Town economy

Roads and Worn Paths

• Roads cost nothing and appear the moment you release the mouse: no goods are charged and no villager builds them. Draw the links you know you want early, because a road costs you only the ground it crosses.
• Villagers route onto roads because a road is cheaper to walk than open grass, and a main road is cheaper still than a pathway. Connect the storehouse to the woods, the mine and the fields rather than letting everyone cut across open ground.
• Where a road climbs, the ground is terraced into steps instead of a smooth ramp: it is graded only enough to hold the sideways tilt under 8 degrees, and above a 14 degree climb the tool lays 20 cm treads. Let the tool stair a steep route instead of dragging a road straight up the hill.
• Walking wears trails into the ground by itself, a well-worn line cuts the travel cost of that route to about 60 percent of open ground, and the wear fades with a half life of one hour of game time. Let your villagers show you the routes they actually use before you spend a road on one.
• A worn trail never becomes a road on its own, however dark the line looks. When you want the upgrade, draw the road over the busiest worn line.

Storehouses and the Granary

• Wood, ore, planks and metal are physical goods that sit in a completed storehouse or in a pile on the ground, and only a finished building with storage of its own gives them somewhere to go. Put a storehouse up before your first real felling or mining run, or the goods stay in the yard. (In testing.)
• Food works differently: grain, fish, meat, dairy and foraged berries bank into the settlement’s shared larder, which has no capacity at all and never spoils, and a granary only shortens the walk. Build a granary near the fields or the pond for the time it saves, not because it protects the harvest. (In testing.)
• Everything moves on someone’s back, about 100 units at a time, and whatever will not fit in the store spills as a pile beside it. Put storage near the work rather than near the houses, because every load is a real walk.
• Once you own a storehouse, more than 100 units left lying on the ground makes villagers unhappy even though nothing rots, and idle hands tidy piles into a store only when that store has room. Keep room in a storehouse so the yard can be cleared and the mood penalty never starts.
• A bigger town multiplies every storehouse’s capacity: twice at the first growth tier, four times at the second and eight times at the third, and the tier is earned from population, beds, storehouses, workplaces, fields and food days. Grow the town and the storehouses you already built hold more, so read the town centre’s next requirement before adding another.

Woodcutting and Planks

• A tree is worth 70 wood, paid as 35 landed swings at 2 wood each, and a cutter who is interrupted keeps what they have already cut in their arms. Expect the wood to arrive in loads rather than all at once, and do not pull a cutter off a half-cut tree without a reason. (In testing.)
• The axe is a skill: a level 1 woodcutter swings at 0.8 pace and a level 50 master at 1.2, so a master is half again as fast as a beginner. Keep workers in the trade they are good at, because the trade you keep them in is the trade they train.
• Woodcutters and miners stop on their own once the settlement holds 1500 wood or ore, and that ceiling rises with the town’s growth tier, but a villager you assigned by hand or told may not quit keeps working past it. Use the hand drop or the duty order that stops them quitting when you want a stockpile beyond the ceiling. (In testing.)
• The lumber mill never fells a tree: every ten logs through the saw come back as about seven planks, and a worker on the bench doubles how much the saw takes in at once. Feed the yard steadily and keep the plank stack from filling, because a saw with nowhere to put its planks simply stops.
• Until your town reaches the first growth tier nobody takes a mill or smelter job on their own, and until the second nobody carries logs or ore to a workplace yard. At the start, drop a villager on the mill yourself and hand its yard the first logs, then let the town centre’s list take over once the town has earned it.

Fields and Harvests

• A field is worked a row at a time, with 3 landed swings to till one row segment and 15 to reap a row, and a row that survives the season yields between 33 and 57 grain. Treat a field as a queue of rows and give it enough farmers to keep the queue moving.
• A crop needs 9 days to ripen and a season lasts 9 days, and wheat grows in spring, summer and fall but not winter. Sow as early in a season as the ground is ready, and count a late fall sowing as lost.
• Every plant rolls to die each day, from a 15 percent chance on the worst ground down to half a percent on the best, which over the 9 days leaves roughly a quarter of the row standing at worst and nearly all of it at best. Fertility and the planting farmer’s skill both matter, so put a skilled farmer on poor ground instead of a novice.
• Rain waters the fields whenever it falls hard enough, and one watered day lifts that day’s growth about a third of the way toward a perfect day, helping poor ground most and staying good for 3 days. Do not spend the water miracle on rich ground in a wet season, but a pour on a dry field in a dry spell earns its keep.
• Farmers volunteer to a field only up to 3 at a time, but a farmer you drop on a row yourself ignores that cap and never gives the trade up. For a harvest you cannot afford to lose, put extra hands on the field with the god hand. (In testing.)

