This guide is a WIP. It will change in form before I am done with it, but for now it remains incomplete, sometimes inaccurate and too detailed for casual readers. it has also been noted that there are many typos. Don't try to read the whole guide; skip to the sections that intrest you (its a long guide)

(on WIP: note that I've not been working with it much of late. It's still incomplete in some respects, but it's a stretch to call it a WIP anymore.)

I do not concider myself an expert, but have played the game through and view writeing a guide as a good way to explore what new directions I can take the game in, as well as reminding myself of which tactics I've used and wether they worked.

it's also a good way to do something constructive for the community while my townies rest and recover happiness ;)

Whatever stage of the game you're at, I hope this guide is of some value to you; Towns is both a confuseing game to learn and a trickey game to truely master. Though it takes little "skill" as far as reactions or timeing, it dose take planning and foresight to keep your town healthy and happy, as well as an understanding of the game mechanics (and bugs).

Towns is currently in development, so don't be supprised if some aspects of this guide become obsolite as the game changes to resolve issues, add new content and tweek game systems. I will try to keep it current as best I can, but with the volume I attempt to cover, Some aspects may still contain inaccuracies even after I modify them.

I should note that although I did not coppy paste any information from it, much of the basic information I use eas first learned at http://towns.gamepedia.com/Towns_Wiki . This site taught me a lot of what I know about towns, so I apoligize if I appear to mimic it in some places.

I have since learned from a frum-goer taht much of the game data is avaliable to be read in the .xml files in the towns game folder. the format is difficult to interpet for me at times, but a lot of good information can be found there.

This is some info on the basic menus, spesifically the right, left and bottom menus.

There are three small colored buttons on the left, right and bottom of the screen which open into a menu when you mouse over them and can be locked open by clicking on the button:

Note: some of these pictures are obsolite.


(all three menus, expanded)

They change to a brighter shade of their unique color when locked open.

is what I call the lefthand button.

In it, you can find the production options for:

• food
• weapons
• armor
• utilities ("tools")
• flowers
• vanity hats
• skins
• dyes
• wood auto-harvest
• containers ("unlocked" version of the containers)
• Burner item destruction menu

Most tasks in this menu require a utility workbench, planted food or farm animals from the "construction" menu on the righthand side to already be set up before production is possiable.

For each item in this menu, you will find a picture of the item with a set of +- buttons to its left and right. The lefthand set creates that many items one time and the righthand set acts as a fill line; "keep produceing untill you have x items" ("autoproduction") . At present, the " - " button on the lefthand side is not always effective at reduceing the lefthand production number.

Unlike the other sub-menus the burner menu queues items for destruction if you have the burner utility avaliable. Useing the righthand set in burner sets a maximum number of items of that type held before the burner will be used to destroy items. Be carefull to have wood and bone production options lower than the burner maximum. Only wood, mud and bones can be destroyed at a burner at present. Setting the righthand number for an item to "0" disables burning that item.

shift-clicking will increce/decrece these numbers by 5 instead of 1.

Ctrl-clicking will increce/decrece these numbers by 100.

Clicking both right and left mouse at the same time can help increce speed if needed.


(example of the righthand/lefthand +- buttons. This is a sub-menu for planted food)

Is my name for the righthand menu; items created in this menu are placed in a selected area rather than dropped on the ground near cafting tables.

(Picture is obsolite) In it, you can find:

• wall blocks
• Fruit trees and other usefull plants
• doors
• utility workbenches that allow for item construction
• stair utilities
• trap utilities
• burner
• fishing set utility (must be placed within 1 space of water)
• well utility (for bucket of water; must be placed within 4 spaces of water)
• medicine cabnet (increces hp regen at hospitals)
• deccoritive items that improve happiness
• furniture
• containers (fixed)
• farms/mineshafts that produce resourses while enabled
• Terraforming

Note that some items under walls can now block water's movement as of v10, but others cannot, and only one door (flood gate) can block water currently. Iron bars (a kind of wall under decorative walls) will survive water passing through it without blocking its movements while still being solid to townies and monsters. Flood gates can be opened to allow water through or closed to block its passage by right clicking on the door.

is my name for the bottom menu. (note: this is not the menu for actual terraforming; that's in "construction")



In it, you can:

• till ground for planting (planting is assigned from the righthand menu),
• harvest plants
• cancel orders
• mine
• dig
• chop trees
• destroy underbrush
• mass-delete scaffolds
• Assign stockpiles and zones.
  
  
  Zones
  I'll explain zones in additional detail, because they are not all intuitive. Note that many workbenches and some decorations can only be placed in a spesific zone.
  
  
  
  • carpentry: with workbenches, allows construction of wood and bone objects as well as construction of a mason's bench.
  • masonry: allows placement of a mason's bench, which allows the construction of stone items and anvils.
  • Bakery, with workbenches, produces all the advanced foods that require flour. Flour is ground from wheat at a mill utility.
  • dineing room; provides a gathering place for eating food. Townies can eat without a dineing zone. Having a chair in this area is supposed to increce happiness bonous from eating.
  • forge: with utilities allows construction of iron objects and advanced weapons and armor.
  • Personal room: provides a place for townies to sleep and having more rooms than townies will allow more immigrents to come if happiness is high enough. If you have no townies, you cannot get more townies.
  • Kitchen: with workbenches, allows construction of advanced foods that don't require flour.
  • Hospital: allows townies to recover hp (they will not heal over time on thier own). Haveing a medicine cabnett and bed is said to speed recovery.
  • Atelier: with workbenches, allows production of dyes, hides and vanity items.
  • Arena: Allows placement of colored badgers; diffrently colored badgers will fight each other. Colored badgers are under decorations in the righthand menu; they consume a live badger to craft and haveing one in the arena/balcony area is supposed to grant a happiness bonous to onlookers. Bait from the same menu as the colored badgers will draw badgers back to the arena if they stray too far.
  • Balcony: must be placed next to an arena and on the same layer as an arena. Townies and heroes will idle here to watch the goings-on at the arena.
  • Tavern: required before heroes will come; provides a place for heroes to eat.
  • Tavern room: Provides a place for heroes to sleep. Heroes will require one room per hero. (barbarians used to not require their own room, but I think they require one now?) Heroes will not come if you have less than 10 townies, and only a handfull will come at first. Hereoes have special conditions before they will arive, which now includes (for some) that a spesific decoration or set of decorations must be in their tavern room (if I read correctly).
  • Marketplace: allows merchents to come; townies will also idle here.
  stockpiles allow you to gather materials and objects to the defined areas (or remove materials from those areas, if the material is disabled). To manage stockpiles (enable/disable materials) right click on the stockpile. You can also set all new stockpiles and containers to have all items disabled by default under options.
  

(note that this picture is obsolite, as it dose not display a hauling depth top-right of the panel)

The citizen pannel is a round button at the top of the screen left of time/date and soldier menu with a bearded face on it.

This menu allows you to equip townies or convert them into soldiers, assign them spesific tasks and allows you to more easily view and compare thier stats. You can also click the townie's icon to jump to that civilian. The menu button itself displays the number of townies, avarage happiness and happiness needed for new immigrents to come. The arrows at it's edges let you cycle through townies. You can equip or auto-equip townies from this menu. Auto-equipping and equipping may lead townies into dangerous areas if the selected gear is somewhere perilous (which can be hard to check).

You can also set the hauling depth for all townies in the top-right of the unassigned townies group (the default group). This will instruct townies to not go below the designated layer for hauling or auto-equipping tasks. Menus for equipping townies will tell you if an item is below hauling depth. In past versions, there was an issue with townies ignoring hauling depth when crafting, but I think patchnotes said this issue has been fixed.




if you click the hammer button (right of the townie's eqiupment buttons, between the assign to soldier and assign to group buttons) you'll be shown a list of tasks;

• bakeing and cooking
  
• Gathering and harvesting'
  
• mine and dig
  
• tilling and chopping
  
• item construction
  
• wall construction
  
• Butchering
  
• Haul
  
• buildings (construction of farms and mineshafts)
  
• Trading (hauling to trader)
  
• Feeding animals (ALWAYS DISABLE!)

for the most part, townies are pretty good at getting things done on thier own; there's no need to divide them into small groups to do spesific tasks. In a few cases, however, it can be helpfull;

• tasks, like mining and digging, that are far away from your town can be done far more efficently by townies that are focousing only on that task as less of them will be called away to make the other townies a lunch in the middle of the mineing project
  
• tasks that you do not want performed, such as feeding of animals if you're cruel like me, can be disabled on townies to prevent that task getting done. (Feeding animals with farms enabled will rapidly exhaust your town as the animal population grows.)
  
• tasks that are dangerous, such as hauling (which can get townies eaten by monsters) can be disabled (when the map and current dungeon layer are not safe.)
  
• if you want townies to rest, allow only food gathering and food preperation tasks to be performed for awhile.

be very carefull to always have most of your townies able to produce food when assigning tasks (to prevent starvation)




Townie groups can be seen right of the scrollbar in the civillian pannel. The currently selected group is displayed as red and any other groups with townies in them will be displayed as green. a group your mouse is hovering over will also show up as red and display the number of townies in that group

The townies in a group will have thier previous tasks wiped and perform the group's tasks instead; the group's tasks can be set at the top of the group menu (the hammer and pick button).
it is not nesissary to assign townies to groups, but it can allow you to set tasks for many townies at the same time, saveing a little time when you want to adjust tasks for many townies at once.

The unassigned townies group will allow townies to have individaul jobs.

is found left of the time/date at the top of the screen. It depicts a townie with an iron helm and allows you to assign tasks to soldiers. It also displays the total number of soldiers. the arrows at the right and left edges of it allow you to cycle through soldiers.
A soldier's level will also be displayed.



Soldiers cannot perform the tasks from the other major menus. You can assign them to:

• guard, (default) which tells them to rush to the defence of any townies who are under attack anywhere in the overmap and dungeon (wether or not the soldier was sleeping/eating)
• patroll task which allows you to set and remove patroll points for them (under the right-click menu) which they will go to in the order they were placed.
• supervise task which allows them to give a short burst of additional productivity and speed to another townie at the cost of happiness. The supervisors often have a difficult time catching up to the townies they are targeting, however.
• add soldier to group button allows soldiers to be assigned to a baraccks and given a single group task.

Soldiers in a group will forget previous soldier tasks and perform the group's task, assigniable at the top of the group menu. The groups can be acessed at the right of the scrollbar in the soldier pannel; a green group icon is a group with soldiers in it and a red icon is the currently viewed group. The topmost icon is unassigned soldiers. a group your mouse is hovering over will also show as red and display the number of townies in that soldier group.

Townies can be converted to soldiers from the civillian pannel.

You can also jump to a soldier by clicking thier immage or else equip them from these menus.

soldiers will remember thier civillian job(s), and will perform that/those job(s) when are converted back to a civillian.

Townie soldiers gain experiance over time; levels and experience will be wiped if they are returned to civillian tasks! Keeping a small group of dedicated soldiers will allow them to level up much like heroes do.

Also of note, soldiers cannot gain happiness and do not count towords the towwn's avarage happiness. When converted back, they will have zero happiness (or at least, I believe this is the case)

is a button at the top of the screen right of the hero menu with an immage of a man wearing a green fethered cap. If a merchent is in town, it will be hilighted with a red outline. If a merchent is in your marketplace (a zone required for merchents to show up) opening this menu will allow you to trade with that merchent for goods. Current gold is displayed above time/date.



the items and gold on the left of the tradeing screen belong to the trader. The items and gold to the right belong to your town. Be carefull; those items could be anywhere on the overmap or somewhere in the dungeon. Selling items without knowing where they are can potentially get townies killed by monsters.

click an item to buy or sell it.

Click an item that is already assigned to be bought or sold to reduce the number you want to buy or sell.

The gold ammount in the middle is the diffrence between the item value. Its from the trader's perspective: A negitive number means you will be gaining gold and a black number means you will be spending gold.

Bear in mind, the merchent and you both have finite gold, and a trade will be impossiable if it requires either party to spend more than they have.

Holding shift will allow you to trade in incraments of 10, pressing ctrl will allow you to trade in incriments of 100, and you can further speed up the process by clicking both right and left mouse at the same time.

The stock panel is a picture of a barrel under time/date at top of the screen lists all currently avaliable items by type. Note that this list includes all items, wheher or not they are restricted for hauling and whether or not they are safe to collect. I am not sure whether it checks if they are acessiable to your townies before listing them. The hotkey to acess this pannel is f2.

These tabs are fairly easy to grasp and get even more intuitive once you get used to which containers store which items. The only odd placement I can think of is fruit being counted as a prepared food.

some items, such as the badger den, do not seem to be implimented in the current build.


The priorities panel allows you to set which tasks you feel should be done first, and which can wait. Tasks at the top of the list wll take priority over tasks at the bottom of the list. Adjust the order by clicking the arrow next to the icon.

