For want of a hammer...

This guide is going to address the "hidden" causes of Sudden Town Death.

We're going to assume that you understand your people need food and warmth. They starve without food. They freeze without shelter and fuel. You've got the hang of managing your workforce and building stuff.

Everything seems to be going just peachy, in fact. Until suddenly your population starts dying off and you don't even know why.

Well it's time to lift the veil and go over the small problems that make for big disasters. Everything is intertwined in Banished, with the result being deadly snowball effects.

This is the stuff you probably already know, but let's go over it anyhow.


To keep your people clothed, you need a Tailor. To make clothes, the tailor needs leather. Your early game source of leather is the Hunting Cabin. The Hunting Cabin also provides much needed meat.

Hunting Cabins are not efficient. You will likely need three of them to properly supply a tailor. But as long as you are making some clothes, that's enough for now. Naturally, make sure you build the Hunting Cabin before bothering with the Tailor.

Lack of clothing is not going to immediately kill off a village, but it is going to wreck your wintertime productivity. We'll be discussing a lot of productivity crashes in this guide.

Clothes are good for bartering at the Trading Post, once you have a cottage industry set up. Sheep provide wool, cattle provide more leather. Wool itself is good for trading too.


You need a woodcutter. Woodcutters change Logs into Firewood, which heats your homes.

Logs should be sourced from your Forester Lodges. A well established forestry should have no problem supplying your woodcutters. The Forester / Woodcutter ratio is around one-to-one, however you'll need to keep tuning it, in response to fuel consumption and Logs being used to build with.

The problem with fuel is housing. You need a lot of houses, but more houses increase your fuel consumption. I strongly prefer to use stone houses to slash fuel costs. Wooden houses should be upgraded as soon as you have a comfortable supply of stone. If you cannot afford the stone, that's fair enough, but be aware that your fuel costs will increase very quickly as you expand.


It may not be immediately obvious why you need Markets, and plenty of them.


Houses do not share food equitably amongst themselves. Food and fuel are a free-for-all, with each family fending for themselves. Some homes will hoard a glut, other homes will be left with nothing. This makes for a confusing picture of resources and food. It may look as if you have ample food to go around, but it turns out that one house has stolen it all.

Markets force an equitable distribution. All homes in their radius will be equally supplied from their stocks (more or less). This will improve your people's health and morale by making sure that everyone gets a balanced meal. Otherwise you will tend to have areas of the town in low health.

Build your blacksmiths, taverns and tailors around the market. These professions will also find their resources at the market. Place barns close by, so the finished products can be stored there. This significantly cuts down on travel time and helps your industries work quickly.

No iron = No tools = No food

To make tools, you need a Blacksmith. Along with the basic building materials of iron and logs. (We'll ignore coal for now.)

Iron shortages are a common problem. Iron can be scavenged off the land, or dug out of mines. Mining is a decent solution, but miners will break tools fast and have a high rate of casualties. The best answer is to get a Trading Post. This provides a sustainable source of iron, without the downsides.

If your workers don't have tools, they are significantly less efficient at their jobs. Food and fuel production will start dropping off. Miners (and stonecutters) burn up tools especially fast compared to the other professions. This creates a vicious circle. You can easily get a situation where the miners digging up the iron, are using up that iron as fast as they can dig it out!

Of course, nobody else has tools either. Including the Blacksmith! For want of a hammer, your town will collapse.

Tool shortages are deadly. Iron shortages can quickly turn into tool shortages, as well as building bottlenecks. This is one of the chief reasons you want to get a Trading Post in good time. You need to trade for iron and tools, to make sure the balance stays in your favour. Trading for steel tools is a wonderful idea, because they will last you longer and release the pressure on iron reserves significantly.

If you are in a tool crisis, make sure that you have no stonecutters for now. Don't let them burn up your tools. Also turn off any other professions you could probably do without for the meantime. Teachers won't use up tools, but fishermen use their tools constantly. Farmers need to work fast, so a tool shortage impacts them badly. Gatherers, Hunters and Herdsmen will cope better.

