How to Get Barley in Going Medieval

In Going Medieval, surviving isn’t just about defending your castle from attackers. You will have to keep your colony full of settlers happy and their needs met too. This includes food and drink. One of the best ways of creating a sustainable food source is by growing your own food. Once your colony has learnt how to grow plants and trees the next step is to get to processing these raw ingredients.

This guide will teach you how to grow your own barley and go over some of the things that it can be used for in Going Medieval. As the game is in early access and still being developed, some of the information in this article is subject to change. I’ll try to do my best to keep the information here up to date when new updates are released.


Barley Uses

Barley is one of the plants that you can grow with the right research unlocked in Going Medieval. Barley is used for an ingredient in other recipes. It is only used for creating food and drink products. Barley can also be eaten as a raw ingredient, although it will worsen the moods of your settlers. Barley is used as an ingredient in three main things; meals, alcohol and vinegar. Alcohol is the most common use for barley as will need barley to create Ale and Beer.

The in-game description for barley in Going Medieval
The description for barley eludes to the inclusion of chickens and bread in a future update

The in-game description for barley reads; A versatile grain for bread, gruel or refreshing ale. Use as feed to fatten poultry. There is currently no poultry in the game as of the current version. Barley’s description eludes to the possibility of chickens being added to the game and barley being used as a raw food source for animals. Once taming and animal husbandry is included in the game, I imagine barley will be used to feed some animals.


How to Unlock and Grow Barley

To begin with in Going Medieval you will not be able to grow barley or any other type of plant. You must first unlock the ability to create grow zones through research in the game. If you want to learn how research actually works in Going Medieval you can check out this guide I wrote on research. That being said I will quickly go over how to research and unlock barley here.

Unlocking Barley

To unlock the ability to grow barley you must first unlock the research menu. This is done by building a basic research table. Once you have built this facility the Research menu at the top of the screen will no longer be grayed out. The research item you will need to unlock in order to start growing barley is AGRICULTURE. Before you can unlock this task you will also need to complete the ARCHITECTURE research as well.

Researching how to grow barley in Going Medieval
You will have to research agriculture before you can start your own field of barley

This means you will need a total of 30 chronicle in your colony as each of these items require 15 each. Once you have unlocked this you can immediately start growing your own barley in your colony, provided you have some soil to grow it in.


Growing Barley

To start your own barley field, open up the Zone construction menu. You can select this from the bottom left of the screen or by pressing F7. Now, select the zone which is for plants. Once you select this, you are able to select a specific variant. Find the barley field in this list and then click and drag an area to place down the field.

Starting a barley field in Going Medieval
You can grow many different types of plants in Going Medieval

Once this area is placed down your settlers will come and grow your barley here when it becomes a priority. Only settlers assigned to grow will be able to plant here. You can change the priority of planting fruits and vegetables by opening up the Jobs menu at the top of the screen. Here, you can change which jobs are the most important by assigning different numbers to the boxes. As you can read in the image above, barley will take around 26 in-game days to fully mature. After this time, your settlers will automatically come and harvest the barley.

If you want to harvest the barley earlier, you can assign the plants to being harvested early. This is done with the Harvest action button which is available at the bottom left of the screen when nothing else is selected. (The small symbol with the Basket, or B hotkey).


Where to Store Barley

In Going Medieval, food can go bad and also spoil. As there is no way to actually build a working freezer like in games like Rimworld, you will have to think about where you can store barley. In general, always try to keep it indoors and under a roof. One of the best things you can go is build some underground storage as the further underground you go, the colder the temperatures will get. The colder the storage room, the longer the food will take to spoil and expire.


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