This guide is focused on goals and progression objectives.

• What order could you go about for an efficient and prosperous small village to set yourself up for success?
  
• How do you ensure that you have sufficient coin income to afford early taxes and required purchases (e.g. seeds)?
  
• What can you do to ensure you have the technology unlocked to build things when you want (smithy, henhouse, etc.)?

This order was how I did things in my most recent village to address all of this. Updated for 1.0, but not much has changed.

Main changes from previous version(s) of the game that affect this guide are:

• coin values for selling items (for example, berries no longer make you a ton of early game profit, now we use them for fertilizer),
  
• the fact you can no longer steal crops (but you can sure steal tools!),
  
• and that essentially all village workers now need tools. This includes farmers. But there is some foraging that doesn't require them.

This guide was made taking all of this into account - this is why I don’t recommend a Barn/farmer villager as early as before. Thus, the focus of this guide is early game goals, ensuring you have sufficient coins for taxes and the needed early game purchases, and giving suggestions on what to spend your time on.

Suggestions to make this even better, leave them in the comments below!

• Double left-shift to auto move forward. Once it's enabled, you can hold shift to run. You're welcome. You could also set movement to 'toggle' versus 'hold'...before you start the game...
  
  
• Purchase your large backpack and (largest) pouch from a tailor village vendor (e.g. across the river from Gostovia) as soon as you can reasonably afford to. I did after year 1 taxes were paid. While it seems like a lot of coin at the time, the increased carry weight is so important.
  
  
• Do as many 'easy' missions for villagers as you can, i.e. chopping trees, giving craftable items like axes and hammers, giving villagers a drink from your waterskin, hunting rabbits, etc. Avoid the time consuming ones like hunting wolves at night. But don't go out of your way to do missions, as long as you do at least one or two a season you'll gain enough dynasty points.
  
  
• Craft at night. Once you've unlocked production buildings (workshop, kitchen, etc.), spend your night time efficiently by crafting bulk items. Like those wooden spoons, potage, firewood, etc. Villagers will usually only talk to you during the day for quests and trading, but you can craft anytime.
  
  
• Optional: Steal at night. You can still steal items from villages, just not their crops. There are great early game iron tools you can obtain, like an iron knife and iron hoe from Gostovia, lots of bags, etc. They even respawn after seasons. Care just has to be taken not to be seen. Sneaky sneaky. Totally optional, of course.
  
  
• Every time you make a run to town, bring a load of crafted items to sell! You run to Gostovia a lot.
  
  
• At the end of a season, your character is teleported to your home and your vitals are refilled. You can use this to your advantage early in the game when food is scarce (or forever for the teleport). Note this does not happen between days within a season. Good thing to know if you plan to make a long trek.
  
  
• Villagers skills will increase as well, so keep them focused on a type of activity. Try to only hire villagers with a 3 in the ability you want them for (and possibly others for flexibility). Crafters and Farmers are great for moving around different jobs.
  
  
• Not sure what inventory to store an item? The game actually tells you. In this screenshot below, you can see it is the 'Food Storage' inventory but the torch item shows in its description 'Resource Storage'. It shouldn't be in this chest!
  

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2475584589
I happened to settle at spot #16 on the Heat Map Village Location (first picture) on the above guide (Between that and Spot #2 in the second community heat map).

Totally optional, but I followed this guide to find some very easy buried treasure (4,000 coin, 2,000 coin, and more!). The buried treasure and/or broken carts are random, but in my game I entered Gostovia (afternoon of Day 1) and after selling I had just over 10k coin. Still able to start all the quests on Day 1, just built my first home Night 1.

However, it seems these treasure values have been nerfed already, and only provide 'hundreds' versus 'thousands' of coin. Up to you if you want to spend the time for that, but hey, it's something.

https://youtu.be/JyydVcTuFoE
And for reference, more of the Buried Treasure Locations:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2475729803

Goals. Try to reach by the end of year 1.

• Small Farm. From Hermitage to Small Farm, by the end of year 1 summer you want a basic cabbage farm up and running. By end of the year you want basic forager villagers to help gather.
  
