Nilla

Charcoal is stored on stockpiles, like all other materials. There are special charcoal stockpiles but they make no sense at the beginning. But I have noticed too that Bannis neglect charcoal and some other materials like clay if there are other, what they find more important work to do. You can use the priority tool, even if it doesn’t work 100%. A blacksmith never get the charcoal directly from the pile, so someone must eventually have moved your charcoal without you noticing it.

In the goahti they can only get 1 child, that’s right but the turf house is for 5 person, a family with 3 children. The longhouse will give you less children. It’s a boarding house for three families of 4 persons so they will never get more than 2 children even if a larger family can move in. There are no houses for a bigger family. Often the first child can move out (12 years old) before the 4th child can be born anyway but if children are born shortly after each other and you want more children there’s a trick: Build another house and the parents will probably separate and there are room for more children. Later if you need the second house for someone else, you can “fake demolish” one house (demolish and reclaim) and they will move together again.

But the best way to grow is to build a Thingstead as fast as you can and you will get a couple of nomads almost every year.

My oppinion is that the optimal field size and number of farmers that are published in different forums are a myth. There is no optimal size valid everywhere in every condition! Not in vanilla gameplay, not in the North. It depends on various things. Climate! Do you optimize output for each worker or output of a certain area? Which crop do you have? Where are stores and the houses of the farmers? Are the farmers happy and healthy? Everything has an influence.

Generally, I use smaller fields in the North than vanilla, the harsher the climate, the smaller the fields. Turnips and other heavy vegetables, smaller fields than barley and beans with lower weight. If the farmers aren’t fully happy, I like to have a bit larger fields with 2 farmers on each, you never know when someone goes away a long time to idle, with happy farmers, I prefere 1 farmer fields. I can say I make sizes between 70 and 150 tiles. And I’m always tryng to optimize the output.

With pastures, it’s similar. How desperate do you need the meat/leather? Can it wait, I use the maximum size (more or less) If I want it to be full fast, I make it smaller.

One thing however is important in the North by fields and orchards; start the harvest manually sometimes in late August early September, no matter if it’s close to fully grown or not. Maybe on mild it can work without but on fair or harsh, it’s absoulutely necessary or you’ll lose a lot of crop.

I don’t think that food preservation generally reduces value. The only thing I can think about is bread compared to grain, that loses trade value but the baker increases the amount quite well, so if you have the manpower, it’s worth it. But it’s not as profitable as in many other mods. You can actually increase the value of some food if you want to trade it away, like making cheese or salted meat but here you need to import salt.

The simplest way to process meat is smoking, but you must always make the decision, what’s more important; food or fuel. Often it’s easier to assign another hunter than to increase the firewood production.

Yes, I find too that gathering food manually gives more and gatherers huts are indeed useless in a harsh climate. But in a mild climate I often use them, especially if I can locate one close to a streem where I can catch crayfish. Gatherers prefere crayfishing and if I set a handful of crayfish spots in late autumn, they catch a lot of crayfish and will automatically go back to gather first firewood and honey, then berries and mushrooms when the spots are depleated.

I can answer the same as by firewood; don´t forget the instant tools.

This might not be the right thread, the version is out of beta but I´ll use it anyway.

I´ve found something about the granaries, that might explain why they don´t work well. I have tried them before but was never really satisfied. I haven´t really looked carefully what happens. But I had the impression that the granary was never really filled with grain, the millers were more busy carrying bread and flour away than to fill it with grain. Now I´ve found something else/more that makes problems.

In my present game, I order wheat to produce bread. Even if I have loads of bread, it looks like not little expensive wheat (cost 5 by ordering) lands in the markets and is carried into the houses. So I thought, if I build one or two granaries and store as much wheat as I can there, the vendors will leave it. As we know, they don´t steal from each other. But in this case there are millers working in the granary and vendors steal from millers and millers steal from vendors, so there´s a never-ending loop of carrying the same wheat between granary and market. 3 millers didn´t manage to fill the granary with wheat, not even when I stopped mills and bakeries, so they didn´t need to carry bread and flour away.

This will also make problems if you have the more normal case of growing wheat yourself and want to use the granary to collect wheat from different places to the mill, if not as big as in my game.

And when I built a second granary, just to test (I actually thought that this would happen), the millers carry the same wheat back and forth from one granary to the other, like you might remember the innkeeper did with the booze.

What is if you change the granary to work like a small specialized market. I guess there´s a risk that it´s filled with flour and bread but at least these loops of carrying the same goods back and forth is gone. Or maybe you´ll have a better solution.

I can agree about the alcohol. What’s there for if not to be served in the tavern? But on the other hand, you can also see it the other way around; if Tom gave us the option to serve a hot meal instead, why not use that if it gives you less trouble? Maybe it’s even healthier. I’ve seen young children consume alcohol. Early alcoholism… Hm…. I think I prefer roasted meat!😉

I might remember wrong and I’m not sure in which mod combination I played but don’t merchants bring lime and copper if you haven’t loaded the production sites? I’m sure that I played a game with some DS houses in a mod that didn’t have iron fittings. He was the first to introduce those,as far as I know. I think it was in an earlier version of the North and I remember how I waited for the merchant. But I think Tom has made some principle changes in the trade after that so it may not work like that anymore.