Adding coal to the mix, you can make steel tools. You're going to need a dedicated coal mine for this. You also have to contend with villagers stealing your coal to heat their homes. I get around that problem by having an extremely small coal cap (no more than 20 units). This means there are no stockpiles of coal simply sitting around, because your villagers absolutely will steal any spare coal you've left out in the open. Also make sure that your Blacksmiths are sited reasonably close to the coal source, so they get first pick. Steel tools are worth it. However you won't have this option until the middle game, when you have enough people to staff two Mines adequately.

As a side note, you could indeed use coal to combat a fuel crisis. Coal is far too expensive in terms of land, labour and resource to use as a regular fuel source. However you might want to buy coal via the Trading Post if your fuel crisis isn't resolving quickly enough.

If you do not have iron, stone and logs, you cannot build new buildings.

This creates an obvious disaster scenario if you do not have enough woodcutters, hunters, storage barns, etc. Without basic building resources, you have no flexibility to meet your people's needs and respond to challenges. You cannot build that second woodcutter, and everyone freezes.

Foresters are an efficient solution to the log problem. Just let them do their jobs. Stone and iron must ultimately be sourced from the Trading Post. Trade provides a renewable source of these, without the high cost in labour and tools. In the early stages of the game, you will get some stone and iron from the landscape, but this will very quickly deplete. Quarries and mines do not last forever either.

Watch out for stone shortages. While not as deadly as iron shortages, a stone shortage will at the very least kill off your village's growth. If stone is getting scarce, make sure you build a quarry well in advance. They're large, expensive and slow to build, so plan ahead.

Above: An early village example. You can clearly see the radius of the forester lodges. The mine and quarry are being built in readiness for a phase of rapid expansion.

Houses = Growth

Houses are where your people live, and more importantly, breed. The growth of your population is intrinsically tied to the building of homes.

Too many houses = population explosion.

Too few houses = population crash.

Steady house growth = steady population growth.

No house growth = demographic time bomb.

Just like in real life, the old people of Banished have a habit of occupying all the houses. This means your young potential breeders can't get on the property ladder. If they can't move in together, they can't make children. The solution is of course to steadily create more real estate, to keep your growth on a controlled upward trajectory.

This means that one of the first casualties of a building bottleneck is your population growth. Any interruption to slow and steady growth can send big ripples through the town.

You may fail to notice a demographic disaster coming. You will see that your town has 40 people, and not realise that those people are old folks who are all about to die off. Generational death waves are big trouble. When all the old folks die at once, it will cripple the labour force. Then you must contend with the after-effect, which is a population explosion as the younglings breed out of control, now they suddenly have a load of empty houses.

A generational death wave, followed by a population explosion, puts your town into a boom-and-bust cycle that will keep repeating. This spells the doom of many a village. Stabilising the population again can be very difficult once the town is in this phugoid pattern.

Above: This population graph (seen in the Town Hall's info) shows a long-term phugoid pattern emerging. Dips and peaks in population are self-reinforcing in Banished. When the dips become too large, your town will collapse. For experienced players, this is one of the biggest problems, and one of the hardest to manage. This is called a phugoid[en.wikipedia.org] pattern because it is the same sort of pattern that an aeroplane's dipping and rising nose generates, when the plane is growing out of control.

The solution is to simply be aware of the problem. If you've gone a decade with a stone shortage, unable to build any homes, you should assume that you have a generational bottleneck. Keep an eye out for the consequences. The Town Hall graphs are very handy for monitoring population trends. Even without the Town Hall, you can keep watch on the number of children in the town, which should neither drop sharply, nor explode. Your ability to mitigate the situation is somewhat limited, but do what you can to avoid getting into boom-and-bust cycles.

Generational Death Wave = When a large wave of deaths occurs, due to old age.
Phugoid pattern = The population is in a self-reinforcing cycle of boom and bust.

Accepting Nomads can really throw off your town's generational balance. Nomads can be very helpful to a small or struggling town, but they're otherwise not recommended. The time to take in Nomads is when you've lost a lot of people to disaster and don't have enough people left to fill all your professions. At that point, rescue your economy and damn the consequences.

If you're aware that your generations have become "clumped" and you're experiencing boom-and-bust, then an injection of Nomads is a good idea, to break the pattern. Generational death waves are dangerous, so spread the generations out smoothly.

Lazy blacksmith = No tools = No food

If your workers are unhappy, they will spend a lot more time idling and ignoring their jobs. Villagers not doing their jobs will obviously lead to your food production plummeting, among other effects. It looks like you have enough workers, but unknown to you, nobody's actually working.

