Town Population

A how-to and list of simple tips and tricks to increase your population of townies without suffering from the dreaded effects of mass starvation.

Introduction

NOTE 10/14/13: My guide has been stolen by a user named Pip Boy and posted to Levelupguides - it is not updated or accurate. I have contacted the webmaster to have it removed please continue to reference my actual guide. Thanks to users who private messaged me to alert to the theft.

Increasing the population of your town is not only vital it can be frustrating if you start to suffer from starvation. By taking a few things in mind while building your town and preparing the necessary components you can raise your population level without the effects of hunger pangs.

What's possibly more frustrating than hunger is doing everything right but no one coming, your town is good enough for those pesky immigrants! So why won't they come?

This guide aims to answer some of the more common problems with immigrants and population growth while giving a basic overview of game concepts necessary to facilitate a thriving towns community.

General Tips

Make sure you have enough food in reserve to feed a sudden influx of townies as immigrants roam in packs and will show up suddenly if your existing population is happy.

Adjust your priorities ordering to encourage food production and harvesting over hauling, mining, crafting, or building. This ensures you're taking care of the most important things before tasks that can be completed at any time without fear of total town collapse.

Nourishing food is better to keep on hand than food with a low fill count - steak is better than a pear. In addition, it is easier to butcher / cook than it is to harvest and bake. The less time you spend making food the more time your people have to relax.

• Animals must be fed to produce as of the latest patch to Towns you must feed your livestock, be sure to prepare at least a 4x4 square of wheat to keep your cows and chickens happy.
  
  
• Decorations increase happiness; a vital component to attracting new immigrants, place them in rooms that your townies occupy frequently to help boost morale such as in your Market (a favorite place for the population to idle), Personal Rooms, and outdoor production areas.
  
  
• All work and no play makes townies something...something... If your residents are constantly harvesting, mining, building, and hauling they are not relaxing and won't gain much happiness. When you're ready for new residents try to curtail your micromanagement and let your existing population rest.
  
  
• Turn off sieges if you're having problems defending your populace and building up for new residents. You can access this through the Options menu. Just remember to turn them back on later or life will get a bit dull. Keep in mind that disabling sieges will not stop a hero in trouble from training monsters into your town.
  

Stockpiles

Food is critical, when new townies arrive they will often be hungry if they've walked half the map to get to your city. Having enough food on hand is essential to making them productive; hungry townies walk very slowly and are apt to keel over and create human remains.

Stockpiles are best placed near kitchens and bakeries for raw food items and dining rooms for prepared food. The route your townies will take to reach stockpiles is often confusing, mostly because they will haul items to the closest stockpile on the same level. Townies only haul when they have no tasks of higher priority in queue.

Example: if you have a kitchen on level +1 and two stockpiles for prepared food, one on top of the other (at levels +1 and +2 from ground) they will haul to the stockpile on +1 first then +2.

Barrels for storage of items are an important aspect of stockpiling each barrel holds 10 units. It is best to have a minimum of 5 food in reserve for each town member. As such if you have 10 townies and want 5 more you should keep 100 food in reserve as a bare minimum.

Building kitchens, bakeries, and stockpiles close to your dining room is incredibly helpful because townies will pick up a prepared food item and carry it to the closest dining facility to eat it (if one is available). Keeping things close together makes your town more efficient and avoids long travel times that can result in the death of a starving citizen.

Personal Rooms

Places to sleep are essential to gaining new immigrants, even if they are not decorated. You can be a kind and generous creator and give your townies individual homes or create dormatory style housing, the choice is entirely up to you.

Whether you are a benevolent land developer or a communal living afficionado the minimum room size is 3x3 squares. Townies who already live in your city will occupy rooms first and their name will be displayed when you hover over that zone, giving you information on the resident. Empty rooms will appear as a "Personal Room" when you hover your mouse over the squares.

Communal housing can be built as narrow or wide as you wish, keeping the minimum room size requirements in mind. Many players in early stages of the game may find it helpful to build their community rooms no more than 6 wide, decreasing walking time for their residents - a 6x6 building will hold four rooms and can be comfortably furnished with decorations and furniture.

The better decorated a room the happier your townies will be when they are inside of it sleeping, idling, or walking through whilst engaged in tasks. Add at least a bed and two decorations to each room even if you are building a communal home. Add decorations you can quickly produce, if you cannot make a Golden Bird Cage or Throne remember that you can always delete that Potted Plant or Stone Table later to improve furnishings for your citizens.

Some resources like birds (used in bird cages) are limited! Once gone they will not respawn. Buy valued decorations in your Market when possible.

Clearing a Path

Make sure you're ready to have tiny townies roaming across the land to reach your city. New immigrants will arrive from the edges of the map, sometimes trying to cross the entire world to get to your glorious town.

Immigrants arrive with nothing but the shirt on their back and a desire to be a part of your population, they're very easy to kill. In early stages of the game groups of monsters like brownies, froggy, or yeti can kill these immigrants - be sure to bury their remains in a tomb as quickly as possible or destroy the human remains to avoid an explosion of ghosts.

You can (and should) set up soldiers with armor and weapons in a patrol group. They can be sent out to kill any nearby hostile creatures by setting and removing patrol points. A group of four is best as they will quickly dispatch your foes and make the world a safer place for new citizens.