• New Buildings: Resource Storage 1, Food Storage 1, 2x Houses, 1x Well, 1x Hunting Lodge 1, 1x Woodshed 1
  
• Population: You + 2 villagers (3 total)

First mission. Build your first house out of at least wood, not sticks/wattle. Make a few walls of stone if you have collected enough. Straw roof is your only choice for now.

• Note: To do this, after placing the House foundation, you can point at each individual wall section and press 'E' to bring up the wheel to modify the material. Or change the wall section, i.e. from a doorway, to a window, to a regular wall, etc.

The better materials not only increase villager happiness, they also increase the insulation, reducing how much wood that house needs to burn for heat - this helps a ton during winter.

• Pickup lots of sticks and stone.
  
• Will craft stone knives, and stone axes for coin super early game, before any buildings. And continue during early game when these can be automated.
  
• This is important to afford fertilizer and cabbage seeds for our year 1 farm.
  
• Should only have to make one reed trip for straw as it's lightweight. Reeds are found clumped in specific areas along the major bodies of water.
  
• Also do the second mission to place a trap and do basic hunting for food.
  
• Even with our year 1 farm, you should still do a fair amount of hunting in year 1 and 2. Start with rabbits and boars using those wooden spears. Once you can craft a bow, purchase your first linen thread so you can do so (after building the Hunting Lodge 1). It's that important.

After you do some basic missions for villagers and flirt with one female NPC (the third main mission), your next main mission (#4, into the wilderness) will be to build a Hunting Lodge, or you might want a Woodshed. Wait on those. Always build storage first, so there is a place to put things (and for NPCs to store/obtain items and tools).

2.5 Field (Vegetable) - Unlock Food Storage & Barn
You are going to need an early source of food quickly, and so we want to get a basic farm up by the end of summer (or spring really) for cabbage.

• Thus, lay and plow and 5x10 field (can be smaller fields), that will get you up to 10 farming technology, unlocking both food storage 1 and barn 1.
  
• You could only do half of that and get the food storage only, but it's quick and easy and we'll build a barn soon enough. So, you may as well.

Fertilizer and Berries. For the first year you have to buy fertilizer for your small field (cabbage seed first as you can plant in spring and summer, Alwin will give you 20x onion seed relatively quickly in his quest line - likely for year 2 spring). This is the only year.

• Starting in spring and summer every year, you should collect berries.
  
• Leave them somewhere on the ground outside to rot between seasons.
  
• After they turn into rot, you can craft ten into one fertilizer in the barn - once we build it.

As soon as you can, fertilize, hoe, and sow your field with cabbage. Ideally, by the end of the first Spring. This way, you can harvest and plant again in Summer, to harvest in Autumn. Cabbage is the only one you can plant in this way, making it ideal for low cost farming.

Saw this coming, right? Not only is this more storage, but it keeps food fresh the longest (over other building chests, and then your inventory last).

You might think Barn first, and while you could there are more important basics we need to set up first, and you can farm yourself by buying a small amount of fertilizer with your early game income sources (stone tools and feathers and wood spoons, read on). This also helps quickly increase farming skill, which is harder to raise. Regardless, a barn will be put down soon.

Before moving on, it would be best to build at least a second house for your first two villagers - a male and female.

• A spouse cannot move in with you right away.
  
• However, if your first/second villager is your intended spouse, you can quickly get married and move her into your house. Opening up the space in this second house. Although, that has to happen before those two villagers become a family, which won't happen for at least a year I think.

Remember, never make a house out of wattle/sticks. At least wood logs, but mix in some stone walls if you can manage (and like the look). Straw roof is the best option until we have a woodshed for the wood plank roof.

New to 1.0, your villagers actually need water too! Thus, before you hire any of your first workers, you should build a well. It's cheap and easy, but requires 50 farming technology. I unlocked that on Day 1 of Summer 1 after harvesting my crop of cabbage (from Spring) and planting a new crop.

And with this built, you can hire your first villager, which should have a 3 in hunting, whom you assign to the lodge. I wouldn't expect this any sooner than Summer of Year 1.

