During the last two months of the farming year, all my farmers stop working and have the “Seeking Shelter” status. This is hugely problematic, because that’s the peak of harvest when over half of my food production needs taking out of the ground. But because all my farmers are heading home (and then stay there), I have 10,000+ units of food simply rotting. Saving and reloading does not help. There is no blizzard or special weather event. My non-farmer villagers are all behaving normally. Icreasing the number of farmers per field doesn’t help, because they all seek shelter anyway.
If I unassign all my farmers and miners, wait a day for the game to recalculate, and then reassign them, I’m able to get some farmers working again (but not all). Presumably by shuffling my population around some neo-farmers are ex-miners.
Needless to say, such massive loss of food production is pretty catastrophic, even with some mild mitigation possible.
I’ve had this happen 3 years in a row since the patch dropped and never before, so I’m pretty sure it’s linked to that. My guess is that the changes to how “exposure” is calculated means that workers who’ve been out in the field all spring and summer suddenly hit their “time spent outdoors” (or similar) cap just as harvest is coming in; while villagers who were in-and-out all year are fine until deep winter and the very cold temperatures hit.
CAVEAT: This happened in a game with mods, but none of the mods could have this effect (and didn’t cause it before the patch). The problem also persists if I remove the mods before reloading the save.
I’m playing with the vanilla version, and I’ve noticed this issue.
Around autumn, all the farmers temporarily disappear from the fields at the same time.
Because of this, I’ve had to adjust my crop harvesting schedule for that season.
The current behavior routine of the farmers has some serious problems.
My fields are already very close to my houses, so that would barely help… Seeking Shelter doesn’t make them just pop home for a second, they then stay there for a long time while their exposure recovers - long enough that the entire harvest season passes.
Messing around in the code while trying to hack together a patch, I’m now confident that this bug is caused by the changes to the exposure calculation. If I make farmers immune to exposure during Autumn (by patching VillagerHealth.exposureStasis), then everything works as before. Of course that’s not a satisfying solution long term: I’d rather that exposure were a little randomised so different farmers go home to recover at different times of the year (like they do for food) rather than all doing it at the exact same time.
I think I’ve also found a related bug with miners at a deep claypit just on the outskirts of my town (~25 tiles away from the nearest houses). The villagers who work there “Seek Shelter” which makes them go home. A little while later they’ll switch state to “Gather Ore” and walk to the pit. Almost as soon as they get there, they switch back to “Seek Shelter” and head straight home lol. I’d understand if this was the other side of the map, but this is less than a market’s working diameter!
It kills most of my hay and grain despite that weather only states “late autumn / cold”. They also seek shelter for such a long time that most of the field products rot. Out of my almost 400 farmers I counted at that time only around 20 farmers working on fields… while I understand that some need to restock their own supplies it doesn’t make sense that all seek shelter if it’s just a bit cold. They all have cloths, shoes and coats.
It’s not just farmers. Many of the labors and foragers are seeking shelter even when there are moderate temperatures. Between seeking shelter and taking a break and other spare time tasks, it takes twice as long to get this done.
