From the very beginning of your time with Going Medieval, you’re going to be battling with your villagers to plow through all the tasks you’ve laid out for them. While you may want them to build everything you’ve outlined immediately, there is also a field to be farmed, trees to be chopped, and a host of other tasks that need to be completed. If you push them too far, villagers will snap and leave your settlement. In this guide, we’ve put together some tips for organizing a schedule that won’t compromise your projects or a villagers’ moods.
A healthy balance
The only way to keep your villagers happy and accomplish everything you want is to have a balanced schedule. Villagers will happily work from 9 AM to 5 PM as long as they’re well-rested, have a good meal in their bellies, and get to spend some time doing whatever they want. Below is the schedule we’ve used throughout our entire playthrough, which is yet to cost us a single villager.
The schedule is as follows.
- Wake up: 7 AM
- Leisure time: 7 AM to 9 AM
- Work: 9 AM to 6 PM
- Leisure time: 6 PM to 9 PM
- Sleep: 9 PM to 7 AM
Sleep is essential. The more your villagers have, the more resilient they are to becoming annoyed. Any villager that’s annoyed will have a low mood rating, and if that drops to zero, they’ll leave your settlement. This schedule allows for ten hours of sleep, plenty for any hard-working villager that’s been out building, harvesting, or hunting all day.
The schedule has a good chunk of work time in the middle of it. It’s a standard working day for anyone today, and villagers have no problem working solidly through it. The work period is in the warmest part of the day, so your villagers will be less afflicted by the cold even in winter. As long as you’ve prioritized your villager’s jobs correctly, they’ll be working on separate projects all through the day. We found that we could have continuous research on the go whilst the rest of our villagers worked our farm or built new structures. It allowed us to expand and progress without sacrificing the mood or stability of our settlement.
Finally, there’s leisure time before and after the work period. Villagers require leisure time to get their fix of downtime. They might drink, play some backgammon, or worship the game’s various gods during this time. Each villager has a religious alignment, and by allowing them to pray before and after work, we saw their mood maintain in neutral throughout the day.
You can shift the schedule so that villagers work later at night or earlier in the morning, but we wouldn’t recommend changing it much. Leisure time is critical, so if you want to sacrifice time for more work, make it sleep. Otherwise, you villagers’ moods will plummet.