Chapels, taverns and graveyards are your direct Happiness 'production' buildings. Wells also provide a small happiness boost, as does having a varied diet.

It might sound morbid, but graveyards reduce the impact on mourning villagers. A death in the family brings a big hit to a villager's Happiness. But because graveyards take up a lot of space, I prefer to lean on chapels instead as the Happiness centres. If you are happy to sacrifice the space, three maximum size graveyards should be sufficient to serve even the biggest of populations.

Taverns are the powerhouse here. Ale keeps people happy. It also one of your basic trading currencies. You can trade ale for resources or food as necessary. Taverns are a win-win situation. Every marketplace needs its tavern next door. The result will be lots of happy drunks. Just like real life!

Towns usually have plenty of venison spare. You can trade in 1000 units of venison for 3000 units of berries, which will convert into ale. This should give you an ample supply of the good stuff. Note that taverns are very hungry buildings. You will have to turn off your breweries should you hit a food crisis. Don't have a large Alcohol storage cap, as the brewers will gleefully use up every berry you own.

The overall town happiness is an average. It is possible - and actually fairly common - for there to be a very uneven distribution of happiness. Keep an eye out for areas of the town that have fallen into a happiness pit, despite overall happiness appearing to be high. I did once have a situation where my village fell into a tool crisis, despite having plenty of resources and people. My blacksmith was the weak link, too depressed to do any work and just idling about. Localised happiness pits can result in Sudden Town Death from seemingly out of nowhere.

Educated workers are a lot more efficient than uneducated workers. They are also less likely to die as they work. This makes an especially big difference to stonemasons and miners, who have a high rate of work fatalities.

We've already covered why an uneducated miner with a broken tool is a disaster. You are going to lose more people, use more tools and use iron faster than you can dig it. Which will lead to other shortages and snowballs. An educated, happy miner with a steel tool, on the other hand, will work efficiently and safely. Iron for all! Educated farmers also do a much better job with the harvest, which is always a time-critical affair.

As you likely know by now, you need schools so that kids can become students, who will become educated workers. If there is not enough school space, kids go straight to being uneducated workers. So you will need to build schools to keep up. Education is a big boon to your productivity. Although, by prolonging the generations, it will also slow your town's growth. Delay schools until you have enough people to properly flesh out your professions.

If you get a school overflow, then your 100% educated population is no more. You have little control over who gets assigned where, so if an uneducated adult gets assigned to a critical role at the wrong time - typically that damned Blacksmith again - that's super annoying. Keep an eye on your school capacity.

As you may have realised by now, any town that is relying on just the one Blacksmith is begging for trouble. Having two Blacksmiths at a bare minimum is advised. Even if they don't really have the workload to justify two, the important point is that one unhappy, uneducated Blacksmith isn't going to doom the entire village to starvation. Hopefully the other one will continue working as usual.

If a critical profession does get a bad villager assigned, you can attempt to continuously un-assign and re-assign from the Labourer pool, in hopes that someone else gets picked. Not the most practical technique, but needs must.

Sudden teacher death is something you need to be aware of. If a teacher dies, their entire class gets kicked out. All their education time is wasted and they become uneducated labourers. This is a problem. More deaths, more tool wastage, less efficient workers, less food, etc. If your economy was finely balanced, then this is sufficient to destabilise things.

I avoid this by always having a spare teacher assigned. If I have three schools, I have four teachers. This makes it absolutely certain that I will not have an aborted class. While Banished will assign a spare Labourer to take over, there can be a significant delay as as the game recalculates job assignments. With small populations, the delay is minimal. But once you have a village of over 500 people, Banished will start slowing and creaking. Job assignment delay isn't such an issue for the other professions, but it will result in loss of a class for the Teachers.

As an aside, profession reshuffles occur periodically. If you are unlucky, a profession reshuffle will occur mid-harvest. This will often wreck your harvest season, because your new farmers are now in all the wrong places. This one of many reasons I advise not being heavily dependent on Fields.

Beware a rapidly growing population. Firstly, you'll have too many mouths to feed. Secondly, you won't be able to sustain that growth, leading to an uneven generational distribution. And thirdly, you're also going to overwhelm your school capacity.

