(Guide Last Updated 1/14/2020) Make no mistake, this game is a lot harder than Banished (Banished with hard difficulty), and it will make Banished feel like a walk in the park. This game requires a lot more micromanagement and macromanagement. It is more time consuming than Banished! Here are some tips/notes you can use to overcome the obstacles you will encounter in Life is Feudal: Forest Village.

Make no mistake, this is not the only method to succeed, but so far, from experience, this has worked for me.

Concerns:
Starvation (Food)
Hypothermia (Firewood and clothe)
Rabies/Plague (Hunter protection and herbs)
Building Placement (Terraforming)

How to obtain food:

* Take note:
Fishing is an all year round profession.
Hunting is an all year round profession.
Farming is a summer/spring/fall profession (during winter, you cannot farm).
Do not rely on hunters or fisherman solely for food.
Fishing and hunting will only help to slow down food reduction from your barn, but it should only be used when farming cannot be done at the time.

What I like to do is focus on farming potatoes early game.
Make sure your farming professions are maxed out. This will depend on the farm lot size. If you do not max out farming professions and your farmers do not harvest the crops in time, when the temperature drops below zero degrees celcius, your crops will instantly disappear.
When winter hits (zero degrees celcius or less), switch the farmers to fisherman, and any extra farmers to hunters, and the rest to other professions.

Vitamin deficiency is glitched. Do not bother with any other food source except potatoes.

Cattle pastures require alot of oats/grass, and produce little meat. Do not bother with them unless for aesthetic reasons.

Hunting cabins are important to have. Hunters hunt down animals to prevent the spread of rabies. It is highly recommended you have the hunting cabins employed with the max number of hunters possible, because even one empty hunter profession can lead to an animal to slip through to your town and spread rabies.

Always keep farms fully employed as a primary priority and hunting cabin as a secondary priority.
If you do not have a herbalist's hut, and a healer's shop, in any event anyone gets infected with rabies or plague (as indicated by the + icon), go into first person mode by clicking on the icon with their face, and then manually walk them far away from town until they starve to death. This will prevent the spread of rabies/plague.

Having firewood/coal does not guarantee the prevention of hypothermia. To lower the odds of facing hypothermia, it is best if your people utilize firewood/coal and wear clothe. Clothe can be created from the weaver's shop with flax (grown from farm) and hide.

If you end up having a large excess of flax, you can switch the farms to other crops you need more of.

It is important you move around the workers to different professions depending on need, season, and situation.

Do not build multiple homes all at once. Build homes at a gradual pace, children consume food, but they cannot work until they reach age 6. Keep this in mind at all times!

Terraforming is one of the biggest obstacles you will have to deal with. Most buildings will require a flat surface to build on. Farms are more flexible, but some sloped/jagged areas can restrict you from building farms on. It is very important to know that it is very difficult to terraform, farm, mine, hunt, and cut logs all in one year, you must prioritize one activity during one year/one season and another activity another year/another season. You have to alternate your priorities! Terraforming is important to make the flow of your citizen's movement smoother, thus allowing increased work productivity, and reducing the spacing of your buildings to one another to give your people shorter time to travel. It will help if you terraform a little during a specific time, and then halting the project, and then waiting for another season/year to do it again. Trying to terraform all at once is difficult, especially when your laborer count is low/limited. Remember, do it in small increments. Also, keep in mind to have the warehouse, barn, lumberjack, and homes close to one another. You can have the forester's lodge/hunting cabin a little apart from the town, but not too far.

Do not build a port unless if you have a mill and a bakery, as you will need to make food (specific baked goods) to set your ship off an expedition OR unless you are going to trade for these baked goods utilizing a donkey and a marketplace.

Distance will determine work productivity. This can mean/determine whether or not your crops will be harvested in time! The scary thing about distance from a home to a farm to a barn is that if they are for example, 100 meters apart, it takes the people 200 meters to travel; 100 meters getting there and 100 meters coming back. Wells will be needed for farming when it isn't raining. Apply the same concept to the distance between your well (water source for farming) and your farm! Keep this in mind!

Miscallaneous issues:
#1
At times, your builder will not build a specific home right away due to several factors. Distance between where the builder lives to where he needs to construct a new building can determine whether he/she will bother to build or not. At times, they may travel far from home and will build for 1-4 seconds and then return home. To prolong the building efficiency/time of your builder, shorten the distance to travel from where the builder lives to where he/she needs to build.

#2
Beware of having multiple barns, there may be a situation where all the food is ending up in one barn located far away from home, and another barn near your home that is not receiving any food. This can lead to starvation as a result of your people attempting to obtain food from a barn that is too far away. Food is usually stored to the "nearest" barn from where it was obtained/harvested from. The same concept applies to materials. You may also face a problem where the materials stored in a warehouse is too far from where it is needed. (UPDATED: Materials/food in storage can be transferred to other storage via Donkeys from the stable).

#3
Workers get the higher upgraded material, charcoal over firewood, warm clothe over regular clothe, which causes an issue with traveling. To fix it, you can lock one or the other, but make sure you have those resource evenly distributed through out your town.

Elysium Population: 900 as of 6/4/2017.
Thermopylae Population: 1609 as of 1/23/2022.
Elysium: 59 percent work force in the agricultural industry.
Thermopylae: 39.7 percent work force in the agricultural industry.

Elysium's excess food stored before workers begin harvesting crops: 700,000.
Thermopylae's excess food stored before workers begin harvesting crops: 1,130,000.

*If your food count is hitting or hitting near zero often, you may want to wait until more children are able to work and collect food, before proceeding with building more houses. Building a 10 capacity house is riskier than building a 5 capacity house since the number of babies that come in is two times more, and more babies equal more mouths to feed. Keep that in mind!

*Calculate distances from one building to another. The shorter, the better end result you will get for work productivity, which could make or break the game.

*Utilize a donkey stable, a donkey, and a market to acquire ore, stone, logs, hide by trading out your food. This way, you wouldn't have to waste logs making mines and waste time having them to mine. Instead, at some point in time, solely focus on food and begin trading them for other resource. Ideal: Trade out your food for hide, clothe, firewood, coal, logs, building materials.

*Advanced mechanics/guide for mid-late game will arrive soon (2020).