There is a lot of content in this game. I am dealing with a wide-variety of subjects but I expect there are gaps in the information. I will try to pay attention to comments and amend/add any suggestions as they become appropriate.

A lot of this guide expects that you have the patience and ability to read some of the resources that the game itself publishes. You'll need to be able to follow the basic tooltips and nested tooltips in the game and have at least a rudimentary understanding of the basic systems to get the most out of this guide.

Update Notes:
March 5, 2025

• Updated broken link to other guides.
  
• Added section on Achievements.
  
• Added reference under "Relics" calling out Dart's guide and Demian Thule's guide.

July 14, 2025

• Updated "Construction Tips: Towered" to include suggestions from Melvice Bane's comments to use columns.

The difficulty settings in this game are excellent and give you the ability to attack this game from whatever angle you want. From my POV, you should consider them as follows:

• Relaxed – Conviction management is impossible to screw up, events are few and irrelevant. This mode is great if you are just achievement hunting and don’t want to be bothered with distractions.
  
  
• Standard – Really well-balanced difficulty that will push you. You’re going to have to carefully avoid conviction penalties and pay attention to all the things that contribute to them. You’ll find yourself having to micromanage needs and schedules quite a bit to be successful and you’ll find the threats that the game produces to be challenging distractions that take your focus. I found this a great way to experience and enjoy the game.
  
  
• Relentless – Admittedly, I have not played this difficulty yet – but assessing the settings, you are going to have an incredibly difficult time managing the fog and the threats that attack you. Your mages are going to spend a lot of time in conviction trouble. You are going to have to be playing at the edge of perfection. Great difficulty for masochists.

SketchyGalore has a good guide that goes into details on keyword difficulty settings and what to expect from them. Highly recommended if you want details.

SketchyGalore's Guide to Keywords

This is a very simple thing - but if you overlook this feature you're going to be really kicking yourself later.

You have the ability to issue a direct command to any mage to do any task. I have noticed that some people are trying to exclusively manage behaviors through schedules - which you should try to do - but sometimes you just need to have a tree chopped down, or a meal prepared.

Sometimes you need to finish up a trial and a direct order is the best way to do this.

In my first play through, I tried solving some of the "do X on my own" trials by scheduling people to be alone, setting up complicated groups, and other forms of automation. It is a lot simpler to just wait for the middle of the day while everyone is working, and order that buffoon to go dance.

You can do this simply by selecting the mage's portrait, and then right-clicking on anything to open a context menu.

There are already some excellent guides that explore how to level up your mages, manage trials, and consider what races go best with what elements. I don’t fully agree with any of these guides, but I believe they make great arguments for their positions.

What I will say is there are a TON of ways to build your mages and most of them are very viable. Enjoy the process of discovering what is best for you and your style and unless you are playing on Relentless, you really don’t need to min-max in this space.

I will also add that I think Gifted Mages are a noob trap. Gnosis shards are precious in the early game, and I would reserve any Gifted Mage hiring for the late game scenarios where you are drowning in high quality relics and want to really max the potential on a Mage.

Consider some of these excellent resources if you want more on the subject.

Demian Thule's Guide

Vuelhering's Guide

Relics serve a couple of purposes that are important to note:

• They are a great source of Gnosis Shards
  
• They provide excellent stat boosts for your Mages, especially combat-related ones
  
• They provide global boosts in the mid-late game in Archives

As a rule, whenever you generate a relic, you should try to equip it on a mage. I edit the priorities on all my mages to put attunement high on their priorities so they can make sure to get this done and start generating experience on them. The relic may be useless to you, but it is still good to max out your early relics on experience and then pulverize them for Gnosis Shards.

The UI for relics is a bit of a pain to work with, but the gains are worth taking a bit of time to micromanage them.

If you want an exhaustive resource on Relics, I recommend Dart's or Demian Thule's guide. Very comprehensive.

Dart's Guide to Relics

Demian Thule's Guide to Relics

I wish I had discovered this a bit sooner in my time, but managing the wild through this menu in the top right is a god send for saving you time.