Nomads arrive uneducated. This makes accepting Nomads a really bad deal if you have a 100% educated population.

Above: An example of Banished struggling to process a large population. Despite two empty Boarding Houses being available, villagers have been left homeless after the latest reshuffle. The game has slowed to a crawl, which generates unfortunate glitches like this.

A health crisis is one of the less common and less deadly problems. It is relatively low on your priority list compared to the other scenarios here. However, allow your population to remain at one heart for too long, and it will become an issue.

The Herbalist is the direct health building. Hospitals do not have any effect here; they are purely for contagious diseases, with no other benefit. Villagers will pick up a herb from storage, then head to the herbalist hut, and get a health restore. One technique I like to use is to have a "GP" herbalist next to the marketplace. This one is centrally sited so that villagers don't have to walk far. I then have a second "gatherer" herbalist out with my Gatherer Huts, to collect the herbs from the woods. That prevents my villagers having to detour out into the wilds to get healing.

Should you have a glut of herbs, they make a decent trading currency. Don't let your Herbalists sit idle. Get them gathering and put their excess in the Trading Post. Having two workers per hut is generally unnecessary, unless you are completely out of herbs for some reason. Obviously there's no need for a "GP" herbalist to ever have two staff.

You can make a big impact on your town's health through their diet. You don't even need Herbalists if your villagers are eating well. They need grains, veggies, fruit and protein. You should start out with a Gatherer's Hut and a Hunting Cabin. These two buildings will provide a sufficient spectrum of food to keep your villagers at working strength. If you have a lot of excess meat, trade it in for more food variety. 1k of venison will earn you 3k worth of things like wheat, pears, walnuts and beans.

Town health is shown as an average. Like with happiness, watch out for areas of the town which have fallen into low health, despite average health appearing to be high. Low health areas are typically lacking in diet variety. Improve food distribution and consider building a GP herbalist nearby.

A lot of these disaster scenarios can be lumped together under the general umbrella of "productivity crashes." Your people stop working efficiently, whether for want of tools, happiness, education or resources. Once one cog in the machine starts slowing, so do all the others. If your economy can't absorb the hit, these disruptions set off a snowball effect, and you're headed for Sudden Town Death.

There are other ways you can unknowingly hurt productivity, mostly by making poor layout decisions. Look at how your people move through town. Help them by making efficient highways, laying down barns and stockpiles, and keeping them warm.


In winter, your villagers will have to break off from their tasks and find somewhere warm. This has the effect of greatly reducing their range. Labourers will not be able to fetch that distant stone.

Farmers in particular are hit by an early frost, just as they are in the middle of a harvest. You will waste a lot of your crop because your farmers suddenly got chilled and had to rush for the nearest cabin.

Use the full reach of your Markets. Put lone houses on the edge of the radius, simply to increase the effective range of your workers in the cold. You'll notice that villagers make good use of these "warmth stations" when they're traversing the land.

Warm Clothing is superior to Woollen or Leather clothes. It will really help to negate the effect of winter on your workers. You will need both wool and leather to make it, so your first choice of livestock - if you have a choice - should be sheep every time.


Again, your harvest season turns out wasteful, because farmers had to take a long walk to the barn. Fields always need a barn next door, because the harvest has to be done fast.

Combined with the effects of winter, a long trip to a barn is really not a good idea. While they are not the cheapest structures to build, a well placed barn makes a big difference to productivity. Mind that your Gatherers are not having to cross wintry expanses to find a barn. Gatherers will keep producing food all year, but they do need storage space.

A lack of storage space will also unbalance your economy. If all your barns are stuffed full of fish, that means your other professions have nowhere to store goods. This causes problems for your Tailors and Blacksmiths, who are now wasting a lot of time. A big food surplus is nice to have, but it does you no good unless you have lots of storage room to go with it. Lack of barns can, and will, create a tool crisis.


Water really isn't fun. Avoid getting yourself boxed in by lakes. Large bodies of water make it difficult for your people to get from one side to the other, even with bridges. Make sure you expand in the direction of the plains when you first set out.

If water is blocking your way, don't hesitate to build a bridge. Bridges aren't cheap, but your villagers have limited range and time to get stuff done. Bridges always help. Be more conservative with tunnels, as they really are expensive and villagers can usually find a decent path through the mountains on their own. But if they can't find a route, build a tunnel.

