218 Tips & Tricks

The free builder is what keeps the plot chain moving.

Six is what one starting logging camp can actually supply — push past it before the well and food chain exist and you're building housing faster than the timber (and soon the food) chain can support.

That completes the opening.

Difficulty settings are saved. You only re-pick character, map spot, and banner.

It only takes effect if you save it on that very first character-creation screen — every future new game and reload reuses it automatically, so you never touch the banner editor again.

Small time cost for a perfect region (rich soil, rich iron…).

See #10 for the exact ore-to-spear ratio — the sooner ore starts flowing, the sooner your militia stops depending on imported iron.

A 100-iron deposit arms 100 spearmen. Ratio corrected for the current flowchart (0.8.065+).

Delaying it delays the whole campaign.

Mine or import extra stone separately if you want to upgrade the granary early; the initial stock is earmarked for those two builds.

The cap isn't permanent — deposits refill the following spring — but until then, treasury and trade routes matter more than chasing more families.

You do get pelts to sell — just don't plan population growth around it.

If the deposit hits max capacity, that year's overflow is lost forever.

Working a deposit at zero just parks a family producing nothing until it refills in spring — reassign them to a job that's actually output (see #16).

Use these as the baseline when scouting a region: a 'rich' tag on a deposit is worth roughly double a regular one.

Low-tier towns can spam 2 types. Advanced towns need pears AND apples, pigs AND goats, carrots AND cabbage, wheat AND rye bread.

Plots make ~1 meat/month and workers can't batch-collect across houses — one house per trip. A single central granary either lets meat rot or drops other foods.

A minimum-stock setting on fishing huts can hold back a reserve so the population recovers, instead of collapsing the way an over-hunted spot does.

Pushing it much below that slows regeneration more than it's worth — 100 balances yield now against recovery speed.

Fish ponds physically freeze over and berry/mushroom gathering pauses in the cold months, which is why those food sources flatline each winter.

Workers restock out the back door. Saves street frontage for industry.

A single granary handling every food type gets choked by cart trips once the town's big enough — splitting by type keeps each run short and dedicated instead of one overloaded route.

Keeps wool and yarn out of the general storehouse queue entirely, so the tailor never waits behind unrelated goods for a cart.

Tiny angles often work where default placement reads red. Stays red? Move a bit, spin again.

Snapping forces buildings onto an invisible grid with gaps between them — free placement lets you push plots edge-to-edge and fit more into the same walled area.

Sometimes sneaking one corner sideways makes an extension appear that wouldn't otherwise. Fiddly but learnable.

Infinite iron region? Crank it up.

Work speed −50%, but many buildings don't need max speed — and tool savings are big.

One of the only buildings that turns a normally-useless byproduct — rubble stone — directly into influence. Worth running even in a region with no other use for the stone.

Kills the long trips for trade post workers entirely.

It reveals where every family currently works — combine it with the reassignment icon to pull spare hands off slow jobs into storage or forestry work.

Tearing down something you no longer need — an empty bloomery once your ore runs out, say — gives back partial materials and returns its workers to the labor pool right away.

The cheapest way to start collecting surface rubble stone before investing in a full quarry — worth throwing up the moment you spot a deposit.

Workers then make ONE trip (for charcoal) instead of two. Doubles firewood efficiency. Storehouse conversion works too but eats valuable space.

Regrowing a cut area takes years — start before you notice the shortage.

Herds need time to rebuild their numbers before they can sustain hunting again — cycling the worker off during that recovery keeps the animal population from crashing to zero.

Hit the cap fast, then that family is free for a year or more.

Deforestation isn't pure loss — balance it against your wood industry.

Setting aside a minimum keeps it fed even when other buildings are drawing from the same timber supply.

See #42 — every extra step between workshop and storage is a round trip lost, so this placement matters as much as staffing does.

Next to it, not near it.

Only 2 of 3 family members can craft; the 3rd fetches fuel instead of idling. Far from fuel with no buffer = −50% efficiency or worse.

Plan for a second brewery once you're rotating all three beverages — one building isn't enough throughput.

Fallow fields also work but fell trees and waste logs. Roads look natural and cost less — toggle the fertility overlay while placing.

