Quick Start

The goal of this guide is to show you how to get your village up and running with a basic economy and initial buildings.

*This game is currently in Alpha so this information is subject to change.*

## Land ownership

**Note:** When starting your first game, it is helpful to play on a map that has water available. New players should avoid starting on the "Hills" map.

Even though you can see the entire map when you start your game, you can only build on land you own. As the game progresses, you will buy or acquire new slots, but to begin with you need to choose a starting location.

When you start your game, you will see several land plots highlighted with white markers - these are the land plots suited to starting new settlements. They contain the resources you need to get going: food (berry bushes), stone and wood. Find one that you like and claim it by simply clicking on it. Once claimed, this land plot will be marked with a yellow border, which is the land you are allowed to build on.

**Tip:** You may want to choose a starting plot close to a river or another body of water, to let you get started with fishing early on.

## Your first settlement

All your villagers will arrive in your Village Center, and this "building" is the starting point of your village. This is your first building, and you can find it in the build menu in the top right. The Village center contains a few starting resources, and your starting villagers. Your Village center will act as your actual village *center*, so find a location in a clearing - a bit away from resources like bushes, forests or stones.

After placing the Village Center, it is time to put your villagers to work! Your basic economy will need the following resources:

* Wood
* Stone
* Food (berries)

In addition to this, you will need a few more things to get your village up and running as self-sustained:

* A market
* Houses
* A well
* A warehouse

You will also need to establish a trade route to one of your "neighboring cities", so you can get items you don't yet produce on your own (like tools), and to sell items you produce (which brings you gold income).

### Builders

Now that you have your first villagers in your new village, it's a good idea to make two of them "Builders". Most jobs are assigned from the buildings which needs workers, but "Builders" build buildings and obviously can't be assigned when there are no buildings yet. Open the villagers list (bottom left corner), and click on a villager. Click the "Builder lvl 0" button in the "Available jobs" list, and that villager will now be a builder. Do this for two villagers in the beginning, since you will be building quite a few buildings.

**Note:** When your villagers need houses, these house are also built by the same builders that build buildings you decide. It's a good idea to keep the villagers list open in the beginning of the game so you can assign more or fewer builders when needed.

### Zoning

One of the core mechanics in Foundation is the concept of Development Zones. Some buildings you will place one by one, but other buildings - like houses or farm fields - will be maintained and built by your villagers, in the zones you decide. Zones are created by clicking the "Zoning" paint brush in the top right menu, choosing one of the available zones and painting them onto the terrain. Use Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Wheel to increase or decrease the size of your zoning brush, left-click to paint zones, and right-click to remove zones.

There are several different zones available:

* **Extraction** - your villagers will extract resources from any available resources inside your extraction zones. You will have to give villagers different jobs to extract different resources, but they will only extract them from the extraction zones.
* **Housing** - your villagers will only build houses inside the housing zones. You decide where they can build, and the villagers build houses when they don't have one.
* **Farming** - when you unlock Farms, you can build farm buildings, but your villagers will only sow and harvest inside the farming zone(s). Keep that in mind when you get to that point.
* **Reforestation** - when you unlock Forester Huts, you can use this tool to designate the area to plant trees. As you're deciding whether or not to chop down a swath of trees, remember that you can always plant more in the future (although, only of the normal conifer model).
* **Forbidden** - your villagers will avoid this location. Can be useful for defining the intended path for your villagers to take by restricting where the AI would normally go.

## Your first resources

There are two types of resources or "items" in the game: extracted resources (basic resources), and refined resources / items. All your basic resources are extracted using "Gatherer buildings" (including farms), and everything else is produced by refining the basic resources or producing goods from them. In the beginning, you will only need a few basic resources, but as the game progresses - to build more advanced buildings and to satisfy your villagers' needs - you will need to create production chains to produce items or refine resources into goods.

To gather your first resources, you should create three gatherer buildings:

* Gathering Camp - this building is where your berry pickers will work from, and where they will gather berries. Place it close to berry bushes.
* Stonecutter Camp - this building organizes your stonecutters, and is where your stone cutters will put the extracted stone. Place it close to a stone deposit.
* Woodcutter Camp - this building organizes your woodcutters, and this is where they will put the wood after trees are chopped down. Place this building close to a forested area.

