Victoria 3

Victoria 3

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Realistic Arable Land
   
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1.843 MB
28 Nov, 2022 @ 4:15am
6 Dec, 2022 @ 1:12am
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Realistic Arable Land

Description
Now updated for 1.1

This mod significantly alters the distribution of arable land in the world to better fit agriculture in the real world.

In the vanilla game arable land is largely distributed based on population in 1836. This results in areas that offer vast expanses of farmland in real life, such as the Great Plains in North America, having very small amounts of arable land in game. This mod instead allocates arable land based on the distribution of farmlands in the modern day using Global Food Security-support Analysis Data, a collaborative effort by NASA and the USGS, as reference.

Altering arable land to this extent obviously could cause catastrophic levels of starvation at game start as hundreds of millions of peasants no longer have anywhere to work so this mod also makes subsistence farms ten times more space efficient. I.e. one peasant will still make the same amount of grain or meat as in vanilla, but you can fit ten times as many of them into a given unit of farmland.

Notes:
  • The new distribution was designed to keep the total amount of arable land the same as in the vanilla game and also ensures that every state receives a minimum of 5 units of arable land.
  • In general it was assumed that 1sqkm of modern farmland offers about the same potential as any other, however where the data indicates major modern irrigation it was assumed that this land is capable of supporting more intensive agriculture and so it receives slightly more arable land than would otherwise be expected (this is largely a buff for China and India which are already loosing out fairly significantly so, whether it is realistic or not, it is probably good for game balance).
  • I'm sure there will be areas where using modern data has resulted in anachronistic levels of arable land, however the goal with this mod is to be better than vanilla, not perfect so unless they break particular countries I won't be changing them
  • The only place where the new distribution differs significantly from what the data would suggest is in Japan, which even with the buffed space efficient farms would still experience game breaking unemployment and so Japan has approximately twice as much arable land as it technically should have.

Data:
https://www.usgs.gov/apps/croplands/home
16 Comments
jackson 4 Jun, 2023 @ 6:36pm 
This mod need update
Rastro 30 Apr, 2023 @ 1:42pm 
Why not just take the higher of both values. If it’s arable in 1836 it’s probably stable now, and Vice versa. Plus potentials.
Pokesus 18 Feb, 2023 @ 6:47am 
I think this is wrong because is based on the arable land nowadays, not in 1836, where the arable land was way bigger and everywhere because agriculture stills a key industry in world.
TheHiker_ 15 Jan, 2023 @ 1:10am 
Ok, the problem is simply uneven distribution of arable land, If you increase the arable land in the southern states it should be fixed. Right now, the south basically collapses if you build any agricultural buildings.
TheHiker_ 15 Jan, 2023 @ 1:06am 
Japan is still broken, I am in the middle of industrializing and 1 million pops are unemployed and basically starving due to the lack of arable land.
Ryguy 13 Jan, 2023 @ 1:46pm 
The data based approach is a great start, but some provinces could use manual tweaking, such as Patagonia which had some the most productive sheep farms in the world but still only has 19 arable land in this mod because it is all off farmland data . Although this issue only exists because Victoria 3 treats all arable land the same. Another place that could use an adjustment is Hawaii being reduced to only 5 arable land because of the modern data, which I assume doesn't count the many national parks that now occupy fertile farmland.
kev.lav 2 Jan, 2023 @ 1:03pm 
Nice mod but does it work with Anbeeld's Revision of AI?
mcmeg 13 Dec, 2022 @ 8:13pm 
Great mod!!!
Nachtblume 8 Dec, 2022 @ 11:30am 
Mod should be at bottom list to work
NTLuck 7 Dec, 2022 @ 8:38am 
Does the mod work on the country select screen? Or will it only work once I choose a country and start playing? I ask because I have this mod at the very top of my mod list yet its not showing any changes while other Arable land mods work on the country select screen