Bakery

*This is about New Lands & Two Crowns.*

* Europe
* Shogun
* Dead L.

The **bakery** is an un-operated structure built from a high tier archer tower, unlocked by the Bakery Hermit, that can produce bread to attract vagrants from their camps in the forest to the Kingdom, making their recruitment easier, especially on larger islands.

## Building

Building a bakery requires the Bakery Hermit to be riding with the Monarch in front of an already built triplet archer tower. Once paid the price of six coins in *New Lands* or fifteen coins in *Two Crowns*, all archers on that tower turn back to their routine of hunters, and one or two builders come to build the bakery. Once their work is done, a medieval bread oven along with an empty table for the loaves will be available for use.

### Placement

The bakery can be built at any tower space (provided there is a triplet archer tower there), inside or outside the walls, and it will do its job of attracting vagrants all the same.
However, greedlings can steal bread from the table, so placing it in the wilderness isn't a wise option.

Furthermore, after being attracted, and eating the bread (or not), newly recruited villagers should start looking for a tool or weapon.
If the bakery is far from the shops, that could cause villagers to take much longer until they reach a tool or weapon to finally start working for the Kingdom.

As the shops (the most important ones at least, in *Two Crowns*) are all around the town center, building the bakery in one of the two spots available on the town square, seems to be the most balanced choice.
That placement also provides that a bakery won't disable a useful and operating military tower around an outer wall.

Thus, summarizing: far from the greed, far from the borders, and near the shops.

 *Kingdom Two Crowns* –
Shops have a more complex positioning, and that could present a variety of opportunities to be exploited by more experienced Monarchs when chosing where to build a bakery.
Placing it near a pike shop or a dojo, for example, could speed up the hiring process of pikemen and ninjas on that side of the Kingdom.
That could be even more useful if the Monarch is planning to aggressively expand towards that side, or if the other side of the Kingdom has already been cleared.

## Feeding the poor

#Bread

At the bakery, the Monarch can purchase each loaf of bread for one coin in *New Lands* and for four coins in *Two Crowns*, with the bakery holding up to seven loaves of bread. Bread attracts vagrants towards the bakery at their running speed to come and eat freshly baked bread. This is a fast way of recruiting villagers, as the vagrants may start coming right after they appear from their camps. In addition, it saves the Monarch from having to go outside of the walls to reach any camps there.

More bread seems to attract from farther:

* In later islands, one maxed bakery does not attract from camps too far out, but two does.
* If too much bread is eaten, some camps that were attracted from are not attracted anymore.

More bread on the table seems to attract more vagrants but one bakery appears to be sufficient for even a huge island. Notably, one bread loaf appears to attract one vagrant at a time.

 *Kingdom: New Lands* –
Eating bread does not convert a vagrant to a villager. Instead, the vagrant will stay around the bakery and will keep eating bread at regular intervals until there is nothing left or until they are recruited. If there are no more loaves over the table, all vagrants around it will start wandering away, slowly returning to their camps.

 *Kingdom Two Crowns* –
Once a vagrant reaches the table, grabs a loaf of bread, and eat it, he's instantly converted into a villager.
Unlike vagrants (from camps), citizens (from citizen houses) will not be attracted to bread.

## Not feeding the poor

In order to save coins, the Monarch can recruit the incoming vagrants *before* they reach the bakery, and eat the bread.

With this practice, an attentive monarch can attract multiple (potentially infinite) vagrants per bread loaf, consequently lowering the coin cost of attracting vagrants from camps to town to nearly zero. However, the task of ensuring that there are always coins on the ground around a bakery is not always easy to do, because these coins may disappear due to several reasons.

## Speeding up the process

 *Kingdom: New Lands* –
In order to save time, the best moment to recruit a vagrant running towards the bakery is when they are very close to bakery, as running vagrants stop running once they become villager. This shortens the time they take to reach the town center if there are no tools lying on the ground.

 *Kingdom Two Crowns* –
Since villagers outside the walls run for their lives even during the day, and they run faster than vagrants, the best moment to recruit a beggar seaking for food is as soon as they're spotted.
Of course, this should only be done once their path to town is safe, or once they're already inside the walls.

## Usefulness per land

The Bakery Hermit is perfect for bringing to Skull Island (New Lands) or later on new islands since the vagrant camps there are usually beyond the portals and attracting vagrants with bread is much safer than venturing far away and waiting for vulnerable villagers to walk over. It is also safer as the vagrants are not attacked by Greed that are roaming the land, whereas a claimed villager will be attacked if they are not protected.

## History

 2018-12-11
 2016-08-09
 Introduced.

**Bread cost in *Two Crowns***

A couple of weeks after the release of Kingdom Two Crowns, a Steam user made an eloquent request:

Make baker bread turn vagrants into peasants automatically
Baker pulls in vagrants EXTREMELY slowly, and the cost of bread is now 4 gold per piece.

You're going to make bread cost as much as a farmer, and then make us wait around until a single vagrant comes along, to then spend a 5th gold to recruit them, and if we don't wait around doing nothing then they eat through the entire bread supply?

Please consider making this important and very useful quality of life upgrade by making bread turn vagrants into peasants automatically.

To which the developer Gordon almost two years later replied:

>
>
>
> | “
>  | Good point about the bread cost. I'll look into lowering it.
>  | „
>
>

Good point about the bread cost. I'll look into lowering it.
As mentioned in the table above, the request was implemented in 2021.

## References

1. ↑ Screenshot provided by developer Alan on *Reddit*. 13 June 2022.