Nilla

If you’re short on trading goods, why not try to sell meat? The farmyard with pigs, don’t remember the number, looks adorable and produces an awful lot of pork worth 3. Locate them as close to the ports as you can and you will be able to buy a lot of cheaper food. I usually order fish or nuts. Always a good business.

Really Brad; I wanted to check but it didn´t work. I´ll tell you all my misery. (What I do for you, you know how I love ;) such things)

1. Loaded the paper mill, realized it needs iron fittings. How do we get them? DS production sites can produce some.
2. Loaded small-town production, smaller and seemed less hazardous than Jetty & Bridges or Industrial mining.
3. Below RKEd: crash
4. Above works
5. Small town Blacksmiths can´t produce fittings, I thought they could but was wrong
6. Loaded Jetty and Bridges, started to produce iron fittings. Hurra, hurra they can even be used at the building site.
7. Realized there are several kind of glass; RK glass can´t be used to build the paper mill
8. Not with paper mill last and not with paper mill first in the mod load order.
9 Built a DS glassmaker, thought it might produce the right kind of glass
10. but it didn´t
11. Gave this experiment up. I hate when things don´t work!!!!

I will now play a nice Nordic game with no (or few) additional mods. Maybe Ironman. I rather struggle with starvation than with mod orders.

Check the pine loom, if something hasn’t changed since I used it, it produces terribly bad. (It’s quite some time ago since I used that mod and your mod-load-order may also have an influence on the production so it might be OK).

In my experience, if you have problems to catch up with building houses, the number of builders to build a house is not the limiting factor; is the distribution of building materials. Rather choose houses that need little, easy to get building materials than those who can use many builders. In my huge nomad town, I used RK country houses(?) not because of the number of possible builders but because they only need one building material; 48 lumber that you make from 12 or 16 logs (educated/uneducated). But maybe in your case with a real time mod (that I think you use) you should consider that these cheap houses can hold a family of 6 and the natural population growth will increase quite rapidly. If you don´t want that, Kid also have cheap houses for 4 person families.

Do you plan to use gold/silver/gems from the mine or just trade it away?

I also keep a number of old mods. It’s fun that you mention Kid’s tiny mod. I think that’s the only older mod I’ve ever used.

On “mild” climate crops usually grow fast enough for a field to be fully harvested. As in vanilla there might be bad years but my experience is that “mild” Nordic and “fair” vanilla is similar in growth. But most food producers give less food than vanilla so you will need more people occupied with food production than you are used to.

Also, other essential products like tools and clothing are more complicated (or very slow like clothes at the campfire), more people also here.

To use as few people as possible, you need to build efficient. And that mainly means short ways between workplaces homes and stores. That´s not always the most beautiful way to build. So I guess your building style with small gardens around the houses and free space here and there for decorations is partly to blame for your struggle. You also build rather expensive mid-game buildings early. That too cost time and resources that could have been used for the basic needs. But as long as you survive it´s fine.

These additional mods you use fit well to the North.

With a growing population, it’s easier to produce leather from the deer hides and produce wool coats. To sell a surplus is also very profitable.

And yes, cray fishing can be a lifesaver. A bit tedious but if you set a few spots when the winter comes, the gatherer will catch crayfish in winter and walk back to his hut when they are depleted.