You can shift+left click on any of the categories and the game will select ALL items in that category. This function will work for any sub category as well.

It brings up detailed information about the selection in the bottom left and with one click you can set the entire wild for harvesting. I found myself setting everything for harvesting once or twice a day in the mid-game and this was a god-send to managing the wild.

You can also use this to set priorities on the plants you want to be harvesting if that matters.

As you progress through the research tree, you are going to unlock planters of various kinds. You are going to need pretty much all of these resources in some quantity. Some of them you’ll likely use more than others and some become important ingredients in late-game material that you’d like to have a surplus of.

I would recommend having:

• Four (4) of each small planter
  
• Two (2) of each medium planter
  
• One (1) of each tree

You would do well to do more than that, and you’ll discover that this is simply not enough on certain resources, however this is a good starting point and as you learn the game you can expand your farming in the areas that you observe shortages.

The growth in the wild will also supplement your economy a good bit.

You don’t have to build greenhouses, but if you can fit them into your structure they do make for very efficient setups. Some of the most time-consuming labor is labor that is sent scouring the edge of the map. The sooner you can bring that cultivation in-house, the more man-hours you will save.

Additionally, on harder difficulties storms are longer and more frequent. Greenhouses protect your economy from the negative events and this is more valuable on higher difficulties.

You are going to want every crafting station and refining beast in the game. Make a plan to utilize all of them in some way. You don't have to put them in their specialized room to get value from them, so once you have access to them get them up and ready to go.

Once you have the resources and planning to get their formal workshops setup you can move the station later, but you don't want to cheat yourself of early value in some of these.

The other thing you'll want to do is to set some automation through the orders menu. I highly recommend, as soon as it is viable, setting up production chains of "Do until X." This is a great way of establishing a floor so you don't have to go back and actively manage your production chains.

Start these floors very low, and then steadily grow them as you have capacity. Experiment with what feels best.


Quilting
There are a lot of things I could call out here - but I love Quilting so much that I feel compelled to share the gospel here.

Quilting is a real game changer for your time management. Hauling all of your stuff is an absolute nightmare until you get quilting online so I heavily recommend prioritizing it to jumpstart your economy.

All of the quilters are valuable in their own right and I generally recommend half as many carriers as you have people and 2 of everything else. Note that some of the Quilted recipes require a 4th level Dark Wizard, so you’ll need a level 2 Dark Wand to get them going.

Groups are really helpful in dynamically managing your mages. There are a TON of ways that you could choose to do this, but I found these 2 groups to be almost required and of significant value to me.

Night Shift
The “Night Shift” group is important because your Dark Mages want exposure to moon light, and they have to be awake to fill that need. Similarly, there are a lot of plants that can only be harvested at night in the mid and late game. Having your nature mages active at night help you more completely take advantage of nocturnal plants. You’ll need to adjust their schedule to make sense, but this simple group solves a lot of problems for you dynamically.


Fully Trained Students
Similarly, having a group to separate “trained” students from “students in training” is really helpful. You may have a fully trained student that you plan to leave in that status for a while. A lot of reasons you may consider doing that. Unfortunately, if you don’t move them into a different schedule, they will still attend class with everyone else. This is a waste of both your teacher’s time as well as the student who could be enslaved tending plants for the duration of their miserable semester.



There are a lot of other really cool ways to use groups, but I found these 2 to be the most impactful of my experiments so far.

The game gives you a variety of tools to manage access to certain areas. I’ve found this most relevant in managing Dining Room tables, Recreation Devices, and Beds. Your Mages will get large conviction bonuses for using these items in the correct rooms. Students favor some rooms and Employees favor others.

You can manage this simply by just adjusting the “Access” on these devices to only be accessible to the types of staff who get the conviction bonus that is most relevant. If you do not manage this, your people will just go to the nearest device and you’ll miss some useful conviction bonuses as a result.

