Villagers and animals

Giving a villager a trade by hand

• Release a villager within four metres of a foundation, a field row, a finished workplace, a free market stall, a house, a pond bank, an ore rock or a tree and they take the matching trade. Aim the drop at the thing you want worked, because where they land decides the job, not what they were doing before. (In testing.)
• The order of preference is a foundation first, then a field row needing work, then a workplace with a free station, then a free stall, a house, a pond bank, an ore rock and finally a tree. When two targets stand together, drop on the one you actually mean, because an ore rock always beats the trees standing around it. (In testing.)
• While you carry someone, a prompt over the target names the trade they would take, such as Assign as Miner, before you commit to it. Read that prompt before letting go, and treat no prompt at all as the drop giving them nothing.
• Drops are measured to the outline of a building, so a villager released anywhere on a large foundation counts as being on it. A workplace with every station taken, a mine at its crew cap or a pond with no free bank spot refuses the order rather than quietly making them something else. (In testing.)
• Every trade wears its own colour on the people, so woodcutters read green, miners blue, builders orange and fishers aqua from a distance. Use those colours to see which trades you have too many of without opening a single card. (In testing.)

Work the village finds for itself

• The settlement keeps a list of its own shortages and an idle villager rolls to answer the neediest one at a base chance of 45 percent, scaled down by how willing they are and by how urgent the need is. Let the town organise itself and step in only when the list is working on the wrong problem.
• Villagers with no body at that moment, which is most of them most of the time, are hired straight off that same list with no dice roll, and only for trades their tier can actually perform. You never have to find a villager for a job, only decide that the job matters.
• Idle villagers also volunteer, and every four seconds one may join a nearby building site at a quarter chance, up to three helpers per site, or take a free station at a mill or a field row that needs work. Leave some people unassigned if you want construction and harvests to keep moving.
• A trade taken from the shortage list is handed back when the shortage closes, but a trade a villager chose for themselves survives three days with nothing to do, and one you assigned by hand or locked on their Duty page is never handed back. Lock the trades that must not lapse, such as a mill crew, and let the rest follow the list. (In testing.)
• Each villager’s card carries a Duty page that sets how hard they push, whether they may work at night and how well they eat, with effort running from three quarters rate up to one and a half, night work pinned on or off, and rations scaling their meal from 0.6 to 1.6 units. Set it villager by villager on the jobs that matter, because a Relentless worker loses health fastest and a Sheltered one never takes the overwork roll at all.

Skills, swings and how hard they work

• Work trains the skill the trade uses, and only a landed swing pays: two experience for a swing that lands and nothing for one that misses. Level two costs forty landed swings and the requirement then grows steeply, so the early levels arrive on their own and mastery is a long campaign.
• The gap between a novice and a master is widest where the base is lowest: a master builder or fisher works more than three times as fast as a novice, a master woodcutter half again as fast, a master miner gets half again the ore and a master forager can double their berries. Put your experienced people on the good you are shortest of instead of rotating everybody through every trade. (In testing.)
• Manual work runs on swings of about a second and a third, a novice wastes a third of their swings and a master almost none, and one tree costs twelve swings to bring down plus thirty five to cut up at two wood each swing. Expect a beginner to be visibly slower on the same tree, and judge your timber income on who is holding the axe. (In testing.)
• Felling a tree can kill the woodcutter, with a one percent chance at the first skill level and no risk at all at the last. Do not send an untrained worker alone into a wood you are clearing hard, and remember that no work order makes felling safe. (In testing.)
• Every villager rolls two or three traits that quietly multiply how willing they are to work, how fast they work, how readily they sleep, how often they react and how faith moves them, and age adds its own term, with children up to fifteen taking no trade and elders from fifty five working at seven tenths willingness. Read the card before deciding that a slow worker is broken.

Food, rest and mood

• Hunger opens at just under half a full belly and a meal taken from the settlement’s food restores about two thirds of it, while meagre or generous rations change how many units that meal costs. Keep a real surplus in the storehouse, because hunger lowers how willingly a villager works and adds sadness, then anger.
• Rest drains all day and a bed recovers it more than twice as fast as bare ground, while the decision to sleep is a roll that is 70 percent at night, 2 percent by day and forced once rest falls below 15 percent. Build beds before you expand, since a rested workforce is the cheapest speed you will ever buy.
• Working below 30 percent rest risks overwork at a quarter chance on each roll, and an overworked villager who is awake loses health until they die, with sleep the only cure. Watch anyone you have ordered to Driven or Relentless, because measures that keep a worker on the job are also what kill them.
• Mood is four bars, where a bed, rest and food lift Happy and Faith while hunger, sleeping rough, goods left heaped on the ground, a neighbour worked into the ground and an unburied body push Sad and Anger up. Happy, Sad and Anger fade back to neutral on their own but Faith does not, so faith is the town’s long memory of how you have treated it.
• An empty larder kills nobody, because there is no starvation death, so hunger instead makes people slow, sad, angry and more likely to fall ill. Treat an empty storehouse as a warning about mood and sickness rather than a countdown to deaths.

