to get at this one I grab copies of the same small tree patch and chopped it
with everything from 3 to 10 villagers of course the more villagers the faster it'll be cut in an
absolute sense but if villager bumping is a big deal then their average collection rate should
slow down as more added and that's exactly what we see in a very clear pattern this is something
we'll come back to again and the non-zero access is exaggerating the difference here but going with
10 villagers versus 5 per Lumber camp in this case drop their collection rate by about four percent
this backs the general rule of trying to have between four and six villagers around each Camp
if possible this was one mistake I made in the original video on this topic as the main test I
did back then was done with 15 villagers to speed things up well not considering how having that
many villagers bunched up would slow them down and make replacing camps look worse than it is
another Lumber related question is how many villagers should physically be involved in
rebuilding the camp itself there isn't necessarily a perfect answer here but consider the fact it
takes one villager 35 seconds to build or six villagers 13 seconds to build more villagers
will get your Camp up faster but are overall less efficient if we turn all of it into villagers
seconds in fact using six Builders equates to about 20 lost wood compared to just having one
do it and that's not including any walking time especially on a large scale just having a few
villagers make new camps rather than everyone is going to be more efficient and generally
cleaner now that said there is one caveat though which is one of a couple of Lumberjack bugs one
thing I have noticed is if you place a camp on top of other Lumberjacks that are actually
working then they'll sometimes go idle trying to avoid this would actually be a reasonable
counter argument in favor of instead grabbing lots of villagers to rebuild camps in an area
the same sort of bug can also show up if you try to wall a lumberjack into a small Nook behind
your Lumber Camp admittedly it feels pretty clever like you're keeping the Villager safe
from Scout to men at arms and giving it extra efficiency but when the camp is built if they
try to Target a tree that they can't reach then instead they'll just stand there and do nothing
it's not the end of the world but is something to keep an eye on if you're going to use this
trick another related idea that I'm sure we're all familiar with is trapped villagers where they seem
to get stuck between existing ones and at least temporarily stop working in my experience I found
this happens almost exclusively when villagers are trying to chop wood directly behind a camp
which can either lead to three all being on the same tile and squishing the one in the middle or
another case is there's a path chop beside the camp as shown here the general problem is just
too many Lumberjacks on one side of the camp and this tends to only happen when you have three or
more but it's also exacerbated by having one of them trying to chop again wood directly behind
the camp personally I used to be a big fan of having villagers Target that spot directly as it
felt very efficient but I've started avoiding that now that I've noticed how much more often it leads
to trap villagers and it's just something to be aware of now all of this talk about trap villagers
might lead you to wonder if it's instead better to leave a one tile Gap with camps that you build
rather than put them right against the Woodline while admittedly that does solve the problem
of Trapped villagers it's generally considered incorrect but of course we have to investigate
further here I have six villagers I'm going to chop this moderately sized tree patch I'm going to
do it three times once building right against the tree line like usual and adding a new camp every
time we can place one with a one tile gap which as we saw is the best over the long run though
it can lead to trap villagers at least temporarily I'll then do the test again but this time placing
camps so as to always leave a one-tow gap between the camp and Woodline where it's built eliminating
the risk of Trapped villagers and making the pathing a little bit easier third while doing
that test I anticipated questions about making the maximum number of camps but this time leaving the
one towel gap between the tree line as it started to feel at times in the second test like it was
quite a long ways that the villagers were walking after chopping the entire patch all three times
the results completely supported conventional thinking with putting the camps directly
against the Woodline doing the best followed in second by leaving a one tile gap which dropped
the efficiency by about four percent finally the worst of the three options was of course adding a
lot of camps which as we already saw is not an optimal strategy the point is even if it does
lead to slightly more trapped villagers putting your camps right against the Woodline is going
to cut down in Walking time which overall makes it more efficient now finally I wanted to address the
question of whether to build one Lumber camp in Dark Age or if you should make two in some hyper
aggressive builds you'll see players elect for just one with the obvious advantage of saving
100 Wood but with the trade-off of course as we've already seen being they're probably less efficient
overall out of interest and because it ties in with a few ideas we've already seen I wanted
to try to quantify that trade-off and how much wood you're either ahead or behind by splitting
your Lumberjacks between two camps to try to model a realistic situation I'm going to use
the classic 21 population Scout Rush build order in that villagers 7 8 9 go on wood after your
first six on sheep and then typically your last three villagers made in Dark Age are sent wood
followed by four being moved from sheep to wood as you click up ending with 10 on wooden total
you then pick up double bit ax immediately in feudal age and typically stay with those 10 on
wood throughout not including any straggler trees first I tried that with one Lumber Camp tracking
how much wood had accumulated over time leading to of course 10 villagers on a single Camp while
advancing and during feudal age I then repeated the same test on the same map with the first three
unwind Camp the next three on a second camp and the last four villagers being split so you end
up with five Lumberjacks or lumberjills on each camp and again track the total wood I had every
minute so let's look at the results probably as you'd expect staying on one Lumber Camp has a
big Advantage after seven minutes in game going by the f11 timer since you're saving 100 Wood though
surprisingly for me it actually maintained an edge until 14 minutes which is often well into feudal
age if you're going Scouts after that point the better efficiency of two camps does start to pull
ahead though not by a lot until 17 minutes and later when it's passing around a 50 wood Advantage
from this you can definitely see why some hyper aggressive build orders call for just one Camp as
at 9 or 10 minutes in game there's still about 80 or 90 wood ahead while the basic idea of staying
on one Camp is pretty intuitive if anything I was just surprised it took until the 17th or 18th
minute in game to see two camps pay off of course splitting has other benefits like a bit of extra
safety from Towers Etc and two Dark Age camps is generally viewed as best practice by default that
was a whole lot of Lumberjack questions and hopefully there was at least one interesting
takeaway for you in that pile shout out to Seb Woodruff John joxster Justin James Samantha and
everyone else on patreon for their awesome support thanks for watching and I'll see you next time