• Assign them to gather feathers only, for selling for coins.
  
• Gathering feathers importantly doesn't require any tools, which you would have to provide yourself right now.
  
• Between your missions and casual hunting as you roam doing other tasks, you will bring in enough meat yourself for your first few villagers, for now (you also need the hunting skill).
  
• Remember to buy a linen thread, so you can now craft a regular bow and stone arrows. Really, its that important. The cost of the schemes is relatively small.
  
• Then, you should be hunting small game (rabbit, boar, deer) with wooden spears and that initial bow & stone arrows.
  
• Keep gathering logs, sticks, and especially stone. As much as you can, all the time for survival skills.

Building the Hunting Lodge will complete main mission #4.

After building a woodshed you can get your second villager (opposite gender of the first you hired so they can both share the second house), which I would assign to the woodshed. Thus, look for a second villager with a 3 in excavation of the opposing gender from your first villager.

I would set them to gather only sticks for now, as you will use them to make spoons for money, and level crafting skill. As you guessed, gathering sticks doesn't require any tools.

Soon, you will have them collect logs to help you build buildings, but you’ll need to provide a steady supply of axes and for that you’ll want a smithy first (okay I lie, I will eventually hand make axes before using a Smithy, but for now you are the lumberjack, as you need early game income for taxes/fertilizer/seeds). It feels like the lumberjack with a 3 excavation, goes through about 2 stone axes per day.

Winter Prep

• If you can afford it, also purchase some cold weather clothing in anticipation of the winter days. A fur hood / boots will suffice. The alternative is running around with torches to keep yourself warm.
  
• Take a little time and chop some firewood and put that in your resource storage. It lasts much longer than having your villagers burn the sticks your lumberjack is gathering...
  
• I do not advise planting carrot during your first winter. You likely won't be able to have much fertilizer, and you want to plant grain in addition to vegetables next spring. Further, the carrot planted in winter will take till summer.

Goals. Try to reach by the end of year 2.

• Automated tool making with a Smithy!
  
• New Buildings: Workshop 1, 2x House, Barn 1, Kitchen 1, Herbalist Hut 1, Excavation Shed 1, Smithy 1
  
• Population: You + 5 villagers (6 total)

At this point I would make a workshop, and not staff it yet with a villager. Generally, you do not want to do that; however, this unlocks some recipes you want early on.

• The main one will be spending 50 coins to unlock wooden spoons.
  
• This should be easy from selling feathers, stone knives, and stone axes. Keep gathering sticks and stones!
  
• You will also want to unlock the bucket, now that villagers need water. You can fill them yourself from the Well for now.
  
• Soon, you will want to unlock wooden bowls, but not quite yet. Don't waste coins on any schemes/recipes just because, only if you need and can craft the item. Usually for profit, or as the items are required for something else you need to survive, or grow, like animal feed.

If you haven't yet unlocked the workshop, just make more stone knives and axes to sell!

Unlock Kitchen 1, Smithy 1
Now, (at night) in the workshop you can have your character use all the gathered sticks from your lumberjack to make the max number of wooden spoons.

• These are very light, so you can carry them all to sell, for 1.8 coin each.
  
• You will also gain a ton of crafting skill. This will unlock the kitchen quickly. With continued spoon-making, and soon potage making, you will unlock the smithy fast enough.

Once we get a few more houses and bring in a few more villagers, a spare villager with at least 3 in crafting can be assigned to the workshop to automate the crafting of your income-generating item(s), wooden spoons at this point (I prioritize a cook and blacksmith first).

In anticipation of new villagers, you need another house. Unless you get married and free up one of those spaces, let’s assume you need another house.

• Again, only wood but preferably stone walls.
  
• At this point, no more straw roofs, make it out of the highest wood plank tier for best happiness. It’s only logs and you have a lumberjack now! (Okay… maybe they aren't collecting logs yet, you can switch them to do so if you constantly, manually, craft stone axes for them. I did by this point.).

This is so you can craft fertilizer from rot/manure. You should only buy fertilizer for your first year or maybe the second, afterwards collect berries and leave them on the ground between seasons to rot.