Townies will try to perform the prioritized tasks first. as a rule, it's best to keep your food production priorities (gathering, cooking, butchering) at the top of the list to ensure townies will be makeing enough food; townies will starve themselves if they have too many tasks to do that are prioritized higher than food.

the tasks are:

• bakeing and cooking
  
• Gathering and harvesting'
  
• mine and dig
  
• tilling and chopping
  
• item construction
  
• wall construction
  
• Butchering
  
• Haul
  
• buildings (construction of farms and mineshafts)
  
• Tradeing (hauling to trader)
  
• feeding animals

The hotkey for this menu is F3



the announcements logs in the top left corner open a log that tells you what events have happened recently that relate to the button's 'sphere'. You can see the most recent events by mouseing over the panel's icon without opening it, or open it to see more events and/or scroll up. You may wish to pause the game before scrolling up, as new events being announced will reset the menu to the bottom of the list.

I will list the logs and their functions from left to right:

• Announcements log covers messages on a global scale, and includes
  • merchent messages,
  • immigrents-can't-reach-your-town messages
  • unable to construct _ messages
  • siege messages
  • townie deaths
  • immigrants arrived!
  • starveing animals
  • (#) messages
• Combat log covers combat messages for townies;
  • sucessfull attacks (dealt or recived) for any liveing
  • death messages for any liveing townie or monster
  • buffs
  • missed attacks
  • direct damage (critical strike effect or some trap effects)
  • probably more as well.
• Hero log which covers the same things as combat log, but restricted to heroes.
  
  
• System log, which covers pauseing and changes in the speed setting and may tell you the game version in some cases.
  
  
  hero menu
  
  
  The hero menu is a round button with an elvish hero's face at the top of the screen just right of time/date, and allows you to see your hero's stats, equipment and allows you to jump to a hero by clicking on thier picture. The button also allows you to see how many heroes you have and cycle through them. You cannot manually equip heros or give them any tasks currently. They will equip items they can see that are not in stockpiles or containers when they idle or when looking arround. You can adjust the lowest layer heroes will explore in this menu as well.
  
  
  "settings menu" or main menu
  is a small gear button by the minimap in the top-right corner of the screen. It can be opened by pressing esc and displays the main menu.
  
  
  right click menu
  
  The right-click menu can do many tasks, depending on the object(s) and terrain selected:
  • destroy objects that are not naturaully spawning terrain tiles
  • till or un-till
  • assign patroll points
  • add or remove water or lava
  • gather
  • chop
  • cut
  • dig
  • mine
  • equip townies or change wether or not they are a soldier
  • lock or unlock or open doors (other than the decorative archways and shrubbery door)
  • delete or expand assigned zones
  • open the manage container or stockpile menu assign scaffolds to be deleted
  • enable or disable farms and mineshafts
  • "unlock" objects, allowing them to be moved to a diffrent location.
  • Rotate objects to change which way the immage is faceing.
  • view a townie's current task type
  If you want to interact with any world object but are unsure how, right clicking will most likely have the option you need under it, but the tools from other menus tend to be better for performing functions on mass.
  
  
  Event indicator
  
  
  
  Shows currently active events. Reffer to my "events" section. Note that your game folder has an ".xml" file for events which is what I based my events section off of.
  
  
  also note the grid on/off, flatten blocks, flatten blocks near mouse, 3d mouse, pause, speed + or - and level + or - buttons arround the minimap.

What was once the 3d mouse feature has been changed to the default (it will start out toggled on.) It can select the top of any visiable block, reguardless of layer, but will not detect the sides or interior of any blocks and cannot place orders or blocks or objects "in the air" effectively. This mouse will allow you to manage your overmap effectively from above, which is convinient. It is inadaquate for some tasks, such as placeing a hanging lamp on the side of a wall at wall higher than ground level or unlocking some placements of wall blocks. Note theat the picture has the map layer at +6 and can still manipulate bones on the ground.


The 2d mouse is a tool for detailed work, and gives you better controll than the 3d mouse. It can only interact with the currently viewed layer, allowing you to more easily place wall blocks adjacent to each other in the air, mine, dig, and allows you to select blocks on the same layer with the right-click menu.



Which mouse you are useing can be toggled by pressing the "m" hotkey or clicking the "3d mouse" icon near the minimap.

You can change the viewed layer by using the scroll wheel or the arrow icons near the minimap or by pressing the hotkey "q" for up or "x" for down (you might concider changeing these hotkeys so they will be adjacent to eah other.)

These are perhaps the most critical ponts to understand;


Townies will wander far and into dangerous areas to gather items into containers or to craft useing scattered materials. Have a plan for how to controll items so that townies only gather them when you want them to, and reduce time spent gathering "wild" resourses when you're just starting. Be aware of where objects are before hauling or crafting.

You can use the haul/equip depth adjuster in the civillian pannel to help restrict hauling below the assigned depth. There have been issues with the haul-depth being ignored for some tasks in previous builds, but the issue should be resolved if I read the patchnotes correctly.


Scaffolds are free, and can help prevent townies from getting stuck and dieing to starvation. Always watch for townies that are stranded, especially right after giveing a set of construction orders.

Keep scaffolds level with the current construction and be concious of any seperated pieces of wall townies might not be able to acess your scaffold from. Scaffolds can be found in most wall construction menus under the righthand menu. When you are done with them you can delete or destroy them in the right-click menu. When useing the delete (as opposed to destroy) option, delete the furthest scaffolds first or townies may get stuck. Use the 2d mouse to place scaffolds above ground level.

Scaffolds will deteriorate on their own over time, so don't rely on them in the long-term!


and the dungeon near the center of the map. Townies are smarter than they were at release, but starvation has been problematic before now in the deep dungeon, and in any case it cuts down on hauling time haveing your main acess point in the map center. If you must build your town near a corner, concider haveing dungeon acess be central; it reduces travel time in the often maze-like underground.

Remember to defend your dungeon entrance and be aware that sieges can spawn underground.


Wether you're a trap master or a player who prefers a concentration of townie force, channeling monsters can help you gain an advantage and makeing good use of locked doors can allow you to easially acess the overmap and any trap-dropped loot afterwards.


Storeing items in containers can help prevent starvation: Townies can often starve when trying to craft items if the needed materials scattered in the deep recesses of the dungeon.

grass map is a good place to start. It spawns a small jungle area and the rest of the map is grassland (naturaully). It is extremely high-resourse, but has a few things you won't be able to farm.


Threats: The grass map's strongest threats are hidden monsters; you won't be able to detect them untill they're killing your townies. They are werepigs and tree keepers. Tree keepers attack when you attempt to cut them down.

You should also be leery of starting too close to the jungle patch, as it usaully spawns sevral small monsters. In time, these monsters will wander near your town, so try to have some equipment avaliable.

Carniverous plants: an enemy 'trap' that kills animals and deals some dammage to townies when they step on it. can be gathered and re-planted to serve as a defence for your town (and will then be harmless to your townies and animals).

Resourses:

• pig
• cow
• sheep
• Skootenbeeton (jungle chicken)
• wheat
• flowers
• apples
• pears
• carniverous plants
• Palm trees
• trees
• fir trees
• mushroom bushes
• bananna
• radish
• jungle mushroom

desert maps are much lower in resourses than most other maps, and present a moderate monster challange in the early-game. Has a unique material most players have to buy from merchents (snake's teeth) which provides an instant weapon if you have some wood on the ground to combine it with.



Threats: The Snakecrabs in the desert are moderate in number and fairly strong.

Resourses:

• Chickens,
• unifallow (desert cow),
• cactus fruit,
• palm trees.
• snake teeth (from monsters)

all resourses and monster types. Mixed map allows you to use gather all resourse types, but also spawns all monster types, which can make the map very dangerous at first.

same as mixed, but snow tends to be on hilltops and little or no sand spawns.



Jungle maps have limited resourses and many smaller monsters roam in it. It can be a difficault map to play at first.



Threats: Frogs, toads, brownies and batriders. Jungle mobs are usaully weak, but are also many in number.

Resourses:

• Bananna,
• blue raddish,
• (jungle tree bush),
• Skootenbeeten (Jungle chicken),
• jungle mushroom,
• jungle tree.

Snow maps are challangeing thanks to wandering yetties, who are hard to bring down with no gear. It has more resourses than most maps, the exception being that it is the only map without sand (for possiable cactus fruit).



Threats: sevral tough, scattered, heavy-hitting yetties.

Resourses:

• pigs,
• sheep?
• cows,
• chicken,
• wheat,
• flowers,
• tree,
• fir tree,
• snow tree,
• snowcherry,
• badgers,
• cave mushroom.
• Snoat (Snow goat)
• bucket of snow / bucket of water

Buried maps are more difficult, but may provide some opportunities for some really advanced loot. There are a couple things you will want to know about burried maps before decideing wether or not to use them in your game.

1) "use local buried towns:" If you have not played towns before or have not burried one of your own towns yet, this is likely a non-option, Local buried maps takes one of your old maps and buries the buildings from it in the newly generated dungeon when you start a new map. You have to go into options while playing a map and select "bury the town" and then start a new game and select "use local buried towns." note that the selected towns are random; you cannot select a town from your list of towns to place in your dungeon





2) "load a buried town from townsmods.net" You might get an elaborate supercastle buried in your newly generated dungeon, or you might get a random campfire somewhere and nothing else. These maps Are made by other players who play towns. If you are new, this is your pick if you want to play with a town buried in the dungeon, but there are sevral aspects of buried towns that make it an option best left to more advanced players (which I'll discuss later in this section.) I am not sure how or if these maps are screened.

3) you can also opt not to use buried towns. I would reccomend this option for new players (unless you're the kind of person who likes starting other video games on "impossiable" difficulty)

[h]Challanges with buried maps[/h1]

Traps: one kind of door may turn into a trapped door, and do minor damage and stunning to townies and heroes. Its not a big deal.

Additional monsters: Some objects generate monsters when buried. Tombs will spawn various kinds of undead, bone beds will spawn ghosts, and some kitchen utilities are supposed to spawn ogres. In short, expect additional monsters that may not scale to the dungeon layer they are placed on.

Ladders are bad: If the buried town has tall buildings with staircases in them, you might want to set your hero explore and townie haul depths high until the heroes have some levels on them, and until you're ready for more advanced layers of the dungeon. Those buildings will fast-track your exploration of the dungeon otherwise, and make it extremely difficult to survive.

Troll towns
Idk how well they scereen for these on TownsMods.net (or IF they screen for these) but some players may find it amusing to make a town that is designed to spawn massive amounts of advanced monsters on the first layer of the dungeon. I know I love the idea of making such a town design myself. If you run into such a town, you may need to ignore the dungeon in favor of building up resourses from merchents until your townies can handle the advanced monsters with a group of over-equipped soldiers. You could also start over, and hope for a kinder map.

Wispering death in buried maps? This is not a carefuly researched point, but:

• An event called wisperdeath spawns zombies at tombs from time to time after population 65 is reached
• tombs are an item that can spawn in buried maps, and will often be found deep in the dungeon where layer 1 of the buried town would have been on their map.
• between these two, zombie hordes deep underground are a possability, especialy if you take your time reaching the lower layers.

I do not know if zombies will spawn in the unexplored regions, but it seemed worth bringing it up.

Zero loot
some town designs are so cluttered that it is impossiable to get any loot from monsters because of spammed roads, cluttered workshops, massive container-spammed storeage areas, ect. This is a common issue in residential areas that have roads lineing every hallway and in the areas near workshops in larger towns.

The place you start building your town at will often evolve into your town center, so take some time and look arround the map before you decide where to start any construction projects. Take into account how central the start point is, how much space is readially avaliable, and what resourses are avaliable. If you spot coal or iron, for example, in a 2x2 block or more on the surface, you may concider building arround it. You may also wish to take terrain types, such as jungle avaliability on grass maps, into account (but starting near jungle is somewhat dangerous!) Some players reroll maps untill they get one with resourses they like.

Hills can allow for easy construction of large buildings (by serveing as part of the building) as well makeing layered farms possiable.

Once you have selected a start point, move your townies to it. This can be done by selecting a small zone to chop wood from or gather fruit from or by assigning them to soldiers and setting them to patroll to a fixed point (be sure to change them back when they arrive.) Be carefull of monsters on the way in, but you most likely will not loose townies this way if they all move as a group and swarm down attackers.

You may also want to refrence the "rush" guide here on steam at this point, which lays out an agressive monster-mashing strategy for start of game.

You should start building some aspects of your town right away, but labor intensive projects, such as full-blown construction of buildings or setting up siege defences, can wait until the map is a little safer and your town has a few more workers. In my opinion the first zone you should build is a hospital, to take care of incidental dammage. The second is the marketplace. Then you'll want to start crafting the basic utilities so that your town can begin construction in ernest.

