County of Fortune building maintenance is what keeps your buildings alive: carpenter's guilds maintain them, and masons' guilds take over at the higher tiers. If maintenance is not met, a building breaks down.
County of Fortune building maintenance: what happens when it fails
A building whose maintenance is not met breaks down, and a settlement whose buildings are falling apart stops attracting immigrants. This is the most common reason a settlement that looks fully supplied still shows a population of zero — population covers the other reasons a settlement stays empty.
Two ways to raise maintenance
- Provide more recipes to the settlement with the carpenter's guild in it. Every new food you provide in the Needs tab raises that settlement's building efficiency, so the guild produces more points per unit of input.
- Unlock extra building slots in other settlements and build another guild there, spreading the workload over more of the region.
Because construction points belong to the region rather than to one settlement, a region that needs more building capacity than it can produce has to bring the raw material in — stone for a masons' guild, logs for a carpenters' guild — or open more building slots inside itself. Construction points covers where the points come from, and building slots covers opening more slots.
Two reading tips that matter here
- A production building card shows its maximum possible production and consumption rather than its current output. It can display a production figure while producing nothing at all because an input is missing.
- The warning icon and the maintenance bar are the quick checks. The missing-input warning icon in the Buildings tab spots a starved building, and the maintenance bar on the same card tells you how long the building has left before it breaks down.
- Opening more slots is the other lever. A settlement that cannot hold enough guilds has to bring the points in from elsewhere, and building slots covers how to open the extra room for them.