Villagers, Jobs, and Mood

How to recruit villagers, assign them to the right jobs, and keep their Mood high so they stay, work well, and grow your settlement instead of leaving it.

A village is only as good as the people in it. Once your Dynasty Reputation is high enough, you recruit NPC villagers who walk to your settlement, move into the housing you provide, and do the work you assign. They are the colony-management layer that turns a one-person grind into a self-running town. But every villager has needs and a Mood, and a neglected villager eventually packs up and leaves, taking their built-up skill with them.

Recruiting villagers

You recruit by talking to NPCs at campfires in towns and asking them to join, which is only possible once your Dynasty Reputation is high enough to support another resident. The recruited villager then walks to your village on their own.

Use Inspector Mode to view a recruitable NPC’s skills before you recruit them. Skills set profession yield, so checking first lets you recruit for the job you actually need rather than gambling on a random hire.

Do not recruit faster than you can house and feed. A villager with no house, food, water, or firewood loses Mood steadily and will leave. Build the housing and secure the supply first, then recruit into it.

Assigning jobs

Jobs are assigned in the Management tab. You select a villager or a building and pair them. Each production building exposes three tabs:

Tab	What it controls
Workers	Which villager is assigned to the building
Assignment	What the building should produce
Production	The output the building generates

A villager’s profession efficiency, meaning their yield, is set by the skill level tied to that profession, on a 1 to 10 scale that rises with time on the job. Match villagers to their best skill: put high-Extraction villagers on Lumberjack and Miner roles, high-Production villagers on crafting stations, and high-Farming villagers on fields and animal pens. A worker assigned to a job they are bad at produces little.

How skills map to jobs

The six skills each govern a cluster of professions:

Extraction: Lumberjacks, Miners, Water Carriers.
Hunting: Hunters.
Farming: Farmers, Barn Workers, Millers, Beekeepers, Animal Breeders.
Diplomacy: Stallholders.
Survival: Herbalists, Fishermen.
Production: Craftsmen, Seamsters, Cooks, Innkeepers, Blacksmiths, Builders.

A higher profession skill not only raises yield, it also raises that villager’s Mood, so skilled, well-placed workers are happier workers.

Mood, and why villagers leave

Every villager has a Mood from -100 percent to +100 percent. At -100 percent they leave the village for good. Mood is the single most important thing to manage once you have a population.

Mood rises when a villager:

Has a job.
Lives in well-insulated housing.
Has their needs met (food, water, firewood).
Is assigned a job they prefer.
Reaches level 10 in their job.
Has a family.

Mood drops when needs go unmet or housing is missing. The practical rule is to keep food, water, and firewood flowing to every resident at all times, especially through winter, and to give each villager a real job suited to their skills. Neglecting Mood until someone walks out is a classic mistake, and you lose all their accumulated specialization when they go.

Building toward a self-running village

The endgame village is a large, housed, fed, high-Mood population with most production automated by high-skill villagers across farming, animal husbandry, crafting, and extraction. Chapter IX sets an early bar at 10 residents and 5 workers, and a thriving settlement runs well past it. Keep recruiting deliberately, house and feed before you hire, and assign to strengths, and the village starts running itself.