Maybe I am playing wrong

[Goliathfox]

This game seems pretty difficult to start. Resources are so low, I had a hard time keeping my wizards alive, since adding new students leads to loss in food very quickly. All my people died from starvation. Games are supposed to be fun, not leave you feeling anxious.

[Katieclysm]

Same issue my first couple attempts. Build a research table and get gardening ASAP. You can start with a cookpot from the opening quest, and cook those berries instead of eating them raw.

[VulpineVandal]

if you've played a deceptively complex colony sim before there are a lot of things you know to do to set the groundwork for you later. If you haven't played something like Rimworld or ONI here are some tips to what you can shift and tweak before anything gets started.

* Hit pause. Seriously. Take the time to look around the UI and at any overlays you have available. I started with the pot and instinctively put it in a room alone thinking "Kitchen". accidentally made a scullery type room and got a 25% bonus to cook speed.

* Your ghost founder doesn't sleep or eat. Take advantage of that. Set it to cooking, building, and hauling. when you get a garden going set it to tending as well. That way core systems like food and shelter keep moving at least a little bit overnight.

* For the sake of your sanity, please know that you can make more than one research table. do so as soon as you can and at least life and death wont be depending on that next upgrade so often.

* Diversity saves lives. Literally. 2/3 of my staff were nonhumans. they walked outside and grabbed a rat to eat instead of precious disgusting gruel.

* Get crazy (but not too crazy) with custom wands. Better wands mean higher skills. the higher the skill the faster they work. someone good with fire magic will naturally cook faster. nature magic grows food faster. lightning magic is research and student summoning. any skill 2 and above get 10% per level as a bonus to speed when teaching. yes they stick around as student longer, but you don't have to have a lot of em. If the basic 3 types are enough for you, just make a tier 2 version of each. at least they will be predictable then.

* Learn the priority menu. the darker the square the better they are at that skill. try to make the ones who are better at certain skills focus on doing those more often and visa versa.
* you don't have to add to staff every graduation. in fact, i would recommend against it. For the demo, try not to go over 10 people total not counting the ghost. while you learn the game and how the systems fold into each other. You survive long enough to get a decent staff team that can push out maybe 4-6 tier 2 wand wielding graduates at a time and you've basically covered survival for the demo.

[madzai]

Yeah, while i have experience with games like Rimworld, Mind Over Magic feel suffocating right from the start. Resources are scarce, fog advancing too fast (3 days before it closes in?), construction site is small, and adding even single additional student may result in death. You need to rush correct research. Also promoting student push fog back way to short.

It feels like rather hardcore experience right from the start.

[Soul4hdwn]

also you don't really need that many people...
on top of that, you don't even need students either... thier only purpose is to complete trials and be sent off for making vivified papers. which... btw... completing trials pushes back the fog, keeping fair bit of surface space for wildlife and resources. most of the resource items for deep stuff requires all the way at the end items like reaper mushrooms.

[Soul4hdwn]

ideal count would be 4 staff and 4 students.

[madzai]

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

ideal count would be 4 staff and 4 students.

Feels about right. But game tells us about rebuidling Magic School, not Mystery Shack.

And even that is too much if you didn't select a pot as your reward and didn't start researching rice fileds ASAP.

[HoJu Eructus]

I felt the same in the first try, I unwittingly made some mistakes and took too long to do some things and went into a downward spiral that ended with everybody dead within a week. The seocnd try went much better

[Isenfalk]

I've been testing some mechanics. Here are my results. I hope they help a bit

Cooking berries is a trap
Unless you've chosen the book bonus of 2x output for cooking, you turn 2 berries into 1 soup - that halves your food supply for a minor bonus which doesn't matter yet.
Also, research food plots early. Berries will run out.

Harvest from the borders
Every night the fog comes closer. If you harvest berries (or any resource) close to the center first, the fog will get the ones farther out.

Just harvest what you use
If you harvest everything at the start, your staff will use the item close to the center first which is bad as I mentioned earlier.
In addition, before you research chests, rain will destroy every item lying outside. Unused harvest becomes lost harvest VERY fast in this game

Stone duty
Stone is imo the worst(because slowest) resource to get early. You need a lot for stations, walls and floors. Pick one teacher to just pick stone makes building much faster.

