Quickstart

You'll need three things in order to have a bustling village filled with activity:

1. a village registry station in a walled village
2. a villager
3. a work order

The village registry you can craft with a bit of wood and resin. The registry needs to be inside village walls for it to function properly. If there is a gap in the walls large enough for a villager to walk through (doors and gates are fine) then the villager won't know what is inside and what's outside. For best results try crafting a village that has less than a 30 meter radius from the registry station to the farthest wall.

Once you have a registry station you can go to the "Add" tab and select a villager type. I recommend recruiting at least one guard, since they can shoot at any errant enemies that find their way inside the base, and have the added bonus of preventing spawns inside the walls. Not to mention they will patrol the village perimeter, indicating that your village is enclosed and safe for other villagers.

A farmer is also a useful villager to have since they can cook, plant crops, harvest them, and store loose items in chests. To try this out you can recruit a farmer at the village registry station and speak with them. The first tab will have a list of recipes you've discovered, and clicking on "order" will create a work order for that recipe. You can then right click the work order to customize minimum/maximum quantities desired.

***Note that the work orders do NOTHING unless they are placed in a chest accessible by the villagers.

Once you have a work order in a chest, a compatible villager in the area, and ingredients either on the ground or in another chest, the villager should start working on the order. It may take a few moments for them to scan through the village storage to find the orders and the ingredients, but once they do they'll get to work. A great starting task is roasting deer meat on a cooking station. A farmer villager will locate raw deer meat, take it to the cooking station, and once it is complete they'll harvest it and store the roasted meat in the same chest as the work order item. Be warned that they can wander away and accidentally let the meat burn into coal, so you will want to keep your work orders in chests close to the stations that they relate to. The villager will do their best to find ingredients anywhere inside your village.

A farmer will also attempt to plant and harvest from cultivated fields for certain work orders. If you create carrot and seed carrot work orders, and place a few carrots in a nearby chest, they'll try planting whatever is available, harvest them, and replant until the quotas in the work order are met. Just watch out for your chests filling up, the villagers like to tidy things by moving loose items into any available chest they can find!

Reviving fallen villagers

In the current version of the game the villagers aren't damageable by players, but they can (and will) be damaged by greydwarfs, skeletons, deathsquitos, and all manner of enemies that sneak past the walls. A villager will try to run away, and a guard will try to fight, but if they fall you can revive them. Simply go to the village registry station and open the "Revive" tab, select the fallen villager, and they will pop back up next to the station itself and continue working.