He or she never do any rat catching but idles or just walks around aimlessly.
The current one reads: “Wandering - Unable to Work”
What makes them “unable” to do their job?
I’ve tried to think up any sort of trigger that I might miss, making sure there are enough tools, if that was it, enough cheese, if that was it, etc. etc. but no go.
No matter what I do I can’t get rid of the rat infestation running about over my farms after a bunch of farmers died in the fields.
Is it a bug or is it me missing something super obvious?
when your village is infested with rats, certain buildings such as the market, root cellar and granary will have a notification above them - a circle with a rat inside it with a red background. It is only then that you will need to build a rat catcher to get rid of them. You can build the rat catcher building anywhere since you can retarget their work radius.
the 12 gold might seem excessive, but think about it - would you do messy work like this if you weren’t paid handsomely? that’s why the nightsoil collector is also “paid”, nobody wants to collect poopoo without a proper reward.
Yes. The Catcher goes to the houses with the vermin plage, and then eliminate the plague icon. The houses of course must be in the “small” radius of the catcher.
I only have one Rat Catcher and I’ve managed to manually move around the catching circle between the two different areas where the rats appear but I think I will have to bite the bullet and get a second Catcher or I will not get any useful exploration done.
I think the monthly cost for the rat catcher is too high (8 gold/month), at least for the hassle it gives us to move around the work radius each time there’s a rat somewhere (we’re playing for fun and for free, we’re not paid either to click on a button and move the work radius. The rat catcher, on the other hand, is …)
I have 3 rat catchers in my town, rats keep coming to my storehouses/granaries/stockyards. Each year, I have to move their work radius around those locations several times (at least 3 times per rat catcher and per year). It’s really not fun at all.
I’d suggest either halving the monthly cost (hence we can build more and cover more areas) if you want to keep the movable work radius, or - and this I would much more support - keep the current monthly cost (even raise it a bit) and have the rat catcher work on its own and locate on its own where to catch rats.
Usually when they get lazy, i go to the professions bar and relocate them for a few months to another activity. That helps to managing their expensive cost and save some golds when they are not catching rats, or you can either do what everyone said: change radius to another location.
This has got to be a bug- three rat catchers; two have the “idol-unable to work” (rats everywhere) - villager seems to do the work animations and then gets stuck or disoriented as they’re traveling. Rat population gets out of control. Bubonic plague; more rats; 60 villagers die; still have rat catchers with text error saying idol cannot work. Interestingly also getting deaths from starvation but I have 10 months of food stored. Might be a pathing but. I’m going to save restart see what happens on reload
I’m doing it that way at the moment, but it feels like a lot of manual micro-managing of a process that should be automatic. Rat catchers seem capable of maintaining a much larger area than their work radius is right now, so you either have a single rat catcher and have to continually move the radius to where the infestations are, or you employ a dozen ratcatchers to cover the entire settlement so they will do it automatically, but you have to pay boatloads of gold to ratcatchers who sit around idle almost 100% of the time.
I think the work radius just should be twice as big, that would make more sense.
Fully agree. And cats in the game as pest control would be great, and we could have dogs as shepherd dogs, guard dogs against raiders and predators, and cart-pulling dogs.
And having cats and dogs should increase the villagers’ happiness, obviously.
The dialog in the rat catcher will say “Catching Rats” and if you have the Building Needs on (F2 overlay) the red rat icon will disappear when they’re done. .