Even if I still don’t find the Bryggen houses cheap with all those iron fittings, I can agree that there should be more glass but maybe not roof tiles. Even if many of those houses may have roof tiles now, I don’t think they had originally.

Good comments, Pleaky. I agree with much of it but have a different opinion in some:

2 workers in smokehouse and brickyard, good. (I actually thought the brickyard had more workers, didn’t it in an earlier version?)

More variation of izbas is also good. For some reason (maybe because there’s only one) I only use them out in the woods or in a pasture area. Usually never in villages.

I don’t like that you will take away the reports at the Thingstead, Tom. I need statistics right at the beginning. It’s necessary in the more difficult starting options. I also think that it should be possible to build a large settlement and stay in “old times” and have all the necessary options to manage it. Personally, I don’t need any other incitement to build the red townhall when I advance into “modern times” than its beauty. But something extra, compared to the thingstead, like happiness is also something to think about. Maybe a safety aspect? To replace all the wells in a more advanced settlement? Or spiritual? Didn’t the communists in Eastern Europe replace the faith in God with the faith in the State?😉

Flagging is tricky and we have discussed it a lot in the past. I find it works now, not perfect but as good as it can work. Of course, it gets more complicated if we add more mods. Just one point of view, don’t make changes too often. It takes time to get used to it, to where a product belongs. I like to have control of all kinds of production and I like to have this as simple and easy as possible. So I’ve learned where to look, on the menu or at the inventory or both to make this work.

Taverns and temple aren’t perfect but they do work, we just need to find a strategy how. If we are in a good mood, we can even see it positive; something to solve that adds a spice to the game.

I like the peat cutting the way it is. I like that it’s a different “mechanic” than deadwood. Peat is an obstacle but also a resource, especially on a Seafarer map. But I agree that the spots could be large but rare on a forest map. I’m a micromanagement kind of person, so I don’t really mind the tedious marking, even if it would have been nicer to be able to mark a whole area. I also use crayfishing, even sometimes in a medium-size game. A permanent crayfisher would also be nice but there’s also something good in various methods here. And crayfishing really “save the day” if you get the crazy idea to try Ironman on a Seafarer map on “harsh”.

Since we can’t mine gold anymore, it makes no sense to have different flags for gold and coins. I guess it’s a remain from the “goldmining” version of the North.

Agree with workshops for late game. I use to put the workshops on all kinds of buildings with a grassroof, like storages, inns…when I’ve upgraded to the red houses.

I like to see the increased radius of the wells. I’m not sure but I think you still have a stone well and maybe it still needs rope to be built. Couldn’t the radius of it be even bigger? A more efficient well, that could support more people with water after you’ve bought the nessesary rope?

By the way, I will start a new Nordic game, maybe even tonight. There’s some testing of the autotrade in a larger settlemet that I wanted to do for a long time. I’ll let you know how it works.

I looked carefully and I couldn’t see anyone putting anything in the red storage from the long side but many people walking by to put/get their stuff from the short side. I looked at several barns and several professions. In my game, there’s certainly no access to the door on the long side. Why? No idea! I have no other mods loaded. I downloaded the latest version of the North, I saw that you’ve made some minor changes since the last time I played. I’ll see if I have some old save from another game to check if it’s the same. I have never noticed this behavior before but that may also be that I never looked carefully enough.

I wanted to play that mission map until I died but it was kind of messy and I got bored so I started a new game instead. So I will never know how old I was in the end or if I maybe found an old widower to share my last years with. ;)

I noticed a couple of things, not really bugs but a little bit disturbing, I don’t know if it’s intended or “just happened”. If I remember it right, the medium red barn used to have two entrances, one of each road side. Now they can only put goods in it from the short side. It’s not very logical since there are doors also on the longer road side.

Usually, I also load the DS wagonwendor and it works really great. As I started Banished after my pause for some reason I didn’t load it and I thought, OK, this game I will play the North absolutely clean. I also remembered that I had some issues with the big market last time I used it. I didn’t know what issues or if they were changed but now I do. It’s simply too big to use in a normal settlement. After I built it almost all of my food was stored in it. I saw more than 3000 mutton (the single food I had most of). I also don’t know your thoughts about storing textiles in it, like wadmal and leather but as far as I can see no other raw materials. I will not say it’s a bad thing. I just want to know your thoughts about it. Anyway; since this is the only original nordic market you can build before you have bricks, I find the content of food should be set down to around 1000 of each category, what you also normally see in a vanilla market of that size. I thought of taking the vendor away but I need him for happiness. So I guess I must live with the loss of health I had after I built it. It’s only ½ heart so far but normally building a market use to increase health.