There is also a mid-game case for managing access to certain learning stones. To accelerate learning, you can set the “Access” on the learning device for certain classrooms to be only accessible by the mages who have a high skill in that element. This can make your learning more efficient and make sure that your braindead 8 Earth Skill Mage isn’t trying to teach Lightning at a 1st level skill.

This can take a moment to setup, but there are a few tricks you can do to save travel time on your mages by managing storage well. For example, you can manage your Pantry access to only allow “Meal Ingredients” and not allow “Meals.” For best results, place pantries in your dining rooms and make sure that those dining room pantries are the only places that can accept Meals.


This can be a lot to manage as you need to have a “storage plan” to really make this work. You can save yourself some time by setting default permissions for certain storage solutions so you don’t have to do this over and over again. For example, you could set the default permissions on your chests to never accept meal ingredients or meals and this would force all of these items to the pantries.

There are a ton of applications for this that can save travel time that I’ll leave to your imagination, but don’t sleep on the potential here.

There are a lot of options for ways you can manage schedules. What you need to do is going to depend a good bit on your difficulty. For example, if you are playing on the basic difficulty, you can pretty much get away with ignoring recreation entirely.

There are a couple of things you should think about with building your schedule.

Travel Times
Moving between different events on the schedule takes time. If you can organize your events so your people move less, you’ll get more out of the time. Ordering it so that your people sleep, eat, and recreate subsequently is a good way to minimize their travel time between farming the wilds and returning home.

The default schedule will have an hour of work baked in between classes. I personally feel this is inefficient as, depending on the chore, the person will spend most of that hour traveling as opposed to working.

Conviction Timings
Depending on your conviction needs, you may need to get some micro-boosts to help a conviction problem. For example, your people get a 6-hour boost to their conviction after recreation. It could make sense to try to space recreations out every 6-hours to maximize this bonus. This comes at the price of traveling, but it is an example of a consideration or sacrifice you need to make to maintain a tight rope on conviction.

If you are on the edge of disaster with conviction and it is requiring you to make a lot of scheduling inefficiencies, you are going to find your overall progression slow and you can very easily just death-spiral on harder difficulties.

I generally prefer a schedule that bundles conviction activities together and work together. Something like the below is a bit aggressive on recreation but does a good job of reducing travel time in my opinion.



Your recreation devices are usually within sleeping areas or close to them, so having people recreate before and after bed helps build that need. Eating usually has similar proximity, so makes sense to bundle the activity. You can shorten or lengthen your recreation window based on your conviction needs.

This game is absolutely at its best in the building challenge. You can configure your game to have these keywords arranged in a lot of different ways and part of the real fun of this game is challenging yourself to solve the riddle of how to put it all together.

There are some efficient ways to apply some of these keywords that I think are helpful to know and that you should consider. You don’t have to use all these tricks, but they can save you some heavy rework on your tower.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and I am sure there are some chads out there that have more efficient ideas than what I present here.

Basic Rules of Thumb

• Mages need at least three (3) height to walk through.
  
• Most rooms need at least four (4) height to manage their contents.
  
• Advanced classrooms will require eight (8) height for their specialized teaching device.
  
• You can have multiple floors in a room so long as there is at least one gap in the floor.
  
• Rain falling on a floor will damage the items one floor beneath.

I’ll confess, I like gridded building structures. Part of the building challenge for me was figuring out ways to work the keywords into a stable structure. As a result, most of the tips are on how to achieve that.

The advantage of this model is it allows you to build your frame first, and figure out your rooms later. While I was personally learning this game, I found that I wasn’t really sure what I needed to build next, but wanted to have a frame ready that was flexible to build when I needed to build.

Central Staircase
My personal preference was to run a spiral staircase straight to the top of my structure. I also structured this around the use of Broom Rack’s being able to complement the design. To do this, I recommend a central room that is at least 8 wide to accommodate the 3 width staircase, 3 width broom rack, and a bit of moving room.

This also results in a preference to go tall. Since you unlock foundations with technology later, having a plan to go tall quickly helps.