To plant food, you will need tilled ground. Look at the ground under the plant you want to grow food from and see what kind of soil is under it, and till similar terrain. Only bamboo and sugarcain can grow on more than one type of soil. (plant bamboo and sugarcane close to the water (within 2 spaces) on grass or jungle terrain.)

you can find the command to till under the bottom menu. Holding shift will allow you to lay down multiple zones to be tilled without haveing to re-select. leave an empty row between every other row of fruit trees, as they sometimes drop bonous fruit on the ground, and also it makes it easier for townies to drop gathered food if there's a space right next to the tree. Note that some fruit will rot eventaully if not stored in a prepared food barrel.

To plant food, you will need to have some of that type of food first. The gathering tool is under the bottomhand menu. If no food of that type is avaliable, a merchent may eventaully be able to sell you some, but you will need a diffrent kind of food in the mean-time.

Once you have the food, give the order to plant the food under planting in the righthand menu. Be sure to order the planting on tilled ground and that it is the right kind of tilled ground for that plant.

To harvest the planted food automatically, go to the lefthand menu under food>gathering>fruit and click the up arrow right of the fruit a few times.

You may also want to place animal farms. Be mindfull that animals will be fed unless you have disabled animal feeding on all townies. Having animals to feed may make planting crops more difficult.

You can find animal farms under the righthand menu; they will produce animals from time to time when enabled. You will need to have that kind of animal avaliable on your map in order to build an animal farm. you can buy animals in a cage and right click them to release them if you don't have one on your map.

Once the farm is up and animals are being produced, you may wish to pen them in as they can cause townies to wander into monsters in an effort to feed them. (monsters ignore farm animals, except for the theft-type monsters which spawn in some sieges). Also, wandering farm animals are harder to feed, and townies will exhaust themselves attempting to do so.

The best way to pen animals in is to build a farm fences (under wall construction>wood walls in the righthand menu) and place a door (under furniture in the righthand menu) to allow townies to come in without letting farm animals out. The reason farm fences work so well is that nothing can stand on top of them; most other walls will have to be 2 blocks high to block animal movements.

Most animals need wheat, but a unifallow eats cactus fruit and skootenbeeten eats blue raddish. If you do not feed animals, they will die (and drop bones; a valuiable resourse in the early game.) Be sure to have a sizeiable wheat (or cactus for unifallow, ect) farm before placeing animal farms.

Animal populations will continue to grow steadily until, before you know it, Your townies are constantly working to feed them and never have any time to rest. Here's some ideas on how to controll their populations:

1) disable animal farms one by one (by right-clicking them) until you are eating them faster than they are being produced. This is the most straightforeward way, but takes some trial and error.

2) place damageing traps (anything other than spike or carniverous plant, in this case) to cull excess animals and reduce buildup.

3) don't feed them! Animals will stick around for awhile after spawning without needing food. And if they die of starvation, it's because you weren't needing them for food. This can cause a lot of bone spam, which is a mixed blessing. It also tends to spam the leftmost message window with "_ has starved" and spam the death sound, which is pretty annoying.

To eliminate bone spam, pack the animal farms close and place the farm fences direcly adjacent to the farms. Fill in any remaining spaces with deccorations or roads so the animal pen won't have any space to drop bones.

4) Fixed population: wait untill you have "x" animals and then shut all farms off. Do not kill them, even for food. This can be a good plan for handleing a chicken farm, if all you wanted was a few eggs for omletts. I have not tested this concept for efficency, but it takes a chicken slightly longer to produce an egg or milk than to die of starvation.

5) limited feeding workers: You will always have sevral townies with 0 happiness this way. Assign most townies to group 1 and disable farm feeding for that group. Leave the rest at default and they will feed the animals. This way, only a part of your town will be exhausted and angry.

6) limit avaliable animal food: This is a good way to controll animal populations automaticaly if you don't need the animal feed for other kinds of cooking.


Bear in mind that townies may get attacked while trying to gather wild food; A few planted food items will produce enough food over time to fill out a designated farmland as long as you keep harvesting them. You can auto-harvest food by clicking the + right of the food's icon in the lefthand menu.

once you have reliable food, nothing is stopping you from bringing heros into town, which can help clear the remaining over-map. If you place a tavern & Tavern room and still have your starting population, and know what furniture and deccorations to put in those hero's rooms, heroes will begin to appear. (not many tavern rooms will be needed)

carniverous plants can cause raw meat to drop as it kills wild animals. You can right-click to delete or gather carniverous plants. If you have a steady supply of most foods, your townies will not choose to eat raw meat. The raw meat may lure townies into dangerous areas to haul or eat it.

You might also want to stop hauling raw meat or bones to containers if it becomes a problem.

Carniverous plants are one of the more usefull traps in the game; To set them, gather them and place them useing utities>traps on the righthand menu. Once set, they can only be destroyed, not gathered again. There is a limited supply of these plants. They are the only trap that will not kill animals (after being replanted). your traps will not harm townies and will reset without townies needing to interact with them.

Beware evil badgers from theft sieges! They will steal your food you have gathered and are difficult to stop. Spike traps at a choke point can help your townies catch up to them and take them down.

Chopping trees is simple enough; there's a chopping tool in the bottom menu that looks like an axe. This will do for immidiate needs, but having a planted tree farm is desireiable in the long-term.


To plant trees you will need to till ground appropriate to the kind of tree; look at the ground under the tree and till that kind of soil. Press 6 or acess the bottom menu to till.

Once the ground is tilled, tell townies to plant trees useing the righthand menu under planting.

Townies will gather bushes untill the designated area is planted. Try not to gather more than a good twenty trees at first, as this may cause townies to wander further and further looking for bushes as they deplete local resourses, risking monster encounters. Also, be sure some of that kind of tree is growing locally.

Planted non-fruit trees can be auto-harvested from the lefthand menu under materials; the advantage is that they regrow whenever you chop them down. If you find you need to remove a section of planted trees, you can chop them all down and find the "cut" command in the bottom menu to destroy the bushes. Then you'll need to untill the ground in the right-click menu before anything other than plants can be placed there.

Leaving a row between columns of trees on large lots will cut down on time taken to drop the wood. 2 rows of trees and an empty row works pretty well.

You can also grow then cut down fruit trees, but this is not an ideal way to get wood. fruit trees cannot be cut with the chop command while bearing fruit, will not regrow and cannot be auto-harvested. Once cut down you can re-plant the area to grow new fruit trees.


hidden monster; tree keeper

Tree keeper will spawn randomly at the start of the game, acting the part of an ordinary tree. Once a townie approaches the tree to chop it, it will transform into a fairly strong monster capiable of destroying isolated unequipped townies. Tree keeper spawns on grass. Hidden monsters will only spawn on grass terrain where there are trees or, in the werepig's case, wild pigs.

to help reduce encounters, do not clearcut large sections of trees; Use a small woodlot to produce wood over time, and harvest a few nearby trees.

when a tree keeper is encountered, as is inevitiable in the long-term on grass maps, quickly set townies to soldiers and leave them as the default guard task; they will move to help the attacked townie. The ambushed townie may still die, as may one or two townies besides, but it's better than letting the keeper pick townies off. Be sure to change the soldiers back after.


try not to order the collecting of bushes over a long time; trees will produce new bushes over time but eventaully stop produceing new bushes, and so some bushes will need to be allowed to grow into trees to maintain a healthy forrest. The process of looseing your forrest this way takes a great deal of time, but once it occurs there is currently nothing that can be done to reverse it.

Also be careful later on in the game of issueing cut and chop orders over a large area at the same time; be sure there are still other stands of trees arround, and remember that just because another tree exists dosen't mean it's produceing bushes.

Trees, pine trees (not snow pine trees) and jungle trees seem to produce less bushes than is needed to maintain a forrest, and the trees will disappear over time reguardless of what you do. Don't count on them being arround forever, but they will be around for a long time before they inevitiably fail.

Snow and palm trees and most fruit trees seem to increce in quantity over time, often to the point of becoming a nusince if left alone long enough.



(note that this pic has NO jungle trees but an overabundance of fruit trees and radishes)

Before you can start building the basic crafting tables, you will need a few units of stone (at least 3)
Mineing stone is fairly easy, but some explanation should be included. Under the botom menu are the options for digging and mineing; mineing orders terrain destruction on the current layer and digging destroys terrain on the level below the current layer.

The current layer is displayed brighter than layers below it.

to change layers, scroll up or down with your mousewheel, hit x or q, or click the up/down layer buttons near the minimap.

On the surface of every (non-tutorial) overmap, plain to see, are many tall, crumbleing piles of stone. Select the mine or dig tool and order the stone terrain destroyed; each stone tile has a strong chance to drop quarried stone when destroyed (I call it quarried stone to help avoid confusion; the item is called just "stone.") You may want to start from the top of the pile of stone when mineing it to make sure you can acess all the stone to be mined. at this point, you know all you really need to know.

Remember that the default 3d mouse can only select the top of blocks. To mine stone useing this mouse, select the dig command and select the top of a piece of stone on the layer you want to mine, then drag.

Useing the 2d mouse is more intuitive for the mine command, imo; change the viewed layer to the layer you want to mine on and click and drag the mine tool across the area to be mined. The 2d mouse only affects blocks on the viewed layer, so you can start in the air when clicking and dragging useing this tool so long as you are on the same camra level as the stone you want to mine.


(example of stone being mined in a tutorial map)


If townies get stuck on a piece of isolated stone, or fall too deep into a dug area, you can build scaffolds for free to get them out again. Scaffolds are under the righthand menu in some wall construction menus; they must be placed adjacent to an existing tile. You can also use the right-click menu to mine stone into a ladder for better acess, but this will remove your ability to mine that tile for stone.

Be careful of mineing stone over a river; townies may fall in and drown, and the quarried stone itself will often fall into the river and be destroyed. If you spot a townie stranded on a lone piece of stone with a mineing order under them, and they are standing over water, pause the game and cancel the mineing order, then Free them useing scaffolds.

Canceling orders is easiest to do with the 2d mouse, in this case, by adjusting the camra to the level the mineing is on and makeing a sweeping movement with the cancel orders tool.

To prevent townies from falling to lower layers (such as when mineing a dungeon floor or over the river), you can lay out scaffolds above the area to be dug and delete them later. Be careful not to delete them all at once; work from the inside out or delete each scaffold manually in the right-click menu.

If you want to move stone out of an area, you can create a stockpile with all items disabled over the area to be cleared and delete that stockpile when the stone is removed. You could also create containers or stockpiles elsewhere with stone enabled. (you can manage stockpiles and containers by right-clicking them)

These are the utilites you will need to produce non-food items. They are all found in the righthand menu under utilities.

Spiderite drops from spiders.

Tongs can be made at a mason's bench, and need 2 iron and a wood. It is found under utilities in the lefthand menu.

Stone hammer is in the lefthand menu under militaries>weapons>stone and requires 2 stone and a wood and is made at a wood detailer. It is also a deacent weapon for use in the early stages of the game.

As you can see, the first zone you will need is a carpentry zone.

Create that zone (just anywhere near your start point will do for now) from the botom menu under zones

gather 2 wood from trees.

find the carpenter's bench under utilities in the righthand menu. Place it and wait for it to be completed.

gather 2 wood and one stone.

Find the wood detailer in the righthand menu; place it near the carpenter's bench.

mine 2 stone

Near the carpentry zone, create a masonry zone and, once the wood detailer is finished, place the mason's bench on the masonry zone.

You now have your basic utilities, and should be able to figure out how to place the rest on your own. You can construct anything in wood or stone with what you have right now.

Note that pressing "F" key can change the direction a table will start out faceing (purely cosmetic)

Food utilities:
* A campfire requires the renew campfire utility in the lefthand menu to be autoproduced to remain functional.

* a Torch requires a mason's bench, wood detailer, coal, and 2 wood to make. It is also produced in the lefthand utilities menu.

* a wooden bucket requires a carpenters bench and is also produced from the lefthand utilities menu.

note that campfire and stove produce the same items, and the stove produces significantly faster.

To see what each crafting table produces, familiarize yourself with the items in the lefthand and righthand menus; bakeing items require a bakery (as dose jungle salad) cooking menu requires various kitchen utilities and militaries require the utilities from the first table. Some vanity items require an Atelier, and the mill grinds wheat into flour for use in the bakery. A well produces buckets of water for soups.

The utilitiy workbenches you will not need for crafting are mediceine cabnet and burner and shrine. A burner will destroy mud, wood or bones, which can be managed in the lefthand menu under burner and the medicine cabnet boosts hp recovery in hospitals as will the beds found under furnature. A shrine allows the return of a dead unique hero at great cost.

As the workbenches are used frequently, concider adding deccorations to these zones as you feel is practical.

