Ive been playing since the game came out and everyone was stuck on animal lore , and server charshes every hour, and at first with no real storage and lootbags everywhere this made sense , but now its just simply annoying.

What?

- WALLS AROUND A FURNACE . STONE/WOOD SQUARES AROUND A SLEEEPINGBAG.
Scenario of people "grouping up" : - Hi i have snapped off a branch. - OH HAI I HAS 3 APPLES! - OMG LETS BUILD CASTLE WALLS AND A KEEP AROUND OUR STICK AND APPLES!

Possible solution :

Make Monuments consume food/water by adding a storage option to them as it is now with sacrifices , and a certain ammount of resources to even unlock the next upgrade.

Example , registering resources in a claim , or even monument chest , that could be looted if you lose a war/raid where you put resources in , that have a certain value depending on the item and its quality, like metal ingots/bars , jewelry , or even add a Mint Building to mint gold/silver coins,or add that to Jewelry skill. Same with Food, if your monument runs out of food value your claim radius decreases and you obvioulsy cant upgrade as part of the requirement is not met , food/water and materials should be 2 different values that have to be met .

This would also boost ingame trade and economy, as now raw food/ingredients fill up warehouses without any real purpose, since theres jsut THAT much that you want to eat yourself, as some other suggestion mentioned , water is pretty useless, and huge piles of ores are just thrown away because unless building something ore is tossed aside as people jsut mine for gems.
At some point everyone just needs steel and trading dies out after a few weeks , as people just sacrifice arrows/bolts and as mentioned before only really need steel.

If this gets implemented at some point, we would actually see something resembling a settlement before people become "kings" of a pile of dirt, rush walls and militarize to harass others, unless a rp server , but even then its the same , minus the harass others part.