Getting started

This article will serve as a short guide on how to start playing the game, and what steps are best taken in order to create a thriving civilization. Information contained here **should not** be viewed as "the" correct way of playing the game, as there is no truly correct way of playing.

## Introduction

### The Tutorial

At the very beginning, the game will offer you the choice of taking a short tutorial on how to navigate the camera, how to use some of the Controls, and to introduce you to your goal.

### The Mother Planet

The first thing you'll notice is the world in-front of you, also known as the Mother Planet. It will be randomly generated each time you start a new game, so it will never look the same as the last. It will also have similar characteristics to that of Earth such as water, greenery, the four seasons, clouds, blue skies, etc.

This is the starting planet, where you will create your civilization and build them up.

### The Epicenter

The epicenter is the first building you will place on the mother planet. It serves as the central and most important place on the planet. Once built, it will create four Nuggets for you to begin your civilization with. Two of them will be adults, with the other two being children.

It is strongly suggested that the epicenter be placed in an area close to a body of water, a forest, and a patch of loose rocks. These will serve as the starting resources that your nuggets can use to advance themselves, construct new buildings, and to stay alive. Having these resources nearby will result in less travel time for your nuggets.

When you are ready to place the epicenter, left-click on the desired location. A message will appear to confirm your action.

## Construction

### Water

With your first four nuggets, the adults will immediately head out to gather resources while the children wander around. At the start, you should command your nuggets to build a Well to create a fresh drinking water supply.

To do this, click on the hammer icon located at the bottom left of the screen. It will open the Buildings menu. The well will be located in the epicenter category. After you click on it, the well's silhouette will hover under the mouse similar to how the epicenter did.

Place the well in an area with a good water source, as indicated by the floating numbers above your mouse. The higher the number, the better the water source.

While the well is being built, if you have two or more bodies of water near your epicenter, you can use this time to plan how to use them. You can use both for gathering water with Water Pumps, or you can start gathering food with the Fisher Piers.

Regardless, having more bodies of water helps speed up the gathering rate for these two very important resources. Once the well is complete, it's recommended you begin building a water pump. Most buildings require the water pump in order to operate.

### Food

Once the pump is complete, you need to start planning for food. You can go the fishing route, or you can build Farms and plant crops. If you decide to go with farms, you may need to construct an additional water pump to have a healthy supply of water for the crops to grow.

There are different kinds of crops in the game. Some will grow better in different biomes, while others can only grow in specific temperatures. Some crops take longer until harvest but yield more food, and vise-versa.

It is suggested you use the crop the requires the least amount of water.

### Maintenance

By this point, you should have more adults working for you. The next building should be the Engineer's Hut. This will allow you to make repairs to your existing buildings so they won't collapse on themselves. If buildings begin to collapse, it'll put a drain on your resources as you re-construct them from the ground up.

At this point you should also consider building a Hospital or a Cemetery. Injured nuggets will begin loosing health if not healed, and dead nuggets can leave patches of illness near their corpses if not buried quickly.

Mass illness and injury can quickly lead to rapid death and the destruction of your civilization.

### Accessories

At this point you can now decide if you want to convert the raw food the nuggets collect into prepared meals by building an Eatery. You can also gain better insight on future temperatures and seasonal changes with the Forecast Tower.

## Repeat

As your civilization continues to grow in population, you need to start adding more of the same buildings in order to keep up with demands. More water pumps, more farms, more fishing huts, more hospitals, etc.

The game is currently capped in nugget population, but that will be removed as the game progresses in its development.