Trying to solve randomly starving villagers problem.

[stuartkasper1991]

I have been looking all over to find a reason for my villagers randomly starving to death in large groups, even when i have plenty of food and plenty of vendors in my market. My entire village is even all withing the border of the market place. All of a sudden, six random villagers will die. Just about every time, it is a group of six.
As i tried to figure out what was wrong, i started to follow some of my villagers around. I found that the villagers that would starve would wander all the way to the edge of the map and stay there for a while, They would get hungry and starve to death before they could make it back to the village. So far this is the only theory to why this happens. I don't know if this is what happens to cause all of the randomly starving villagers but i would like to find out.
I would like to ask anyone who is dealing with this problem to try to switch between your villagers and see if any of them are wandering a long way from your village. Perhaps if we figure out if this is actually the problem, then maybe we can find a solution.

[ROFLpl0x]

This is a very old and thankfully very rare bug that manifests itself in a lot of crazy ways. Sometimes it happens only to children, sometimes only to students, sometimes they're idling, sometimes they're going to the doctor (even if you don't have a doctor), sometimes they huddle on the edge of the map, and sometimes they try to come back, on and on and on. Vanilla or modded, it doesn't matter.

It's also unfixable and you can't get around it by reloading an old save. It's like some kind of corruption that happens when the map is created and your whole town will eventually die because of it. Only solution is to throw the map away and start over. That sucks but you'll probably never see this happen again unless your play time goes into the thousands of hours.

It's also something that begins fairly early in the game before you've had a chance to get really invested in it. There's that, at least.

[ebrumby]

The most important thing to keep people from starving is to produce at least 100 food per person every year plus extra for new kids, new houses and production of things like Ale which isn't a food. No where do you mention how much you are producing.

There is also a "bug" in some older versions of builds that attract nomads where the Nomads were not told where to appear. Sometimes, they appear at the edge of the map and if you agree they can join the town, they become citizens but can't get to town if there are rivers / streams in the way.

I think you should check your food production stats at your town hall 1st.

[ROFLpl0x]

Brumby, did you read the guy's post? He's following them and watching them do it and you know that food shortages don't cause villagers to wander any further than the furthest barn or market, never mind so far away from town ("all the way to the edge of the map") they starve to death.

[Vrayna]

It's one of the maps with a buggy edge where some spots are not marked correctly as unroutable, so people see edges of the map as a valid path to go iddle on the other side of a river / stream near the town.
Adding a bridge can help as it provides a valid shorter path to the other side, but in the end that bugged edge always wins and dooms the town.

[Jambie Lionheart]

I might have an idea.

1) What work category are those particular villagers in?

2) You said they'd die before getting back, that means they went to the map and probably started heading back at some point, so what di they do when they got to the edge of the map?

2a) Were they following a stream or did they walk around a stream at the edge of the map? If not, then what were they doing? Did they idle or well... what?

2b) Did you check to see if you had any work for them up there? Maybe a wrong button and slip of the cursor meant they think thare b hackin' and a choppin' ta do (Couldn't help it, honest).

You can click on the clear resources button to check, any work areas will be highlighted.

[stuartkasper1991]

Originally posted by }P.B{ CtMurphy:

I might have an idea.

1) What work category are those particular villagers in?

2) You said they'd die before getting back, that means they went to the map and probably started heading back at some point, so what di they do when they got to the edge of the map?

2a) Were they following a stream or did they walk around a stream at the edge of the map? If not, then what were they doing? Did they idle or well... what?

2b) Did you check to see if you had any work for them up there? Maybe a wrong button and slip of the cursor meant they think thare b hackin' and a choppin' ta do (Couldn't help it, honest).

You can click on the clear resources button to check, any work areas will be highlighted.

Just to answer these questions. they were in different jobs. A couple were blacksmiths, one was an herbalist, two were builders, and the last was a laborer. They would wander to the edge of the map and idle until the starving icon popped up on them and they would start heading back. On the way back they would die. Only one of them was even on the opposite side of a river or stream as my village. Even though, i had bridges crossing every stream so i could collect resources from the other side. They were all idle and just standing there. all of them were in the farthest corner of the map. I had not even looked up there until I started following people. I would just cycle through all of my villagers on a regular basis to see who was starving when i noticed that some of them were a long ways from where they were suppose to be.

[J's]

Quick question, although very possibly not what will answer your querry : what's your happiness level for those people? (assuming you can reload an old save and check)

Even though your average happiness can be 4 or 4.5 stars, some of your people may be as low as 1-2 ish. I've heard that unhappiness can make villagers iddle by and/or move to location that "make them happy". Let's rule out that this is not an extreme case of this feature.