Dynamic Villager Needs and Schedule

Dynamic Villager Needs

Tired of micromanaging villager schedules — and watching them sleep half the day or stand around even when you've set them to work? This mod replaces ASKA's clock-based Sleep/Work/Leisure schedule with needs-based behavior. Each villager decides what to do from how they actually feel:

• []Tired → they sleep (and only as long as they need)[/]

  []Unhappy, or genuinely short on food/water → they take leisure[/]

  []Otherwise → they work[/]

The goal: stop wasting time without sacrificing happiness.

All of that is fully automatic — install it and you're done. And when you're ready for more control, there's an optional shift-schedule mode: paint real work shifts for villagers who share a station (24-hour kitchen coverage!), and choose what they do off-duty — relax, keep working, or pitch in with your builders.

Features (automatic mode — no setup needed)

• []Needs-based sleep — villagers sleep when actually tired and wake up when rested, instead of sleeping the whole scheduled night. A configurable rest-recovery boost lets you make sleep shorter so they spend more of the day being useful.[/]

  []Leisure that's actually worth it — vanilla leisure restores happiness painfully slowly. This mod lets leisure actively top happiness back up over a configurable number of in-game hours, so a short break genuinely recharges a villager instead of wasting a whole day.[/]

  []Self-correcting happiness — if a villager's happiness dips, they take a quick leisure break to recover, then get back to work. Villagers whose happiness is capped (e.g. by poor housing) won't get stuck relaxing forever.[/]

  []Adjustable hunger & thirst pace — optional multipliers let you speed up or slow down how fast villagers get hungry and thirsty, so you can push the settlement toward a tougher survival challenge or a more relaxed builder pace. Defaults match vanilla.[/]

  []Smarter warmth — cold is left to the game's own warm-up behavior (so they don't thrash between a fire and their job), with an optional multiplier to make warming up at a fire faster.[/]

  []Fully configurable — every threshold and rate is exposed in the config file, and config edits apply in-game within seconds (no restart needed).[/]

  []Villager-only — your own character is never affected.[/]

Optional: shift schedules & off-duty jobs

Everything in this section is off by default (RespectManualSchedule = false). Turn it on only if you want villagers to follow schedules you paint yourself.

The idea, by example: you want your kitchen staffed around the clock. Set RespectManualSchedule = true, then use the game's own schedule editor to paint your two cooks opposite shifts — Work for the hours they're on duty, Sleep for everything else. They'll hold their shifts and spend their off-duty hours sensibly (see below). This applies to villagers who share a station with at least one coworker; everyone else stays on automatic behavior.

The three brushes — what painting each actually means:

• []Work = on duty. Be at the post. Only a life-threatening food/water emergency pulls them away.[/]

  []Sleep = off duty. Not "sleep this entire block" — it marks the hours they're free. The mod handles the actual sleeping for you: one shorter, well-timed sleep placed so they start their next shift rested, and the rest of the window goes to the off-duty behavior you pick below.[/]

  []Leisure = guaranteed downtime. Use it only when you want to reserve specific hours for relaxing (a social hour, runestone time) — those hours are honored no matter what the off-duty setting says. Otherwise you don't need this brush at all; just paint Work + Sleep.[/]

Off-duty behavior (OffWindowFill): what a rested, fed villager does with their remaining off-duty (painted-Sleep) hours —

• []Leisure (default) — hang out and recover happiness.[/]

  []Work — go back to the post anyway (double up on coverage).[/]

  []Builder — join the builder pool: they'll clear land, haul materials, and build alongside your real builders, then return in time for their shift. Their job assignment never changes — an off-duty cook building a cottage still shows as a Cook everywhere.[/]

Per-building control (ManualScheduleStations): one line decides which buildings use shift mode, and optionally what each does off-duty: