Orchards in the Winter

[GanAiden]

Hi all

So in the winter, I take all my farmers and put them elsewhere because the farms don't get worked till spring, but I've been leaving my orchard workers ontask because I honestly don't enough about orchards in general to know if they require care in the winter. Anyone have some insight on this, ingame or IRL?

[kevinshow]

All farmers, no matter if they work in crop fields or orchards, will go help do other things in the winter (or rather, when they finish harvesting, since some crops can finish in early autumn or late summer). You don't actually have to change their job designation.

Now, I did find out something by accident regarding orchards. I started an orchard, got 1-2 rows of trees planted, then moved the farmer back to some other crop field. Those trees grew on their own. When I noticed that, I temporarily assigned a farmer back to the orchard, and he finished planting the rest of the trees. When he finished, I moved him back to his regular assignment. For the next 3-4 years, the orchard trees grew to maturity without having a farmer tend to them. At that point, then, I assigned a permanent farmer and he began harvesting the tree products.

There have also been other reports about micromanaging farms. You don't actually need the farmer to be at the crop field during the growing season. He just needs to plant and then harvest. So if you want to get really picky about what your villagers are doing, you can make a farmer plant 100% of his field then move him to another job until time to harvest, when you move him back. The problem here, then, is to know who will get assigned as a farmer, and how far away he is, so that he can make it to the field in time to harvest before the crops die due to cold weather. Or you can make more of a guarantee by bringing them back earlier.

Having said all that, this knowledge may be useful when your population is low (after a disaster or many people dieing, etc). In a normal village and with the aim to have a successfully populated town, you should not be in dire situations where you have to micromanage workers like this.

[GanAiden]

I thought that if I left them all on as farmers in the offseason they would only do laborer work and I wanted to send them into the mines. Will they specialize themselves at all?

[A Bat From Wuhan]

Originally posted by GanAiden:

I thought that if I left them all on as farmers in the offseason they would only do laborer work and I wanted to send them into the mines. Will they specialize themselves at all?

If you want them to do something specific (such as miners, blacksmiths, woodcutter, etc.) I believe you would havr to reassign them, otherwise theywill just act as laborers, chopping down trees, mining stone and iron deposits lying around, and moving supplies around.

[kevinshow]

Right, when I mentioned that they will help do other things, I meant labor type tasks. In fact, because of this, I sometimes use the winter as the time to build several new buildings at a time, or clear up some larger than average area of stone/iron/trees, etc

[Hierynomous]

Its feasible to move them around in off seasons when your town is small enough as they won't be so far away but later you'll end up with fields dying off in winter and are better off just letting them default to labor