A guide for somebody who has just founded a colony and is wondering what to do with it.
You begin with a flag, a handful of citizens and nothing else. Everything below is made of two things — wood and stone — so the first building is always a Resource Camp, and so is the second.
A sensible first hour, in order:
The yard comes last on purpose. Nothing is waiting on it: a builder takes materials from wherever in your colony they happen to sit, camp bins included, so a yard on day one is a citizen spent carrying things from one shelf to another. It earns its keep once the camps are filling up faster than they are emptying, or once you have producers far enough apart that a central store shortens the walking. Food, water and a roof come first; logistics is what you fix when you have something to move.
Every citizen runs the same cycle, over and over. In each cycle they want to drink, then eat, then sleep. Miss any of the three and a penalty stacks up; meet them and it drains away again.
Happiness and productivity are not the same thing, and the distinction matters:
| Happiness | Productivity |
|---|---|
| How well a citizen is living — fed, watered, rested, housed. It is the number the colony's mood is made of, and it drives whether children are born. | How much work a citizen gets done in a tick. Unmet needs drag it down; equipment and schooling push it up. |
A citizen with everything can still be unproductive if they have no tools, and a citizen with the best tools in the colony is worth very little if they have not slept. Fix the needs first; the equipment is a multiplier on top.
Four things raise a citizen's productivity permanently, and they stack:
| Bonus | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Tool | An iron or steel tool from a blacksmith |
| Shoes | A cobbler |
| Clothes | A tailor |
| Schooling | Two terms at an Elementary School as a child — the only one you cannot buy, haul or forge, and it must be paid for a generation early |
Nothing teleports. Every unit of every resource is carried by somebody, on foot, from where it is to where it is needed — and that walk is most of the cost of most things. Three consequences follow, and they are the whole game:
Construction works the same way: a site is not built until every material has been physically carried to it, and only then does a builder start spending the ticks. A site that says it needs iron tools will wait for ever if nobody is making them.
Each tier is laid on top of the one below it, so a cobbled street is four improvements deep. Build them along the routes your haulers actually walk — which is usually producer to store, not house to house.
| Tier | Laid on |
|---|---|
| Path | bare ground |
| Gravel path | a path |
| Macadam | a gravel path |
| Cobblestone | macadam |
| Road (asphalt) | cobblestone |
The Highway is faster still and is not an upgrade of anything — it is laid in its own right, and takes a 2×2 of ground for every stretch of it.
A wood bridge carries a road across water at macadam speed, and is the only way anything crosses at all — nothing swims.
The three made tiers — macadam, cobblestone and asphalt — wear out under traffic — slowly. Not with age: a spur you laid once and never used will sit there sound for ever, while the street between your quarry and your warehouse is the one that goes, and even that takes hundreds of cycles of being walked on. Lorries chew a surface faster than horses, and horses faster than boots, so the day you motorise your hauling is also the day your best roads start needing attention. Paths and gravel are not part of this, and neither are bridges, ramps, tunnels or the highway.
A road goes through two stages. Worn is a quarter slower to cross and costs one stone to put right, whatever the tier — that is meant to be trivial, and catching it here is the whole point. Left alone it becomes broken: as slow to walk as bare ground, and relaid at the tier's full build price. Nothing is ever severed, though — a lorry can still drive a broken asphalt road, badly.
You do not order repairs. A worn tile becomes a job your builders pick up by themselves, like hauling; what you actually control is whether there is stone within reach and a spare pair of hands to carry it. Roads on unclaimed ground never wear at all — a road nobody owns is nobody's upkeep.
Three networks, and the thing they have in common is that none of them is a resource you can pick up and carry. They are laid, they reach a certain distance, and a building is either on them or it is not.
Electricity is neither stored nor carried by hand. Either the grid is live where you are standing or it is dark, and an electric works in the dark does not work slowly — it stops.
Making it. The first two ask almost nothing: a Waterwheel Dynamo takes a river and no fuel at all, a Steam Dynamo burns a fuel and a water a charge. Then the stations, which are a different order of thing: Coal, Oil and Gas plants take their water off the mains rather than from somebody with a bucket, so they wait on the pipes before they make a watt. A Nuclear Power Plant is the largest of all and the most demanding — graduates only, a full crew, and a rod that takes most of a hundred cycles to prepare. And three make power out of nothing at all: the Wind Turbine, its Offshore cousin (twice the output, because the wind at sea does not stop for a hill), and the Solar Array, which is the only building in the game that wants no staff, no fuel, no service and not even a road to reach it by.
