Whilst you’re starting to build out your regions, we wanted to give you some hints, tips and answer some of your frequently asked questions about County of Fortune!  

You are a lokator – a medieval colonizer and noble steward – given a blank stretch of kingdom to turn into a living county. It’s your job to create the county of your dreams.

We're planning on keeping the demo online as long as possible, and so don't have a confirmed end date, but we'll make sure to give everyone advance notice if that changes.

County of Fortune is releasing into Early Access November 5th

The following languages are supported in this demo:

·       English

·       Spanish - European

·       Spanish - Latin American

·       French

·       Italian

·       Portuguese - European

·       Portuguese - Brazil

·       Korean

·       Chinese - Simplified

·       Chinese - Traditional

·       Japanese

·       Polish

·       Russian

·       Czech

·       Turkish

·       Ukrainian

In County of Fortune’s demo you’ll be able to get to grips with one map, level your settlements up to level 2 and unlock the Commoner social class. 

In the Early Access version, there’s no cap on settlement level; you’ll be able to level up all the way to level 4, giving you access to two new social classes: Artisans and Patricians. You’ll also be able to unlock over 40 new production buildings (including ports, which will give you access to sailboats, capable of transporting products both up and downstream) and 50 new products.

We’re glad you asked! Many changes and additions have been made based off of your feedback. We’ve summarised them in our demo post here, but there you can explore the changes in more detail.

We’ll also be releasing a dev diary soon looking at these changes!

Due to the changes made to County of Fortune, saves from the Steam Next Fest demo aren’t compatible with this demo.

If you try the demo and decide you want to buy County of Fortune, your progress will go with you, so you won’t need to start the game from scratch. 

All you need to do to build a settlement is select the ‘Build New Settlement’ on the bottom bar, or use the shortcut ‘C’ on keyboard. If you’re building your first settlement in the tutorial, make sure you place your starting settlement in one of the white circles. Select your starting building and place your settlement in the blue area, which is where you'll find that particular resource, whether food, forest, stone or something different

QUICK TIP: It’s worth taking a moment to see what resources are available and which direction the river’s flowing in whilst building your first settlement.

Find out more on settlements in the dev diary here[aquila.now]

Select ‘Build a road’ on the bottom tab, or use the keyboard shortcut ‘V’. Connect the middle market squares (the squares in the middle of the settlement that are yellow when you hover oer them with the road tool active) of each settlement together with a road. Any section of road that’s red will mean the road can’t be built. If it’s over water, you’ll need to build a bridge first using the bridge tool.

If you’re finding that products aren’t getting to your settlements, check whether a road is connected or not.

QUICK TIP: Use the ‘Shift’ key to build diagonally

When you first build your roads, they’re a dirt road and can only carry a limited amount of vendor traffic at a limited speed. To increase both the speed your vendors can travel and the amount of traffic the road can handle, you’ll need to upgrade your road. Don’t worry though, you’ll be notified if capacity on a particular road is no longer sufficient!

You’ll first need stone from a stone quarry, and a mason’s guild to process the stone into something usable. To upgrade, select the ‘Upgrade road or bridge’ icon on the bottom tab, and click to select the start and then click again to confirm the end point on the road you want upgrading. If you have the resources, this will now be a stone road, capable of holding more traffic at a faster speed.

QUICK TIP: If the road won’t upgrade, check how much stone you have available for your masons to build with.

After building a road between settlements, all you need to do then to get vendors to start automatically distributing products is set up the settlement to accept a food recipe, or equipment, and watch the deliveries start rolling in.

QUICK TIP: This may not happen instantly, as there has to be enough product to take between settlements.

You can close windows in County of Fortune by right-clicking anywhere on the screen or by pressing ‘ESC’

To select a mayor, all you need to do is open the settlement window, click on the empty red portrait and then onto the portrait of your selected mayor to appoint them.

QUICK TIP: Take a look at the mayor’s bonus before selecting them; you may want to appoint somebody different depending on what the settlement’s starting building is. Though it’s perfectly fine to have a mayor that doesn’t have a bonus for the buildings you have - you can always swap them out later on for one that does!

The way you produce additional goods in County of Fortune is by creating more settlements, or by building additional buildings in already-existing settlements. You can build additional buildings in already-existing settlements by providing equipment needs, and alongside building more settlements, allows you to produce additional goods.