I generally like to build 7x10 or 8x10 rooms as the building blocks of my room structure.

The 10 height gives you flexibility to do a couple of things:

• Meets the requirements for advanced classroom height needs.
  
• Leaves enough space over the 8 height items to build a roof within the room if I need to.
  
• Meets the Lofted room requirement.
  
• Allows you to divide the room into 2 floors if you need more floor space and are not worried about tall items.
  
• If you have really small room requirements, you can always cut the room in half horizontally to have 2 short rooms instead of one tall room.

The 7 or 8 width can make certain rooms tight, but there are very few rooms that I could not make work with these dimensions. For some of the exceptions, it was just a matter of combining 2 of my blocks into one to keep the structure intact.

Skewed is pretty easy to work in if you give yourself enough overhead space. You can do it in a tall room by using the ceiling method, or you can do it in a short room using the wall method. The wall method takes up more of your usable space though, so be careful about how you approach it.

To do the ceiling method, you just need to put at least 3 wall length’s of ceiling right up against the wall as you can see in the screenshot below.


To use the wall method, you do the same thing, just from the floor using walls to create a double wall. You’ll need to use 2 entries to accomplish this if it on the side exiting the room.

Meeting the Silent requirements can be a real pain to build into your structure. Using a combination of double walls and roof segments can give you a lot of flexibility in building around this constraint.

The image below shows a double wall separating a bedroom from a workshop and a roof in the bedroom itself separating it from the noisy room above. Notice that this allows you to maintain your block infrastructure by carving into the structure itself.

At first glance, Elevated may seem like a really tough keyword to solve for. . . but in reality, it is one of the easiest especially in the block model. All you need to do, is make sure the room beneath it has a ceiling so that there is a gap between the two. You don’t need to have empty space all the way to the ground, you just need a gap between the floor and the roof of the room beneath it. See below.

Making Towered work is probably the most difficult and the bane of my block model – but it is still achievable in a few ways. My personal go-to is to have a towered column just for rooms that have towered requirements. See the screenshot below for a visualization.



With a use of roof segments between each floor, and the bridges to the main building at every room, you can have a towered column in your building to meet this need.

The other way to do it is a bit more laborious and a bit more consequential to your design, but you could make an arched roof through your square to meet this requirement. The challenge is, you can only enter the room through the floor or a broom rack this way. With a large enough square, you can probably make this work, but it is guaranteed to significantly reduce the functional space in the room. That may be worth the price to you if you don’t want to build a column in your school just for towered rooms.




07/14/2025 Edit:

Credit to MelviceBane in the comments with the recommendation of using "columns" instead of "walls" to help maintain your block formats. You could disable an adjacent room by substituting a column in a portion of the block format to allow your towered to work. See his screenshot below.

Roof decorations can get tricky to manage, but are not impossible to solve for with this approach. You have 2 real options.

You can sacrifice space in the room or steal from the next square like in the below.


Or you can warp space and time and just cram them into an existing room through the floor. For some reason, you can have the decorations go through the floor, but it will still create collisions with objects in the next room. If you choose to do this, just make sure you have walking paths around the obstruction.

I did not find much information on this in my searches, so I’ll leave some spoilers here on end-game content if you were curious to know how it proceeds.

To remove the curse and the fog from the map you need to fight your way to the bottom of the dungeon. When you open up the Nexus, you’ll eventually find a path that leads to a seal. You need at least 4 keys of any kind to open the seal and approach the final boss. If you have made it this far, you already know everything you need to know about combat to handle this challenge. Bring the Mage combinations of your choice and seal the deal.

The keys can come either through Dragon Questing or through the Advanced Classrooms. I will say that the questing path is excruciatingly long and I found it significantly quicker to generate 4 keys from the Advanced Classrooms. Meeting their build requirements can be resource intensive, but this is much faster than waiting a lifetime for the dragon quests to resolve. Once you have the classroom built, you just need a level 8 mage which you can accomplish pretty directly with a Tier-3 wand specialized into the same element.

