You have rooms ready and waiting. Now let us fill them. Recruiting is how new people arrive in your town, and it is one of the most satisfying actions in the early game because it directly grows your workforce. It is also, conveniently, the one common action that costs no energy - so it is a move you can always make, even when your energy bar is completely empty. There is a real joy in watching your population tick upward, and you have earned it.
Where recruits come from
New citizens are recruited at the City Hall, the administrative heart you met earlier. When they arrive, they come in as free, unskilled workers. That word unskilled is not an insult - it means they are raw, flexible labour, the starting material you will later train into specialists or assign to jobs. Every specialist in your town began life as an unskilled recruit, so this is the wellspring of everything. Think of them as fresh clay, full of possibility.
Recruiting is free of energy
Recruiting is the only common action that costs no energy. Instead it costs raw materials and time. So when your energy is spent on building and production, you can still keep growing your population - recruiting never competes with your energy budget.
How a batch works
You recruit in a batch of 1 to 5 workers at a time. How big a batch you can call for is capped by your City Hall level. A level 1 City Hall recruits 1 worker at a time, while a level 5 City Hall lets you bring in up to 5 at once. So upgrading your City Hall is what unlocks faster population growth - it is the throttle on how many people you can summon in a single batch. If your town feels slow to fill, the City Hall is the dial to turn.
Each batch costs raw materials, and it takes 1 hour per worker recruited. That per-worker timing is worth picturing clearly. If you recruit a batch of 3, that is 3 hours of recruiting time before they all arrive. A batch of 5 is 5 hours. So bigger batches are efficient in clicks but still take real time per head - there is no instant army here, just steady, honest growth. The town fills the way a real town fills, one neighbour at a time.
Because the time is tied to the number of people and not to how often you click, there is a nice rhythm to settle into. A level 5 City Hall lets you queue up to 5 workers in one go, which is a tidy 5-hour batch you can set going before stepping away and come back to a meaningful jump in population. A level 1 hall, by contrast, brings people in one at a time, an hour each, so early growth is slower and more deliberate. Neither is wrong - it simply means your City Hall level quietly sets the tempo of how fast your town can fill up. If you find population growth feels sluggish, the City Hall is the lever to pull, and upgrading it pays you back in every recruit that follows.
The room requirement
Remember the rule from the last lesson: no free room, no new citizen. It applies in full here. You need a free room for every single worker in your batch. If you try to recruit without enough open rooms, the game will refuse and tell you the houses are full. That is not a bug - it is the population cap doing its job, exactly as we learned. The beds have to exist before the people can move in.
Houses are full?
If recruiting is refused with a Houses are full message, it means you have no free room for the workers you asked for. The fix is to build or upgrade a house to open more rooms, then recruit again. Make room first, then bring people in.
So picture the flow as a new mayor, and it is a gentle one: check that you have free rooms, head to the City Hall, choose a batch size up to your hall's level, pay the materials, and wait an hour per worker. Once they arrive, these recruited workers are wonderfully versatile - they can labour, be trained at a school, clear land, or be assigned to staff your workshops. They are the all-purpose hands your town runs on, and there is rarely such a thing as too many of them.
It is worth dwelling on that versatility, because it shapes how you think about your population. A fresh recruit is pure potential. The same unskilled worker could go and clear a tree patch this afternoon, then be trained into a specialist at a school next week, then be hired into a workshop to run production after that. You are not locked into a decision the moment they arrive. This is why recruiting generously, whenever you have rooms and materials, rarely goes to waste - spare hands always find a job. And because recruiting never costs energy, building up a small pool of unskilled workers is one of the safest investments a young town can make. When in doubt, recruit; the town will know what to do with them.
Let me connect recruiting back to the whole loop so it does not feel like an isolated chore. Population is the fuel that everything else burns. Land needs at least 3 free workers to clear; workshops need workers hired in to produce; schools need bodies to train into specialists. Every one of those needs is satisfied from the stream of recruits flowing out of your City Hall. So when you recruit, you are not just adding a number to a counter - you are topping up the reservoir that feeds your land, your buildings, and your production all at once. A town that recruits steadily always has hands ready for the next task; a town that neglects it keeps finding itself one or two workers short of whatever it wants to do.
There is a calm, dependable rhythm you can fall into here, and I encourage you to find it early. Whenever you log in, glance at your free rooms and your spare workers. If you have room and the materials to spare, set a recruiting batch going before you do anything else - because it costs no energy, it never competes with the building or production you are about to do. By the time you have finished your energy-spending tasks, your new citizens may already be arriving. Slipping recruiting into the start of every session like this means your population quietly climbs in the background of everything else, and you will rarely be the mayor staring at a workshop they cannot staff. Make it the first small thing you do, and it pays you back all day.
Lifespan, and selling spare workers
Your citizens are not immortal - each worker and specialist carries a time to live that ticks down a little every day, and you can see it on your town page. How much life they have is set by your town happiness: a happy town keeps its people going far longer, while an unhappy one wears them down fast. When that timer runs out, the citizen dies of old age, a small event appears in your feed naming the worker, or the specialist by their role such as a doctor or teacher, and any home or job they filled opens back up. The way to keep your people alive is the same as keeping them productive - hold your happiness high by upgrading houses and supplying what your town needs. The one exception is your founders, marked with God: they never age and cannot die.
If you find yourself with more hands than your town can use, you do not have to let them simply grow old. A free worker you no longer need can be listed for sale on the people market, where another mayor short of labour can buy them. Open your town page, find the worker under Unskilled workers or Specialists, press Sell, and set a price in gold. Selling turns idle population into ready cash, and it gives the worker a fresh start in a town that actually needs them.
Only healthy, free workers sell
You can only list a free worker - one not busy in a job or tied up in construction - and only if they still have at least 30 days of life left. Free a busy worker first if you want to sell them. When the sale goes through, the buyer's town happiness recalculates the worker's remaining lifespan, so a happier town quite literally gives them a longer second life.
You now have a pile of fresh, unskilled workers waiting for direction. In the next lesson we will give some of them careers - turning generic labourers into the specific professionals your production buildings demand. That is where your town starts to specialise and really earn, and where those raw recruits begin to shine.