After placing the buildings, your builders will start building gathering the required resources and build them. Now is a good time to start painting the extraction zones for your gatherer buildings - remember to paint extraction zones for wood, stones and berries close to where you placed your gatherer buildings.

### Assigning workers

As soon as your buildings are completed, click on them and click the "Assign available villager" button to assign a villager a job in that gatherer building. If you haven't closed your villagers list, you can see that when you click "Assign available villager" in your Woodcutter camp, one of your available villagers will be assigned as a woodcutter.

Keep in mind that your workers will need to travel between their extraction zones, workplace and home to do their jobs and fulfill their basic needs. It's a good idea to keep this in mind when moving on to the next step.

### Planks

Your first refined resource is planks, used to create buildings like the warehouse (which you will need to build early) and many other buildings. To produce planks, build a sawmill and assign a worker just like you did with the gatherer buildings. It's a good idea to place the sawmill close to a woodcutter camp, since the villager working in the sawmill will need to fetch the wood to turn it into planks. The closer they are, the shorter the distance the villager needs to walk to get the wood.

## Distributing resources

Even though each gatherer holds a stock of the resource being gathered and each workshop holds a stock of the goods it produces, it wouldn't be much of a working economy if all your villagers needed to go to each gatherer to get their wood, berries or stones. For this, you need to distribute your goods and resources around your sprawling village. There are two main ways to distribute resources: markets and warehouses.

### Markets

Your villagers need to be able to buy food and goods from markets. Before you can even start to build houses, you need to build a market by clicking the build button and choosing the market.

**Note:** The market is one of the special buildings composed of several parts (other special buildings are the rural church, manor, and other). These are not built once like the gatherer camps, but are built piece-by-piece and can be edited and redesigned at any time during your game.

Selling goods to your villagers in markets is how your villagers fulfill their needs and one of your main sources of income. To distribute food to your villagers, build a market with a food stall. When choosing a location for your market, keep in mind that the market will increase in size and will function as a "hub" for your villagers to get everything they need. Find a central location close to where you plan to allow housing. When you are satisfied, click the "Start construction" button in the market builder interface.

When the food stall is built, you need to assign a worker to the stall, and decide which resource is sold at that stall. Click the food stall, then click the resource box and choose "Berries", then assign an available villager to the market by clicking the "Assign available villager" button. This villager will fetch berries from warehouses, and sell them at the market.

### Warehouses

In addition to distributing food and goods at markets you need warehouses to distribute resources and goods around your village and trade with your neighboring villages. Building a warehouse ensures that any of your villagers who need a resources stored in the warehouse only has to travel to the warehouse to get the resource, instead of to the gatherer or workshop producing the resource. As you consume and handle more resources and goods, it's a good idea to position warehouses around your city to decrease distribution time. Warehouses are also needed to enable trade - to trade a resource, it needs a location to be stored, and your warehouse provides this.

**Note:** The following steps can be done at the same time as "homes and happiness".

Construct a warehouse from the build menu. You only need to assign a villager to the warehouse if you want to store items produced in your village there. This is usually only needed after a while. After the warehouse is constructed, assign "Tools" to one of the warehouse slots, to allow storing and trading tools. After this is completed, open the trade menu and choose to open a trade route with a city that sells tools (usually the kingdom). You may see that you have to pay a fee to open this trade route. If you don't currently have the material required, produce them. After you have opened the trade route, click the Trading resources tab in the trade window and choose to buy so you always have 20 tools.

## Homes and happiness

Your villagers need homes and access to basic resources to keep them happy. As your village progresses, they also need access to more refined resources and goods. Your combined village happiness is displayed in the top left, and is a combination of all your villagers happiness. Their individual happiness is also shown in the villager list, where you can click each villager to see which of their needs are not fulfilled, keeping them from achieving a zen state of complete happiness.