As a side-note, there is a slight productivity bonous for many of these if they are placed underground or in a "completed" building (I am unclear on some details of what defines a completed building. Have walls, doors and a roof and no open spaces).

You may have noticed the "ite" smithy in the menu, as well as ite storeage stockpiles and containers. When I was first playing, I was confused by this name, so I've added a quick section to my guide explaining ites.

"Ite" is shorthand for a group of materials that drop from monsters (such as spiderite, goblinite, hobgoblinite, ect.)

An "ite" is, I presume, the crystalized essense of a given monster. The "ites" allow crafting of advanced weapons and armor at an ite smithy. For most of the game, "ite" armor and weapons will be the best that you can reliably get your hands on in any quantity. Each ite corresponds to one armor set and one weapon and one cloth chest armor. the exceptions are goblinite which has an extra boot type and spiderite with two weapon types. Direite and hobgoblinite also do not have cloth armor types.



(<--the orbs in this picture are ites)

When makeing a choice for which items to construct to gear-up your townies and heros, it's importent to understand what the stats do.

Health: Ok, you know what health is, but here's a slight spoiler: some late-game monsters can one-hit townies who are low on the hp scale, and a couple can one-hit kill any townie unless they have a hp+ modifier from items. high health is extremely importent when selecting soldiers to defend your town as It is the hardest stat to increce reliably. Some item mods will increce health (of the turtle, ect)

Health is easier to increce now, as dedicated soldiers will increce in level over time, gaining health.

attack and defence: attack is your accuracy versus the enemy defence rateing. In towns combat, attacks often miss, but haveing a high attack rateing can help, and high defence will make more of the enemy's attacks miss. Defence is (I believe) the most importent stat, especially as the game continues, but is also easy to increce.

Dammage: Dammage is straight-foreward; Items seem to deal a fixed ammount of dammage based on what the item rolled on creation. Not sure if the same applies to monsters.

Eat time: How long untill townies must eat. Note that foods fill a % which can be higher or lower than 100% of a townie's fill time. This bar can be more than 100% full and begins with over 10k or more fill time to help you get your town started.

Sleep time: How long untill townies must sleep. The v10 patch allowed sleep time to be reduced by haveing a roof over the place townies sleep as well as roofing increceing how long they can go without needing sleep again.

Happiness: Townies have two invisiable timers that affect happiness; work time and idle time. Try to give townies some time for both idleing and working and happiness should increce. some decorations, eating cake, eating in general, and fishing task serve to boost townie happiness. not being able to eat because they are in the middle of a task, working too long, idleing too long, death of a townie, and seeing stink clouds/corpses will decrece happiness.

Townies need to have an item in their line of sight to gain happiness from seeing a deccoration. Giveing them extra line of sight (LoS) from bows or enchantments may help them see happiness boosting items more foten, and placeing deccorations along high-traffic areas and in zones townies spend time in will help them stay happier.

Time units: Time units come in "ticks;" a measurement of time that starts at 4 per second and passes 2 ticks per second faster for each speed setting above the first. This is according to http://towns.gamepedia.com/Ticks

Some items have added effects that are not described in-game. I don't have the inclination to cover all of them, but fire armor will be covered when I adress sieges. You can read up on these effets at http://towns.gamepedia.com/Effects or look at the information in (I believe) the "effects.xml" file in your game folder. Note that many of these effects can be caused by sourses other than weapons and armor.

As the game goes on and sieges begin comeing, you may want to protect and arm your townies with basic equipment. You could raise farm animals and butcher them to make bone armor (which is quite strong) or craft wooden armor with a stone weapon. If you have the dungeon open and are starting to gather copper, iron and coal, you might try makeing more advanced armors.

Wood and bone gear are the best gear you can likely craft early-game; bone can be farmed by letting any farm animal starve, by butchering pigs and cows or by haveing badgers do battle in your arena zone (arena badgers are under deccorations and consume one live badger to craft). Many monsters in the dungeon will also drop bone. To make bone armor you will need a bonecarving bench, and sevral pieces of bone per armor (4). To craft the armor find bone under militarities>armor in the lefthand menu. You will want to make sure to have a few bones ahead or townies may fail to craft the item and meerly consume resourses. The stronger bone weapons require a little iron to craft.

Bone armor is especially useful as it is the best armor many heroes can equip (besides special armors and cloth chest armors) but getting them to equip it is another matter! As best I understand it the developers plan continue to make this prosess easier in future patches.

Lether armor can be made stronger than bone, and provides an easier way to craft advanced armor types. It is limited to chest armor at present, but on the plus side, provides high-defence armor to light-armor heroes if you can get them to equip them and if you have the "ites."

Townies can be equipped in the civillian pannel and soldiers in the soldier pannel. Heroes cannot be manually equipped, but choose thier own gear from what they see lying arround on the ground. Most will not equip from stockpiles or containers. Autoequippping is a good way to quickly gear up sevral townies.

Be carefull when equiping or autoequipping, as some gear in the menu or that townies choose to sutoequip may be in a dangerous area. If you want to autoequip safely, set the hauling and equipping depth (from unassigned townies group in civilian pannel) to "-1" and lock any trap mazes you might have.

Alternately, just make sure all items are in your containers before equipping.

if you choose to use wooden bows, they have limited rounds. Arachnid bows also have this restriction, but silver and gold bows do not, and niether dose the golden staff. I am unsure if elven or fire bows have limited ammo, but I expect they do not.

To me, importance of stats on items you craft goes something like hp>def>dmg>atk>LoS (hp bonouses and LoS (line of sight) bonouses are from rare item mods)

Importent note on monster heads: From what I saw in an earlier game they are a one-shot consumeiable weapon. Townies or heroes relying on them will end up weaponless. They are more usefull as cheap decorations.

Some items that you create will have enchantments (which I sometimes call mods) on them. Items dropped from monsters or made by townies each have a small chance to recive a random mod from a list of mods. These modifications are not limited to just armor or just weapons at all; any weapon or armor can gain any enchantmant.



Enchanted items will have green text.

it is possiable to have both a prefix and a suffix; Items with both a prefix and a suffix have blue text.

Here's a list:

Suffix: Of the turtle: grants a bonous to armor and health.

Suffix: Of the dragon: adds a bonous to attack, health, and damage.

Suffix: of the hawk: Gives some health and increces line of sight (LoS) (improves missile range and exploration range)

Suffix: of the tiger: seems to be a copy of "of the hawk" with slightly better avarage stats.

Prefix: Green: boosts HP and defence.

Prefix: White: adds a little more HP than green, but little or no defence.

Prefix: Big: adds attack rateing.

Prefix: Small: reduces damage (debuff)

Prefix: Black: Adds exactly 100 HP and a random reduction of damage.

Prefix: Red: adds damage.

Los (line of sight) enchantments reliably add 2-4 LoS

Health bonouses varry greatly between about 6-480

Damage also is in the 6-480 range, I believe.

I am unsure of the range of attack rateing bonouses.

Defence value bonouses have gone as high as ~ +600.

Items purchauced from merchants are never enchanted with these mods, but some items they sell have strong special effects.

With some renewiable resourse items (Iron being the strongest of these) it can make sense to constantly make and delete items in hopes of getting enchantments to buff your townies. Develop a system to delete the excess efficently if you do. Ths simplest way to make deleteing faster is to use autoproduction (with 'containers disabled by default' setting in options set to "off") of weapon and armor racks to ensure they will be stacked in containers. Be sure you are not deleteing higher-teir gear by accident.

Clearing the map is something you can leave to heroes later on, but for now you will need to understand how to deal with local threats. It's not difficault once you understand how soldier tasks work. I'll review them quickly:

guard: will defend townies that are attacked anywhere on the map. Will interrupt tasks, includeing eating, to help.

Patroll: moves to a set point, or cycles through a group of patroll points when not eating or sleeping. Will engage only enimies they see. items that increce line of sight (LoS) will increce the radius they will spot enimies in. They cannot spot enimies over ditches or through walls.

Supervise: grants additional productivity and speed to townies for a short while at cost of the affected townie's happiness. Supervisors will only engage enimies they see.

Groups: all soldiers in a group perform the group's task. This is extremely helpfull for assigning mass patrolls.

now, for how these tasks can be used:

if enimies wander too close, have your soldiers patroll to where the monster is, and delete the patroll point afterward; be sure to assign enough townies to swiftly dispatch the enemy. Try not to send wounded townies.

If a townie is attacked, convert some townies to soldiers; the default task, guard, will have them move to defend townies who are under attack no matter how far away the fight is. They may arrive too late.

to brace for a tough siege, assign as many townies to soldiers as you dare, assign them to a single group, and gather them by setting a group patroll point at a choke point.

to keep monsters from being lead into your town by heroes, have some townies patroll the lowest dungeon entrance. You could also have the tavern be the dungeon entrance if you don't care about heroes dieing. Bear traps add stun and will slow down monsters following heroes.

To quickly help a townie in need, you can also assign a large task, such as tilling or chopping or gathering, in the area near where the townie was attacked. This is an inprecise method, though.

I will cover traps in more detail when I adress siege defences directly. Traps can be used to kill or briefly disable enemies.

Many traps will be needed if you intend to kill an enemy (though bamboo shooting traps can harm many enemies at once if they are clustered up.) In the early game, because of the danger of the map monsters and the lack of resourses and workforce, traps should not be your primary defence just yet. Wait until the maps is safer and untill you can effectively channel enemies into your traps.

A few spike traps to protect food barrels from theft, however, might be helpful in ensureing guards can engage evil badgers when they come.

You should also check the "rush" guide here on steam for more ideas on how to handle early-game threats.

When townies die, they will leave human corpses behind. (it also decreces townie happiness when a townie dies)



Human corpses will spawn stink clouds, which decrece townie happiness when the stink clouds are seen.

Human corpses then degenerate into human remains, which will spawn ghosts from time to time. Ghosts are strong enough to easily kill an unarmed townie. Each corpse may spawn one or sevral ghosts before becomeing purged. Some may not even spawn a ghost before being purged.

After 3 days, a corpse will become purged and will stop producing ghosts.


Gravestones are found under outdoor deccorations in the righthand menu and consume human corpses to craft. You will need a mason's bench and stone to craft it. Be carefull, as makeing graves often leads the townies crafting them into dangerous areas.

Gravestones do increce happiness when seen. Zombies can now spawn from corpses, so they are no longer safe to leave out in the open in the long-term (a zombie is a semi-late game monster.) There is some concern as to whether making them at all is wise.

Use due caution when crafting tombs! When a townie or hero dies it is often because the place they were in is dangerous. Don't queue up a lot of tombstones without knowing where the corpses for them are, and make certin that it is safe for townies to craft them!

Right-click: You can right click on a corpse to open the a menu and destroy the corpses if its too dangerous to approach them, or to prevent any new ghosts spawning.

Sell them! some merchents will buy human remains for a pittance if you hang onto them.

Again, know where corpses are before selling them, or you might end up increceing how many corpses there are to sell.

Heroes have unique corpses and special tombs you can craft for them. These corpses will decay after some time, and will become human remains and purged human remains.

If you're quick, you can craft their corpses into hero tombs.

If you have solved the puzzle of how to use the shrine utility, you can use a shrine to revive unique heroes (sips, sir punchwood, vechs, the herbalist.) This requires a lot of resourses, and the shrine itself requires rare ogerite to craft. Shrines are used to revive unique heroes, and how to activate the shrine. Unique heroes will not enter your town again after they have died unless you revive them. They may not immidiatly re-enter town, but will be avaliable to re-enter. I am unsure how the game selects which unique to be revived or if all are revived at one time.

The shrine pattern:
* mud
* coins
* saccrifice animals
* human corpse

Tip: Be carefull when equipping townies when other townies have died; when townies die they drop some of their gear, and one item looks like another in the equip menu.

To get new townies you need enough personal rooms for each new (and current) townie and to let your town rest and recover happiness, often for a long time. mouseing over the townie menu button will display current avarage happiness and happiness needed for the next wave of immigrents to arrive.

Work and happiness need to be balanced for townies to be happy. that balance is usauly achived while food autoproduction tasks are the only tasks on the queue.

To speed up happiness growth, have decorations in all the rooms townies spend time in, make sure they're well fed, and minimize townie deaths. Eating cake and performing the fishing task will also improve happiness somewhat.

The most difficult part of getting happiness up is avoiding giving townies orders; You may want to find something else to do outside of towns (like writeing a guide ^.^) while the townies are resting, to keep yourself sane. Do check on it from time to time, though.

You will need a certain number of townies alive before heroes will come, so try to replace the townies you loose as you are able.

Make sure to have extra food waiting for the new townies.

townies may die before they reach town

If you have not cleared the overmap yet, you may wish to postpone adding immigrents untill the map is safer. They have a tendency of getting killed on thier way in, and if they get killed all you can usaully do for them is right-click thier corpse to prevent ghosts spawning.