Push the fog
2 or 3 students can do the simplest trial and push the fog back up to 6 days, even with tier 1 wands.
So always have 3 fully trained students around to push the fog back every 2-3 days or you run out of space for resource spawns.
Aaand there is no mercy
The fog pushes in at full speed from day 1, so you should have 3 students ready for the trial at day 3, latest at day 4.

The most important room
The most important room is .... the classroom!
At best, you fully trained 3 tier 1 student every 2-3 days to keep the fog at bay. +50% learning speed makes it very easy.
Every other room is convenient, but you can do without.

Sanity is for later
Sanity is not important at the beginning, so beds can be outside (you'll have the wood), comfort rooms are lowest priority. The first teachers are resilient and the first students don't stay long enough to go insane.

[HelenaSaphir]

I think I restarted the game like 5 time because one of my teachers would break and leave the second day xD
I then started building beds first. It wasn't even a bedroom but they were sleeping sheltered in a bed and did not go crazy on me xD. On the second day I build a real bedroom.

I used to have 9 students most of the time.
I made 3 schedules with a teacher and 3 students each, had 2 classrooms and just one bedroom with 4 beds.
The students also help you pick up an cook and all of that so I never had a problem after the first few days and it really felt like a school :)

Also yes, grow rice as soon as possible and get them a dining room with just one table. It helps with their sanity in the early game.

[Stealthkibbler]

Once you have the rice fields setup you will be swimming in food and you need to be because you can sometimes get a 'wasting' event that halts all plant growth on the map for a day or two

Originally posted by madzai:

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

ideal count would be 4 staff and 4 students.

Feels about right. But game tells us about rebuidling Magic School, not Mystery Shack.

And even that is too much if you didn't select a pot as your reward and didn't start researching rice fileds ASAP.

Once you get to chapter 2 you get a lot more, By the time I had research everything I was regularly training 9 students at all times and had all my staff slots filled out. Also because higher tier wands take longer to train the students wielding them. like a majority of your school is going to be bedrooms and classes.

[KellyR]

I just never have more than 3 students at a time until at least chapter 2. Then I eventually bump it to 6.

[nanathetiger]

I agree. I think the tutorial needs to be more guiding and controlling. I had two staff starve to death haha.

[corbo]

Originally posted by nanathetiger:

I agree. I think the tutorial needs to be more guiding and controlling. I had two staff starve to death haha.

That was my only issue: People dead of starvation while I had enough food; they would simply not eat.

[Cloft]

Honestly, just go the brutal ONI/Rimworld cheese and kill off the first staff once you get t2 wand users to replace them. Their graves will serve as resources. The replacement staff will be much better depending on how you plan them to be. Meanwhile ake the Verdant Wand and make them a teacher, pump out t1 students to push the fog and get pages and research everything and then it's just a sandbox playing with your tower.

Treasure hunting is not just for treasure...

[Dexter]

I feel the Tutorial and explanations at the beginning are insufficient as of right now and the Tooltips seem to always appear after you've already kind of done something and might have figured out a mechanic yourself. For instance the "building walls" or the "create rooms" Tooltips telling you about the F1 menu which tells you about room boni, which are important gameplay mechanics only appear after you've already put down walls and made your first room respectively instead of before.

I think the Tutorial ends and is being replaced by Tooltips where it should kind of begin. Kind of the opposite problem I had with Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I was confused about not being able to dig/build underground. There should also be something to make it clearer what's important to build first/at all to survive your first few days and how long it takes to train students etc. I completely screwed up my first playthrough just trying to figure out basic mechanics and nearly did the same with the second one (after which I don't know that I'd have tried a third time), although it kind of worked out in the end:

Originally posted by Dexter:

Where I nearly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my 2nd run:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2993854656

How it ended up in the end:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2993855206
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2993855176

It's also hard to tell which items you can place further back or in front or which are fixed at the beginning like stairs, doors etc. seems very finnicky. Why can't I place a door or hallway more in the middle of a room?