Experience Tiers
Villagers gain experience by physically working at a building. The longer they stay in the same profession, the more productive they become. There are five tiers:
| Tier | Years in profession | Output bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Apprentice | 0–2 years | No bonus |
| Journeyman | 2–5 years | +10% |
| Expert | 5–10 years | +20% |
| Master | 10–25 years | +30% |
| Legendary | 25+ years | +40% |
Experience also decays when a villager is away from their profession — they lose roughly one year of XP for each game-year they spend not practicing. Legendary tier requires staying in the same trade for most of a working life; you may only see one or two in a long-running settlement, possibly none in a turbulent one. Their name appears in gold in the citizen panel.
Education and the Master Cap
Whether a child attended school has a permanent effect on their working life. Uneducated villagers are capped at the Expert tier — they will never progress to Master, no matter how long they work. Educated villagers have no such cap.
Build schools early. The investment doesn't pay off immediately — children need to grow up before the benefit shows — but a settlement full of educated Master-tier workers produces meaningfully more than one full of Expert-capped adults.
Schools only help children ages 5 to 11. The school must be built and staffed during those years for the education bonus to apply.
Job Assignment
You don't have to assign jobs by hand — every day, the game automatically places unemployed adults into open positions. The assignment system uses two passes:
- Skill-priority pass: For each building with open positions, the system scans all unemployed adults and picks the one with the most experience in that profession — regardless of distance. An experienced blacksmith gets the smithy even if they live across the settlement.
- Distance fallback: Any remaining unemployed adults are assigned to the nearest open job, as in previous versions.
This means skilled workers naturally flow to the jobs they're best at. Build a new bakery and your experienced baker will find their way there.
If you want a specific villager in a specific building, you can manually pin them from their citizen panel. A pinned assignment sticks until the building is demolished or the villager is evicted.
Inherited Skills
When a child is born, they inherit a snapshot of their parents' experience. That inheritance stays latent through childhood, then materialises as real earned XP when they reach adulthood at age 12.
| Inheritance type | Chance | What the child receives |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 80% | 30% of the higher parent's XP in each profession they've worked, capped at Journeyman (2 years). A Master parent's child starts with 2 years — already at Journeyman. |
| Rebellious | 20% | Nothing from parents — instead, a 1-year head start in a profession neither parent practices. The child chose their own path. |
The citizen panel shows a child's inherited skills before adulthood, so you can see what they're likely to bring when they come of age.
Passions
Separate from experience, some villagers have a passion for a particular profession. Passions increase how quickly experience accumulates:
- Minor passion: 1.5× XP gain in that profession
- Burning passion: 3.0× XP gain in that profession
A villager with a Burning passion for farming reaches Master tier in a fraction of the time a passionless villager would. Check the Skills tab of the citizen panel to see if someone has a passion — it's worth routing them to the relevant job.