Beginners take note: you do not want to start your game next to a lake. Your odds of success are much higher if your starting position has plenty of land to work with.


As previously addressed, food issues are mostly solved by the use of Markets. Otherwise, villagers can waste a lot of time trying to find something to eat. This problem will resurface if your Markets are struggling to find resources. It's a good idea to ensure that each Market has an independent supply of meat, fuel and veggies. There's nothing wrong with having lots of Woodcutters, as it's the fuel storage cap you need to focus on. Markets competing with each other for resources is not a good situation, so each one having its own Woodcutter and Forester is ideal, though not always possible.

The Town Hall's resources tab will show you exactly how much food and fuel you are consuming per year. Obviously, aim for sustainability. Trade to plug any gaps in the short term, but build to meet your needs for the long term.

Above: A problematic situation. Notice in the Town Hall tab that last year's food consumption was around 15,000 units, while food production was only 10,000 units. My priority this year is to rapidly increase food production to a sustainable level.


Endless debates can be had over the most efficient size for your field, orchard or pasture. I can't be bothered with that. So here are some rules of thumb:

Pastures should be maximum size, always. So that's easy at least. If you're playing on easy mode, you might want to get a smaller pasture just to house your initial herd, because you'll be very short on logs otherwise.

Fields should no bigger than 8x15, with one worker. Crop type also has an impact. Crops which are harvested early (e.g. beans) work out a lot more efficiently than crops which harvest late (e.g. pumpkins). So I'd advise you to buy beans first and make good use of them. Place your pumpkins nearest to your people, and your beans further out in the sticks. The best place for any field is always right next to the Market and the hub of the village.

As a side note, having lots of Fields is a pitfall in itself. The harvest is always capricious. Your Gatherer Huts will provide more food at a steady rate. Fields should never be your central source of food, just a useful supplement for your diet. Grow wheat for ale and some early harvest crops, just for the variety. Beans, pepper and corn are recommended. Pumpkins definitely not.

Orchards are dependent on orientation. 15x4, and not 4x15, is the ideal size for one worker. Also don't overlap your orchards with your Foresters. They do not get along. Like fields, do not rely on a good harvest from your orchards. Their supply is patchy and it takes several years for orchards to establish. Crop type does not much impact orchard efficiency. If your Taverns are consuming every last Berry in existence, it's quite important to give your villagers an alternative source of fruit. Orchards will do this nicely.

The start of the game is the single hardest challenge. If you want a simple template to follow, my method should - mostly - see you through. Just build in this order:

1) Boarding House (if playing on a difficulty that has no houses already built)
2) Gatherer Hut (and a Barn, if you don't have one pre-built)
3) Forester Lodge (and stockpile)
4) Hunting Cabin
5) Woodcutter (and stockpile)
6) Blacksmith
7) Tailor
8) Homes
9) Market
10) Mine and/or Quarry, if needed
11) Trading Post

(Easy mode note: you're going to need a Pasture for those animals.)

Depending on your needs, you might want to build the Tailor before the Blacksmith. Tools are more important, but your villagers usually run out of clothes first. Check your stored goods.

The Gatherer Hut and Forester Lodge need to be neighbours. The Forestry provides the trees that feeds the Gatherer. Give them plenty of space so they can harvest the land. The Hunting Cabin is generally placed alongside them too. Throughout the game, keep building as many of these Forester, Hunter, Gatherer hubs as you reasonably can - they're the central engine of your village.


Start with shelter, then food, then fuel, then tools and clothes. Build barns and stockpiles as required. With that covered, it is time for steady growth with constant home building.

You don't need a Market until you have several houses. You will probably need to build a Mine and/or Quarry to supply your house building, unless you're fortunate enough to have a glut of resources on the ground. You need to build the Mine and Quarry before you run out of easily accessible resources, because they are themselves expensive to build. You will also require a second Forester very soon, because you need logs for both fuel and building.

Using the Boarding House sidesteps the need for a Market, because everyone is under one roof. It has enough room for everyone and won't burn up lots of fuel. The only problem is, villagers do not breed in a Boarding House. So you need to get building homes, pronto. If you keep the Boarding House around, you won't have to worry about homelessness, as it will take on Nomads or families who lost their house to fire.

