Tricks/tips you have learned

[SapphireRose50]

I am relatively new to the game and looking to know any and all tips/tricks you have figured out in the game please! I am slowly learning as I go so ANY additional info would be helpful. Thanks!

[hubbemattsson]

Oh... Everything. That would be hard to answer.
Biggest tips I have tho, dont rush. Dont play on to long seasons, and dont over recruit.

Nothing goods comes out from it.

[Maehlice]

I've only been playing for about a week with about 45 active hours (about 15 more paused for sleeping, eating, reading, whatevering), so take it for what it's worth.

I hated this game after the first 8 hours. I was ready to throw my computer out a window.

My "tips" are all mental ... about your headspace.

Pay attention to and read everything presented -- especially anything from the "knowledge" tab. This game won't beat you over the head with information; most of it must be read and deduced by cross-referencing multiple screens.

And slow down. There's no need to rush anything. Whether you make 20 coin or 20000 coin is moot relative to what the game requires. If it takes you 2 years or 2 generations: still moot.

You can gather and craft things orders of magnitude faster than any NPC, but that doesn't mean you need to be doing all the work. Because, there's ultimately no game-defining gain to be had from min-maxing.

The only "trick" worth knowing is about gameplay. All of your Resource Storage buildings are linked like Ender Chests. Use that to your advantage by building a few throughout the map, as necessary.

Okay, two "tricks". Again, gameplay. Villagers collect from and distribute into storage automatically and remotely. It doesn't matter if they're in the house sweeping or 1000m away wandering; they're still putting in the work.

[bstangeby]

Recruiting adults have a limit based on your reputation. I had built 3 houses and thought to run from city to city to find 3 females and 3 males. I was only able to recruit one male before hit the limit.

[Morri]

If food is an issue in the beginning, you couldn't even hit a tree with a spear if your life depended on it and you don't have bow and arrow yet; the easiest way to get food is to just run after rabbits when your stamina is full or almost full.
I only figured this out after trying to fiddle with spears to kill them for many seasons, because I didn't expect to be able to outrun them, so I never tried. But you can indeed outrun rabbits, and just one-punch them to death, no weapon needed.

[Dreadstone]

I started writing a guide, taking things I learned in-game as well as from this board. Suffice to say my original idea for a one to two page quick start has turned into 'War and Peace'. Below are some things I learned (often the hard way)

(No particular order)

1) Flirt with every female possible. Even if they're sitting right next to each other. ("Don't hate the player") (Diplomacy)

2) Pick up everything. If you reach a weight limit, drop it. (Survival, Extraction)
2a) NPCs will not pick up or "steal" trees you cut down.

3) When recruiting - age trumps skill set. I never recruit anyone over the age of 20-21, this is especially true with women. While their initial skill set may be higher, by year 8-9 they are seriously lagging behind as they will have lost two to four years (24-48 months) of skill advancement. (Due to the in-game mechanic of two years of post-delivery unavailability)

3a) Before you recruit a villager, make sure they have four things: a place to live, food and water, and a job.

4) If you are going for a standard village, meat-based economy is much, much easier to start and sustain than agriculture. (Farming). Less land intensive, less tool-intensive, less resource (fertilizer and seed) intensive.

5) Wife. She is the first person you talk to every day. Not only does she have five (5) special quests for villagers (the other comes from your son), she is your first line of defense when it comes to keeping the village up and running.

5a) Get her pregnant early. My usual goal is to be married by summer season two (2) and put a baby in her by fall of the same season. Don't worry about her mood, it'll start low and go up.

6) Mood. Mood affects productivity along with skill. (Tool as well) Plan for the Type-III house fully insulated (Limestone from the excavation hut, or you gathering said limestone yourself)

6a) Decorations. There are people (Goldi (?) I think is her name. Best voice ever) who have great decoration guides. They (villagers) don't care what the decoration is - just that there is one in the slot.

6b) King's Challenges. If you have a "bad" king ('Bloody', 'Terrible') accept the challenge, then ignore it. This will raise villager mood. (And hopefully get him "replaced"). If you have a "good" king, accept and complete. (There are other second and third order effects)

7) Music. The music is not just background noise. Certain times of the day and certain events (Bandits) will have music triggers. Pay attention.

8) Learn how to maneuver your way around the menu. Both the radial for the hammer, and the main menu for overall management.

8a) Time stops when you open the menu via Tab.

8b) Feel free to use the customize game settings. They're there for a reason.

9) Villager productivity starts (except for farming) in their respective "shop" / "building" at 0800 and ends at 1800. Farming starts when they get to the field. This means your miners are "collecting" resources as they walk to the mine, however, farmers don't start productivity until they actually get to the field.

10) You do not need to sleep. Ever. This means you can (for example) mine or hunt throughout the night.

[MarQan]

- Most importantly play it however you want. Try different styles if you don't know what you want, the game allows a variety of playstyles: roleplay, powergame, or just decorate. Which brings me to my next point.

- Dropped items don't despawn. In similar games they almost always despawn, and sometimes in a very short time, so you have to be careful not to leave anything. Not here. If you can't move because you chopped too many trees, just the drop the logs and come back for it tomorrow... or 3 years later. This means you can also decorate your village with dropped flowers for example (no gameplay effect tho as far as I know). But you can create super realistic settlements. (this is why you have the "Dropped items stop spoiling" option)

- Also, play with the custom settings! If you want a difficulty experience, then 300% tax, 50% skill/tech gain, and 200% animal hp and damage can be fun. But 500-1000% tax is a bit... taxing

- Farming is a lot of time and money investment, especially at the beginning, especially alone.

- Cabbage is easy, but.. cabbage is too easy.. and heavy.