Homes, births and neighbours

• A villager claims the best liked finished house with a free bed and keeps that bed for life, scoring a home as its appeal times five metres minus the walk to it. Build a few good houses rather than many plain ones, since a nicer home wins a resident until it stands five metres further away for each point of appeal.
• Newcomers arrive only at a town holding four days of food, at a fifth of a person per free bed per day, rounded and capped at eight people a day or six percent of the town. Spare beds plus a full storehouse are the whole recipe for a growing population, so count your free beds before you wonder why nobody is moving in.
• A birth is rolled once a day for each finished house with two adults and a free bed, at four percent a day plus thirty percent more while a homekeeper lives there, and the child takes twelve days to become an adult. Put a homekeeper in the house you want children from, because that one resident more than doubles the chance.
• Outlying hamlets grow with their households, rising from a hamlet at nothing to a village at five, a large village at ten, a town at twenty, a large town at forty and a city at sixty, adding a building about every half day. Deal with a hamlet you want before it grows into a town that a rival can use. (In testing.)
• Buildings earn impressiveness from their appeal, their beds and what they cost, and repeats of the same building are worth less each time, while a town that leads a neighbour by twenty plus two per building it owns gains regard daily and takes the neighbour over when that regard fills. Spread different impressive buildings around instead of repeating one, and keep helping nearby towns, because dousing a fire, healing a villager or setting one down gently all earn regard too. (In testing.)

Death and burial

• Villagers die of impact, overwork, combat, being eaten by the Creature, sickness, a feud, a lost person incident, a mine cave in, fire and falling trees, and there is no death from old age or from hunger. Watch the overworked and the sick rather than the old, and treat an unsafe workplace as the thing that actually kills your people. (In testing.)
• A dead civilian is not cleaned up on a timer, so their body waits where it fell until a neighbour buries it, while the bodies of soldiers and other non civilians fade after the corpse lifetime of ninety seconds, which the settings screen lets you shorten to thirty or lengthen to one hundred and eighty. Put up a cemetery before your first accident, or your dead will lie in the street until you do.
• Burial is done by a living idle adult civilian of the same settlement, who is given a real body for the job, walks to the corpse, drags it to the first free plot and leaves a named grave behind. The walk is the slow part, so put the cemetery near where people live and work, and remember that an errand lasting longer than nine hundred seconds is abandoned and offered again later.
• News of a death carries twenty five metres and up to four mourners walk over to grieve at the body for eight seconds, while a villager who simply walks up on a body within nine metres has a quarter chance to start a vigil. Expect work to pause around a death, so keep a second worker in any trade that cannot afford the gap.
• An unburied body within nine metres of an awake civilian adds to that villager’s sadness continuously, and every dead villager keeps a memorial with their name, birthday and full history. Bury your dead near the busy parts of town, and read the cemetery’s list when you want to know how a particular person lived and died.

Hunting, fishing and wildlife In testing

• A town hires hunters only while its food sits below the reserve, and a hunter stands down as soon as that need closes, so meat normally arrives as an answer to a shortage rather than as a standing trade. If you want meat on purpose, ask a hunting wood for workers from its card, which keeps that spot staffed even when the larder is full.
• A hunter only takes an animal that is free to be taken, meaning not penned, not being led home, not in your hand, not already claimed by another hunter and not itself hunting or eating, and they look about a hundred and twenty metres. Keep penned stock out of their reach and they will not touch it, and remember that an animal you are carrying is safe from them.
• Every wood holds a stock of game set by how many trees stand in it, four head per hundred trees, regrowing two head a day, and a head taken from that stock yields eight meat, while near the camera the hunter kills and butchers a real animal instead. Hunt across more than one wood, because a wood worked hard is emptied for a while.
• Wild herds live only in woods with at least forty standing trees, prey animals flee the god hand and the Creature while predators hold their ground, predators hunt the species they eat with one hunter per animal, and the world keeps roughly two hundred and fifty metres of wildlife around you and culls what wanders past three hundred and fifty. Site your hunting near a big wood instead of waiting for animals to come to the town, and do not worry about thinning the population, because it is topped up and anything you place by hand is never culled.
• A pond is fished from bank spots, cannot be taken below a quarter of its fish, takes about eighteen seconds a bite into a basket of five carp worth two food each, and freezes over in winter with regrowth only in spring and summer. Ask the pond’s card for workers if you want it fished when the larder is full, and take your carp before the freeze.

Herding, pens and livestock

• A pen is drawn on the ground with the area tool, and how many animals it holds comes from its usable area divided by the space the species needs per head, up to sixteen head, with sixty livestock allowed in the whole world. Draw a pen larger than you think you need if you want a herd, and remember that the sixteen head ceiling is hard whatever the area.
• A pen takes its species only while it is empty, and only species marked as pennable appear in the list at all. Choose the species as soon as the pen is finished, because changing your mind later means leading every animal out first.
• A herder catches a wild animal on a roll against their Breeding skill, a failed attempt startles the animal, they give up on one animal after three tries, and a captured animal follows them home about three metres behind. Send your most experienced herder after the difficult species, because the capture roll is the trade’s skill and a startled animal has to be approached all over again.
• A stocked pen banks produce once a day at each head’s daily yield times three quarters, up to three days of slack, and breeds when it has a pair, room and the species’ waiting time served, with the herder carrying that produce to storage. Tend your pens or they fill up and stop, and keep a pair in each pen if you want the herd to grow.
• You can stock a pen by setting a wild animal down inside it from your hand as long as the species matches and there is room, penned animals are safe from hunters and predators, and demolishing a pen releases its animals rather than destroying them. Your Creature can raid a pen it has learned to feed from, so keep it away from livestock unless you want sad, angry and less faithful villagers.