Having litters of kittens can realy clog up your village. As things stand right now, I understand that there are pros and cons to having families. I weighed those when I chose to breed my own cats and decided in favour of a family. This suggestion isn't to complain about that, just a quality of life suggestion to tip the scales a bit more into the 'pro' category in a game that has quite the robust breeding system but quite slow growth mechanics.
Introducing the Nursery! This post-village lodge building unlocks a Sub-tab of traveling cats where beans and their families can grow outside of the hustle and bustle of village life. Much like traveling cats, Nursery cats cannot do any jobs, do any gathering, engage in any scenarios (and do not count towards scenario total) or eat food from the lunchon. Unlike Travelers though, when sending cats to the Nursery you must send the entire family - The parent(s) and any of their current non-adult* (EDIT, probably should exclude adolescents as well) kittens. This means missing out on skilled job parents in favour of opening up active slots.
Nursery cats would draw from the total number of traveling cats, that is you could have 216 traveling cats or 200 traveling cats and 16 in the nursery. Additionally I feel that the Postal buff of allowing traveling cats to be placed in scenes should apply to nursery cats, and that adult nursery cats could send letters (Oh goodness or have a check for the cats age and have some special bean/young kitten letters that are just, like, a inky pawprint pressed into the page YES PLEASE).
Kittens and adults can move freely between the Village and the Nursery with the same cool-down as traveling cats. When Nursery kittens age up to adult* they and their parents automatically go into the Traveling Cats tab. When parents have kittens of multiple life stages (such as a much younger adoptive litter-mate), grown kittens would move to Travelers while the parents would stay with their still-kitten.
(* I say adult since cats need to be adults to go traveling but I personally think it should be Adolescent since that's when you can send them to other villages, and if I can send them to another village why can't I send them to loiter in the old woodlot for a week or so.)
Building the Nursery unlocks the Matron specialty profession. The Matron could potentially have any of the following benefits:
- Increase the cap of cats the nursery can hold based on HEALTH * EXTROVERSION or DETICATION (I'm thinking 10 cats base, up to 30 with max stats)
- Slightly increase the chance of larger litters based on HEALTH * BENEVOLENCE
- Slightly passively increase the statgains of nursery Beans based on BENEVOLENCE * HEALTH or PERCEPTION
(I'm gunning for health since it's not used in any other jobs but also interpreting it as, like, health knowledge like keeping the nursery sanitary, supporting expectant parents)
Anyways thank you for coming to my TED Talk