How to start the game?

[Morhem]

I will share my adventures so far:
Create first character, decide to be adventurer, buy some supplies, go out. Eat all my food, hunt wolves, starve, try hunting more wolves, finding none. Starve some more. Find a wolf, get mauled because I'm starving.

Create next character: I will be a lumberjack, and sell lumber for food to get the ball rolling!
Sell some lumber, buy 5 coconuts. Apparently that's all the food my town has. Desperately try to find berries in a forest, find one bush, eat it for 20 nourishment, starve to death.

Create new character, go out into the wilderness, kill bunch of wolves - no knife, no money to make knife. Search for bones to make a bone one - find none, starve.

Create lizardman - instant infinite food supply, EZPZ. Don't want to play a lizardman. Maybe fishing is good? Fishing rod takes 12 Adventure. So far managed to level it up to 2, between several characters.

[Leonaras]

Elven areas have a LOT to forage usually. Depending what race you are there SHOULD be a generally large supply of food somewhere in a settlement. Ursine and orcs have a lot of meat on hand usually which is cheap and can be enhanced by cooking it. If its not the case try aging your world a little bit so settlements can develop better infrastructure.

Another option is just giving your character a solid baseline, specialise in a physical damage skill, a magic, and exploration. Axe gives you the ability to cut trees from the get go, adventuring gives you access to a knife from the start, and a magic skill is always good to start with as trainers are rare. With a setup like that you can waddle around easy areas (After speaking to the local hunter) and forage/kill for loot/meat from skinning.

[RetroGrade]

Take adventuring skill line..take knife tool and waterskin..go to tavern keeper and ask about the area...go to attacked caravan first..lotsa wolves and meat..cook meat which gives more nutrition..put points into endurance first to get you tanky..thumbs up!

[Lawrence]

I don't think I've ever had a food problem, but I sometimes have water issues, which is why I always pick up a barrel as soon as I start.

If you are near a jungle (which it sounds like you are since your village sells coconuts) you can get 999 food just by finding banana or coconut trees. Virtually all villages have meat, next time speak specifically to the hunters. Shops only sell what their family produces, which sometimes ...well often... is nothing.

[Rooty Tooty]

You should start the game with adventuring, so you learn how to play and not starve as bad. Starts you out with a knife and waterskin. I never take adventuring anymore. I just go to a bonewaith settlement and buy a humanoid bone for like 3 gold and make a bone knife. Stick to rivers or towns for free water until I get lvl 6 adventuring and I can make a waterskin.

Once you can get past the start of the game my biggest advice is to buy a settlement for 100g and build a stash and drop extra loot and gold in it. Your next character can access the stash. Would of saved me a lot of headaches if I did this earlier.

[Rooty Tooty]

It also sounds like you could of been in a starving village. Villages can have food shortage problems. It shouldn't be a regular thing. Most settlements have an abundance of food.

[Morhem]

Finally got a character actually going somewhere. Got a pathetic shack in the woods to my name now, and more questions emerged:
So I claimed this map cell as my "Settlement", but obviously, there's only my shack, and only me. Can it be an actual settlement somehow?
There's magic skill in the game, and I have none of them. It says I can train them by using abilities, but that kinda requires having more then 0 skill first. I tried trainers in towns, but apparently blew my money on nothing, got 0 XP from that. How do I break into pyromancy?

[masternate]

step 1: go to workshop
step 2: get mod for starter knife and fire

[Nevoras]

Originally posted by Morhem:

Finally got a character actually going somewhere. Got a pathetic shack in the woods to my name now, and more questions emerged:
So I claimed this map cell as my "Settlement", but obviously, there's only my shack, and only me. Can it be an actual settlement somehow?
There's magic skill in the game, and I have none of them. It says I can train them by using abilities, but that kinda requires having more then 0 skill first. I tried trainers in towns, but apparently blew my money on nothing, got 0 XP from that. How do I break into pyromancy?

Once you have the claim you need to get i think it was 10k gold in your stash to upgrade it to lv2 (in the settlement view the house button), then you have the options in the building menu to create zones for the different types of houses depending on what stuff is in the tile your claim is (the explorable things like meat berrys wood types , fish, etc. Those small numbers in the corner of each of those on the worldmap view tell you how many buildings kinda you can build on that claim. There you have to create Houses with the required furnitures (seen in that extra menu after upgrading the settlement) and size and use the zone tool to set the house/area for the use.

After that you need villagers from other settlements. Once you upgraded the land you also have the option now to ask people to go to your settlement, they will go there with their respective familys but only unoccopied people without an assignment will go inclusing kids etc wich grow up with time flowing. Then you can assign them in the settlement view to the respective buildings for work and they do their thing.

They need Food first to not starve so thats should be your first kind of building and after that you can use the stuff you have growing there to get some work done for trade etc hunter is pretty nice for meat and hides for example a tavern can then cook the meat for better food and the hides could be used for money making by trading or/and by a leatherworker for example (though idk if they level or it takes ages not yet better than only making shoulders and that it for me) ^^

Its pretty op for now i litterally swim in gold but it also makes it kinda booring for the moment cause there is not too much going on after building it to that extend.

