Want to get to the point where Money is "easy" and you can focus on making your village look lived in and photo ready? First: don't die! First, automate the basic survival part. Check this guide by yixaglax: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3109052843 The flow chart included shows you which buildings and villagers you need to become self-sustainable. Do only that, add to those production nodes until you have abundance, then your population is safe from dying of starvation or freezing. Remember balance: As you hire more harvesty and crafty villagers, you will need to build and hire more producers for more of those basic survival nodes in that flowchart for everyone to live without your crisis intervention. Think abundance. Too much food? Sell it or compost for fertilizer. No problem. There will Never be too much wood or stone. Take some out of the storehouse and drop it on the floor nearby. You might need it later. To craft thousands of planks for upgraded roofs all over town, for example. Better yet, make 5 tier 3 storehouses. Lol. Think abundance. Husbandry Needs? Confirmed. Next we set up many fields for growing the ingredients for animal feed and flax. An abundance. An excess. Our first critical animal needs are two pig pens, Fill with as many as possible. Start with 2- a male and female per pen, then go for full paddocks. Caution: as long as your fields can produce 20 animal feed per pig per year, or more. So they don't die off. Go for 300+ feed per year, as a starting target. 500+ later, or more if you have All the animals... Set up fields & villagers to exceed that animal feed math, and you're automated. Then add 2 goose pens and fill them up, because you need tons of feathers for crafting, as you'll see. Later add 2 sheepfolds full, for wool. These are to fill up all over time. Place the blueprint down for 2 paddocks of each animal, build one, put in 2 animals, a male and female. Just to start. As the profits and years roll by, build the 2nd paddocks and fill them as able. It's like a snowball. Start small, with your first two pigs or geese. Then fill up your farm as able. You don't need a mule unless you already have too much of heavy goods to haul to market. Horses are nice for later game as a time-saving convenience. And they're fun. And a spouse might have a quest or request for one. NPC Leveling Protip: Start ALL farmers off as your goose herder, gathering feathers. Or pig keeper... If you have 3 or 4 or more geese they will pull 30+ at first, leveling up to 100+ per day, and level up to 10 in just a couple of seasons to couple cycle years. Then put them onto another farm job... The secret to leveling yourself and your NPCs is a fast repetitive item which costs low resources. Or generates a high number of resources out of nowhere. Takes a while (without XP buffed in settings,) So this becomes a 3+ year plan. But that could be done in 1 gamer's day or two? But what to craft? NOW you start to automate crafting for profits. Here's the best guide in the world for that! Use A-bullet's Awesome guide. Click the link to his amazing spreadsheet. It's in Bold print at the top of the page. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2291358519 Tl:dr: If you are using weight in your playthru on original settings, you need to craft light items which sell for high coins. If you craft heavy items you can only carry a few to market. Even with a mule. But the most profitable items are light... Hmmm. Let's dive deep into that: Automating our resources needed: Set up gatherers bringing in sticks, feathers, & stones at first as these are key. They will level up to 10 in a couple of days (if you're at 10X XP?) bringing in feathers, sticks, and stones at 100+ per day. (That's in addition to woodcutters bringing logs which to make enough firewood for the year. Multiple same buildings with multiple villagers, yes.) *IF they are level 1 in extraction, they will still be slow to level. Start them on Straw in the extraction hut. Grabbing 50/day at level 1 will take them just a couple days to level up high. SO day 2, put them on something useful for the village, like stone? More needed, grab feathers next, in the hunting shack. Caveat: If you have default 1x XP settings, yeah this will take a couple years, maybe. So if your goal is to build a cute picturesque village in "creative Mode", 10x XP, & 10x the others, is the fast-forward button. If you want to do that the default slow way, realize its not possible for a level 1 character to hit 10 in a couple days, rather a couple years on the job. BTW, to level Your survival up, grab lots of straw along the rivers as you walk back from town. And clean out every stick and stone as you walk thru your village. It's going to take thousands to master the skill, but there are thousands you walk by in the course of a few years... Miners start out focused on copper and tin. Iron can wait a bit for later... To level them up fast, start them in an extraction hut getting stone? Then switch into the mine. Still, but what to craft?? At first set your smiths to make stone knives, NOT for profit, but so they can level up. Lay out space for 3 smithy's. Assign *every* new crafter of every kind (production skill) to make stone knives, and they'll hit level 10 in 2 days. Then switch them to their real craft building. For Smiths that means making copper then bronze, knives or arrows. Much later you can switch your miners to all iron and the smiths too. Why light items again? Because you can carry hundreds of arrows to town on foot, take the Uberwagon to all villages, buy everything you can possibly carry home even with a magic weight potion, and Still bankrupt all the vendors on the map each season. Without a mule. That's ~8-10k coins. Per season. Or more. PLUS all the goods you bought then sold the same vendor even More of your goods to get your coins back. So you walk away with your pack full And all of their coins. If you're out of feathers, go to knives. Out of sticks? Make hammers. Out of logs? Well I guess they get some down time while you build another woodcutters hut? Being out of a resource is a hint... I stick with bronze arrows because my geese are many... and I dont want to waste feathers on lessor arrows. Then in the 3rd smithy, have 2 ironsmiths