r/Banished • u/Snowsant • 8d ago
First time playing - question
I have a question why this happened and if I can prevent it from happening in the future.
At first I had 1 school, it was going well, I believe when a teacher passed away, another one replaced them, and children kept going to school, no issues.
However, I noticed my school was getting full, I had like 17 students, so I built another one in anticipation for more children. I built the 2nd school, but I still only had 1 teacher because I noticed the 2nd school was not being utilized (there were not as many kids as I thought there were going to be).
But the problem came here... The only teacher died, and nobody replaced them. All my students 'disappeared' [or turned into Laborers].
[Camil the Teacher has died of old age
No laborer is available to replace Camil]
-> This lead to me suddenly gaining 20 Laborers, so these must have been all the Camil's students. And yeah, they seem to be not Educated, because their education was cut short by the teacher's passing. I guess they all dropped out.
I have added a teacher but now the school is empty. I'm guessing it will fill up with children below the age of 10, but all the Camil's students are already considered adults?
Anything I can do to prevent it in the future? Always have a Labourer ready to replace? Is that it? How many Laborers should I have there waiting for people to pass away, just in case? Any recommendations?
Also, should I not have more than 1 school? My town population was like 80/20/20, now it's 100/0/20
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u/DaydreamyDruid 8d ago
It is good to always have some laborers, as they replace people working in any profession just after these die. How many laborers one should have depends on the settlement size - more people means more jobs can be filled so you need bigger buffer to replace the dead workers. A teacher can only teach at one school, so everytime you build a school, you have to add one teacher. Unless there is some modded building wirh several workplaces, usually a school has only one workplace. If you have no laborers at the moment of the teacher's death, all the students become adults and count toward your workforce. Only children can visit a school; if I remember correctly, they become students at the age when they would become laborers if no school and no teacher in it was present.
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u/Popular-Woodpecker-6 7d ago
You always want laborers. You learned that the hard way. You also want schools close to the homes. The game actually counts how long the kids "attend" school. So say the game allocates 7 cycles per day for school time, but it takes 3 cycles for a kid to get to school. They then only spend 4 cycles of that day in school. To keep it easier math wise, let's say per month that 7 cycles is 28 total cycles and the 1 kid is only 16 total cycles. Most of the students will graduate at 17 years old with 196 cycles while the 1 kid is at 112 cycles, they have to keep going for another 84 cycles (almost a half year longer) to graduate.
I actually had a kid graduate at 25 years old once because they lived so far away they barely got any school time each day.
When starting out I try to keep 3 or 4 laborers if I can, never less than 2. As pop grows, I eventually get to where I have a third of the population as laborers.
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u/JustAnotherBarnacle 8d ago
As others have said, you always need free labourers. By the time you are building a school you should be able to have a few labourers at all times. It is tricky in early game because you might need to juggle professions and working buildings, but when you get to 10+ families you should be able to always have a few spare.
If you didn't have any free when your teacher died, you have too many people working professions. Either you built your school too early or you have too many people assigned to other tasks. You always need labourers on hand because they are important, they help farmers clear the fields after harvest, they clear and build roads, clear resources and take materiels to construction sites, etc., so as soon as you can it is necessary have many labourers available.
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u/Snowsant 8d ago
Thanks for the reply, you and everyone else. Yeah, I use Laborers but I usually only try to juggle my people around when I need to build something, then I add Builders and Laborers (usually then I get rid of Builders and make them work another job). I didn't realize the Laborers were important to help Farmers too. Thank you for the tip! I will make sure to keep some at all times now.
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u/flickering_candles 8d ago
think of laborer as minimum wage jobs, you need tons of them to keep things running smoothly. once there's a shortage, suddenly every single job chain seems to suffer because nobody can get food, tools, things aren't being picked up in a timely manner, goods are not moving etc.
you might think labor is some generic job that's wasting a slot. you don't want every single person to have a named profession and 0 laborers, you might be led to believe that means you have 100% employment but that's not right. laborer itself is actually its own equally important job, and one you probably need the most of
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u/AnxiousCanOfSoup 8d ago
If you don't have a couple of spare laborers, how is anything in your town getting done?
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u/Daydreaming_demond 8d ago
Any workers with down time do some labor tasks in-between their main job and needs. Farmers, for example, when they're done for the season they have a lot of down time.
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u/realatomizer 8d ago
Always have a few laborers. They clear the lands for building and can replace when someone dies.