If you're desprate, it is possiable to force them to approach from a spesific angle; they will only come from an angle that can reach your town, so if you have edge-of-map acesss cut off from the rest of the map with walls, a mote, or fences, you can bring in all the immigrents you want without risking incidental monster deaths.

immigrents unable to reach your town messages

Townies spawn at the edge of the map and walk to your town. If they can't get there, they won't spawn. Be sure no doors or terrain features are barring them acess. You might check that the individaul personal rooms can be acessed (not sure if that matters). Note that heroes, merchents and sieges will also not spawn if your town is inacessiable.

To attract heroes to your town, you will need at least one tavern room, at least one tavern (which is diffrent from a tavern room) and a reliable sourse of food. Heroes can quickley clear out the remaining overmap monsters, but may pull enimies into your town if they are forced to retreat. They will grow in stregnth, but you may loose them and any gear attatched to them if you ever run out of food.

They require spesific objects be placed in their rooms:

Necromancer statue: sips, the campmaker unique hero

Wooden bed: knight

Wooden bed plus hero statue: Sir punchwood unique hero

Planted pot: the herbologist unique hero

Harp: elf hero

Bone bed: barbarian

Carved chest: rogue

Cupboard: mage

Bird in a golden cage: Vechs the bird miner unique hero

Some also require a spesific map layer:

Dwarf requires an underground room and exploration of level -4.

Highlander requires a room at layer +5 or above

Heroes cannot be manually equipped, and most will not pick up items from your containers. They pick up items mostly while idleing or wandering the dungeon, and often end up underequipped as a resault; try to leave some items on the ground (not stockpile) for them by disableing nearby containers you've gathered items into or setting up stockpiles and deleteing the stockpile later.

higher population will allow you to have more heroes, and a tiny population may not allow for you to gain any heroes. They may also may leave town if your population shrinks too far.

heroes will often run away from a hard fight; This can mean drawing monsters into town for your townies to handle. Have a defence of some kind in place to deal with incomeing monsters.

If you don't care much for your heroes, try having the tavern be the dungeon entrance, so that heroes have to finish what they start.

Heros leave loot lying around, which can lead townies into dangerous situations at times:
Adjusting the hauling depth in the unassigned section of civillian panel can help prevent townies from running into trouble in partly explored areas due to items dropped from monsters (but some tasks, such as crafting and moveing unlocked wall blocks might still be performed below that depth).

When heroes start dieing alot, try to improve their equipment if you can. You can also prevent heroes from entering a layer if you feel it's too dangerous. This can be done in the hero pannel. If all else fails, just let them keep dieing; most monsters won't heal and most heroes are expendiable (with the exception of some unique heroes, such as sir punchwood, who will need a shrine to revive them once they die.) and corpses will allow you to make tombs later, to troll those who dare to dig up your buried town and to farm wisperdeath event for zombite.

Heroes are often the last to know about sieges, but will often try to come to the aid of townies once they realize what's going on.

A hero will enter rage mode if they both cannot get food and cannot leave the map. They will break doors and walls and kill townies untill they can acess either food or the edge of the surface map.

• Once they can acess the edge of map or food, the rage will pass.
  
  
• in a pinch, drop water arround the hero in a narrow corridor to attempt to drown the offending hero.
  
  
• note: the hero log will tell you if a hero has entered rage mode.

Heros may pick up items you wanted for townies; don't leave purchuced/crafted items lying arround unless they're for heroes. haul them off or equip them fast. If you are concerned that heroes might pick up your favorite items, try restricting which heroes come into your town to heroes with very spesific item requirements, such as the mage or the elven archer. Knights and sir punchwood are particulaurly problematic, as they can equip more kinds of gear then most other heroes can.

Hereoes will only equip items if they are of a higher item level than what they are useing.

Not all heroes can equip all items

all heroes can equip cloth armors.

all heroes can equip special items (except in the case of weapons; i.e. an elf will never equip any weapon type but bow)

Most heroes can use wood and bone type armor. Mage heroes cannot

Only sir punchwood, dwarves and knights can equip metal armor.

The herbalist, Sips and Mages equip only wands for weapons. The only craftiable wand is the golden staff.

vechs and elf only use bows.

Dwarves cannot use spears or swords.

Knights and Sir punchwood cannot use clubs (but can use hammers).

Barbarians cannot use axes.

Also note that haveing many places that a hero can idle at (multi marketplaces or sevral arenas with balcony) may help reduce the chances of 'theft' of advanced merchent-sold gear.

much of my basic info comes from here: http://towns.gamepedia.com/Heroes (but not all.)

finding and useing zones and containers.

Stockpiles can be zoned useing the bottom menu, containers are found in either the righthand or lefthand menus and require carpenters bench and wood detailer utilities. containers can hold 10 items each. You can enable or disable materials by right clicking and selecting "manage [stockpile/container]" which will bring up a menu. One or two items are said to take up more than one space in a container.

Containers in the lefthand menu are built "unlocked" and will be moved the next time you place containers with the righthand menu. This also allows autoproduction of containers, which can then be readily placed.

Townies will haul any items above the haul depth into containers or stockpiles when they have time to. Some utilities cannot be placed in containers (but can be placed in zones), and the same is also true of decorations. I believe snow cannot be gathered into containers or zones at present, and wall blocks can't be gathered into stockpiles (excepting roofing).

In the options menu, you can select "Newly built containers/stockpiles have all items disabled by default." which can prevent townies from hauling unwanted items into it before you can disable items you don't want that container to hold. It can make senes to pause the game when manageing containers in some cases.

Cautions:

There are many times items will drop without your notice; unexpected items can get townies killed at times, trying to haul them

Be carefull when starting out on a map with grass (carniverous plants) or snow (snow piles), when enimies are dieing to traps in sieges, and when items are dropped in the dungeon or a townie or hero gets killed. Also, some items may be too far away and townies will starve trying to collect them (this generaly only happens underground or in trap mazes).

You may opt to not create containers or stockpiles early-game to reduce risk to your townies.

Be carefull of selling to merchents and crafting if you think the items involved might endanger townies.

Containers full of junk resourses, such as mud or gel.

Sometimes this happens when all materials are enabled on all containers. Just disable the item in some containers to make room for more nesissary items or craft an obscene ammount of

containers (or both).

You might also Use up the materials in construction, sell them to merchents, or (if appliciable) destroy them in the burner. Burners are found under the righthand menu under utilities and are managed in the lefthand menu under burner. Wood, bones and mud are the only items a burner can destroy

You can set a stockpile over a zone and disable that stockpile to clear away unwanted "unlocked" objects.

After you zone a marketplace (in the bottom menu under zones.) Note that heroes and townies will rest here when not busy, so deccorateing it (deccorations are under the righthand menu) can increce townie happiness. haveing a marketplace can also help prevent townies from wandering into monsters, as they have a place to be when idle. A marketplace can be small or massive, but should have some space arround / in it for items to be dropped. You may wish to set it near your stockpiles, or vice versa, to reduce time hauling items for sale.

Marketplaces attract merchents. It may take some time for a merchent to come. In the meantime, try to gather together a few things they might be interested in, such as wooden armor or bone armor or even just dye. Each merchent has their own list of items that they are interested in buying. selling Mud, stone or sand is a good way to kick-start your town, but be cautious about selling snow piles too early in the game as some may spawn on the snow map at creation and townies may run into monsters while gathering it. Try not to sell off all your non-renewiable resourses.

You can buy and sell items, but bear in mind that both you and the merchent only have so much cash. The merchent's gold is displayed on the left and your gold is displayed on the right in the tradeing menu, and the town's gain (red text, displayed as negative) or loss (black text) in gold is displayed in the middle of the tradeing pannel.

Items you will definatly want to buy:

gold and silver: makes advanced gear.

Iron and coal: help you get mineshafts, which allow infinate iron, copper, stone and coal when placed on the apporpriate kind of floor tiles.

food: look for plantiable items that you could otherwise not find on your current map. Check first that you have the required terrain type (you can check in the righthand menu under planting)
Anvil and smelter: utilities that are hard to make in the early-game.

Boots of haste: increces townie move speed.

Bird in a golden cage: when released, spawns a bird, which allows you to make boots of haste. To release it, place it and then use the right-click menu to instruct a townie to release the bird.

Animals in a cage: use the right-click menu to release the animal. Buy animals in a cage to build a farm for an animal type when no animals of that kind exist on your map. Be sure the required terrain exists. Be sure to get wheat before buying animals, or cactus fruit in the unifallow's case.
An animal will never starve while in a cage.

There are aslo a few expensive weapons and armor merchents are constantly trying to get you to blow all your gold on. Do it, but not before checking the base stats and looking up thier effects. spoiler below.

Mask of the beast I concider a cursed item. it applies "the power of the beast" which never fully expires, even if the item is unequipped. The curse has some advantages, such as giveing you a higher HP max (which is immaginary HP unless healing is applied) faster movement and 130% atk and dmg for the power of the beast's durration. You also loose 75% of your defence, which will in effect increce how often enimies can hit you.

When inactive, it becomes "tiredness" status and your townie will move slower. You also loose the bonous maxhp when tired, but I believe your armor becomes the normal rate again.

You can take the mask and pass it to another townie or hero and they will also recive the curse. If you have a cursed townie, give them a strong ranged weapon and hope for the best or keep them in town by assigning them to a food-related role. Divine iron breastplate can help fill in thier missing hp.

The rare "highlander" hero has a similar effect, but has an advantage over cursed units; he gets to turn it off when the "power of the beast" buff durration expires and never becomes tired.

I can't tell you what to build, but I can help you understand how to build it.

Foundations: You can build on top of the ground or dig a foundation area. A building dose not nesissatrialy need a foundation.



To dig a foundation, use the "dig" command and click & drag your mouse over the area to be dug. You can press shift to place multipul digging orders at once. Remember, though, that terrain blocks cannot be replaced if you make a mistake; plan it out first.

If you dig down, you will need to dispose of the debries somehow; one trick you can use is to set up a stockpile over the foundation area that has all items disabled. Townies will come by and find another place for them.

Fill in the dug area with blocks from the righthand wall menus.

Do not order the placement of blocks that would not be adjacent or on top/below (kitty-corner is not sufficent) another block or terrain piece.

if you do not dig down, you may need to clear the trees and underbrush.

• gather from any food trees in the area
• chop down all trees in the area
• cut any remaining brush
• set a disabled stockpile over the area.
• repeat steps if needed if new plants grow.

alternatly, you could just right-click and delete all objects in the way.

When the area is cleared, begin crafting and placeing wall blocks to fill the foundation area.

Planning zones:

Decide where to lay out your zones before placeing interior and exterior walls, so that you won't end up rearangeing the building later. Be sure to leave space for any interior walls and hallways and staircases you intend to add. You can place walls on top of zones if you don't need the full 3x3 space as a way to fit more zones into a building with interior walls.

Interior/Exterior Walls:

Plan to make a wall that is at least 2 spaces high if you want a seccond floor or to block unit movement. Be aware townies cannot jump down from a layer 2 wall; To prevent stuck townies, have scaffolds on one edge of each wall segment that is seperated from the other segments; make sure to have the scaffolds level with the current wall before adding a new layer.

Always glance at the construction area from time to time to make sure no townies are stuck; They will usaully find a way.

seccond floor: Since townies will need something to stand on, only every other map layer can have rooms in it, with the other layers holding only floor blocks. leaving a layer between the foundation and the seccond floor, Place wall blocks on top of or adjacent to existing blocks, working inward. Corner-to-corner is insufficent. The 2d mouse is the best pick for this part, since the 3d mouse cannot easily place blocks adjacent to each other in the air.




If you make a mistake, you can use the 2d mouse to right click and "unlock" a block to make it avaliable to be placed somewhere else. An "x" will appear on unlocked wall blocks. The 3d mouse cannot easily do this, since it cannot detect the interior of a wall block, and will select something on a lower layer, visauly behind or the top of the block if you try. If you want to use the 3d mouse, try selecting the block below the one you want to unlock.

If a block cannot be placed, townies will just drop the unplaceiable blocks on the ground and an "x" will appear over the block's immage, indicateing that they are left unlocked.

As new orders are placed, townies will sometimes look for these blocks and place them rather than crafting new blocks, especially if insufficent materials are abaliable to place all the blocks you have ordered. This can be a real problem in burried maps, as some unlocked blocks may spawn in burried maps, and townies will go deep into the dungeon to fetch them rather than crafting new! The only way to prevent this from happening is to use a door to lock the dungeon while placeing wall blocks. (heroes may go bezerk if they get locked in the dungeon; be carefull)

Continue makeing a solid layer of blocks, filling it in as you are able. Reserve some space for a staircase, ect. When the base for the second floor is done, you can assign zones and place wall blocks on it to make walls and rooms for that floor.