Carrying it. A Power Line strung between poles feeds everything within ten tiles of the wire. That is usually enough, until your centre fills up with the tall things a wire may not be strung over — a station's flues, a turbine's mast, a civic hall. That is what the Underground Power Line is for: a duct bank dug in a trench like a water main, going where a wire cannot. It joins the grid only under a pole or under or beside a generating hall, and once it is carrying it feeds the same ten-tile ring a pole does. What stops it simply replacing poles is that you pay for that reach by the metre. Across water there is the Seabed Power Line: armoured cable on the sea floor, brought one tile ashore or met by a buried line at the beach — and, like everything else built at sea, it needs a boat to lay it.
A well serves a hamlet: somebody walks to it, drinks, and walks back. A town lays mains instead. Water Pipe is dragged as one straight run, like a bridge or a tunnel, and it goes underground — you will only see it in the underground view; above it, while it is being dug, a safety cone and a heap of spoil. A main may cross a road (you lift the surface and relay it) but not run under a building, because a trench has to be reachable to be dug. Anything within four tiles of a main that reaches back to a source is on the water.
The pipe carries a kind of water, not just water. A Water Pump standing in the sea lifts brine, and brine is no good to anybody: nothing drinks it, no field takes it, and the only building that wants it is the Desalination Plant, which puts fresh water back into the main (and a little salt, which it throws away past fifty). Put a pump in fresh water and it lifts fresh water. This is the one thing about the mains that surprises people.
What the mains buys you: houses that drink at home instead of walking, the Communal Tap — a standpipe anyone may draw from, to drink or to carry to a field — irrigated farms and orchards, a café, a bakery whose ovens are plumbed, and the big stations, which will not run without it.
Every citizen leaves refuse behind every night. It accumulates in the house they sleep in, and when the house is full somebody carries the night's rubbish out and leaves it under a tree — which is exactly as good an idea as it sounds. Fouled ground sheds a little each cycle on its own, and a dumper walks past a tile that already has more than five units on it and finds the next tree, so an untended colony does not poison one spot: it slowly fouls all of them.
The answer is a Waste Collector: two handcarts, a pit and an open fire, emptying houses and clearing fouled ground for twenty tiles around. Upgrade it to a Sanitation Yard — the same trade with two horses in it, working the whole colony — and then to a Sanitation Depot, which does it by lorry with no catchment at all and an incinerator on the grid instead of a woodpile.
Refuse is also a raw material, which is why the works do not burn it on sight: they hold it for a while first, in case anybody wants it. A Compost Heap turns a straw and a unit of refuse into two of fertiliser, and is the cheapest thing a colony can do with its rubbish; a Fertiliser Plant does it on 12 kW, and five times over if you feed it natural gas and sulfur. Fertiliser spread on a field is worth more than the walk to spread it. Separately, a Water Treatment Plant takes the refuse out of every plumbed home on its water main — the version of this that scales, once you have mains and no longer want a cart calling at every door.
Everything in the early game moves on foot or behind a horse. Once you can refine crude into petrol, the transport buildings get motorised versions — the Distribution Centre for the warehouse, the Tanker Depot, the Gas Depot, the Freight Terminal for the trade yard — and each carries far more per trip, at a price: they burn petrol by the tile, one unit per forty tiles travelled, and a motor vehicle with a dry tank is a building that has stopped. They also must stand on a made road, and they need somewhere to fill up: a Gas Station is a shelf of petrol that vehicles may draw from.
Crude oil itself is awkward stuff — it will not go in a storage yard and a loading crew cannot shift it. The Drum Filling Station is the answer: one iron and one crude makes a barrel, and a barrel stacks in a yard, rides a wagon, and is still spent as oil by anything that wants oil.
