(This happened several days ago now, but I recorded the data while it was still fresh in both the game and my mind.)

Early spring tornado, year 38:
Started a ways outside one arm of my town, then proceeded to roll right across, killing or destroying:
- 79 people (including a few children who were, for whatever reason, listed as having simply "died", rather than having been "killed by a tornado" like everyone else) -- this was something like 1/3 of my total population at the time;
- 21 buildings (mostly wooden houses, but also including 2 storage barns, a boarding house, a market, a fishing dock, a chapel, a gatherer's hut & a couple stone houses);
- all goods stored in the inventories of those destroyed buildings, or being carried by those people (the market had quite a bit in it [45-65% full], and at least one of the barns might have held a decent amount at the time, too [maybe as much as 30-some percent full]);
- the majority of (full-grown) trees in one max-size apple orchard, and I think some newly-planted field crops in 2-4 farm fields as well (though, since this happened at the beginning of spring, the latter was only a very minor setback, as replanting could occur just as soon as the tornado was gone and I could shuffle around some job allocations to make sure there were enough farmers);
- a fair swath of forest trees and the attendant wild foods and herbs.

This was, without a doubt, the single most destructive disaster I've ever experienced in this game in terms of the loss of both structures/stored goods, and lives. Even counting player-caused starvation die-offs, I'm sure I've never had anywhere near that many people die in such a short time.
One other thing I found remarkable was that, even having lost 14 houses and my sole boarding house in a very short amount of time, by the time the tornado petered out there were no homeless people. But then, I just let my citizens go about their business as they wished while the twister rolled through, only reassigning people to fill vacancies in food production and other crucial jobs as other workers were killed and my pool of general laborers depleted (not giving any thought to where those job sites were located...). If I had had more presence of mind, I would have closed down any businesses in the vicinity of where the tornado seemed to be heading and tried to assign their workers to other workplaces far away (though that would probably have required quite a bit of creative overstaffing). Perhaps if I had done that, enough people would've survived for some to have been homeless for a bit.


Early autumn tornado, year 38:
Started quite a long distance away, but headed straight for an older section of town that hadn't been damaged by the spring tornado, only to lose steam and die out right outside the easternmost edge of the settlement, having destroyed nothing but a swath of trees and other natural life.

This time, I actually did think to shut down work locations I thought might be in danger and shuffle the employees elsewhere in town. So of course this tornado didn't even make it to town. :P



As a footnote, seven years later -- sometime in year 45 -- another tornado touched down and skirted the edge of town, killing an adult and a child in the woods, but doing no other damage (other than to untended forest) as far as I could tell. However, because this happened during one of my late-night play sessions before bed, I was apparently tired enough that I didn't even notice this had occurred until much later in the year, and then only because I realized that the game was in 1x speed for some reason. XD

Three tornadoes in eight years - that's some extreme luck, even if two were more-or-less harmless. (I take it yours is a large map?)

Here's my best guesswork:-

- People who are widowed remarry almost immediately, consolidating households (if there is an available partner within 20 years age difference)
- Children die if they lose both parents, before the second one can provide the child with a step-parent. So you lost a few young families complete.
- Of the 79 dead, it is likely forty or more were married adults, so after remarriages you'd have twenty less households to house, except in so far as some of the younger survivors took their new partners from unmarried adults (or students) rather than from fellow widows and widowers.

Given how thorough I was with remembering & recording all the other data, I kind of wish now that I had recorded the numbers of people who died in each age category during that first disaster; I was just getting kind of bored with clicking through the little event log. I do remember seeing a couple stretches in the log where multiple students died in a row, and the total number of children who died (whether by tornado, or the game simply deciding "No surviving parents + not yet a student = needs to die now") was also not negligible. You're probably right about the majority of deaths having been adults, though I suspect that the student population suffered the greatest proportional loss.

Also, it's a medium map -- my settlement's just kind of spread out (though Uhrichton is likely my most compact town overall, due to the fact that I tried to make farming a more fundamental part of my food strategy from the beginning, for once).

Medium size map - you were fortunate then that the game managed to find enough space for the second and third tornadoes away from where your town had spread to.

If a small map is size 4x4, then a medium one is 6x6 and a large one 8x8. Which ought to mean a medium map having just over half the chance of a tornado that a large one does, and a small map only a quarter chance, but I've no idea if the game takes this into account.

"A fair swath of forest trees and the attendant wild foods and herbs" - and deer.

"Multiple students died in a row" - sounds like a complete school-full. Which fits with something I'm convinced happened in one of my towns - a tornado on the far bank of the main river killed the fishermen on a dock without damaging the dock. So while a tornado makes a clean sweep of most things directly in its path, on the fringe it kills without damaging, when I'd have thought, realistically, it ought to be the other way round.

"Most things in its path" - from what I've seen, pastures lose animals but keep their fences, stockpiles survive with all their contents intact, and roads suffer no damage. Nor do bridges, which is a definite cheat in our favour.

In this game, I would count them as "wild food". ;D Nah, my nearest school was a few blocks away from the nearest edge of the path of destruction; the tornado probably just caught a gaggle or two of students on their way to or from school.

(I also wish that I had taken a screenshot of the destruction while it was still fresh, before I began rebuilding. I just so seldom have any real use for screenshots from Banished that I forget about the built-in feature on the rare occasion that I might want to use it.)