243 Tips & Tricks

The free builder is what keeps the plot chain moving.

One starting logging camp supplies six. Past that, housing outruns your timber

That completes the opening.

Difficulty settings stick; you only re-pick character, map spot and banner

Character-creation screen only. Every new game and reload reuses it after that

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

Early ore means no imported iron (ratio in #10)

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.

Deposits refill in spring. Until then, treasury and trade routes beat chasing families

Pelts to sell, but don't plan population growth around it

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

A family on a depleted deposit produces nothing until spring. Reassign them (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 collect one house per trip, no batching. 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 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.

A plot finished on the 2nd sits empty for a fortnight

Workers restock out the back door, which saves street frontage for industry

Split by type and each cart run stays short

Keeps wool and yarn out of the general storehouse queue, 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.

Free placement pushes plots edge-to-edge, fitting more inside the same walls

Fiddly, but sneaking one corner sideways can make an extension appear that otherwise won't

Crank it up in an infinite-iron region

Work speed −50%, and plenty of buildings never needed max speed

One of the few buildings that turns rubble stone, otherwise useless, straight into influence. Worth running even where the stone has no other use.

Kills the long trips for trade post workers.

It reveals where every family currently works. Combine it with the reassignment icon to pull spare hands into storage or forestry.

Tearing down something you no longer need, say an empty bloomery once the ore runs out, gives back partial materials and frees its workers immediately.

The cheapest way to collect surface rubble stone before investing in a quarry. Throw one up the moment you spot a deposit.

The footprint wipes it. Check the forage overlay before you place, because a small patch is easy to miss under a build ghost

The crown marker on the deposit is the gate. Without it the quarry option stays unbuildable however much rubble is on the ground

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, so start before you notice the shortage

Cycling the worker off during recovery stops the herd crashing to zero

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

Not pure loss: felled ground feeds the fields. Balance it against your wood industry

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

Every step between workshop and storage is a round trip lost (see #42)

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.

A handful of apiaries lifts the whole region's food with no micromanagement (#47)

Cuts the commute for the families who lose most time to travel at planting and harvest. See #56 for why harvest commuting costs so much.

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 or granary work near home suits them

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? The field takes a one-time yield hit. 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.

Breeding does the heavy lifting after the initial import. The year-2 spend is small next to the year-6 flock (see #65).

You pay import price for stock that can't produce yet

Wool shortages are rarely a sheep 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 auto-culling breeding stock you'd rather keep.

Leave it high and surplus sheep sit at the cap doing nothing

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, and the 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 more here; there's one shot a year.

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 upgrade cost stays low on any origin. Rarely a good reason to leave a plot low once you can afford the jump.

Chickens solve early food; goats solve the hide bottleneck. Keep the coops anyway: they add food variety and surplus eggs sell.

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 a trip, roughly 5× a hand-cart, so 60g pays back fast.

They fund extensions and expensive trade routes early, and stay real revenue late.

They move the needle fastest per unit, but an economy built on a couple of premium goods is exposed to a price or demand shift. Pair them with the steady small trades from #77.

One region sells clay, the other tiles. Keeps you from flooding your own market

Not monthly survival goods.

Easy to overlook, because bread is also your food supply. Same math as #20

None of them feed, clothe or arm anyone, so draining them to zero costs only the goods. 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, then 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.

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

The discount barely survives rounding (#100); the route is what you're picking

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

Hold position and let them come. Losing the charge mid-fight turns an easy bandit clear (#102) costly

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 line to intercept the flankers

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

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

Armor tier moves fight outcomes more than troop count does (#73)

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.

Shield-bearing units can form a wall for far better defensive stats, and every unit takes a balanced, defensive or aggressive stance. Double-clicking makes a unit run, which empties stamina quickly, so save it for repositioning rather than approach.

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, so 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. Sheep shear once a 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 beverage demand 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, 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 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.

Citizens and animals route through the entrance and exit points. No more walking 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.

Yard oxen use the cart and only collect from supply dumps, logging camps or construction yards, though they still deliver to sites. Yard efficiency also shows properly in the maintenance UI now.

A long-standing bug killed oxen parked too close to a pasture. If you lost oxen for no visible reason before this patch, that was almost certainly why.

They now choose the closest available post in the chosen region rather than whichever was built first, respect storage filter rules, and ignore unbuilt posts.