Cars are the far end of it. An Automobile Factory is a 100 kW assembly line at the end of nearly every chain you have, six materials in and one car out — and a car is not a yard good: it is collected at the factory. Where cars go is parking: a Parking Space or Parking Garage above ground, or, where the land is too valuable, an Underground Parking Entry with modules dug behind it, six bays a module and up to five modules deep. Citizens park near home and near work.
Water is not only something to bridge. A Harbour is where your colony meets the sea: it employs nobody and stores nothing, goods simply pass through it — and any colony's carriage may take ship from it, whoever built it. A harbour keeps two boats, and that number is the one that bites: every crossing books one, so two errands at sea at once is the limit of what one harbour can start.
Everything built on water is built from a harbour: the crew and the materials go out by boat, so an offshore site with no harbour of yours in reach is a site that never gets finished. The Offshore Platform reads the seabed under it for oil and gas, the way a prospector reads the ground. Where it finds something, an Offshore Rig works that seabed — for oil, for gas, or both, and on one alone it wins a quarter more of it. Neither can send its output home over a road, so the Offshore Terminal brings it ashore: a tanker and a gas carrier working from its pier, and the land hauls on from there. Offshore Wind Turbines stand in open water too, and are wired home along the seabed.
Aircraft are the last transport tier and the only one that ignores the ground entirely. There are two kinds and they do not overlap.
Aeroplanes fly between aerodromes. An Airport Hub is the real thing — a runway, three hangars, a works that builds aeroplanes, and a tower whose watch has to be kept or nothing flies. A Landing Strip is a runway and a shed for one aeroplane; it employs nobody and builds nothing, so its aircraft is commissioned at a hub and flown in. A citizen with a long way to go will take a flight if there is an aerodrome at each end and one to spare.
Helicopters fly deck to deck, up to fifty tiles, for a unit of petrol. A Helipad is a deck and a small office for one machine; hubs and strips keep one too, and so does anything with a helideck — which is what makes a rotor the way to reach an offshore rig without a boat.
Flying is not free and the game knows it. A flight burns fuel by the tile, and before anything is loaded aboard, what it is carrying is weighed against what the trip costs: three loaves of bread will not be flown a hundred tiles, three of iron will. An empty machine always flies, because a machine that will not reposition is a machine that blocks its own deck.
This is what the shared map is for. Every colony is on the same world, and the one thing you cannot do is take anything by force — the only way to get what your ground does not have is to swap for it.
The Trade Yard is the marketplace. Set a target per resource and up to eight traders fill it: what they carry in becomes export stock, committed to trade and no longer available to eat, haul or build with. Lower a target and the surplus is released again, back to ordinary colony stock — it arrives in the yard's arrivals rows, along with everything bought, and any store will collect from there.
An offer is a swap: this much of mine for that much of yours. It is posted from your yard and any colony may take it. When somebody accepts, the goods are locked on both sides at that instant and a courier is dispatched — by road, by sea through a harbour, or by air, whichever the route actually allows — and you can watch it make the journey. Losing the race for an offer is ordinary: the first accept takes it and the others simply find it gone.
Doing all of that by hand is fine for one swap and impossible for a colony that produces steadily while you are not looking. Trade Policy is one switch, on your hall, and it turns your colony into a participant in the market rather than a spectator.
What it does, in order: it reads your own history — the last twenty-five cycles of every resource — and works out what you are genuinely in surplus of and what you are short of. Then it posts and accepts on your behalf at a price taken from a table derived from the recipes themselves rather than from anything anyone typed in. Goods rarely divide evenly into one another, so where a swap will not come out exact, the colony that needs the goods pays the odd unit — never more than a couple of per cent, and never the other way about. If you are the one short, you round up. Where two colonies have both switched it on and their lists happen to fit, it arranges the match directly.
Three things about it are worth knowing before you turn it on:
Some goods are never traded at all, each for its own reason: refuse and water (a colony that auto-sells its water dies, with no undo), horses and cars (neither is a yard good), spent nuclear fuel (the vault exists so that it stays where it is put), raw meat and raw fish (a yard cannot hold them — cure or smoke them first, which is the point), saplings, and a brewed cup of coffee, which is worth an hour to whoever drinks it and nothing in a crate.
Everything below is read from the running game, so the numbers are the ones the server is using right now. n workers is the most it will take; costs are what must be hauled to the site.