Your town looks nicer than mine
@hopledor and I can see that we partly use the same strategy for food; dock farming. I mostly have cranberries because the very first merchant brought bean seeds, so I changed my original plans to produce watercress and farm for beans. Rice on the docks gives a lower yield, so I trade mutton and duckmeat for grain (and sometimes some other food) and let my people eat fish.
And yes, I have 3 nomad attractors but I think no schools is more important for the speed. You must reach a population where you get more than 5 nomads fast, before the nomads help to speed things up even more. It took 10 years to reach 100 inhabitants. In that time I got 5 nomads. But if you look at the population graph, you can see that nomads have played a big part in the development in the last few years.
You can also see a lot of driftwood collectors. That means I don´t need to buy any logs. Except for a few houses at the beginning, before I had a lumber mill, I only build these little country houses. I think they are the most economic houses; you need only 48 lumber, no difficult stone. An uneducated worker makes 3 lumber from each log; that means only 16 logs and the heat economy is decent enough.
I don´t know if this town is sustainable. I will run it a bit tonight and see if I can survive the following years. If you look at the production numbers; food and fuel are quite alright. Clothes are not that important, they can do without but tools are the problem. I need to buy tools, there is even a merchant there right now with a big load of excellent carbon tools. The problem is only, I don´t have much to sell, my beer is out, no new malt delivered. It´s winter and the stores of firewood are not overfull. I´m about to reload goods from the other ports to be able to buy at least some. Maybe I will let him stay until summer when I can produce a surplus of firewood.
Can someone make 500 inhabitants faster? Yes of course. If I would make one more attempt, I would do pretty much the same with one exception; I would use more boarding houses: as many as I can afford to build. I thought about to build some in this town but for some reason, I don´t like boarding houses, so I choose not to.