Don't hesitate to build bridges, if it will get you to new land and resources. Try not to place your buildings too far apart. Your people will struggle to get around in winter, if you've put their workstations too far from the warmth of home.

While the Trading Post is very important, don't rush to it too fast. It's going to take a while until you actually have anything to stock it with. You will certainly want to build a second Forester / Gatherer / Hunter hub before you're thinking about bothering with the Trading Post. A Tavern and Herbalist will also give you some actual goods to trade first.


Set your stone, iron and tool limits to a low number. You don't want people working in the Quarry or Mine and risking their necks, unless you actually need the resources. You also don't want your Blacksmith consuming every last bit of iron on the map. Likewise, limit your fuel storage to what you actually need, so the Woodcutter doesn't deny you Logs for building with. Your tailor should get cracking though, because any excess clothes will stock the Trading Post.


If you are a novice, don't attempt a difficult map. Keep rolling until you get a good one. You do not want to be hemmed in by lots of mountains and water. A map with lots of lakes is a bad one. You want to have unimpeded expansion in at least two of the four compass points.

You do want to start relatively close to the major river. In fact, one of your first actions should be to lay down the blueprint of the Trading Post, and pause it. You won't be building it for a while, but it's important that you know you'll have to expand in that direction.

If you've been wondering what I mean by "early" and "middle" stages of the game, then this is exactly what I mean. You'll fast become familiar with these life stages of your slowly growing village.

Start: Year One. You have a handful of people and no buildings. You need to build shelter, food, fuel, tools and clothes. In that order.

Early game: You've survived the first winter without everyone dying. This is the period that spans years 2-20 typically. Your ultimate 'goal' here is to reach the Trading Post, but you've still got a lot of basics to tend to first. You'll need to get building homes, or else you will hit a Generational Death Wave when your initial villagers all die off (a situation that you're probably familiar with). To supply all this, you're probably going to need a Quarry and a Mine, because you'll be running out of easily scavenged resources. Make sure you build a Market too.

The Early Game Pit: Hopefully you won't end up here, but it you're unlucky, you'll get trapped in the early game phase, unable to break out. You've got everyone fed and warm, but your growth isn't taking off, because you don't have the resources to build homes or Markets. You may also be far away from the major river, so the Trading Post remains out of reach. The chief cause of the early game pit is having a difficult map, with unfriendly geography and few resources on the ground. This phase requires a lot of patience and tends to really drag out, but will resolve as long as you're stubborn and wise. Be careful not to run out of iron, as a tool crisis is the last thing you need. "Mountainous" seed maps are extremely prone being trapped in early phase.

Middle game: The characteristic of the mid-game, is you no longer have any Labour issues. Your villagers have been breeding comfortably and you have around 80 adults. This means you can now take a hit from a disaster and still have enough people spare that it won't disable the economy. With all these spare people, you should flesh out your professions and build any remaining workstations, like Herbalists or Chapels. You want to get your Trading Post comfortably supplied with ale and clothes, which you'll be trading in for stone and iron where possible. You'll need to continue balancing your growth against your food and fuel stocks. The Trading Post will give you access to livestock and seeds, so this is the time to develop some Pastures and Fields, if you couldn't before now.

Late-middle game: Characterised by extreme boredom.

End game: The characteristic of the endgame is when you are running out of land. You can no longer solve problems just by expanding, because there's nowhere left to expand into. Your population will be well over 1000, if you're on a large map. After coasting for so long in the late-middle game, hitting the endgame can be a shock. Your food-versus-people ratio is a constant tightrope walk that even the Trading Post can't always solve. You'll have to start remodelling older parts of the town. You'll also have to contend with boom-and-bust cycles because you can no longer build houses - leading directly into generational death waves.

Above: this is an example of a town in the endgame phase. The population is just over 1400 people, on a large map with a mild climate. While it may appear there is still plenty of land, the vast majority of map space is given over to food production by Gatherer Huts, which are very much needed to feed the people. Balancing food and population is vital in this phase.