Roofing: as with the seccond floor, when you are satisfied with the building's height, set roofs on /adjacent to other walls or terrain and spread them inward, making a solid layer of roofing blocks above the existing rooms. Layer more on top of them untill peaked if desired. If you wish to have an attic in the peaked area, you can leave the inside hollow instead, building it like a staircase.

Delete the scaffolds when townies are safely down.

Roads are useful for increceing townie movement speed. you must plan roads well or they will tend to ignore them in favor of a shorter route. They may make on occasion make small adjustments in order to use roads (about one space) but this is the exception rather than the rule.

One way to add roads to an established town is to observe where townies commonly walk, and place roads on those tiles.

To plan for roads in a new town, concider using fences or building placement to channel townies onto roads.

Concider the placement of the more commonly visited areas of your town (food production, dineing, stockpiles, major residential buildings, ect) and plan roads between them.

Remember that channleing townies onto poorly designed roadways may mean a net loss in efficency rather than a gain.

Some roads grant a higher bonous than others.

Note that some events have no effects, but are prerequisites for other events to happen. I may have misinterpeted the effects of some or all of these events. Some events may not be fully implimented yet. This information is my interpetation of the info in the towns folder in the file "events.xml" but I am not sure if I understand it perfectly.

is a cluster of events at the top of the list. Precondition for some other events.

Prevents hot and extreemly hot events;
Non-snow biome foods grow more slowly.
Precondition for a yetti siege event.

Requires cold. Unsure of its effects. May be a stronger vestion of cold, or may be unfinished.

Townies work slower.
Immune to cold/extreem cold events.

Townies are slowed even more.
Requires hot event.

Planted food grows much faster

increces chance to have "fertile ground" happen.

Townies get belyache whenever they eat, causeing d.o.t. (and slowing?)


Calls a siege underground, but seems to not have any units?
Requires hot event.


Happens after fertile ground. Seems to have no particulaur effect, in and of itself.


80% happiness (A reduction of 20%)


120% happiness (increce by 20%)


requires cold. Reduces townie walk speed.


Spawns something like 22d4 ghosts and makes food regenerare MUCH slower! (10x as slow as cold event!)


Occurs after nervous sheep event.

Spawns 40 werewolves.


120% happiness


+20% townie speed.


Requires cold.
Spawns yeties.


Townies walk 80% as fast.


Spawns 20 ghosts.


Do nothing of themselves. Preconditions of other events.


No effect that i can determine. I don't think it is even a prerequisite.


Slows townies?


nothing.


Seems to target random milked cows with "godlightning." effect, which Deals 10,000 dammage to the targets times 5 "ticks" (50k dmg total!).


deletes either 30% or 70% of wall blocks of various kinds. Not sure which % it is.

Targets all your townies with "farchants" effect. This adds a 20% boost to combat stats (atk, def, hp, dmg)

Boosts line of sight by 80%. This means +2 for most townies, but could mean a great deal to a townie with +LoS mods from items. max vision bonous ~24? Line of sight affects missile weapon range.

Spawns lava and a unique kind of terrain block called darkstone, if I read it right. Destroys many blocks in the process and floods the area with lava (which has a similar effect to flooding an area with water.) I think some tiles touched by lava were supposed to change to darkstone during this event, but I am not sure of that.

Spawns non-siege zombie type monsters at each tombstone at a 50% chance. Unsure if gravestones count towords this.

Wispering death is an event ( you can disable events in the menu under options) which spawns 1d2-1 zombies per tomb (or a 50% chance to spawn one random zombie per tomb). Tombs can be crafted under decorations in the righthand menu.

Spoiler: To take advantage of wispering death

Make a fenced tomb area and place bamboo shooting traps in the tomb area. Have a door at the entrance to this tomb area. When zombies arrive, the bamboo trap will say "zombie recives direct dammage" in the combat message log. If you notice this, lock the tomb so zombies will not wander out of the tomb area. The zombies will die over time as they continue to step on your traps. Make sure to leave some space between traps for shiny loot to drop.

A restriction will soon be added or has been added to prevent this event from triggering unless you have more than 65 townies.

You may have noticed by now that every now and then the lefthand message board will flash red and say "siege!!" and then two slimes will unimpressively saunter into town and die to whatever townie encounters them first. Those sieges are just a warning; sieges are a big deal in the long term, and if you fail to prepare for them you may loose your town. Here is some basic information to help you understand how to better prepare to deal with the real sieges that come later on.

1) if you're not crazy about sieges, or if you find they are becoming too difficult, you can disable sieges in the options section of the main menu. You can also adjust the difficulty in the same menu (which represents an aproximation of how many monsters you can expect to show up and attack your town)

2) Sieges will spawn at the map edge above ground or below ground.

3) Siege monsters mill around for a moment before attacking. This gives you some time to place orders or set locks on doors.

4) Setting sieges to pause when they start in options will alert you to sieges (since the game will suddenly pause) and allow you the ability to take your time with placeing needed orders and placement of locks on doors in preperation for a siege.

5) There are three types of sieges; event sieges, normal sieges and theft sieges.

theft: monsters will ignore townies and try to carry off objects, such as food livestock and gear. They can carry off your containers, meaning the amount they steal may be much larger than the quantity of thieves.

Evil badgers: steal food or food containers

Snatching wolf: steals livestock. Note that the start-of-map animals do not spawn; be sure to have animal farms, or you might loose the opportunity to build them.

Thief: steals gear and deccorations, and perhaps other town objects as well. I do not know the full list of what they can steal (they can't steal traps, thank goodness!) but they do not steal food or animals.

Even if you confront a theft-type siege monster, they will walk past or even through townies and grab what they can rather than trying to fight. Use spike traps to slow them down to make them easier to kill. Theft sieges will get progressively larger as the game continues.

Normal sieges: are the ones I cover most directly. Monsters spawn, mill around, then move to attack your townies even if they have not seen townies yet in terms of line of sight. These sieges will get more dangerous as the game progresses.

Normal sieges spawn the assorted monsters you can find in the underground dungeon. Most will be fodder units, such as gel monsters.

Event sieges: I have only encountered one such siege so far; the yetti siege from "winter comes" (or somesuch) event.

the only diffrence between these and normal siges is that they spawn spesific monsters rather than assorted monsters and some may have an indicator event warn you they are (or might be) coming. I do not believe that they scale. Wispering death event is not a siege, which is why the zombies will not charge if they don't see a townie in their line of sight.

7) Most siege monsters will be of a weaker "fodder" kind in normal sieges. Only a few will be stronger monster types.

There will be more info on sieges later.

Townies can only jump up or down one layer. Use ladders to allow them acess to the dungeon or to the higher floors of buildings. If you right-click stone, grass or dirt, you can mine them into staircases. Using the 2d mouse can help you select the correct block to mine into a staircase more easily. mine stairs one on top of the other untill you reach -2.

to change the layer you are currently viewing use the up-down arrows near the minimap, press x or q, or use the mouse scrollwheel.

All stairs are only ladders in truth; they can only allow townies to move into or on top of them.

You can also craft ladders in the righthand menu under utilities.

The dungeon starts at level -2, so be carefull of acessing that layer before you're ready to handle additional monsters. On the other hand, building an undergound town requires less work because it dose not require you to build roofing and you will get a bonous to productivity in underground rooms with walls around them (less than the bonous from an overmap roof-covered area) and it frees up the whole over-map for farming.

When mineing on any layer below ground level, watch for water in both your current layer and the layer above you; even one block mined out next to a river or lake will cause a large flood. floods can be stopped with most wall blocks, but whatever area they claim is very difficault to reclaim unless you have flood gates behind the flood to stop new water comeing in. Water will eventaully begin to evaporate faster than it spreads in most cases, and thus will stop on its own.

Don't forget to defend your dungeon entrance with traps or posted soldiers.

The dungeon entrance point may not seem to matter, but the dungeon is mazelike in structure, and starting from the corner of the map may mean townies spend vast ammounts of time just pathing through it's twisted passages.

note that a second entrance will be needed across the river from your town to acess the rest of the -2 dungeon map. After you get to -4, one entrance should alow acess to the entire map.

Placeing your dungeon entrance near the map center can reduce starvation in the lower levels (though the ai has improved on that score, it is still a risk on lower levels) and reduce time townies spend hauling items back up to the surface for crafting, ect.

your dungeon entrance should be reasoniably close to your town. Don't move your town to the dungeon entrance, but do try to build arround it as much as is practical. This is to help reduce starvation from hauling resourses to the surface.

Remember to plan to protect your dungeon entrance from both above ground and underground sieges.

Keep staircases nearby or on top of each other to reduce hauling time

Iron, coal and copper terrain blocks can have mineshafts on them. Mineshafts produce materials over time, makeing the materials renewiable. You will need a 2x2 section of that material to place a mineshaft there.

If you suspect a dark area has additional, sealed dungeon rooms, you can mine the unexplored area to link up with them. This is particulaurly likely in maps with buried towns, as the buildings will interrupt the normal flow of the dungeon map.

Avoid haveing more than one point of acess to the same layer unless they cannot acess each other. It has confused the ai in previous versions.

Concider building roads to any mineshafts or other underground hotspots once the level is clear

You might want to mine out sections of wall to reduce walking time later.

On some maps, dirt snow or sand will be avaliable on the first dungeon layer, makeing underground farming possiable. On other maps, you may be able to set up fishing spots underground with a little terraforming.

Remember to check for water.

if flooding happens, some wall blocks can stop it's spread. Add flood gates to the barrier so townies will not get stuck next to the flooding as easily.

heros may lure monsters into your town when they retreat; have soldiers or stunning traps waiting for them.

make sure to guard the lowest open dungeon layer with stunning traps or soldiers so that townies useing mineshafts are not ambushed by monsters being trailed by heroes.

If you are looseing many townies to the dungeon, stop all item crafting orders and set the hauling limit higher than the dungeon layer being explored. Stop burn orders for bones as well.

Haveing advanced food items avaliable to townies, such as bananna bread or whole roasts, will do wonders in preventing starvation underground.

You can also mine out walls to make hauling easier on townies

Cleared dungeon layers are a great sourse of stone.

if you aren't planning anything like a ditch, you can probably get away with mineing out the layer -1 resourses (just above the first dungeon layer) with little or no concequence. Just be carefull of water. This is a good way to get mud on snow or jungle maps where mud is a rare resourse.

you may concider placeing your containers or stockpiles closeby the dungeon entrance, or even underground.

In my other guide on this topic, I tried to cover alternitive methods as well. This is one method I discovered on my own and got excited about, but there are other methods that can be used, mostly involveing a lot of right-click deleteing of water.

Flooding can be avoided by being careful to check above and level with mineing orders. Use flood gates whenever channeling water to allow you to more easially reverse flooding. When you accidentially trigger flooding, it is still possiable to reverse most of the dammage (which I cover later)

If you are on the first dungeon layer and see a long strip of pre-explored wall, do not mine it! Right above it is the river.



Flooding will spread quickly at first, but it's progress will then begin to slow.




Containing flooding is intuitive; Most wood (not log) and stone wall blocks will stop water. be sure they say (fluid blocker) just under thier name in the wall menu. Leave townies a way back out when containing water; a flood gate door also blocks water. If you have mineshafts, ect near an underground river or lake, concider protecting them pre-emptively.

Digging holes dose not stop water from spreading; it only changes where its spreading to.



notes:

Water can move diagonally past wall blocks; keep corners sharp on walls intended to block floods.

Lava is different from water only in terms of inability to fish, ect.

tip:Townies can walk on closed flood gates, so they can be used as a way to cross water if the flood gate is on top of a solid tile.



Reclaiming flooded ground: It is possiable to reclaim an area of flooded ground but it is also tricky. Before you try to, you may want to save your progress. This process may take a great deal of time.

Please use the 2d mouse for all of the following instructions. If it is not currently enabled, the 2d mouse can be enabled by pressing "m" or by toggleing the 3d mouse icon (near the minimap) off.

Two layers below the flooded area, place a single flood-gate directly below the sourse of the flooding. (If there is more than one sourse, or if it cannot be placed directly under it, it will be harder to reverse.) If you haven't unlocked a lower level yet, do your best to contain the flood untill you can do so.




go back up one layer and mine out the block between the flood gate and the sourse of the water. There should now be a block of water resting over the flood gate and below the point water is entering the dungeon from. Do not worry about surrounding the door in blocks; water cannot fall diagonally.

take time to mine out walls near the flood area (but don't unlock the water yet if it's contained) and arround the lower flood gate.

Open the flood gate in the lower level (right-click menu); remove any impediments you safely can to the spread of the flood in the upper level. This will redirect the water sourse so that very little new water will be flowing into the upper level and allow water on the upper level to evantaully spread thin and evaporate.

it is important that the sourse water be able to continue to fall to the level below; give it as much room to spread into as you can, and open up any choke-points that you can. Do not try to contain it more than is nesissary for the safety of your town.

when (and if) the flood fully recedes in the upper level (only a couple water blocks), quickly wall the sourse in. Then, close the flood gate in the lower level so the lower water can also evaporate. If you can't get it to recede, you may have to delete it manually.