Mines, Smelters and Industry

• A mine holds a crew of up to 4 miners, each 40 second shift pays 5 ore into the mine cart, and the cart holds 13 before anyone pushes it out to the pile. Staff a mine fully and watch the cart, because the ore only reaches your storehouse once it has been tipped.
• Every paid shift rolls for a cave-in before it pays, the risk climbs as the mine is worked out, and an unshored mine is four times as dangerous. The timber is worth it, because 5 wood buys 10 shored shifts.
• A cave-in pays nothing, can kill the miner and shuts the mine for 750 seconds, about half a game day, and a demolished mine leaves a scar on the ground. Keep a second deposit in mind so one collapse does not stop your building programme.
• The smelter turns every ten ore into about seven metal and loses the rest to the slag, and it burns wood from its own fuel bay with each beat. Keep a woodcutter on the fuel row and a miner on the ore row, or the furnace goes cold and says so on its card.
• After the Joined Furnace Works research you can pipe silos to a smelter, up to 4 smelters and 4 silos in one works, with each pipe run limited to 12 m, and the network moves 4 units a second and lifts the works rate by a fifth, or a quarter with Reinforced Couplings. Group the furnace and its silos together before you lay pipe, because a run that is too long is refused.

Markets and Household Supplies

• A new market makes its first stall a food stall, its second a firewood stall and every stall after that a goods stall, and no stall does anything without a keeper. Turn hiring on for the stalls you want staffed, or drop a villager on a free stall yourself.
• Food on a food stall is only set aside from the settlement’s larder, never carried there, while firewood and goods are drawn out of your wood and goods stock. Use the market to get food into homes far from the granary, and do not expect a food stall to store anything for you.
• A home runs one errand at a time in a fixed order, food first, then fuel, then a good, and it buys at a stall in reach or walks to the nearest storehouse or granary when no stall sells what it wants. Put the market within its reach of the houses, or they will keep walking past it.
• A home burns half a unit of wood per resident each day and four times that in winter, and a home left cold for more than 2 days starts losing appeal. Have firewood in reach of the houses before the first winter, at a stall or in a storehouse.
• Supplying a home from a stall, keeping more than one kind of food in its pantry and having a market in reach each add appeal, while a home out of reach of a market its settlement owns loses some. Spread markets through the housing instead of stacking every stall in one square.

Ponds and Fishermen In testing

• Ponds are placed once when a new game begins and are never re-sited when you load, and their carp grow back once a day in spring and summer only. Fish your ponds hard in the warm seasons and expect winter to give nothing.
• A pond can never be fished below a quarter of its capacity, and a fisherman who finds it at that reserve stands down rather than emptying it. Treat the last quarter as the seed stock that keeps the pond worth visiting next year.
• A fisherman fills a basket of 5 carp and each carp is worth 2 food, so a full trip lands 10 food. Give them a pond with a short walk to storage and let the basket fill rather than pulling them off it.
• Fishing is a skill that speeds the bite from about a third pace at level 1 to full pace at level 50, and a fisherman is assigned either by dropping them on a pond bank or by the town centre’s list for a pond with fish to give. Keep one good worker on a pond rather than several, because a pond has only a handful of bank spots.
• Fish is eaten after grain and before dairy and meat, and foraged berries are eaten before everything else in the larder. If you want the fish to last, keep grain and flour in store, and if you want the berries used, they will be used first anyway.

Research, Cisterns and Aqueducts In testing

• Research happens at a completed research court, one project at a time with a queue of three, and the project’s materials must be delivered before any hours are earned; one researcher works at half rate and a second one at the court doubles it. Queue the projects you can pay for and put two researchers on the court.
• The discoveries unlock real buildings: water powered milling opens the watermill, joined furnace works opens the silos and their pipes, civil architecture opens the urban houses and the Domus, and public waterworks opens the spring intake, the aqueduct, the baths and the Nymphaeum. Check the research list before you plan a district, because the card does not appear until the discovery is done.
• A cistern’s output comes from the ground beneath it: shallower water is better, a thin aquifer at the edge of the water yields about half of a basin core, and a shaft at the very limit of its reach gives a quarter of one at the surface, with a perfect site authored at 60 water a day. Survey the underground water overlay before you place one, because a cistern on poor ground quietly underperforms.
• Every settlement drinks 1 water per living villager each day, takes the whole day’s draw or none of it, and can only bank 3 days of what its cisterns make, so a village with no cistern always reads as short. Watch the water meter on the town centre’s stores page, and remember that nobody suffers yet, because no villager has a thirst.
• An aqueduct is drawn with the wall tool from a finished spring intake and only ever runs downhill, and it feeds a building whose tap is within its own reach or inside the 60 m circle at a fed open end. Finish the intake first, draw from high to low, and read the building’s card for the fed or dry line, since today only the watermill asks for water.