Workers

**Workers** are the newcomers you have recruited for your settlement.

## Needs

Each worker has needs which must be fulfilled to raise and maintain their mood. If a worker's mood reaches -100% they will leave the settlement.

* Food: can be stored in the home's storage, village's food storage building (or village's resource storage building, but that leads to less organized gameplay).
* Firewood: can be stored in the home's storage, village's resource storage building (or village's food storage building but that leads to less organized gameplay). Wood-derived items such as sticks, logs and planks may also be used, though they are not as efficient at satisfying the villagers' need for wood.
* Water: can be stored in the home's storage or the village's food storage building. Items that count include food that also has points for "water", buckets of water, and filled waterskins.
* Housing: Each house may contain only one male and one female villager (plus their children). Improved insulation and added decoration results in increased mood.
* Profession: Having a job assigned will raise the worker's mood. Workers have preferred and disliked jobs which can be found out by speaking with them, but preference generally aligns with their skill level.

Fulfillment of needs can be automated by strategic planning of jobs and the items yielded through them. For example, by building a well and assigning a worker there they will maintain water levels, if buckets or waterskins are in the shared storage. A worker can be assigned to make buckets and waterskins, if the materials they need are in the shared storage. So on and so forth.

## Profession

The player has to manually assign a worker to a building and assign a specific profession. This can be completed in the Management tab.

If the player demolishes or upgrades a building they will have to reassign the workers and working orders. Having a job modifies the mood of the worker. Jobs can be reassigned at any time by the player, which can be especially advantageous if a new worker has joined the settlement with a higher skill level than a worker currently assigned to the related building.

## Skills

There are 6 skills that every worker has: Extraction, Hunting, Farming, Diplomacy, Survival and Production. The workers start with a value of 1 to 3 on each one of these abilities. Working will increase the ability associated. The maximum value a worker can reach is 10.

Skills can be generally assessed by speaking with the character. When a villager is assigned a profession, their level at the associated skill determines their efficiency (affecting yields), and will increase over time as they continue to perform that job. To view a recruitable NPC's skills, the player can use the Inspector Mode.

Workers gain skill at half the rate of the player, but the skill experience is given to every worker assigned to the building. For example, an item that gives 10 production skill XP to the player gives 5 production XP to every worker at the building. Furthermore, the thresholds for worker skills are the same as the player (i.e., level 10 requires 3000 XP).

Farming is the exception to this rule; tending to fields grants personal skill XP to the worker performing the action, and **that XP is not shared**. In addition to this, any production activities completed by barn workers **does not share XP** with field workers.

## Pregnancy and Motherhood

Female workers living with a male worker could become pregnant as long as the age gap is within the limit of 20 years. The smaller the age gap between the couple, the bigger the chance for the female worker to become pregnant. When this happens, a green icon will be displayed next to their name in the Management tab. Pregnancy lasts for three seasons and birth occurs on the fourth. After labor, the woman changes her profession to mother, and will be unavailable to work for two complete years.

## Children

Children have four stages in their life:

* Infant (age 0-2)
* Toddler (age 2-7)
* Child (age 7-14)
* Teenager (age 14-18)

Every time when they grow up, from infant to teenager, their skill levels increase. Children can become teenage apprentices in the worker buildings at the age of 14. They can continue to work as apprentices until they turn 18 and start to count towards dynasty reputation when they mature into adult NPCs and begin to work by themselves. Being an Apprentice boosts the childrens skills and they develop the skills at half the adult rate. However, they don't contribute to the production.