Life Stages
Age advances once per year (every 120 days). Each stage changes what a villager can do and how they experience the world.
| Stage | Age | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Child | Under 12 | Needs decay at half rate. Attends school from age 5 to 11 if one is built. Cannot work. |
| Adult | 12 and up | Can work any job. Eligible for marriage at 16. Inherited skills from parents materialise at age 12. |
| Elder | 50 and up | Moves to an Elder Home if available and has space. Still works, just a bit slower. |
Childhood
Children are dependents — they consume food and resources but can't contribute labour. However, a child's experience matters in the long run:
- School: Children who attend school from ages 5 to 11 earn an education bonus that stays with them into adulthood. Uneducated adults are capped at the Expert skill tier and can never reach Master. See the Skills & Jobs guide for details.
- Childhood happiness: A child's average happiness over their childhood years influences what kind of person they grow up to be. Children raised in a flourishing, well-fed settlement are more likely to develop positive traits as adults. Those raised in hardship often develop resilient or harder-edged personalities.
Marriage and Children
Unmarried adults eligible for marriage will find partners on their own. The matchmaker is relationship-aware — villagers who have spent time together (as housemates, coworkers, or neighbours) and have developed a Friendly or Close relationship are more likely to pair up.
Siblings cannot be matched, even if they've grown close. The system checks for shared parents before making any match.
Married couples living together can have a child each year, or sometimes take in a foster child — a wandering orphan from outside the village who finds a new home. Both parents must be non-elder adults, happy enough, and have room at home for either to happen.
Foster children arrive aged 5–8 rather than as newborns, but join the family with full bonds. The same moodlets fire, the same grief applies if they're lost, and the chronicle records them with the same warmth — just "taken in by" rather than "born to." The one difference is that foster children don't inherit professional skills from their parents, since they weren't raised from birth. See the Skills & Jobs guide for how skill inheritance works.
Ageing and Elder Care
Once a villager reaches 50, they become an elder. Elders can still work — a 60-year-old Master farmer is still a Master farmer. But they move slightly slower, which can affect how much ground they cover per day.
If you build an Elder Home, elders will move there when a bed is available. The Elder Home provides better need satisfaction than a standard house, helping elderly villagers stay healthy longer.
Death and Grief
When a villager dies, the people who knew them suffer happiness penalties as moodlets. The closer the relationship, the heavier the grief, and the longer it lasts.
- Spouse: deepest grief, longest duration
- Parent or child: strong grief, significant duration
- Sibling: moderate grief
- Friend (Close relationship): meaningful grief
- Neighbour (community loss): a small shared sadness settles over the whole settlement
Building a cemetery and keeping it staffed significantly softens these grief penalties — a staffed cemetery can reduce them by up to 75%. Without one, every death hits the whole settlement hard. Visiting the cemetery also restores Faith.
Memory
Citizens don't just forget the people they've lost. Over time, memories of significant moments — both joyful and painful — resurface as small moodlets. Elda might remember her late husband on a quiet winter evening. Tolman might still carry the warm feeling of the year his daughter was born. These memories are part of who your villagers become over a long lifetime.