Settlement Demographics Generator

What this generator does

Takes a population and works out the rest. A share of the town is too young, too old or too unwell to work; the remainder is the workforce. Each trade is the population divided by the ratio shown next to it, so a settlement too small to keep a tanner busy has no tanner. Whoever is left after the trades works the land or takes general labour. Households are then built to hold every inhabitant exactly once.

How to use this tool

1. Type the population you want the settlement to have.
2. Build it, and read the totals before the trades — everything below follows from them.
3. Divide the population by any ratio shown to check the count beside it.
4. Copy the link to keep this settlement, or the text to paste into your notes.

Understanding the controls

Population

From a hamlet of forty to a city of forty thousand. It is the only figure you set, because everything else is worked out from it.

Repeat word

The word this settlement was built from. Anyone opening the same link gets the same town.

Common use cases

• Fleshing out a town a party has just walked into, with numbers that survive a question
• Deciding whether a settlement is big enough to have the trade a plot needs
• A consistent backdrop for a novel, so the same town does not change size between chapters
• Comparing two settlements on the same basis rather than two different guesses
• Handing a table the same town from one link

How this generator works

The totals are added up again from the finished settlement rather than recorded as the town was built. Every trade count is compared against the population divided by its own stated ratio, the three groups are re-totalled against the population, and the household sizes are multiplied out to check they come to the population exactly. These are whole numbers throughout, so there is no tolerance: a total one out is wrong rather than nearly right.

Randomness and fairness

The settlement is built from a repeat word taken from your browser’s secure generator unless you type one of your own, so the same link rebuilds the same town. A repeat word is there to make a settlement reproducible; it is not a security measure and nothing here is suitable for anything that has to stay secret.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

• The settlement is invented. No real place or period is being described.
• The ratios are a stated model, chosen so the figures stay consistent and can be checked. They are not taken from any surviving record, and no census says one baker per two hundred people.
• One ratio applies at every size, so a city is modelled as a large town rather than as something different in kind. Real cities specialise in ways this does not capture.
• Trade, geography, season, wealth and who rules the place all move these figures in reality and none of them are modelled.
• Households are sizes and counts, not families — nobody is named and no relationships are described.

Privacy and your data

The settlement is built on your device and nothing about it is transmitted or stored. The repeat word is a short label this page made or you typed, and it is the only thing that appears in the address; it is never measured.