The world of Nested Lands is dead, and so is anyone foolish enough to attempt surviving the horrors of the Death Plague without the aid of others. While you might yet be able to live and explore by yourself for some time, the challenges of this decaying land will eventually become far too great to face alone. If you truly hope to not only survive, but one day also to thrive, you will need a village, and, to achieve that, you will need villagers.
Villagers
Villagers keep the wheels of progress turning, be it through collecting raw materials like wood, stone, or metal; through crafting tools, weapons, food, and medicine; or through working as a nurse to treat the sick, a guard to protect the village grounds, or perhaps a priest to lift the spirits of others through all the hardship. Ultimately, villagers are the heart and soul of any settlement, and the more trusted souls you can find, the more you will be free to focus on other, more pressing matters.
Today, we will tell you a little bit about how villagers will work in Nested Lands, how to recruit them, what they can do once in your village, and even how their stories and personalities will take center stage in one of the central recurring dilemmas of the game: “Should I recruit this person, or will they eventually betray me and harm the village I’ve worked so hard to build?”
Recruitment
First things first: the initial step in the journey of any villager is taken, technically, by you. While exploring any Norovellir islands, you might run across random encounters, which may be hostile, neutral, or friendly. In some of them, a potential villager might be involved, and you can choose between helping them or not. If you do, you may speak to that person to discover some initial information: Who are they? How did they get there? What can they do?
After that, you must make your decision. Is that person trustworthy? Does that person deserve a place in your village, or is the risk just too high?
Village Life
If you decide to recruit them, that person will now become a villager. They will occupy one of the available beds, and you must fulfill their needs and desires if you want them to stay. After all, the player character has needs, and so do the villagers. Hunger, thirst, warmth, hygiene, and happiness, which is the total sum of all the others, plus a few other attributes, are all of the utmost importance. This is because if any fall to dangerously low levels, a villager may decide to leave, or, worse still, to settle the score their own way.
To keep them happy and hard-working, a player must ensure that their needs are met, that their houses are maintained, and that they have a meaningful occupation within the village. To choose that occupation properly, you should assign jobs in accordance with the traits and skills of the villagers.
Speaking of which…
Traits and Skills
In Nested Lands, each villager has a unique personality, and nowhere is that more visible than in the character’s traits and skills.
Skills represent that villager’s ability with a certain type of task. Villager skills include things like Farming, Forester, Defender, Crafting, Apparel, Cooking, and Medicine. Each skill is then used for different jobs, each of which requires a corresponding building, and allocating a villager with a high skill to a matching job is essential for the growth of the settlement. For example, a character with a high Cooking skill will obviously do well when working at a Cookhouse, but that same character might also excel as a Butcher or when working at a Brewery. Similarly, a villager with a high Forester skill would be best suited to work outside the village and in the forest itself, be it as a wood chopper, as a miner, or even as a hunter.
Also, villagers have individual traits that represent their most unique aspects, including their bodies and personalities. Currently, we have over sixty different traits, divided into seven categories: Habit related, Needs related, Plague related, Event related, Religion related, Stats related, and Work related.
Obviously, some of them are somewhat simpler than others. Work related traits mostly deal with the aforementioned skills, with each villager always having one positive and one negative trait for each. Others, such as the Habit and the Plague related traits, can be more interesting. We will discuss them further in our next diary, giving more specific examples for each category!
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