For more complicated floods, neutraulize the sourse as best you can and use a similar method to seal it.

Be very carefull of drowning during all phases of this process.

The key here is to neutraulize the sourse of the flooding in the upper layer by redirecting the sourse to a lower layer in a way that allows you to shut the water flow to the lower layer off afterwards.

After you have a solid food foundation, start crafting more advanced food from the lefthand menu.

You will need a kitchen and bakery with a cooking pot, stove, kitchen table and butcher's table in the kitchen and baker's table and baker's oven in the bakery to be able to craft all the food items.

You should have a few of each workbench if possiable. As you progress to higher fill food, like bananna bread, the frequency of townies starveing while hauling/crafting should go down noticiably ; Always keep a supply of advanced food arround if you can.

Once you're sure you have enough, here are some reasons why even a well-fed townie may starve.

starvation due to dungeon

The dungeon is huge, and often mazelike in structure. You probably cannot completely eliminate starvation deaths in the dungeon, but can reduceing them:

• mine out sections of dungeon wall as the map becomes safe
  
  
• place roads in some places near the entrance to speed movement underground
  
  
• have a centrally located town and entrance
  
  
• avoid haveing more than one dungeon entrance or more than one acess point to each level (unless they are mutaully inacessiable)
  
  
• keep entrances pretty much right on top of each other from layer to layer.
  
  
• equip townies with boots of speed.
  
  
• seal a townie who is moveing slowly because they're hauling while starveing by spawning water at both ends of a narrow passage. Be carefull to leave plenty of space arround them or you will drown them. They will drop the item. Quickly delete the water so they can pass; they will move faster without the item in thier hands.
  
  
• Set the haul depth high when you start haveing townies die to starvation untill you can improve mobility through that layer.
  
  
• cycle out which soldiers are set to guard, so they can rest and eat.

stuck use scaffolding to reach stranded townies, or delete any offending wall blocks.

trap maze When makeing a long trap maze (for sieges), be mindfull that any loot dropped in it will need to be hauled out of it again. You can kill your own townies by makeing such a maze too long, and then tasking them to haul items out of it (or even place the traps). Try to make acess points, especially in the center of a switchback maze pattern. I'll get more into looting mazes later.

Siege monsters will not path through a locked door.

An exception is made if they started moveing to a point past that door before it became locked. In this case, they will rush to and attack the door, destroying it.

Water stops an enemy siege in their tracks even after thier pathing has started. To use water in defences, you will need a choke point that monsters have to pass to acess your town.

Mote:

Rather than building a 2-high wall or fence, you can dig a mote. This has the advantage of GIVEING resourses rather than costing them (provided you haul the materials out of the mote before it fills in.)

Always use flood gates at the entrance point when constructing a mote as an emergency shut-off. Water cannot reach an infinite distance from the river or lake unaided, so release it in steps useing flood gate doors, allowing it to fill up before releaseing the next door. Increce the frequency of these doors slightly as you progress further from the sourse.

You could also fill it in manualy with the right-click menu, but this might take a very long time.

Flood gates in water can be walked on, so remember to only leave them open or locked when you do not want townies or monsters crossing them. Remember not to lock them if siege is chargeing at them; the siege will not get past the water, but will destroy the door. Open them to prevent siege crossing them.

Iron bars can be walked on and can have water "in" them. They can be usefull for making acess points for water without provideing monsters an acess point if the area is only occasionaly flooded. Be mindfull that monsters can walk on iron bars, though, so make a suffucently tall wall above or next to them.

Using water to kill:

Monsters, like townies, will drown if they cannot move away from flood water when it spreads onto them. Surround a group of siege monsters with water, either by right-clicking or with channeled water from a river or lake, and they will die when it spreads onto them as long as they cannot escape the water.


Take advantage of your ability to right-click and destroy wall blocks. You can wipe out sevral monsters this way if you pause the game and delete sevral blocks to drop them into lava or water below. You can also just delete a line across your bridge to prevent them getting into your town.


Sieges will only spawn in places that can acess your town, and cannot spawn on top of fences (since thay cannot stand on fences). By walling off sections of the edge of map on a given layer and leaving an entrance where you want sieges to come, you can controll where a siege spawns. To save map space, place your walls right on the map edge, rather than just near or next to it.

Sieges can spawn on top of most walls, but won't spawn on them if there is no way to acess a townie from the top of the wall or if it is a fence.


If you find your town is getting overrun, or that you can't handle sieges, then lower the siege setting or disable it so you can rebuild. If you want to be legit, you can accomplish the same effect by locking enemies out of your town (but you will get no new townies this way, naturauly.)


Channel enimies with motes and walls rather than just trying to spam traps everywhere and hope they step on them. If the enemy siege can only approach your main town area one way, they will use that way. If that one way is a trap maze filled with traps they will not hesitate to step on every last one of them (so long as they are well placed).


Placeing an innoculous townie soldier on patroll at the end of a long trap maze will help you lure enimies into traps without risking the lives of your entire town. If you use water or 'cut' the bridges the bait might not even die. The key is to lock the town and leave the baiting townie outside of it, defended by the trap maze. Concider giveing them a barrel of food and a place to sleep.

Baiting is best used as a way to prevent the inevitiable flood of townies wanting to collect loot from a long trap maze, risking starvation and getting eaten by swarms of monsters (even with hauling depth set, they may go out there to drop items on the ground, gather items for crafting or guards may rush out there if immigrents have the misfortune to spawn next to a siege.)

I often pick a townie who has rolled the lowest base health for the honor of being the bait.


If you use a trap maze style of defence, be sure to have "service entrances" that are locked or cut during sieges but allow convinient looting of the maze. This is to prevent starvation as trap mazes are (of necessity) often quite long.


Guards are not to be taken as the end-all solution to sieges! Sieges grow with population so the math would be stacked against you. Still, it can make sense to have a team of well-leveled soldiers with high-tier equipment waiting to ambush or tank enemy siege groups.

If you want guards as your primary defence late game, be inteligent about it; Isolate groups of enimies useing water or cut bridges and attack the smaller isolated groups. If you try to tank all the enemies at once, even in the early goings, you are almost definatly going to loose many of them and will get next to no loot from it since there will only be a few squares the loot can drop on.


If you have no defences, the enemy will target random civilians which can spread them out over a wide area. If your townies are strong, many enough and if they are scattered enough across the map, they might have a better chance of surviveing fighting a handfull of enimies than they would if gathered to a set location. This generaly will end poorly, though, especialy as the game goes on.


Fire armor can trigger an effect called "burn" in a radius around it, that will deal a token amount of damage to all affected enimies. Some enimies cannot be affected by burn status. This can affect enimies through walls provided the area on the other side of the wall has been explored first. Use this to add extra damage to enimies as they mill around in your traps, but be mindfull that more than one burn status will not stack. Line of sight enchantments on items seems to affect the burn radius?


Traps are self-rearming utilities that deal damage when passed over. Some will deal damage over time (which dose not self-stack) and others will inflict direct damage. There is only one non-damageing trap (spike trap; a very potent slowing trap). Traps that you place will not harm townies, but may harm farm animals.

enimies will come in small groups at first, but thier numbers will increce over time. It's important to have a plan for dealing with groups of 100, 200, or even 500+ monsters assaulting your town by late game. Since it will take a long time to set up a defence that is truly impervious to such attacks, you should work at it over time, so that you won't have to weary your townies with a massive project when such defences become needed.

Part of a sucessfull siege defence is makeing sure you have a way to channel enimies into your traps. It can be a switchback maze, a simple mote forceing them into a bottleneck or a massive underground trap-maze spanning all levels of the dungeon. Here's some ideas to help you plan an effective maze. If you do not want to rely on traps, just use a bottleneck.

• Remember that enimies will not charge a locked door, but will not repath and will destroy a door if you lock it after they start moveing towords it. Use doors to choose the path enimies must take to get to your town without restricting townie movements between sieges. Setting sieges to pause the game on start in options helps a great deal with this.
  
• Use farm fances or water-filled motes to quickly set up a maze for monsters useing less resourses.
  
• enimies will not charge if they cannot path to a valid target townie (or item, in theft siege monster's case.) Sieges wil not spawn if they cannot reach your town.
  
• keep all crafting far away from any mazes, or townies may try to set objects down inside the maze and this may waste a great deal of thier time.
  
• flame heads are trap immune; be prepared to intercept them with soldiers.
  
• for a trap maze, have all monsters pathing through the same maze; don't try to have diffrent mazes for diffrent entrances in most cases.
  
• sometimes sieges will defeat your best efforts to build a maze sufficently long to kill all of them with traps; try useing water controll to stop monster's movements when they get near your town. Water will evaporate in time if no new water comes and if it has enough space to spread out in. While the water is evaporateing lock the door behind the water blockage.
  
• when setting up a maze, remember that you cannot replace lost terrain in the current build. Plan it out carefully first!
  
• be carefull of townies rushing to gather loot dropped from traps during sieges. Use a baiting soldier or locked stockpile & crafting areas to draw enimies in without sending townies out.
  
  Even with the hauling depth set higher than the maze, they will find a reason to leave town. Count on it.
  
• leave space for loot arround traps as you feel is practical.
  
• make acess points at sevral places in your maze to allow townies to loot it without walking quite as far as the enimies have to.
  
• when constructing your maze, be carefull (as always) to watch for stranded townies
  
• traps only do a small ammount of damage, so a sucessfull trap maze will need to be quite long.

Be sure to have some townies guarding in case some of the enimies break through.

Before I get started on siege defence properly, the best way to defend a battered town from sieges is to turn them off in options. If you find yourself unable to tank sieges or feel you're looseing too many townies to be sustainiable, turn them off.

In the long term, swithing to traps as your primary means of siege defence will save you a great deal of lost townies and may also provide you with more loot, though it will probably take you a fair bit of trial and error to get your defences strong enough. alongside time elapsed, Population is said to be a factor for how many siege mobs you will get, so eventaully defending with only townie guards will become impractical.

early sieges are a breeze if your townies are equipped. Late-game sieges are not a breeze, even if they are.



This is my first attempt at useing traps. I tried placeing scattered traps to isolate individaul monsters but, because I'd played with sieges off, I had no idea what they would do when they arrived. as a resault, most of the traps were ignored. The sieges you can expect to see early game will be significantly smaller than this. After standing a few sieges I learned that you need to channel the enimies into a long trap maze if you mean to rely on traps for defence.

With a well-planned trap maze you can easially get sevral times the loot (the end-game sieges quickly run out of space to drop items if you try to tank them) and keep your townies safe. If this is not to your likeing, know that population is said to be a factor in how many monsters you will get; the math is stacked against townies being the sole defence against sieges. You need a defence that is able to cope with monsters without townies needing to die.

Note that traps will not hurt townies, but will hurt animals, with the lone exception of the carniverous plant, which harms niether (once re-planted).

status effects, such as posion or bleed, do not stack; use alternateing traps for best effect.

Because someone asked about it on the forums before now; traps do not need to be maunally re-armed, do not harm townies (excepting the wild carniverous plant and door trap,) and will kill friendly animals (excepting the gathered carniverous plant).

here's a list of the traps:

spike trap: no dammage, slows enimies to 10% of thier normal movement, extremely fast rearm speed. a few of theese mixed in to dammageing traps can slow many enimies thanks to the quick cooldown. It is the easiest trap to make, and can help increce the efficency of a section of trap maze with little cost, buying other traps more time to trigger thier cooldowns.

log trap: in no way disables enimies, but dose physical dammage, makeing it able to be effectively spammed with no dammage inefficencies. It can also be crafted early, as it only takes wood and bone. It has a moderate cooldown.

Posion trap: inflicts posion (50 total dammage over 100 ticks), and has a fast cooldown. Requires iron and a posion bottle (utilities in the lefthand menu) to make. Posion status inflicted by this trap dose not stack.

carniverous plant: inflicts bleeding (100 total dmg over 100 ticks) and stun, but has a long cooldown. Will not harm friendly animals.

Bear trap: the same as carniverous plant, but has half the cooldown, requires iron, and, unlike carniverous plant trap, is made from a renewiable resourse. Bear trap still has a long cooldown.

Bamboo-shooting trap: Similiar to the log trap except that it deals 25 more damage, has an incrediably long cooldown, and its damage hits other enimies based on the line of sight of the struck monster. This is the only trap that can harm trap-immune monsters (but it must be triggered by a monster that is not trap-immune)

note that the sound effects get really loud when many monsters are killed at the same time by bamboo traps.