make tools for the villagers and your lordship to use. They seem slow but can keep up with the slow tool wear rate of iron. You may need to step in as needed. At some point they dont need your help keeping up because you switch all smiths and miners to an all-iron economy, including every villager tool and the selling of iron arrows. Note: To make this faster, you should go down the mine and clean out all ores, and grab ores your miners have placed in the storehouse, then You smelt them, to put in the storehouse. So your Smiths just spend their time on crafting. If you dont mine and smelt ores by hand, this will run just fine, but take 2-3x as long in years to get to the all-iron age. This might consume 1-2 days of your seasons, with all the walking in and out of the mine with a full load +20% overweight of ores. Add days to the early season in settings. I go with a full 30 days and spend the first Spring laying untilled field layouts and blue floor-plans all over the place... I'm at day 14 in my new/current playthru's Spring and haven't hired a villager yet. Soon as I do I will flip it. Never know if a great hire is waiting unless you have a house ready and talk to them. Flip seasons and they change to new people. During winter, I usually cut it shorter. Seeds and Seams and Sales. Meanwhile you are building your additional farm fields and pigstye and getting profit crops automated... Go for seeds: The ultimate profit per kilo from farming. (check the chart again) So That part of your world is feeding everyone And producing max profits. Then get your orchards producing cherries and plums... Tarts and wines are high coin, but you can wait the years for the trees to start producing. You'll need to level up everything else to finally build a tavern anyway... Now, your seamstresses are big-gun money-huns too. Depending if you gather more fur, wool, or linen, go for Felt hats, long hoods, maybe trousers with cuffs... Each of those are the highest profit per kilo on the chart. Get three sewing huts? One on each! Multiple hunting shacks needed, btw. If you have just One gathering feathers for arrow crafting, you need another for leather for bags for your farmers, and now a 3rd for fur for crafting high-coin sales. And you can set up a seamster/ess for each of those categories. Now, whatever your highest profit items on hand, load up your mule and head to town! If they are all light, you wont even need a mule anymore. I have had no problems carrying my goods to market since finding Sir A-Bullet's guide and setting my village up to craft accordingly. More the problem is, finding vendors enough to buy more stuff. I've purchased everything I need, sold still more arrows or seeds to get my coins back, and they are ALL out of coins, across the map! Finally, the Automated part Set up at least 2 market stalls. When the person is new they sell your stone knife stockpile to level up in 2 days!. Then selling knives, arrows, or hammers, whatever has the highest item count in the storehouses. Each quickly pulling over 1000 coins per day... On Auto. Build a 3rd to sell clothes. A 4th to cross-train new people in? It's actually a GOOD thing the King nerfed the price of stone knives by royal decree. It's a quick craft so our smiths level up in a day or two making them. Which fills our storehouse with these cheap things... not worth carrying to market, right? But then our market stall sellers level up in a day or two selling them precisely Because they are so cheap. And at level 10 their sales and profits skyrocket on other goods... Why wait? Level them up in a day and then they will make you Huge coin piles selling the real valuable crafts faster. These are passive incomes on auto-pilot, as you dont need to go find a vendor with coins to buy from you. Travellers appear out of no where because you have a market stall or tavern. This is additional income from thin air. Perhaps a thousand per day for each market stall? If you can keep them supplied, yes. A toast: To Profits! Oops, I spoiled it: Build a tavern! You need to tweak your 2nd and 3rd cook's crafts to make tarts and wines. Selling these products thru *a market stall* after crafting in the tavern is another passive income. If you dont just move your high-level cook over, but hire a new one, you'll need to run your new intended barkeeps thru a production site first, to level up crafting for these high-value products. And hire another Diplomat. Run them through a market stall first, selling those stockpiles of stone knives for a couple days, so they can sell wine, mead, and tarts as fast as humanly possible at level 10. You'll need a treasury! How long to 100k coins? Guess we'll have to start buying all the decoration schematics and prettify the place up! Since now the food, water, firewood, tools, and income of the whole Manor is automated. So now you only need to go to town just to look for that lovely maiden with a great personality... Or handsome talented guy, for your Ladyships. Bonus: How to skill up your heir, before they are born? Protip: To get an Heir with max skills, you first must put your princess-to-be through all the different skill-trees to max her levels up. Make her a smith for a couple days. Make her gather feathers. Make her tend pigs. Or geese if you'd rather keep her clean... Make her sell the stone knives she made... When she hits 10 switch to another job. Using the above method it shouldn't take long to master each skill branch. So she knows the village so intimately she will be a great princess once you figure out that romance thing... lol. You might be wise early on to place a small house near your hilltop castle, so she can stay away from the other men while she learns All the things. So whenever you find your ideal future mate, you can assign her there for easy romancing. She can be friends with your nearby mule and horse keepers up there, and maybe become that when she's done learning the rest of the skills? To get newborn villagers with high skills, put two villagers together with different skill-jobs too. If the parents each have a different level 10 skill when baby is born, they will have 2 level 10 skills in them when matured. And you thought good breeding was of concern only in the horse paddocks? lol. Let us know how it goes!