Before you can build homes, you need to satisfy your villagers' thirst for water. Build a well from the build menu before proceeding.

**Note:** You can prioritize building by clicking the green "Prioritize" button in the building popup for that building.

After the well is built - and your market is operational - you have set up ways for them to satisfy both hunger (berries) and thirst (water). This gives you access to the **Residential** zoning brush. Find a suitable location for your housing area and paint a residential zone using the zoning brush tool. Your villagers will soon start building houses in this area, without further intervention from you. You don't have to zone flat land as housing areas, people will just build wherever they want, inside your housing zone.

You now know how to satisfy basic needs, and how to set up a self-sustained city. As you progress more options, buildings, zones and goods will be available to you. Don't try and build everything at once, but gradually expand your territory, and your economy. Keep an eye on your resources and your economy so you don't go broke. To learn more about how to advance, check out these topics:

* Splendor
* Quests
* Fishing, farming and clothing
* Manors, castles and churches
* ...

## Camera Controls

**A** - Strafe camera left

**D** - Strafe camera right

**W** - Move camera forward

**S** - Move camera backward

**Q** - Rotate camera left

**E** - Rotate camera right

**R** - Tilt camera up

**F** - Tilt camera down

**MMB/MB3** - Pan camera around in the direction of mouse movement

**Ctrl + MMB/MB3** - Move camera around in the direction of mouse movement

**Mouse Wheel Up** - Zoom in

**Mouse Wheel Down** - Zoom Out

**Ctrl + U** - Show/Hide GUI

## Interface Controls

**Esc** - Close active panel and switch focus to the next recently used panel

**Backspace** - Close all panels

**Space** - Pauses game speed

**+** - Speed up game speed

**-** - Slow down game speed

## Building Placement

**Mouse movement** - Locate

**LMB** - Place building

**Ctrl** **+ mouse movement** - Rotate building

## Modular Building

**LMB/MB1** - Place component

**Ctrl + mouse movement** - Rotate component

**RMB/MB2** - Remove component

**Hover  + Drag** - Set height component

## Zoning Tool

**LMB/MB1** - Define Zone

**RMB/MB2** - Undefine Zone

**Ctrl + Mouse Wheel** - Increase/Decrease brush size

## Read more

Warning messages

*Transcluded from Keybindings*

## Strategy for a successful medieval village

TBD

Once you have a working self contained village you will want to expand to make room for more villagers and their needs. As your population increases so will their needs but don't expand too quickly, or your economy wont be able to keep up. Your coins pays for the maintenance of your buildings. You get coins by selling goods to your populace in marketplaces. The more you can sell the more coin you get, more coin can pay for more buildings, more buildings give access to more goods. Some building are very expensive, so make sure there is adequate need before you build them and that you can pay for the upkeep.
To expand you need to get more gold! Lots more! In order to pay the king for more land you need 500 gold coins and be prepared to pay a weekly tribute for it. Expand with caution. You do this by pressing the map like button in the upper right line of icons and then chose in a direction to expand. With an additional hexagon of land you have space to use for additional needs.
Needs, as they were, are many. Once you have a fair few newcomers to provide for, they will start to have a need for hierarchical structure. The new arrival is a newcomer that can be promoted to a serf. A serf can be promoted to a commoner. The commoner promotes to a Citizen. Each tier have additional needs. The serf requires a place of worship as well as a place to live, housing.
The house of worship is currently restricted to a christian faith (may change in future). Housing is what is mentioned in the chapter on Homes and Happiness.
The commoner requires clothing and an additional source of food and better housing.
The other sources of food aside from berries are bread, fish, cheese and boar.
Bread is made from flour in a bakery, flour comes from processing wheat through a windmill, wheat is produced by wheat farms.
Fish is caught by fisher huts near a water source.
Cheesemakers use milk from dairy farms to make cheese.
Boar is produced by hunter's huts.
Clothing is created by the tailor's workshop from cloth, which comes from processing wool made from sheep farms through a weaver's hut.
The citizen requires a source of luxury goods.
These tiers can be kept separate if you chose who you promote carefully.