This basic tutorial will assume the following map settings:

• Terrain type: valleys
  
• Terrain size: medium (you could go large if wanted too)
  
• Climate: fair
  
• Disasters: on
  
• Starting conditions: hard

The very first thing to do is work out a good location for a Forester's Lodge as this will be the centre of your town for now. Its working area is shown as a yellow circle. You are looking for an area which has no rivers or hills within the circle.

Go ahead and place the building down. Assign just 1 builder and pin the building menu to the screen for easy access.

Now you need resources, so assign an area just out side the yellow ring for clearance. You do not need iron for now, though it will be useful later. Make the selection fairly large (about 20x20).

Afterwards, opposite the lodge place down a Stock Pile. 4x4 will do, but no more than 8x8 for now.

Next you need a Gatherer's Hut. Place it as close as you want to the forester's lodge and within the yellow ring.

If at any point you have not got a clearance job set up but need more resources, feel free to set one up out side your yellow ringed area.

When your first 2 buildings are finished you will assign 2 people to each building type(4 people in total).

Now that we have a small stock of food and wood we can build 2 houses. To avoid people wasting time walking from their house to their workplace, try to place the houses as close as possible.

The next few buildings are the Hunting Cabin and the Herbalist's Hut. Each one can also be built within the yellow area of the forester's hut.

Then it is time to build another house. Just be aware of assigning additional clearance tasks if you are running low on a resource. Trees will grow back on their own.

It is time to increase your storage capacity with a Storage Barn. You will probably later on want a central area for all your crafting buildings. It will probably be best to place it close to the centre of the map, just outside of the forest we are going to deforest with the forester's lodge. Next to that you will want to construct another house and a wood cutter.

If you got things done swiftly, you should be seeing winter set in around about the time the last house is being built.

Your building order should be something like this:

• One or 2 people set to builder
  
• (2 people) working at the Forester's Lodge
  
• Clearing tasks for resources
  
• Stock Pile
  
• (2 people) Gatherer's Shelter
  
• 2x houses
  
• (1 person) Hunting Cabin
  
• (1 person) Herbalist's Hut
  
• 1x house
  
• Additional clearing tasks for resources
  
• Storage Barn
  
• 1x house
  
• (1 person) Woodcutter

After the first year there are a number of paths you can take

• Trade
  
• Food
  
• Market based society
  
• Mining

Trade Path
Diverse in its options and perhaps in many ways it is the defining moment of mid game. Once you have that trader assigned it opens up the rest of your game play. But lets not get ahead of ourselfs. Right now we can only just about sustain 4 families, let alone produce enough goods to buy into agriculture.

The trade path is quite far off. Perhaps 5 years at minimum, you will want a higher population count and to be almost completely self-sustaining before even building the trade building.

Before you embark on this path, ask yourself "what can trading give me I that I lack?". This may be tools, clothing or the ability to provide a diverse food pool. Now with a target you need to find something you can produce efficiently in large. For example, making alcohol from berries.

Food Path
After year 1 there are only 2(3) buildings that make food. The best option is the Gatherer's Shelter. go back to your Forester's Lodge and pin it. place another one so the yellow area are only just about overlapping(it doesn't matter so much if they do overlap(about quarter way to the centre is perfectly ok) opposite the building place the Gatherer's Shelter and close by 2 wooden houses. then plop down a road to connect our new area to what we built in year 1. just keep doing this when you feel you need more food.

Market based society
A market society is a very effective way to organise where people live work and store.

Find an area in the wilderness, close to centre of the map with plenty of area to build around and plop it down.

• Roads - wrap a stone road around market.
  
• Extend the road, corners away in a straight line from the building until you reach the market's yellow ring
  
• On each corner place a 4x4 Stock Pile. Try to be organic with the lane/avenue.
  
• Closest to the market you will want job buildings, like the Wood Cutter. Keep them "flat" to the market.
  
• Construct lanes/avenues - basically a square around the work buildings.
  
• Construct more houses

This type of organisation will help to reduce time wasted traveling to restock houses and walking to work

Mining
Just after the 1st year you are not going to need the resources a mine/quarry can provide, though stone may soon become a scarce resource. Find an area where you don't plan on building anything, such an awkward bit of land between 2 rivers and place down a quarry. Assign up to 5 people. This will reduce the need to clear cut large areas of your map.

Farm animals have a lifecycle just like humans. They get born, mature into adults, have children and die of old-age. But in contrary to humans they procreate asexually. A single animal in a pasture is enough to start a livestock industry.

No pasture will produce any meat until its population cap is reached. The maximum cap depends on the size of the pasture, but you can artificially reduce it with a slider in the menu of the pasture. When the cap of the pasture is exceeded, the herdsmen will butcher any excess animals for food. Animals which die of old-age do not provide any resources.

Of all animals chicken have the highest rate of growth. They more than double their number each year. But they also have the lowest yield of food per butchered animal: a mere 6 units.

Cattle and sheep procreate much slower. Sheep double about every 30 months, cattle slightly lower with every 36. But butchering a cow or sheep yields a whole 200 units of food, enough to feed two citizens for a year.

Looking at the production statistics window of a fully-stocked, maximum-size, maximum-workers pastries of chicken, cattle and sheep for a year and adding up the production of each season gave the following results:

Sheep are the preferred farm animal according to these numbers. They produce the most meat and the most clothing-material as by-product.

Cattle are quite meh compared to sheep. They produce less food and less clothing material. The only reason to have them is when you want some leather for warm coats. When it comes to leather-production, a cattle farm is more personnel-efficient than a hunters lodge, and when you count the whole forest of the hunters lodge as used space, also more space-efficient. Create three cattle-farms for each sheep-farm and you should have an equal supply of leather and wool for your tailors.

Chicken are the least efficient animals to have around. When you add up their egg- and meat production, they are still slightly less productive than cattle, and they have no other by-product you can use. But they have the advantage that they are much quicker to set up due to their high reproduction rate and they already produce food during the setup phase.

Orchards have the advantage over farms that they only need workers for harvest, not for seeding. Trees only need to be planted once and then live for several years. That's a job even a single worker can do. But orchards have a setup time of several years until the trees will start to carry fruit. Also, after a few years the first trees will die and need to be replaced by young saplings, which will reduce the food output of the orchard. Even when all trees are in the food-carrying age, the output of an orchard will be slightly less than that of a farm.

Pastures with livestock require a large area and have a long setup time until they produce food. But they are maintenance-free, only require a very small amount of workers and when they finally reach the maximum animal population they produce even a bit more food than farms. Pastures can also be used as an emergency food source. When you set the amount of animals per pasture to a lower amount than you currently have, all excess animals will be butchered as soon as possible.

The most space-efficient food source are fishers. They only need a small building at a river or lake. Do not place them right next to each other, because this reduces their output. But you are free to use the space between them for other buildings. Fishers are also low-maintenance and reliable, but they unfortunately don't have a high yield per worker compared to other food sources.

You could, of course, assign your farmers to other jobs during summer and winter. But this is dangerous, because you risk forgetting to assign them back when it's time for field-work. That means there is an additional risk of losing a harvest because of your own negligence.