Gameplay Overview

First, you'll want to get used to using the navigation controls to move the camera around the landscape. You'll slao want to familiarize yourself with the main toolbar. It allows you to display information about the town and allows you to place and construct buildings. The status bar, event log, and map will help you monitor and navigate the town.

Before you can construct buildings, you'll need to collect resources from the landscape. Logs can be harvested from the forest manually, or can be produced by a forester. Loose stone can be collected from the landscape or mined out of the ground in a quarry. Iron can also be collected from the terrain or mined from the ground using an iron mine.

The most important thing in Banished is to keep the citizens of the town alive. They need shelter, food, and warmth. As you build workplaces you'll need to assign jobs to the workers.

You can shelter the citizens by building them wooden homes and stone homes. You can also build boarding houses as temporary housing for any homeless or nomads. As the people have children and they grow up, you'll need to place more houses for them to move into so they can have their own families.

Food can be created by using fishing, hunting, gathering farming in fields, growing fruits and nuts in orchards, or raising livestock in pastures.

Citizens can heat their homes using firewood or coal. Firewood can easily be created by a woodcutter. Coal can be dug from the ground using a mine.

As your town grows, you'll need places to store construction materials and produced resources. Stock piles store logs, stone, iron, firewood, and coal. Storage barns are used to store everything else, from food to clothing to tools.

Most all professions require tools, and tools wear out over time. More can be made by a blacksmith.

Once your town is stable, you can work on improving resource production and making the town more efficient.

Dirt roads and stone roads can be placed where citizens walk often to increase their walking speed. Bridges can be used to cross streams and rivers, and tunnels can be used to tunnel under mountains and ridges.

By using leather and wool, clothing can be crafted that can help citizens stay outside longer in the winter. A tailor is needed to craft clothing.

An herbalist will collect herbs growing in old forests, which can be used by citizens to supplement a poor diet. Hospitals can be built to reduce the effects of sickness should disease break out.

Markets can be used as a central storage area for citizens to collect goods. Rather than visiting multiple storage barns and stockpiles to collect food, clothing, tools firewood, and other needed goods, market workers will store a variety of all resources where the citizens can pick them up.

Trading posts can be stocked with resources which can then be traded with traveling merchants. In addition to selling food, clothing, tools, and textiles, merchants also sell new seeds for crops and orchards, and livestock for pastures.

A full town overview can be viewed at the town hall. Full town inventories, graphs of data, and resource production can be viewed. Any nomads that arrive in town will first go to the town hall.

Schools can be built to educate citizens. Children will spend several years in school, after which they will produce more resources as they work.

Chapels and cemeteries can be built to improve the happiness of citizens. Wells can be placed in town both as a gathering area and as a means to put out fires quickly. Happiness can also be improved using taverns that produce ale using fruit or grain.

With a little luck and management, your town can grow into a busy village! Good luck!