Testing latest beta of North7

First picture
It works alright that they prefer peat as fuel in the house. In a period where I had a lot of peat, there was no firewood in the house stores.

Second picture
Why isn´t it possible to priority a tile for the peat cutter? I have used the priority tool at least 5 times on the one spot in front, close to the river, where I want to build but the peat cutter seems to prefer to work in the forest in the background.

I just played a bit more and have a few more things to tell. It´s not an easy game. I have “food issues” as well as “fuel issues”. No one has starved or frozen to death but we are never safe. There´s about the same problems as in the last game with food but in that game, I had more than enough fuel at the beginning. I think that the main difference is that here it´s not so much close forest as in the last game so they need to go further to pick deadwood (or have you also reduced the amount of deadwood, Tom?) I also have an impression that peat cutting gives less fuel, despite more peat from each tile. It takes long to get the 12 peat. But it´s easier to clear land for fields and pastures because of less bogland in the area. (This is no complaining, I like it to be challenging).

First picture
Here we can see the fuel graph. Last winter I sent the labourers further away to pick deadwood. In one way it paid off, there´s a lot of firewood but it also lead to that the farmers, who work as labourers in winter (not reassigned still farmers) were late to plant the fields and even if the temperature was good that year, the harvest was not. You can see the smaller turnips at the end of the field.

Second picture
Since I find the output from the peat cutter a bit small, I followed one to see what he was doing. He didn´t spend that much time cutting peat, not only going home to the longhouse to eat and get warm, and went idling (the peat area is located close to the thingstead, so it can surely be worse), he also helped making labourer´s work, as you can see on the picture; getting firewood from a quite remote place. In 9-10 months he cut 8 peat. As you can see, there can´t be a lack of labourers; there are 3 labourers, 2 builders without assignment and it´s -14, so at least I suppose that the 4 farmers still work as labourers, even if the calendar says early spring. Now, I don´t think you can do anything about this behaviour, Tom except consider this by setting the actual work time.

Third picture
Year 16 and 17 were hard. Year 16 had 4 C at most in late summer, so I wanted to be smart and doubled the fields. Next year was warmer; 7 C at the most. I think I could harvest 60 turnips on these 4 fields. Luckily a merchant brought 1000 beans, otherwise, I don´t know how we would have survived.

Fourth picture
A couple of small requests if it´s possible:

Why is the “inventory” site of the menu always shown when you click on the small trading dock? You must always change to the “trade” side before you can make any business.

Is it possible to add an option “empty storage” to the wagon workshop? It looks like you have added wheelbarrows, so I guess it may be possible even if it´s a DS mod. In my last game, I accidentally demolished the site, as I wanted to use the fittings that the blacksmith had stored.

The same thing would be good at the small bloomery, even if it has no options to choose between. It´s always the same problem at the beginning; charcoal that you need at the blacksmith is stored in the bloomery. (or reverse but there you have the option to empty the storage)

I played a bit more this afternoon and made a few more screenshots.

First picture
It looks like there´s less bog iron than in the last version and far less than it used to be. It´s also rare that new bog iron pops up when you clear the bog area. You can see that this small settlement has already used all close iron ore. Now, I don´t know if this is a problem. When we know, that we need to mine iron ore after some time, we can plan for it but I would find it nice if the peat cutter more often found some bog iron, when they dig.

You can also see that there´s a lot of blueberries in the store. Maybe there´s a bit too much to be found. Although I reassign many workers in the “berry season” and send everyone out in the woods, it´s a bit too easy, considering that this is a “harsh” game. On the opposite; there´s not so much firewood. I clear a larger area for deadwood than for berries but must still occupy a woodcutter if I want to make charcoal or pottery.

Second picture
I made some calculations, how long it takes for 2 peat cutter to clear a bog area. At the first area close to the village, it took 20 months to clear 43 peat (first picture). At the area you can see on the second picture, still not that far away, it took 18 months to clear 35 peat. So we can say that one peat cutter with 3 stars and fair coat on “harsh”, clears about 1 tile each month, a bit more if it´s very close, a bit less if it´s far away. As it is now, I use peat cutter because I want to clear the bogland for development, the fuel is only a small bonus.