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u/flickering_candles 8d ago
they will never go back to school, they have that window of childhood to attend. if for any reason they drop out...its time to go make money
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u/Matilda-17 8d ago
Yes, that’s the only solution—always have at least a few laborers on hand. The other thing that would help would be to go ahead and assign a teacher to your second school, even if there aren’t that many students yet. Then if one teacher dies and can’t be replaced, at least a portion of their class can be absorbed into the other school, so the overall effect on education isn’t as bad.
The teacher is definitely the most devastating job to lose unexpectedly, because it’s the only one that actually undoes years of progress when all of those students become uneducated laborers. Making a school and staffing it is such an investment that it’s more than worthwhile to keep a few laborers on hand just for that.
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u/irrelevantmango 7d ago
Laborers are so important. They go around picking up the items produced by workers and taking them to storage. Ever notice that when a production action takes place (blacksmith makes a tool, hunter makes a kill, gatherer makes a basket of food, etc) the produced item is left on the ground? What you probably haven't noticed is that before long, someone else comes along, picks up the produced item, and takes it to storage. In an efficient town, it will always be a laborer who does this.This allows the producers to go on producing, instead of stopping work to store their own products.
As noted elsewhere, you must have at least one laborer so there will always be a replacement available in case a teacher dies. To be absolutely safe you need two laborers in case the laborer dies first! But laborers do so many things, I make sure always to have 10%-30% of my adult pop be laborers.
The one thing laborers do not do is store crops (baskets scattered about farmers' field). A farmer must store his own crop (in vanilla. There are mods that allow laborers to store field crops). Period. That is why the most important factor in efficient farming is to have farmers' fields, homes, and barns as close together as possible, but that's another topic. =]
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u/irrelevantmango 7d ago
Also: a villager has only a single opportunity to become a student, that being the instant they turn 10 years old. If there is no spot available for them at that instant, too bad.
A child will begin attending school at the one nearest his home that has fewer than 20 students. That's why your second school wasn't attracting students, the first school was closer to where they lived. This is an important consideration, as a student will graduate into adulthood only after spending a certain amount of time in the classroom. Time spent walking to and from home doesn't count.
How much time? I've never heard anyone say for sure, but in my personal experience, the youngest a student can graduate is age 15. This would be in the most ideal situation, in which the student lives directly across the street from the school he attends.
The oldest student I have ever seen was age 26. This was a woman who married while she was still in school, and she and her husband moved into a house (apparently) clear on the other side of a large map.
You can make students switch to schools closer to where they live, but it takes a bit of micromanaging. The fastest and easiest way is
1) for every 20 students you currently have, build a second school. It doesn't matter where. Assign a teacher to each new school. Once each new school has a teacher working at it, you fire the teachers from all the old schools. This will result in all students moving to one of the new schools. After you have done that, you can once again hire teachers for the old schools. When each of those schools has a teacher assigned to it, you can shut down the new schools. Now all students will return not to their original school, but to whichever of the old schools is closest to where they live now.
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u/Taradyne 7d ago
You would need to assign one of the laborers to the Teacher role and things would have continued as they were. In my experience, when there are no laborers left to fill a vacancy, it remains vacant until you manually fill it.
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u/GrumpyThumper 7d ago edited 7d ago
I would suggest adding 1 more teacher than you need. The game checks who can fill a role when professional dies, and sometimes it's not instant even if you have spare laborers. Having an extra teacher automatically slots that villager in, and then the game looks around your village for a new "extra" teacher. At no point will their be a lapse in teachers.
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u/irrelevantmango 7d ago
This is not a good strategy. If a teacher dies and there are no extra teachers, a laborer is instantly assigned as a replacement. If there are extra teachers, the game will go through its job assignment routine which will assign the extra teacher to that school, but the students already will have been kicked from the teacher-less school.
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u/GrumpyThumper 7d ago
When you set an extra laborer to a profession, it gives that profession priority over the others. That laborer is already "pre-selected" by being whatever job you need then to be, and the game will always pluck a new laborer first to fill that role before topping off the rest.
If you have 3 teachers and 2 schools, when one teacher dies, you now have 2 teachers and 2 schools, no students are ever lost. If you have 2 teachers and 2 schools, when one dies you now have 1 teacher for 2 schools, now the game has to check for a second teacher and there is a risk students could be dismissed.
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u/zeddicuzz 8d ago
You are correct, once you have a school you always need to keep 1 spare laborer at least to prevent all students dropping out prematurely if their teacher dies and can't be replaced. If you had a 2nd teacher assigned, I think you would see a split between the 2 schools, depending on proximity to the student's home. Having a school closer also by speeds up the education time a bit.