Patron – Plagued Achievement Advice

I struggled for a lot longer with this one achievement (75 cumulative deaths from illness), and I expect many of you are as well, but I finally cracked it today and would like to put this out there for anyone who was in my position and wished there was some way to understand how to trigger citizens dying of disease.

Plagued Achievement Tips

Сrеdit gоеs to Djarte!

I have to caveat this advice by saying I don’t know why it works, or even if what I observed was the real cause of any illness deaths I was able to create, but I put a lot of trial and error into it and this is what I’ve personally found:

The answer, as it turns out, is not to wait for RNGesus to bestow Plague events. You just need to accept that they’ll basically never happen (no matter how few Herbs and wells you have), and if they do, you won’t get more than a handful of fatalities. The key is to set up some balance of negative effects that a consistent trickle of one-off illness deaths pop up from time to time. I don’t 100% know which parts of the following is actually important, or what the exact effects of any of them are, but I was able to trigger a few disease deaths per year with this recipe:

1. All Wooden Houses – No idea if higher level housing gives a hidden Health boost? But it seems like the kind of thing that could happen and I wanted to err on the safe side.
2. Zero Wells – Do wells increase Health like they say they do? Maybe? I dunno, but again the safe thing was not to build any.
3. Zero Herbs & Medicine – This seemed to have the most concrete positive (negative) effect on Health score. It’s easy not to grow any, but always remember to export immediately or risk your citizens using them. But lack of herbs alone is definitely not enough.
4. No Food Variety – I’ll admit again that I don’t know exactly how the food variety mechanic works, but there was a noticeable drop in population healthiness when I moved everyone onto a diet of only cabbages for a few years, and then a noticeable shift back up when I ran out of cabbages and had to reopen the fishing piers. I don’t know if it’s enough to just stick to one kind of foodstuff (“Vegetables”) or whether one specific food truly has to be the only thing going, but spam up production in your favorite foodcrop and don’t let them eat anything else.

I was able to do the above and saw my overall health score move down into the 70’s/80’s, and I also started to see some citizens marked with “+” signs overhead and a caption about them being ill.

AND … one or two citizens a year would seemingly randomly die of illness!

The strange part though was that it wasn’t ever any of the “sick” ones. I kept track of a few of them as they would go through their days/years, and even without any herbs or medicine or food variety or decent housing or wellwater, the “sick” citizens would always bottom out at ~30 Health and just keep on chugging.

But there was a pattern: the ones who died, as I discovered after the seventh or eighth individual pop of a citizen death by illness, were all MINERS.

5. Build more mines than you need, and staff them to the gills – Nowhere in the game does it say anything about workplace affecting health, but boy does sending citizens to work in mines seem to somehow be the tipping point. No one else, no matter how unhealthy you try to make your town, seems to die of random illness, but Miners will.

In summary – set the stage with as many Health penalties as you can, and that should be enough to start killing your Miners.

A lot of the mechanics in Patron seem to be pretty delicate and hard to understand, especially when it comes to trying to make bad things happen (provoking riots is another pain in the hole!), so I was hugely relieved to figure out a system that, for whatever reason, worked for me.