You must decide, Tom; do you want the bogland to be an obstacle or an asset? As it is now, it´s more an obstacle. This is not bad. I like seafarer to be difficult but a little bit more peat wouldn´t hurt. It would be interesting to know, how other testers feel about the bogland.

Third picture
I want to expand so I now employ 4 peat cutter. First, they worked the area down left on the picture. Since it takes some time to prepare the new sites, I marked the upper area, when there were a few tiles left to clear. I thought that they would finish the first area, then go the second but no, there is still some peat left and the workers are all at the new site. I have tried the priority tool but no use.

Now, I don´t really think that you can do anything about this, Tom but I find it quite annoying, so I want to tell anyway. I see 3 ways to get around it; wait until one area is done before you mark the next, a thing I don´t like because I want to prepare a fast development when I have time or pausing every tile after it´s prepared; nothing for me or simply give away the peat on these tiles and demolish everything in an almost cleared area.

Fourth picture
I always say I don´t do much planning in advance but I do plan a few things. I find it good to have sand and claypits together. So before I made the claypit, I also planned for a sandpit close. I sat the footprint on the spot you can see. But unfortunately, this area was also suitable for cray fishing, so I demolished to footprint, something I shouldn´t have done because now when I need it, I can´t build it on that spot. The land has been lowered by the footprint. Must it work that way?

And I always forget to tell; the building menu still contains 2 longhouses and 2 turf storehouses.

Of course, how stupid of me not to think about the separate buildings. I will not do anything about it until I´ve finished this game.

Since I didn´t have much to do last winter (out of logs, the reason can be seen between the menu windows) I decided to study the slow working peat cutter. They certainly do a lot of other things except working. I took a closer look at one of them and he worked a lot with clearing and carrying firewood north of the peat area. Like earlier, there are a lot of available labourers. But all of them live in the south of the settlement and probably it´s too far away for them to go up there. In the houses in the north part of the village, there are normally some labourers but they have all become peat cutters.

Now at least I have an explanation for this odd behaviour, what I however don´t understand, is that why I saw several peat cutters working with the firewood but none of the herdsmen in the same area. I followed a peat cutter husband and a strockbreeder wife for a couple of months. Until all firewood was cleared, the man was more often in the forest than at the bogland, I didn´t see the wife up there once. If she was picking resources it was her own wool or some mutton from the pasture.

It looks like there is some priority order between the professions, when it comes to doing labourer´s work when no labourer is available. And it looks like peat cutter is high on that priority list and shepherds for some reason I don´t understand low. I doubt that anything can be done about it but I wanted to tell, anyway. The opposite would make more sense to me.

Something completely different; just a small idea. I´m a bit short on storage space and (until I ran out of wood) I was about to replace the turf stores with log storehouses; the same size, almost double capacity. Wouldn´t it make sense to have an upgrade button? It takes some time to empty the store and at that time I sometimes forget that I want to build a new store after the old is demolished. By the way; an upgrade button at the turf houses to log cabins would also be helpful.

As I´ve said; I would have prefered some way without icons but if it´s not possible, we need to make do with icons.

In large areas that are almost depleted, there are many work disabled signs and without the “?” it´s really hard to see if there´s peat left to get. So as long as you keep the “work disabled” sign for the depleted tiles, I would like to have the “?” for not occupied tiles as well. If I want to delete the depleted tiles without miss any peat, I can always unassign all peat cutter. If there´s no “?”, I can demolish it. Unless it´s a single spot, I never use the small icon at each menu, I use the normal “remove construction” button for the whole area.

I also think that a sign for reached limit can make sense. In this game, it doesn´t matter; I would never see it because I´ve set the limit high and are rather short on firewood than close to the limit. But what is in a “mild” forest game with no fuel issues? Here you may very well just want to get rid of the bogland and especially someone who doesn´t play the North very often, may miss that work has stopped because you´ve reached the limit. Many players (including me) employ too many woodcutters in such a game and let them stop work at the limit. So a reminder that peat also follows the fuel limit makes sense to me.

In this case, I would prefer also a sigh for not depleted, maybe in another color.