If you’ve maxed out the amount of settlements you can build and need more buildings, it is possible to unlock more building slots. All you need to do is supply your settlement with equipment. For the first social class (peasant) this is either wooden chests (from a wooden chest workshop) or wool tunics (from a wool tunic workshop) and that second slot will unlock.

Yes, this ability was a much-requested feature from Steam Next Fest. All you need to do to move a settlement is select it, then click the ‘Move settlement to a different location’ icon in the top-left corner of the settlement menu. Then you can move your settlement to a different location, though it will need to be near its original location and in the same region.

If you get halfway through and feel you need to completely change what your settlements are producing, you can do just that. Each building, even if it’s the starter building, can be demolished and a new one built in its place, allowing you to change your settlements as necessary.

All you need to do is build out your region’s economy to the point where you’re fulfilling all consumption needs in both the food and equipment categories for a single settlement.

Click the ‘Level Up’ button on the settlement screen, just to the left of the mayor’s portrait once you’ve fulfilled all your settlement’s needs.  In the demo, you can take your settlements up to level 2.

QUICK TIP: You can level a settlement down in order to level another settlement up.

This is an easy one - once you’ve upgraded your settlement to level 2, providing more equipment doesn’t just unlock building slots, but also increases the maximum number of workers in those buildings. So all you need to do is either provide more equipment to that settlement or provide more recipes to increase building efficiency.

You can access higher level buildings (up to commoner level in this demo) by levelling up your settlement. Once your settlement has been levelled up, head to the Buildings tab and select the green person icon labelled ‘Commoners’. Click the plus sign you see in the first slot and select the higher level building you’d like to build in that settlement.

QUICK TIP: You can also see your Commoner needs by heading to the ‘Needs’ tab and selecting the green ‘Commoner’ icon there too.

Carpentry and masonry points are used to build and maintain your infrastructure. Free construction points can be used to replace carpentry points during construction, especially early in the game, but in general, to generate carpentry points you’ll need to build both a carpenter’s guild and a way of getting wood.

Masonry points are mostly required for Commoner buildings, and act similar to carpentry points, but with stone instead. To generate them, you’ll need both a mason’s guild and a way of getting stone.

You can find your free construction and carpentry points in the top right-hand corner of the screen, but you can see all your points by selecting your region and seeing your balance. 

QUICK TIP: Your free construction points will slowly increase as the game goes on.

Your buildings are maintained by carpenter’s guilds, or by masonry guilds later on. To ensure your maintenance doesn’t drop, you need to increase production of carpentry points. Ways of doing this involve providing more recipes to the settlement with that particular guild in it to increase its efficiency, or unlocking extra building slots in other settlements and build another guild to spread the workload.

Heavier goods like stone can’t be traded between regions via road, so you’ll need to move them using rivers, and specifically, you’ll only be able to move them downstream in the demo using raft ports.

You can check the way a river’s flowing by clicking ‘Build a settlement’ and zooming in on the river.

QUICK TIP: Take a look at river direction before building settlements or planning out a new region.

Once you’ve upgraded a settlement up level 2, you’ll be able to build a market or a raft port to trade with your other regions. Trading can either be on land, with a market in each region and a road connecting them, or by water, with a raft port connecting each region, though a raft port can also be used to receive items over land, so long as there’s a small market in the region you’re trading from.

Click the open trade button in the top-left corner, or use the shortcut ‘T’, then select the goods you want to trade and click to 'add trade route' and select the regions you'd like the trade between. It’s automatically set to auto-trade, which will automatically adjust the traded amount based on the region's demand, though you can specify how much of that item you want your traders to transport throughout a year. 

QUICK TIP: Just remember that rafts can only travel downstream and heavier products such as logs, stone, clay and sand can only be moved via river.

Whilst heavier resources such as clay, logs and stone need to be transported via rivers, lighter resources don’t need to be. So long as you have a small market (a commoner building) in the region you’re trading from, raft ports in the receiving region will be able to receive them. Just set up the trade route as normal and the raft port will receive the goods via land.

QUICK TIP: Make sure you have a small market in the region you’re wanting to trade from.

We’d love you to give us your thoughts on the demo - come and join the County of Fortune Discord[aquila.now], or let us know your feedback in the Steam forums!