- For most playstyles it's probably best to slowly grow your village instead of booming. So you can adjust everything how you want, before things get overwhelming. If you expand too fast, then village management can eat up all your time, so you'll have no time to do quests or explore the map, or whatever else you want to do.

- You will not find ores as easily as stone. They're a bit harder to get to, but you will know for sure, from a distance, that it's not just stone. Again, this is a bit different from most similar games I've played, it was a nice surprise when I finally got them.

[bbyhighness]

My general advice would be: Don't be impatient. That goes to almost everything in the game. Don't try to do everything at once, rush the main story or recruit too many people too soon. You'll end up running around like a headless chicken. Take your time to explore and don't just run mindlessly somewhere you don't know. Pay attention to your surroundings. Don't deplete your stamina by running everywhere. Pace yourself. It can save your life if you get into a shady situation.

Oh also, do try to get some warm clothes before winter. Winter is a great season to go exploring, because the visibility is much better and you don't have much to do with farming and such (especially early game when you don't have people for it yet). But you need to be able to travel around without worrying about freezing to death. You can pull out your torch to warm yourself temporarily, but it's not the best thing to rely on when exploring.

It may be tempting to play on longer seasons and you can definitely try it out, but I personally found out that it ultimately doesn't give me much benefit. It may seem like the time flies really quickly, but remember that you have ages to do everything. The story quests have 18 years limit, the side quests repeat themselves and respawn every season (that being said, if you do pick one up, make sure to finish it till the end of the season), your character is 18 and will live until his 60s. He's not expected to build a town in a year.

You can always adjust the settings as you play though, so don't stress over your initial settings too much.

And most importantly, the biggest cliché of all: just enjoy yourself. It's a beautiful game and it can be incredibly relaxing as well as challenging, depending on how you play. And if you struggle at the beginning, don't give up. It only makes it more rewarding when you achieve things in the game.

[Walrus]

A note about pacing yourself; when you start it's hard to realize just how much time you have available to you. The only real rush is to try to get warm clothing before your first winter. Outside of that, the faster you try to progress, the faster you make work for yourself. If you don't bother building any buildings for the first year, you pay no taxes in the spring. If you rush to max your build limit, without having villagers who can produce value from those buildings, you're suddenly responsible for all those taxes. not to mention the food, water, and heating needs of a village full of people.

You'll have plenty of time to build up. To get to play as your heir, which is the dynasty part of medieval dynasty, you're going to have to play for at least 20 years. Each day is 24 minutes, each season is 3 days, each year is 4 seasons, that's 96 hours of real time you have to invest just to get to that point, and that's if you never open a menu (which pauses the flow of time). Don't be in a hurry to get that building built today, or even this year, or a couple years in you might find yourself afk, waiting for days to pass so that you can get to play as your heir.

[JerryC]

Starter tip I wish I knew is use torches to scare off wolves when they are attacking. Easier to deal with them when you don't have any real weapons.

[Walrus]

That being said, I do have a gameplay tip for anyone wondering how to just quickly get that next level in diplomacy. Once you have a decent amount of coin, you don't have to run around all the villages creeping on all the young women. Just take your stack of flax seed to a vendor, sell them as much as they can buy, then buy it back from them at a loss, then sell them as much as they can buy again, then buy it back from them, etc. until you run out of coins. Every flow of coins in either direction gets you diplomacy skill pionts.

[bbyhighness]

Originally posted by Walrus:

That being said, I do have a gameplay tip for anyone wondering how to just quickly get that next level in diplomacy. Once you have a decent amount of coin, you don't have to run around all the villages creeping on all the young women. Just take your stack of flax seed to a vendor, sell them as much as they can buy, then buy it back from them at a loss, then sell them as much as they can buy again, then buy it back from them, etc. until you run out of coins. Every flow of coins in either direction gets you diplomacy skill pionts.

That's a really good tip. I was honestly mostly just concerned about not having to go to every village imaginable to sell my flax at the beginning, so I would usually go to Hornica and sell Jan all he could take, then buy iron tools from him so he has coins, sell more flax and so on. I would just make sure to have enough coins to take a ride home, because I would usually end up encumbered :D. And it's maybe a bit of a cheat to just hoard iron tools, but I do like not having to worry about the tools breaking every two seconds. It also makes the mining and cutting trees at least a tiny bit faster.

[carpdirector]

Morel mushrooms are a quick and easy food source when you first start the game, just make sure to also collect St. John's Wort to counteract the poison effect. Summer is berry season and you can collect hundreds in no time (but beware, they get heavy!). They aren't a great food source in the long run, but they do keep me from needing to refill my waterskin all the time.

There's a very easily accessible mine between Branica and Baranica...with NO bears!! Sometime in the first year I like to build a resource storage building in the wide open space between the cave mouth and the road. That way, when I get overburdened with mined ore, I can just run out and put it in the shed and then head right back in to continue mining.

Use the end of the season teleportation to your advantage. Gotta make a run to a village across the map? Plan to arrive on the last day of the season and then let the game get you back home. Before realizing I could build the resource building at the mine, I would drop stone and ore at the mouth of the cave, and then pick it all up just before midnight. You'll probably have to drop some next to your bed in the morning just so you can move, but at least you'll have that heavy load in your village!

Winter is the BEST time to pick up stone because it's everywhere and you don't end up grabbing everything else around. In fact, my husband and I jokingly call winter Hot Potato Season because of the size and shape of the stones and the sheer number of them, especially along the river bank.

[Dreadstone]

11) Your piglets are not dead, they are sleeping.

[Skeletor]

Maxing out the hunting skill to level 10 requires absurd amount of grind (if you play vanilla). It will be probably the last skill in a tree to complete. Instead hunting animals in the wild id suggest to invest in Trapping Master Tier 3 asap. Place as many traps as you can in your village and collect the animals every day. Thank me later