• I still farm manually at this point, but am preparing for farming villagers once I can automate tools (smithy!).
  
• By farming for a second year yourself, you will easily unlock the henhouse and pigsty by year's end.
  
• This is the last building you can make (limit 10) until you complete the fifth mission. Luckily, it is to go through the farming process. You should be able to do this a second (or third) time now in year 2 Spring.

10.5 Field (Grain)
If your income is at a point you can afford the extra seeds, this is a good time to start a second field for grains (I made a flax field, and another grain field for rye/oat/wheat).

• Rye Is planted in the Autumn, the others in Spring.
  
• All are needed, flax for crafting and profit, while rye/oat/wheat will be for animal feed. If you need to cut one, cut wheat.
  
• I didn't start this till year 3 Autumn, and year 4 Spring my first game. For 1.0 I planned ahead and had a barn during winter of year 1, and prepared to plant grain on year 2 Spring.

With this and hiring another villager, set them to collect berries only during Spring and Summer. Not only does this not require tools, you will need a bunch of berries to turn into rot, to turn into fertilizer for some time (until the pigsty).

• In Autumn, you can have them change to mushrooms that you can leave to rot and turn into fertilizer as well.
  
• In Winter, there is nothing to collect so you could move this worker to a fishing hut in the future. Or, just spend the winter crafting potions with the herbalist (in the future).

You can build this before the herbalist, but I built it here to get our basic food supply automated after focusing on that initial farming (herbalist to gather berries for fertilizer!).

• You can set your first cook (crafting skill of at least 3) to roast meat.
  
• At this point, you should make your hunter collect just enough meat that the cook can roast (30/day), and with the remaining hunter intensity keep gathering feathers for money. I'm sure you figured that cooking doesn't require any tools.

You could now craft wooden bowls from the workshop, and with incoming meat and grown cabbage, you could buy the recipe (100 coin) and produce potage at the kitchen (instead of roasting all or some of the meat). Great food source! You get the bowls back after they are consumed (at 10% reduced durability, so ten uses). At this point I make potage myself (for skill ups), but keep the cook roasting meat for the villagers.

All stone and top tier wood plank roof. No house should ever be less than that from here on out. With this you can house two more villagers for the next buildings. Or perhaps an extra hunter.

With this and hiring another villager, set them to collect stone only. You need a bunch of stone for building upgraded houses. And for tools. The villager assigned to this building can gather straw without tools, but at this point you need stone. Thus, you will have to craft a number of stone pickaxes for the worker until the Smithy is up and running.

Finally! With all the other basics taken care of, and a steady supply of sticks and stone we can craft the first smithy.

• Put your best crafter (at least 3) to work on making tools that all your workers need.
  
• Namely, stone axes, stone knives, and 1x wooden hammer (for the smith).
  
• As you get more workers and have them doing other tasks, you will need to produce more tools. Hoes, pickaxes, shovels come to mind.
  
• To keep up, the smith building will need to be upgraded to provide more worker slots, better tools, and the blacksmith(s) have to level up. You could make multiple Smithys, but that is really only an early game solution and I do not recommend it.

With a smithy up, gatherers can move to start gathering items requiring tools, I would get a barn-worker villager for farming. And you can finally stop making stone axes yourself for the lumberjack/miner!

Goals. Try to reach by the end of year 4.

• A fully automated Hamlet with animals (pigs+geese/chickens).
  
• This means we need to produce animal feed.
  
• Buildings: Sewing 1, 3x House, Henhouse/Goosehouse, Pigsty, Fishing Hut 1
  
• Population: You + 9 villagers (10 total)
  
  • This will complete mission #8: The newcomers

Again, all stone walls and top tier wood plank roof.

Before building a Sewer, if you haven't already, you should start establishing a grain field in addition to a vegetable field.

• To grow oat/flax/wheat in the Spring, and rye in Autumn.
  
• The oat/rye/wheat will be used to make animal feed for the upcoming animals.
  
• Note wheat should be the last priority, as you can still gather Straw from reeds (and you get some straw from processing the other grains).