Trap tactics:

The posion-spike:



spikes combo well with any trap, but especially with posion traps. Because the slow kicks in only on the lead enemy, spike traps can change which monster is leading the charge, which works well with posion traps because of the problem with posion not stacking with itself, so that by alternateing posion and spike, monsters take turns reciveing posion status. Both posion and spike traps have a fast cooldown, which also stregnthens this combo. This combo is intended for areas where monsters are being channeled through a narrow maze.

Bearspam



Bear traps require iron to make, but are a self-contained combo. They stun for 50 ticks (half of the duration of the d.o.t. that they add when they trigger) and also change the leading monster with the stun, so that diffrent monsters get the bleeding status. Because of the long cooldown, bear traps will only snare a few monsters after the initial wave passes by.

Often monsters will move in a slightly diffrent direction for a step after this trap has hit them.

(note that the number of ticks per second is based on your selected gamespeed, so it is an arbitrary measurement of time.)

Useing a log trap:

The log trap is good at takeing out a few leading monsters, but needs a few disableing traps mixed in with it to really shine. It is not an incrediable trap when used on it's own, but stacks well with itself and is good for provideing a little burst dammage when something like that might be desireiable. You might use it between patches of posion or bear traps to inflict ectra dammage while waiting for the status effects to expire, so as not to waste as much of the d.o.t.

Its moderate duration and direct damage make the log trap kind of an oddball trap, like the concept of a medium tank; can't tangle with the heavies, can't roll with the light tanks, but is fairly good on its own.

it deals ~ 75 damage if I remember correctly.

Because log trap is so easy to make, it is a good option for early-game siege defence.

THE ALL POWERFULL bamboo trap's uses:

You might have gathered that I like this trap. Though it is not as usefull at dealing with monsters in a trap maze, oweing to its long, long cooldown, it is effective if you can predict or rig where the enemy siege will spawn and place it there. Just one or two of these can severely weaken sieges as they mill around prepareing for a charge, particulaurly if the siege is quite large. Place this trap either at the siege spawn point or after a cluster of spike traps have grouped the enemy into a tight knot.

Its direct damage means that this trap can easily be spammed. If you do spam it, spam it early in the trap maze, so that it will hit as many targets as possiable, or in a place where enimies will end up milling around a lot.

Whe useing this in a trap maze, be mindfull that, though powerfull, this trap is a one-trick wonder that has such a long re-arm time that you should not count on it hitting more than a few times after the initial push. It is not a good combo with most of the other traps because of this.

Note that although most traps only target one monster, others may be affected by a status effect from the same trap if they are all moving in perfect tandem.

This one is a bit of a spoiler.



1) set walls around the edge of map so monsters can only spawn in one spot on a given layer.

2) set up a wall around the place monsters will spawn, with a door that can be locked in case of a siege to prevent monsters entering your town.

Make sure there is enough space for the monsters to spread out a bit while inside that room.

3) place traps in it

4) set sieges to pause the game when they arrive.

5) when a siege comes, lock the door and unpause the game. If you've made the wall high enough, the siege monsters will mill around in your traps and die.

This method generaly will give you loot at no cost of life.

note: Sieges can spawn on top of walls, so make sure townies cannot acess the top of the wall after the wall is completed. This will prevent monsters spawning there (but be mindfull of stuck townies, as always.)

Also note that this dose not protect from underground sieges unless applied underground as well.

This is the most effective method against theft sieges by far, as (if done right) they will never even approach your items.




1) Make a narrow path, possiably with switchbacks, that the enemy has to walk through before they can get into your town.

2) Place traps in it and extend its legnth untill it kills siege monsters outright.

3) Along its legnth, place points of acess that can be locked or flooded so that townies can more easily loot the maze afterwards.

4) at the entrance, place a door that can be locked if townies try to rush in to collect loot from monsters before the siege is over.

5) Place one soldier, patrolling outside that door as bait and have soldiers ready near the door to come to his aid if needed.

6) when a siege comes, quickly lock all acess points. Make sure the bait is in place or select a new townie as bait if he is asleep, ect.

7) use a mote. if possiable, as a precaution to prevent monsters reaching the baiting townie.

This is effective against theft and normal sieges, but will have to be extremely long to kill all of your enemies.

Baiting a trap maze:

1) set a wall protecting your town

2) outside the town wall, set up a trapped area with walls around it.

3) have a small group of soldier townies who live in that trapped area or a secure room inside that area or just outside town. Give them a soldier group and baraccks so they won't have as much reason to leave. Tell them to patroll to that traped area (at the end, in secure area if there is one)

Optional: Set up a water-based defence, such as trench you can quickly fill with water, to protect the bait from harm. You can spawn water or lava by right-clicking or channel it from any overmap water sourse.

4) set sieges to pause on start.

5) when a siege comes, seal the town but leave the trapped area and secure room open so that monsters can path to the baiting townies.

6) Many or all of the monsters will take the bait and move to kill the baiting townies.

7) if you made a water defence, trigger it at the last second so that as many monsters as possiable are drawn into the trapped area. Locking a door at the last second will not stop siege monsters.

8: You may need to add an escape tunnel or stock food near the baiting soldiers to prevent them from starveing during a longer siege.

9) having more than one water-protected defence of this kind may allow you to juggle monsters between the areas.

Note: ranged townies make the best bait, as they cannot be lured out of the secure area by the appearance of monsters.

Wall off the entire edge of map. No immigrents, no sieges while the edge of map (above and under ground) is acessiable.

This is only usefull if you have sworn off disableing sieges in options for your playthrough, and only then as a temporary measure for making adjustments in your defences

Bait pocket rooms: Lure the enemies into a large room filled with traps useing bait. Particulaurly effective underground, where rooms are easy to come by. You can then defend the townie by dropping water between two flood gates once the townie is clear. This is also easy to rig legitimatly if the room happens to be directly beneath a lake. On the overmap, the townie can be extracted via tunnel useing the same method. You could juggle enemies between trapped rooms this way to reduce wasted loot.

Anti-theft defences:

Antechamber works well against theft sieges. Just lock it and leave it. note that theft monsters never spawn underground.

In the early-game, build a fence around your food containers. use spike traps to slow thief monsters and post guards near your food area. On grass maps, you might try collecting carniverous plant traps instead, since they're free. the monsters will be killed by your guards while the disble prevents them from fleeing.

Since they can drop your hard-earned gear and food on death, remember to leave space for some of those items to drop between the traps.

Underground sieges will spawn at edge of map on the lowest avaliable layer.

Underground sieges are more difficult to defend against, because the places they will spawn at will change as you continue to dig down from layer to layer. Because these seiges spawn at map edge, you can wall off the edge of map from time to time as you progress deeper into the dungeon, but sieges won't wait for your walls to be established before they spawn. Here are some guidelines for making an underground strong point:

1) if you make your dungeon defences underground, wall off the edge of map on each acessiable dungeon layer above your defences to prevent siege monsters from spawning behind your defences when the lower dungeon layers are closed off.

2) water should be easy to acess underground. Make good use of it.

3) "cut the bridges" monster blocking method applies to staircases as well.

4) if a siege is underground, your townies and heroes should not be. Use haul and explore depth controlls to help keep your townies and heroes from going back down into the dungeon. if a townie still is heading down into the dungeon, you can pause the game and right-click on them; the right-click menu will display their current task so you can know what else needs to be disabled.

5) remember that the dungeon defence needs to take up a very small area to prevent townies having to travel a long distance to gather loot from the lower dungeon layers. Alternately, it could take up a large area but allow easy acess (locked doors) when the defence is not needed.

6) draw the enemy into your defences so you will only need to place defences on one layer instead of having to defend all of them. be ready to block them from entering your town by destroying stair acess or using channeled water to block the monster's movement.

7) acess to layers lower than your dungeon defences should be outside your defences. This is why the defence area needs to be small.

The objective for an underground defence is to take up less space and use that small space to kill large swarms of enemies. The method I have come to prefer is to spread traps out over one layer of the dungeon (once properly cleared) without bothering to turn it into a maze and then bait waves of enemies onto that layer. once they bounce off my water-based defence that protects the bait and bars acess to the upper layers, they mill around in the traps and die. It may take a long time to wipe out a larger siege this way, but it is rare for me to loose townies in this way.

Once you have unlocked and fully explored the last dungeon layer (congradulations, btw,) you can have more say in where the monsters show up, allowing antechamber style defences in addition to the usaul baiting techniques. If you wall off the lower layers, you could even rigg them spawn on a higher dungeon layer again, breathing new life into your older defences.

If you do a little compareing of fill versus time taken to craft, you'll quickly notice that not all food paths are equal. Some foods, such as cookies, take more time to craft and provide less food value than another food type in the same menu (ie; bread.)

Most players advocate the use of bread, which provides 75% fill and has 4 steps (gathering, milling, and 2 work tables).

For comparison, a cookie requires 5 steps (gathering wheat, gathering egg, milling flour, and 2 craft tables) and provides only 50% fill time.

A pie also takes 5 steps (apple, wheat, mill, 2 tables) but adds a slight bonous to fill time at 80-85 fill (snowcherry adds 115%.) Compared to bread, most pies are not that impressive because of the extra crafting time and the large amounts of additional farm space allocated for the fruit.

Do note, though, that a cake (though inefficent to make at 6 steps) can be worth the extra trouble for the happiness buff it adds.

Notes on respawn times:

Definition of a tick:

4 ticks per seccond plus 2 per speed setting, according to; http://towns.gamepedia.com/Ticks

Time in minnutes is noted as if gamespeed was set to 5.

Fruit trees and blue raddish: 6,401 -11260 ticks (~9 min- 15 min 38 sec.) produces 1-2 fruit.

Wheat & sugarcane: 2161-2880 ticks (~ 3 min - 4 min)

Cactus: 2881-5760 ticks (~4 - 8 min.) Produces 1-2 fruit.

cave or jungle Mushroom: 1441-2880 ticks (~2 - 4 minn)

Animal "build time:" 2880 ticks (4 minn)

Milk & egg cooldown: 1441-2880 ticks (~2-4 minn)

Sheepskin cooldown: 1441-2840 ticks (~2-4 minn)

Note: animals starve after 1440 ticks. (~2 minn) so you only get one egg or milk per animal when not feeding them, meaning the cooldown is moot if you are not feeding animals.

This information is based on the .xml file in the game folder.

(example of a personal room. All shown objects are for added happiness.)



(bottom-right: a bakery zone with all utilities. Also in this picture are the carpentry zone and masonry zone, both with their utilities. You will notice I was having some difficulty with ghosts at this point.)


(example of a forge zone with all utilities)


(Example of an Atelier zone and all utilities.)


(Example of an arena and adjacent balcony zones with two badgers, seating and decoration. Note that the chairs, though not essential, help controll where visitors will sit in the balcony zone. The fence is to keep the badger(s) in the arena zone. The badgers fought to the death a moment after this picture was taken because thay are diffrently colored.)


(Example of a tavern. None of the objects are there for practical purposes, but the chairs help control where heroes will sit when eating.)


(example of a merchent in a marketplace zone. If this zone has chairs, visitors will tend to 'sit' on them rather than standing at a random point)


(Example of some tavern rooms. Note that the objects placed in these example rooms are designed to attract diffrent kinds of heros)


(Example of a baraccks. The deccorations are not useful to soldiers (soldiers cannot have happiness in v14b), and the beds only help organize where the soldiers will decide to sleep.)


(hospital zone with two objects that supposedly improve the speed of healing. A deccoration might also have been a good addition to this zone.)

Just a few thoughts:

-mine out the untilliable tiles on the surface (such as gravel, stone, ect) and fill them with water with the right-click menu. Surround them with fishing, bamboo or sugarcane.

-for channeling water over long distances, use flood gates every 20 spaces and let the water progress in stages. Increce frequency of flood gates as you get further from the river. If you only unlock the water into a mote without doing this, it may never reach it's intended destination (it has an effective max range it won't be able to pass based on evaporation and the sourse's stregnth)

-flood gates allow townies to pass when closed, and keep monsters out effectively when opened & filled with water.

-use iron bars to allow water through without letting monsters pass in areas that are only sometimes flooded.

-most walls can block water. look for ones that say "(fluid blocker)" in yellow text under the wall's name.

-use the fluids elevator to move water up to a higher layer. Water that touches a fluids elevator will be transfered up one layer.

The game tutorials place you in a cramped (very few vertical layers) map and give spesific instructions which can be viewed by pressing F1. These maps can be a good place to get a handle on the "not starveing" aspect of the towns game without being attacked by monsters, and to learn how to use zones and workbenches. The instructions given can help you understand some of the basic commands, but many have expressed the opinion that the tutorials are inadaquate. The developers are working on a new set of tutorials at present, as best I understand it.

edit: the developers have made a new tutorial (wip: more planned) which is much more helpful than the old version. It does not cover everything, but should (I think) be enough to get you started.














Tutorial maps are also flat and have no water or piles of stone.