For context, because I am an idiot I am walking through the achievements right now. I am writing, editing, and screenshotting this entire guide while I wait for the dragon quests to complete on max speed to round off the last of the achievements. This guide will be finished, published, and reviewed long before I am done with all the dragon quests.

So – the best advice I can give you really is to not hunt the achievements. Defeat the fog and consider the game won. Move on with your life and go touch some grass.

Some of you may be interested in chasing achievements. I'll share a few thoughts on this matter below.

Don't do it!
My first piece of advice is to simply not do it. Some of the full completion achievements are just a giant time sink. They aren't particularly hard, just really time consuming. Getting the achievement where you unlock all the keys in one game is just one giant time sink of waiting for days to pass while your mages are away on a magical adventure off screen.



Time Challenges
I will say, I did enjoy pursuing the time challenges.



The most straight forward way to do this is to start a fresh game on relaxed difficulty and basic room complexity. These settings make it so the battles are trivial, you don't have to worry about conviction, and the room requirements have bare bones limitations. You can complete every achievement in the game with these base-level settings (I did Iron Man save on this as well).

With this approach, you don't need complicated bedrooms, recreation rooms, or other intermediate-advanced scheduling problems. You can focus on full greed economy and pushing the dungeons as quickly as possible.

With this approach, I managed to kill the burrow larva on Day 7, the burrower spitter on day 20, move the fog to the end of the world on day 30, and finish the game on day 55.

I will say, I was sweating a bit on the final fog push. I got set back because I miscalculated a fog push and it was a couple of coordinates off. To do the final push required a boat load of end game resources that I did not have setup and had to scramble to acquire.

I would also recommend working 2 research stations. Prioritize getting a second lightning mage and enough nature mages to aggressively push agriculture.

You'll obviously need to aggressively push the underground as well. I had my mages spend entire days in back-to-back encounters speed running underground segments. The benefit of this is you get a tremendous volume of building resources this way and stone should not be a problem for you. You probably won't need to mine stone or iron until the mid-late game due to how fast you're clearing rooms. The combats are easy, even for under-leveled mages, so just bring a semi-competent group and get it done. You probably do want to be on tier-II apprentices by the time you are pushing Level 10-15 encounters.

If you really want to plan ahead, you need a plan to get 4 keys somehow before day 80. You could pre-determine what mage types you are going to do that with and preempt getting them to level 8 and researching their trees. You'll need the final research room to be able to meet these requirements, so make plans to get that room up as quickly as you can. You may have enough time to get one or two keys through questing depending on when you start the timing. . . but I would not recommend it.

Using the Ember Dragon is not a big deal, but I would not recommend sinking your focus or resources in to the Jade Dragon Egg. Hatching the Egg and meeting the dragon's needs is a massive distraction.You need to do this for other achievements, but if you are speed running keys, I think it will slow you down more than help you. Once you've broken the curse, go crazy.

Relic Achievements
The relic achivements are not that bad to get figured out once you've broken the curse. The endless dungeons give you level 25 relics like candy and all you need is a Gifted Mage with the extra Relic slot and just roll into 5 25's.



Regrettably, "obtaining" a level 25 relic requires you to raise one. So you need a level 24 relic that you got from hiring/graduating a mage, and then use one of the dragon quests to raise it to 25. From there, just make sure the mage that is farming experience on it is on as many dragon quests as possible and they'll level it to 25 off of that experience... over the duration of the rest of your life.

Finally - displaying a relic of each type is just an annoying accounting puzzle. You'll need 5 archives to pull it off and just have to account for all of the types. Pain in the neck, but not bad once you've cleaned up the rest of the game.

Getting 8 in 2 Disciplines
Just get a pair of relics that raise 2 different mage levels and you can do this by accident. I recommend attuning them on an apprentice so they can train the skills in class. If you put them on an already employed mage it is going to take you a lifetime to grind the experience in combats as employees struggle to gain levels on magic any other way.