There is another upgrade to lv3 after that wich costs 100k gold wich is easy to earn (having several 100k now) but another requirement for the next upgrade is also having 100 people in the town wich i only have 50/100 atm so yeah ^^

Official explanation video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g3m7CAdSjw

just remembered that vid so i kinda wrote my ass off xD // have fun :)

/// Trainers do upgrade your Potential lets take Adventuring if you picked it at the start its learned and has 20 potential already someday by exploring stuff or crafting the adventure stuff you will have 20/20 skill there not going furter (unlearned skills start with just 10 max) Then you need to find a trainer for that skill thats capable to train it over 20 and there you pay for each point upwards atfer lets say 4 times paying him you now can adventure some more and get the next 4 perks in the skill up from 20/24 > 24/24. That uses your Potential points up there on the skillsceen and once theire gone you cant learn anymore. (Mods exist etc)

Also have a look at race and how long your life could be cause when having family in your settlement you have an option to work in your own building etc to skip time for how many years you want i think 1-10 maybe more i dont remember - point is your time flows too while the settlement works and gets rich too but there is nothing like it builds itself or something like that. But the world evolves whilest doing that too - including master workers in other settlements maybe dying at some point of old age and new crafters growing up children getting older and married etc the whole cycle. So you might wanna get crafting nice stuff done before advancing on cause the crafters you want might die someday. And your settlement makes enough money to let the people craft stuff what you are missing is actual good materials at that point so the dangerous exploring comes up now.

Another info about worldtiles - Once you explored / got into the tile by entering and then go out the tile has a timer showing when it will be reset for a new random map. This seems to only occur when actually entering a tile on the map. Could be helpfull for some Settlement building but takes litteral Months or Years ~ What i mean is maybe getting a nice area where several lands collide like forrest grassland desert mountains and all have a river etc and now you try to get the best tiles out of it for multiple settlements. Like grassland makes the whole Wheat farm Mill to Bread stuff while the other respective areas can have stuff wich only exists there and then trade in between your settlements etc by waiting for resetting area you can kinda reroll the ressources avaiable maybe / Later on i think at adventuring there is a skill to use time to explore the ressources of a tile on the worldmap so you dont have to explore by foot everytime btw ~
But i guess thats a longterm goal here just a nice info to have :)

Wall of Text end x-x

Edit: I though ill throw in this Marriage link in too since its Settlement related..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwnLo1iobKA

there should be even more Tutorial Videos on the Channel since its the Official one. Though trough patches there may be some outdated things i think. But the Game is quite straightforward with most other stuff to do so yeah.

[Morhem]

Thanks for great answer! Only thing left is to figure out how to open that settlement window, lol)
Oh, and I still have no Idea how to get actual XP in pyromancy when I don't know any spells

[Nevoras]

Its a normal Tab when opening the Menu the one with the 3 people on the right side called Settlements.

If you did not pick the Skill at the start you can only hope to find a book to learn it in harder encounters (Werebeast Lair (Extreme) was an example from a post maybe all harder encounters have it idk really) but its small chance. Never found a book yet but only heard this from other Posts. ~

Originally posted by Gnollmar:

Hard encounters is where I've found those, I found two books at once in a Werebeast Lair (Extreme) ... no I couldn't take them down, I went invisible and jumped around a lot.

Originally posted by Oblivious_Cargo:

I've heard you can find pyromany skill books from hard POIs, I've personally found one pyromancy skill book from killing a wizard at an extreme POI.

I found something very interesting too here from a Reddit post:

Originally posted by mm1palmer:

Three ways to get levels in magic skills

I always thought there were only 2 ways to get skill levels in Pyromancy, Floromancy, and Cryomancy;

take them during character creation

find a book

Turns out there is a third way. It takes a lot of work but is guaranteed.

What you need is to start a settlement and get it to level 4. Yes, takes time and lots of money. But at level 4 under military buildings you can build 'schools' for the 3 magic types. You need to get construction way up there, for cryomancy you need level 37 so you can build fountains.

Then you need to get married.

You assign the building to your family. And you assign yourself to the building for a few years. And presto you will gain a level or two.

[Morhem]

So basically the best run is to make Adventure/construction guy, make a Fishing rod and some tools, stick em into stash, die. And then create a dude with 3 magical skills, because you can pretty easily get everything else.

[Azghall]

My start is:
Pick each race to check the settlement, sometimes some race have only one settlement, if it's dwarf remake the map. (if you need contruction, i allways go for Elf)

My problem is time, by the time i got things settle, all the top Construction are dead since apparently it's only Dwarf and Rasimi have that skill.

I usually go for Adventuring, level 20 is a must to start a settlement and 40 to have full z-0 map when you enter a region. (40 for city mapping and resource and seeds collection).
At least 28 Construction for settlement building and alchemy table and Leadership since it suffers the same problem of magic skills, using my party as haulers for bigger profits. Then get at least 20 Carpentry for spinning wheel,
I pick pickaxe instead of the knife you can go to bone wraith settlement for bone or Avian, fishman, owl people, strange hut pois for bone knife and bones, some other pois have bones. if you don't want start with adventuring you need to visit a settlement with a tavern to order a waterskin or go to a cave poi with people you can find barrels and bedrolls i think you can have a free barrel and a bedroll if you start with a family with a winery and mine. (not all races have this)

With this your job it to explore the map, locate resources, map the cities and build some settlements, i don't think you have the power to go for some of the hard and extreme poi but all the necessary skills are there to re learn when starting a new game+.

To get the seed of the world check at: [your user location]\AppData\Roaming\WizardsOfTheCode\Soulash2\saves\[name of the world], then open general.json (text file).