Happiness Levels

No one wants to live in a city where everyone is miserable, and who could blame them? Townies won't immigrate to depressed population centers. To increase happiness and encourage a population boom make sure you do the following:

Decorate! Aside from the Market, Personal Rooms and production centers (kitchens and bakeries) the dining room is a vital component of your town. When eating in a dining room that is decorated your townies will quickly gain happiness.

One easy way to get the best decorations quickly is to build and use the market, sell off items like mud, sand, flowers, and wood to gain money and purchase decor.



Destroy any human remains whether or not they're still gooey (skeletons count as well but not animal bones) or make tombs which also increase happiness as they're outdoor decorative items and can be found in that section.

Graveyards can also be a cathartic way to look back on the days when half your population was slaughtered by a roaming pack of yeti or green slime.

You may find it helpful to disable stockpiling of human remains and skeletons which can be done per barrel / stockpile or by disabiling all items in new barrels / stockpiles in the Options menu.

Be sure to keep these things in mind as well:

• Let your townies rest, when they idle they will stand and stare numbly at walls, trees, and decorative items gaining blissful respite from your constant demands for new resources and buildings. Often they will rest in your market, make sure it's snazzy for an added boost.
  
• Your residents will start to put away items like armor, weapons, food, and raw materials when they have nothing higher in the priority list to take care of. Once they have run out of space to store, they will stop. If you still have massive amounts of items on the ground this may be a good time to make more stockpiles and containers even if it puts off immigration.
  
• Be patient, it can take time for happiness to increase. If you find you're just not gaining after a few sleep cycles or it's going very slowly, gradually decrease your auto-production of things like food or utilities.

Do not ever do the following while trying to gain happiness:

• Do not turn off basic auto production to encourage rest, you need that to keep up your resources and base food levels - that will not help your people rest only cause a massive headache when you start building up your stockpiles in the future. Basic food production is enough to increase your happiness and population.
  
• Do not go delving into a new level of the dungeon or queue new demands for walls, this will occupy your townies with tasks and cause them to maintain or decrease in happiness.

Instant Boost:

• If you're truly desperate for new citizens make sure you have large enough food stores and convert half to two-thirds of your citizens to soldiers. Do not assign them any orders or add them to a group. These soldiers will idle and rapidly gain happiness levels, if you have rooms available your immigrant numbers will fly up. Be sure to convert your soldiers back to civilians once you have regained your population numbers.

Reasonable Limits

Imagine you're in charge of a town, wait...you are!

Increasing your population by upwards of ten at a time can put a massive strain on your resources and stockpiles and make it hard to recover. If your people are suddenly given an influx of new priorities such as increasing the stockpiled food or creating new armor they will quickly plummet in happiness. In addition they can out eat your prepared food leading to a dangerous game of catch up that causes heroes to abandon your town and possible death.

Be prepared to accept new members to your community:

• Have rooms made and decorated in advance, who wants to move into an empty house and why start building after new immigrants arrive? Your new labor force is much better utilized preparing for the next expansion not trying to handle the last one.
  
• Like rooms, prepare any armor or vanity items before you get your immigrants as often as possible. It's easier to auto-equip or manually equip your new residents when you aren't waiting for that last hat, sword, or breastplate. This will also allow your existing population time to restore the amount of resources you've used up.
  
• Make sure your food stockpiles are near full and you have adjusted your production levels before new townies arrive. If you're expecting then you're storing for two, or more! Don't get caught without enough food - minor adjustments to auto-production are to be expected but trying to ramp up production after the arrival can lead to disaster.

Acknowledgements & Final Word

Guide Updates and Notes:

10/14/13: Removed link to broken Happiness Levels spreadsheet.

1/27/13: Minor tweaks have been made to the guide to account for the release of the latest version of Towns on Steam. Added the "Instant Boost" tip for gaining population numbers under the Happiness Levels section.

If you think of something that should be added to this guide please feel free to comment or message suggestions and feedback.

[♛☢WeẞẞO☢♛ ツ 6ð ҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉҉]

such a fantastic game, its unfortunate that in the past the game developer abandoned the game, if you change your mind and you need help with music, i can help you with the music free of charge, or if anybody in the community has improved this game and seeks help with music, ask me and ill help you, we will make this game bette together lordwebbo@ hotmail. com

[jexadox]

i heard there is a glitch that causes tombs to produce infinite zombies?

[Berny Bernson!!]

Such a shame this game got abandoned. Thank you, by the way.

[Verschlossen]

You're very welcome! I need to spend some time in Towns again so that I can upload a version of this guide that will be accurate for the latest releases.

[BeanSlinger419]

this is very helpful. thanks :)

[ZOTI]

This is very helpful. Thanks :)

[BLACKBERRY CRANBANAN]

Hi verschlossen, I just wanted to ask about the instant boost. Will being an idle soldier actually increase the citizens who became soldiers happiness?
I thought that converting them to soldiers temporarily removed their happiness value from the average calculation. It might be worth pointing out that you should convert the citizens with the lowest happiness into soldiers, so that the average increases more. For example, converting a citizen with 100 happiness to a soldier will remove him from the average, which if it is below 100, will decrease the average happiness - whereas converting a citizen with 0 happiness to a soldier will remove him from the average, which if it is above 0 will cause it to increase.

[emeraldpopcorn]

This helped SOOOOO much! Thanks!

[Tobias]

Thank you it helped a lot

[Yebob]

Thank you for the guide!! :)