The bonus applies to every farm, orchard and veggie plot in the region at once, which makes it one of the highest region-wide returns available for the cost.

Combined with #47, a handful of apiaries lifts the whole region's food output and needs zero micromanagement afterward — plant them early and forget them.

Cuts the commute for the exact families who lose the most time to travel during planting and harvest — see #56 for why that commute is especially costly at harvest.

3.5–4 possible with a perfect setup (adjacent housing, tight work area, fields beside it). Give 3–3.5 to guarantee full harvest every year.

Fertility regenerates per crop group: 1 year growing, 2 recovering.

Fewer crop types mean fewer field switches for your farmhands, but you trade that labor savings for lower total yield, since fallow years produce nothing (compare #52).

Barley and flax have their own separate fertility, so they mix in freely.

They'll do one job or the other, not both. Storehouse/granary work suits them (lots of downtime) — and keep it near home, since harvest-season commuting eats collection time.

Plan seasonal staffing per crop instead of assuming a uniform harvest cycle across your fields.

Useful baseline numbers for sizing a field before you scale up.

Forced to sow in spring instead of autumn the first time around? That field takes a one-time yield hit — once the rotation is established, later years run at full efficiency automatically.

Check it before placing any field, not just once at the start.

Rough community-tested figures: ~15%/month sitting uncollected, ~10% in a burgage plot, ~8% in a granary, ~7% in an upgraded one. Meat and berries spoil fastest; beets barely spoil at all.

A slow, compounding curve — breeding does the heavy lifting after the initial import, so the year-2 spend is small next to the year-6 flock (see #65).

Lambs need to grow up before they can shear or breed — paying import price for stock that can't produce yet just wastes the trip.

Enough clothing to supply a sizeable share of your population from one staffed building — wool shortages are rarely a sheep-farm problem, they're a tailor-throughput problem.

Set limits on the Advanced tab.

Set both on the Advanced tab (see #61) — a sheep limit near your true cap stops the game from auto-culling breeding stock you'd rather keep.

Without lowering it, surplus sheep just pile up at the cap doing nothing — dropping the limit pushes them into the butcher's queue instead.

Animal trading post: uncheck sheep + set import in the region with spares, uncheck + import in the receiving region. Workers cross the border and haul them back.

Extensions lock in a food or goods type for the plot's whole life, so building for today's shortage instead of next year's means redoing the work later.

Large: 200 apples from 2 families beats 200 from 4 — spare families run their own extensions. Square: minimum walking to the back trees.

Bigger = trees that never get picked = wasted money and space.

Every other month the trees just stand there uncollected — the walking-distance rule from #67 matters even more here, since there's one shot per year to get it right.

Higher-tier plots demand the range even when one food is clearly "most efficient" for your map.

Match the animal to the region and the plot tier you're building toward, instead of defaulting to one meat source everywhere.

Ensure enough males in high-tier plots to qualify for the better armor.

Full chainmail regiment = 18 tier-3 plots (36 helmets + 36 chainmail).

Without Regensburg (#93) the approval hit is more noticeable, but the upgrade cost itself stays low regardless of origin — rarely a good reason to leave a plot at a lower tier once you can afford the jump.

Chickens solve early food; goats solve the hide bottleneck. Keep the coops anyway — they add food variety and any egg surplus just sells.

No milk, no hides, and less total food than chickens or goats — unless you're leaning on the forest-mastery bonus below.

Only pays off once you already have a salt mine and butcher running for other reasons.

Build stables nearby; assign horses on the livestock tab. A horse carries up to 50 goods per trip, roughly 5× a basic hand-cart — that volume is why the 60g pays for itself so fast.

They fund extensions and expensive trade routes early — and remain real revenue late.

They move the needle fastest per unit, but building an entire trade economy around a couple of premium goods leaves you exposed if price or demand shifts — pair them with the steady small trades from #77.

Example: one region sells clay, the other sells tiles. Prevents flooding your own market.

Not monthly survival goods.

Same math as #20 — easy to overlook bread as a trade good because it's also your food supply, but the numbers work whether you're feeding the town or selling the surplus.

None of them feed, clothe or arm anyone directly, so draining them to zero costs you nothing but the goods themselves — the opposite of the food risk in #84.

Trading pears: over-plant pear orchards AND keep apples + quinces as backup so an empty pear stock doesn't crater approval.

