From my point of view libraries have a few issues:
- Amount of workers for the production chain is way too high.
- Amount of items produced is very low.
- As far as I can see, having a library or not has a very low impact on the overall entertainment score.
- Building is too big in comparison to other buildings and for a small town of 1K people.
Amount of workers for the production chain is too high
At the moment, for a population of 1K residents and taking into account how the library can provide entertainment for 20 residences within a radius of 100 meters, you can manage to provide this with a total of 3 libraries. I have 1000K residents, 126 households, and each library reaches 41, 41 and 44 residences.
The production chain needed is
- A farm for Flax: In my experience so far you can have this chain working without halts with a 12 x 12 farm (on which two years contain Flax crops) with 13 workers.
- A paper mill: 8 workers.
- A book binder: 8 workers.
- A library: 1 worker.
This should work non stop providing enough books to keep people entertained all the time with no book surplus. So a ratio of 1:1:1:1 production buildings.
Now this will cover 1 third of your population so multiply the total amount of workers by 3: 90 workers. Which is almost 10% of your village working to provide the bare minimum.
These are the numbers. I personally think that 10% of your pop to provide an item from which you can make no profit only to gain an insignificant amount of entertainment is too much. Will cover the insignificant part in a second.
Amount of items produced is very low
As I mentioned, the production chain costs a lot of resources for little gain. You get just the right amount of books to keep your town entertained constantly but there is no extra stock to make a profit of and considering all the workforce invested I think it would be fair to expect some returns.
Low impact on the overall entertainment score
I went ahead and deleted the whole chain altogether, no more books, no more libraries. Entertainment went down for about 5% (for what I can tell looking at the entertainment bar), very little. And again, so much effort and resources spent on this chain I would expect a larger impact. Maybe not make it a requirement for homes to upgrade to Tier 4 but at least have a bigger impact where people in T4 households complain about the lack of books. But it seems they don’t mind. Having a library makes no big difference it seems.
Building is too big
This is really not that important, just a detail that crossed my mind and I thought I would mention it.
One library can cover let’s say 45 homes more or less. Each residence stocks 1 book maximum for what I can see. We can store 45 books on a simple shelf. Why do we need a library of size 4 x 3 (bigger than the clinic or a home - where a home could have more than one shelf for dozens of books) to hold such a small quantity of books?
Just a thought. I think a 2 x 3 would be more appropriate. Is a tiny town library after all.
And there you go. That’s what I think about libraries. 