The flax will be used for the Sewer (Tailor!). Flax is really where you start to enter ‘mid game’ income making, by selling linen cloth, seeds, and crafted items. Later on it progresses to wool, with true ‘late game’ income coming by selling bred animals.

• You may not have a grain field large enough that you need a full-time tailor yet, and thus like the workshop you might staff this yourself for the short term.
  
• But obtaining the linen thread recipe is the most important unlock here, so we can make fishing spears in the smithy.
  
• Then, obtain the linen fabric recipe, as any spare thread should first be turned into fabric before selling for coin. The thead sells for less than the fabric, there is no good reason to sell just thread.

Also by this point I was on Alwin's Story #8, where you have to give him a recurve bow. As I couldn't craft one yet, the choice is to wait or purchase one from a vendor for around 500 coins. One of his previous missions rewards you with a longbow.

All stone walls and top tier wood plank roof! In addition to the next buildings, now is when I would start obtaining farmers. For the fields now, and animals shortly after. This should house enough folks to get up to ten people

Should have flax up and running now, with a sewer (tailor) building so you can make linen thread yourself. This will allow your smithy to produce the needed fishing spears.

• The fish income allows you to switch from roasted meat to roasted fish meat (let's be honest, roasted fish sticks) at the kitchen.
  
• Those hunters can now look to items other than food, focusing on leather for profit (small bags), or fur. They could gather a little meat for potage as desired.

More feathers! Also, eggs for food. But for the foreseeable future you should just collect feathers for money and arrows.

• Naturally, you have to purchase a hen and rooster to get your operation up and running (or baby versions and wait a season).
  
• Your other means of income should be enough to cover taxes (which will be around 1200/year at this point), and these needed items. It's okay to take it slower if need be.
  
• If you're like me, you may also have the Pigsty unlocked before placing a Henhouse. You could change the order here and prioritize pig-poo, but the pigs are more expensive initially.
  
• As it turned out, by the time I was ready for chickens, I had just unlocked the Goosehouse. Geese are basically upgraded chickens in the game, so I just placed a Goosehouse.

This should house enough folks to get all your initial workers, including your initial farmers and animal breeders. All stone walls and top tier wood plank roof!

Glorious manure. With a farming villager working this and gathering poo, you can make fertilizer so you can stop picking berries (or letting vegetables spoil) to obtain rot. Vastly superior to your herbalist gathering berries (or you, for that matter). To balance the cost of my first animals (which I bought Summer of year 4), I bought 2x piglets, and 2x adult geese to start producing feathers right away for profit.

And with a Pigsty, we now have all the pieces in place for a fully self-sufficient and automated (tool production, gathering and harvesting) Hamlet. Once they grow up the next season, of course.

From here on, how you choose to expand and really upgrade your village is up to you, although the unlock/technology system naturally guides this process.

Congratulations on coming this far!

At this point I had the Workshop II and Resource Storage II unlocked, as well as had my heir born (Autumn of year 4). Depending on where you are, the game is now about doing lots of tasks, like:

• Upgrading buildings, and expanding more residential, and farming field areas as needed.
  
• Unlocking the remaining animal husbandry buildings (stables! cows!).
  
• Dealing with the 'motherhood wave' as your village reproduces.
  
• Gathering ores (starting with copper), and working to unlock a mine (& stone walls / lampposts).
  
• Building a fortification around & lighting up your settlement.
  
• And continuing along Unigost’s story as the years go on, there are quests at year 5, 10, and 12. Also finish up Alwin’s story if you haven’t already.

Personally, here I built a new Resource Storage II next. These share inventories, so it doesn’t matter where they are placed. This second resource storage I placed near the entrance of the cave I plan to mine, which happens to be the one between the Branica and Baranica - easy access to sell items as well as dropping off ores and stone. Gathering copper for tool upgrades and moving on to bigger and better things!

Let me know below if you'd like me to continue this guide into later stages, or cover more advanced topics.

General Gameplay

• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2257082989
  
• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2238348707

Where to locate items

• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2234919967

Basic tips and tricks

• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2232565759
  
• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2232683015

Village locations by the community

• https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2475584589