Nilla

I wouldn’t worry too much about room for workplaces after upgrading. You will not need all too many of those, so there will most likely be some house that has space for it also if the first houses are close to each other.

By the way, shepherds is a good starting option. Making clothes at the campfire is slow and you need to hunt pretty hard to get enough skins to make clothes for everyone after a while if you aren’t lucky with the merchants and get sheep very soon.

Good luck with your game and please show us some pictures. Always nice to see the ideas of other players.

I have a set of old mods, too. I use them seldom but I could if I wanted to.

If you´ve never played the North before I guess it´s a real challenge. Good luck! It´s a nice little mission. Please let Smurphy rescue me. ;)

By the way there´s another mission that´s very nice as well, also with only two people from the start but a bit more “normal” gameplay. You should try that as well.

I did some testing, too. Vanilla gameplay, easy start 8 chicken.

No herdsman ever; chicken don’t breed and start to die late winter 2, all dead early winter 3.
Same start but herdsman assigned when the first dies, late winter 2. More chicken die, early spring only 4 left, early summer 2 new chicken born but another 2 dead, early winter all initial chicken dead but one more born. Summer 5 pasture (9×9) full with 13 chicken.

Chicken split into 2 9×9 pastures. One with and one without herdsman. Chicken breed in both pastures, early spring, 7 chicken start to die without herdsman, all dead summer 9.

Same split, now I let the herdsman visit the empty pasture as soon as the number of chicken reaches 15, let him slaughter and unassign. Numbers from 13 chicken during 4 years:

With herdsman. Without herdsman
Eggs Meat Eggs Meat
132 24. 126. 30
150. 72. 162. 30
150. 66. 156. 42
132. 72. 144. 24

I also restarted the game and let a herdsman work for about a month at the beginning and the chicken started to breed after some time.

Conclusion: Chicken (and I guess all other animals) breed faster if a herdsman is at the pasture but they survive and breed also if you only assign one from time to time. If you never assign a herdsman they all die but you can let the herd survive by temporarily letting one work. But of course, if you primarily want wool from sheep, you can get more if you only assign one from time to time. But of course, in this case you need enough labourers to pick it up.

As I’ve seen in my present game, a good located pasture give more meat than a bad located where the herdsman is absent longer. Here is the screenshot I promised with the output from the 3 pastures. You can also see some of my favourite RKEd things I talked about above.

I am sure that in some mods animals don´t breed without a herdsman and that they breed faster when one is present a lot but as I´ve said: I havn´t seen it that obvious in the North but very clear in my present game.

I like many unique things in the RKEd, like the fodder-fertilizer-chain, the canals, the corner buildings and 3 store NMT houses but I have one issue; the survivning aspects that I like so much in the North is missing, so I decided to make a try with RKEd and Ironman. There´s one start option Shepherds where you have 2 different animals from the start. I found a map I liked very much that had sheep that I wanted but with one disadvantage; 10 children from the start. I can tell the first years were very tough, I didn´t survive the first attempt but after waiting to build a school it worked.

Anyway, as you may understand there was a constant lack of workers from the start so the animals weren´t tended very well. I had 6 sheep and 6 pigs and bult a small pasture where I put the sheep to get wool for clothes early. I had in mind that you need to assign a herdsman in RKEd so I had one assigned from time to time. After a while the number of sheep had grown to the maximum 8 and I built a bigger pasture for the sheep and put the pigs in the first small one. Now I didn´t assign a herdsman. Soon I had only 4 pigs. That made me send a herdman to the pigs and soon a couple of piglets were born but the herd didn´t grow. I think all of the initial pigs died before the herd reached the maximal 8.

Now my settlement have grown and I also breed ducks. In one corner of the map I have 3 duck pasture that happend to hold 20 ducks each. One is very close to a barn and quite close to the herdsman´s house, the second a bit further away and the third even further. I´ve followed the output of meat in these pastures from the beginning and it very much depends on the time the herdsman spend there.

I will probably play this afternoon and will make a screenshot. I also have two pastures with bisons about the same size and distance from barns and housing. I think I will assign a second herdsman to one of them and see what happens.

It’s not a confusing question. I find it an interesting question but my answer may be a bit confusing. Maybe Tom or someone else can answer clearer.

You don’t need to assign a herdsman to get wool, milk, eggs; those things produced continuously. The animals “drop” it and if there’s no herdsman, labourers pick it up. Although if the little store is full, there’s no new “drop” so if you have few labourers with a lot of other work to do, the production gets down. And of course, without a herdsman, no animal will be slaughtered and there are no meat and skin.

So far, it’s clear but the most interesting question is: Do the animals breed faster with a herdsman? In some mods I have seen that they do and if you never assign a herdsman the animals die, but I’m not sure it’s like that in the North. I have tested with and without herdsmen but come to no conclusion. Sometimes it looks like it’s faster with a herdsman, sometimes not. If I’m short of workers, I let one work from time to time to better pick up wool/milk (I seldom breed chicken) and maybe speed the breeding up but when I’m very short of workers (or forget) they breed as well.

I have used this “behaviour” in several games; combining crayfishing in winter with wild food in summer and it has worked very well but in my present game it doesn’t work anymore. It’s some kind of bug and I’m sure it’s nothing you can do to fix it, Tom but I’ll tell you anyway.

When you have several gather’s huts (I first noticed it with 4 huts and 12 gatherers) and set several crayfish spots (about 10) it looks like the game can’t assign a certain gatherer to a certain crayfish spot anymore. After I saw that the spots wasn’t harvested after the winter, I watched a few gatherers a bit closer and they went from one spot to another doing one work and back to a hut to harvest one firewood then back to one crayfish spot, often far away. Not much was harvested.