Not many players ever reach the endgame phase, so give yourself a well deserved round of applause when you get there! I like to play for maximum possible sustainable population, which is a formidable challenge. Judging from my own personal bests, on a large map with a mild climate, you may award yourself:

Bronze medal: 1200 total population
Silver medal: 1500 total population
Gold medal: 1700 total population
Mythril medal: 1900 total population. This exceeds my own personal best!

Hopefully, now you've read this guide, you have a better sense of your town's weaknesses and where the system is likely to break down.

Now we've seen the insidious snowball effects, let's finish with a quick look at the big, showy disasters. While they have the potential to hit you hard, the game's disasters can be contained by the proper measures.


It takes plenty of Labourers and water to put out a fire.

If you have buildings that are far away from water, you must lay down a Well. Aka, the fire service pump.

If you have a relatively small workforce, de-assign as many people as you can. Get your tailor and brewer to help out with the relief effort.

A fire that spreads through a town is devastating. The paranoid city planner can make use of fire breaks in their design plan. Fire cannot cross a three tile gap. Building your town along a stream will largely solve the problem altogether.

Keep a Boarding House around, so villagers have somewhere to stay if they lose their homes.


Infestations hit orchards, fields and pastures. They will spread to their neighbours of the same type as well.

You can reduce the risk of transmission by not having crops of the same type next to each other. Do not have a wheat field next to a wheat field. Do not keep chickens next to chickens. And preferably, use "fire breaks" by not having neighbours at all. Break them up with barns, houses or stockpiles. Alternate pastures and fields.


Above image: The neighbouring two pastures are vulnerable to infestation spread, however the third pasture is perfectly safe from them. The fields have no protection from infestation spread. In no case does the same crop neighbour itself, which will slow down any transmission.

To rid an orchard of an infestation, cut down the trees and start over.

To rid a field of an infestation, you just have to wait until winter. Infestations will rarely survive the winter in a field. If there's a risk of transmission, immediately harvest all the crop and return the field to bare soil.

Infestations are most dangerous in pastures. You will end up losing the herd. It's important to have a spare pasture of maximum size, if you cannot afford that risk. Move the herd into this spare pasture and they will be safe. Just leave the infested pasture empty for a while and it will quickly be back to normal.

Having a valuable herd trapped in a single pasture, is a situation the wise city planner will desperately avoid. Get a spare pasture.


When plague hits, this is when the Hospital comes into use. Infected persons will head to the Hospital, where they may or may not get better. The important part is they are away from everyone else. Place your Hospitals so they are not on any highway, with their doors pointing away from any flow of traffic. You do not want anyone passing in front of the Hospital.

Without a Hospital, villagers will lurk at home, and anyone who passes their house likely gets infected. Hospitals are used for isolation. You need to be careful that an infected person isn't crossing the entire breadth of the village to get to the hospital. You'll need a four corners approach, to keep the contagious out of the centre of town.

Accepting Nomads into the village is said to increase the risk of a plague outbreak.

There's no point staffing hospitals unless there is a plague outbreak. They do not help with general health.

Outbreaks will hit whether or not you have Disasters enabled. There's no escaping them! Very large populations will naturally tend to have multiple Outbreaks in a row. That is not evil programming, but simply how statistics works. Every villager is a potential Patient Zero. So if you have 800 people, that's 800 rolls of the dice, and even with low odds, it's very likely one of them will turn infectious. Make sure you have built some Hospitals by the time your population is in the 400-500 people zone, as your risk factor will just keep growing.

Some diseases are much more deadly than others. Because you can only have one Outbreak at a time, it might be worth letting a less deadly strain of flu stick around... because it will block the ever-deadly Diphtheria from hitting. This would only ever be a strategy under consideration for extremely big populations, where Outbreaks are hitting regularly.


A strange beast, the tornado never seems to appear on some maps, and can't leave others alone. The tornado is the most frustrating disaster, as there's little to no means of containing it. But it helps to know that its behaviour depends on the landscape.

Tornadoes avoid mountains and prefer the plains. If you have a settlement within a ring of mountains, there's a good chance it will be protected. A big stretch of flat land will become Tornado Alley, with nothing to stop the beast from ripping through.

Tornadoes have a habit of striking the same place over and over. If you have a repeat offender, then build around it accordingly. Keep your Markets out of its path and put your Forestry there instead. Sacrifice your fields and forests to the tornado route, while hiding your population centres behind mountains.