Barters clogging your trade post? Build a storehouse closer to the pack route.

Do it at the livestock trading post — export and lower the limit.

You still bake it, but you won't strip the other region to zero.

+30% mining, +20% farm yields at altitude, animals import 20% cheaper (incl. plot-extension animals). Cost: −20% artisan speed — rarely the bottleneck.

Also: more from hunting camps (minor), clothing consumption −50% (default: 1 clothing/2mo, 1 shoes/yr). Cost: pricier trade routes — negligible unless you spam routes, which you shouldn't.

It slows bakeries, but bakeries run so fast it barely registers.

The import discount barely survives rounding (#100) — the route itself is what actually makes the origin worth picking.

Even without converting any plot, it gives better food-variety satisfaction and a higher reforestation success chance — a reasonable default pick if nothing stronger is available.

Losing the charge bonus mid-fight is what turns an easy bandit clear (#102) into a costly one — hold position and let them come to you.

Otherwise every group sits half-strength.

Fill the first three fast; pull population from the others without crippling the army.

Rout the frontal push fast, then turn the front line to intercept the flankers. The ranged firepower is what makes the rout fast enough.

Combine both where you can — a castle inside your own territory stacks the morale bonus with the chokepoint-and-ranged-fire advantage from #110.

Also works with bow/crossbow behind any melee front-liner.

Same figure as #73 — armor tier is usually the biggest lever you have over fight outcomes, bigger than troop count in most bandit and raider engagements.

Signing a contract removes that unit from the shared pool, so grabbing the dangerous ones denies them to the AI even if you don't plan to use them yourself.

Raiders escalate 2 → 3 → 4 per group. Three camps, a couple of early raids, or one late raid = a neutral claim.

September = nothing left to collect; the starting stash lasts only a month or two.

Extra bread jump-starts population, extra logs build faster, and you're collecting seasonal food the moment March hits. Adjust the build-order priorities per settlement too.

A resource-perfect spot that raiders can reach easily may not be worth the risk.

Reported in one playthrough: fighting and winning over a region an AI lord was actively claiming took it without spending influence, unlike a normal claim. Worth testing before you bank on it.

Passive monthly Milk (except winter), plus Beef and Hides at the butcher. Calves yield half of adults — let them grow.

Oats share fertility with barley but tolerate poor soil far better — and threshed oats can be eaten directly. Ideal for feed regions.

Rye yield was cut 12.5%: check the fertility overlay — below ~30% wheat fertility, rye still out-yields it.

Cows breed in summer, sheep in autumn, offspring arrive in spring — and sheep are sheared once per year, in summer only. Plan wool contracts around it.

They accumulate yield through spring/summer and harvest in autumn; the Meadow environment (Wilding affinity) sets both yield and how many apiaries the land supports.

Brewery makes Cider from Apples 4:1 and Mead from Honey 1:1 — regions with orchards or apiaries can meet the beverage need without barley.

Some structures only complete with builders assigned at the Construction Yard — unassigned families just haul and flatten ground. Staff it before starting a Large Stone Church.

Settlement-level milestones now grant 100 influence (scaling per level) and a Wooden Church grants 100 on build; the Manor now gives 100 (down from 250).

Filter which good types each Trading Post stocks and imports — one post for food imports, another for military goods.

Pig yield now scales with Woodland environment via Pannage — pigs belong in forest regions, chickens anywhere.

Reforestation is stronger but pricier in labor; the AI now builds two foresters per logging camp — copy it for sustainable wood.

Beta password on Steam: veryNiceBasket (Properties → BETAS → pre_release). Mods will most likely crash it.

Buildings no longer reserve their own products for maintenance — produced tools can be sold or distributed even if maintenance is due later.

Reselling loses money (adults resell for less than the ~60g import cost) — the real profit is bred offspring and milk, not flipping bought stock.

Roughly 9/year at baseline, climbing to about 13.5/year around 50% meadow — still only a modest step up from a goat, which throws in hides a cow doesn't.

Citizens and animals have to route through the entrance/exit points — they can no longer walk straight through the fence.

Combined with cider (apples) and mead (honey) already covering casual tavern demand, you can run a full beverage economy without ever building a malt house.