Resources & Production

Resources

Gathering

Gathering buildings produce resources continuously, even while you are away. The yield depends on the type of resource region the building stands in — forests favour wood, quarries favour stone, fields and meadows favour food and clay, water favours fishing. The same building can be far more productive in the right spot.

Tip: Visit one of your gathering buildings in person to fire up its production: for 4 hours it runs 50% faster, its storage grows for that time and part of the yield lands right away. The building then rests for 8 hours. Visiting several buildings in a row extends the boost of the earlier ones too.

Where to build and when resources arrive

A gathering building only draws from deposits within its range, and only from those on terrain it can use. The build preview tells you for each resource whether it is in range and on which kind of spot to build. If there is nothing to gather within range of the chosen spot, the game asks before building whether you want it anyway. A building without a deposit gathers nothing and shows an exclamation mark on its map icon.

Gathered resources stay in the building's storage and do not count towards your stock until you pick them up in person in the Storage tab (you must be within the building's range) or a cart on a transport route brings them to your Base. As the building's storage fills up, a label with the amount appears under its map icon. A full storage stops gathering.

While a building is being upgraded, transport routes through it stand still and start again on their own once it is done. Meanwhile the route shows you when.

Exploration

You see resources on the map only in municipalities you have explored. Unexplored ones lie under a grey fog. A municipality gets explored as soon as your hero can see into it, and it stays explored. An Observatory sees far: once built, and again with every level, it explores its whole surroundings. Airdrops can also hold maps of the surroundings, from a map scrap to an old atlas: once used, they explore the municipalities within 1.2 to 10 km around you. The bigger the reach, the rarer the map; the largest ones come only from treasure chests. When you are the first of all players to explore a municipality, it glows golden on the map for a moment while its resources are being prepared.

Processed resources

The brickworks turns clay and wood into bricks, the sawmill cuts wood into planks and the foundry smelts iron and wood into steel (4 iron and 2 wood make 1 steel). Processed resources are required for upgrading buildings to higher levels, so it pays to start production early. Steel is the scarcest of them — it only comes from iron, which makes it the bottleneck of the late game. Fired-up production works at the brickworks, sawmill and foundry too: batches then come 50% faster, as long as there is something to process.

Deposits run out. A building always mines its full yield, but only from what the deposits in its range currently hold, so a mined-out area means a smaller yield or none at all. Deposits refill at a steady rate per hour: slowly in green areas (forest, meadow, park), faster in rock and fastest at water. A deposit guarded by an NPC garrison does not refill until you drive the garrison out. Buildings at the same deposits compete, so it pays to spread them out.

You can speed refilling up with deposit care: buy it for gold in the detail of a gathering building for 24 hours. The refill of the deposits in the building's range (only the resources it mines) is multiplied by its level, 2.5 times at level 5 and 4 times at level 10. Care from several buildings on the same deposit adds up, but each further one counts for less. The price is half of what an NPC trader would pay for the building's daily output. You cannot buy care while the previous one is running or while a garrison stands nearby.

Storage and transport

Your Base stores production directly in your player storage; other buildings accumulate resources on site and you need to collect them — in person, or automatically. A cart assigned to a transport route travels between your buildings along planned stops, loading and unloading resources, either back and forth or in a loop. Beware: rides on the road can be ambushed by other players.

Every leg of the journey costs gold based on the distance covered and how full the cart is: a full cart pays the whole fare, a cart loaded to three quarters pays three quarters, and a half-full or empty cart pays half. When the destination building is full, the cart waits at the stop until you free up space, paying nothing meanwhile. When you cannot pay for the next leg, the cart waits at its stop until you top up — the cargo is not lost. You can give a route a gold reserve it will never spend: rather than dip into it, the cart waits. You can set the default reserve for every new route in Overview → Routes and apply it to the routes already running with one tap. A route can be paused or cancelled from anywhere, even when you are nowhere near its stops; changing which stops it visits still requires you to be there in person.

In the route window you can save a route as a blueprint and use it in another building with Route from blueprint. For every stop the blueprint remembers whether the cart always goes to the same building or to the nearest building of a type. The first stop is always the building you use the blueprint in, because the cart sets out from there. Blueprints are managed in Overview → Routes.

Each stop says what happens to each resource. Load what fits takes what is available and the cart leaves at once. With Load to full the cart waits until it is full or reaches the limit you set. Without a limit the cart fills up with the first resource in the list and there is no room for the next one, so when you carry several resources, set them individually and give each a limit. Unload what fits unloads what the building has room for and the cart drives on with the rest. Unload all waits until everything is unloaded. If you cancel a route, the cart drops its cargo in a building on the route, and whatever does not fit goes to your stores.

The brickworks, sawmill and foundry have a separate part of their storage for each resource. If a cart brings only wood to a foundry that has no iron, production stands still, the wood space never frees up and the cart waits at the building. For supplying them, the route window has a Set up from recipe button: it appears on a two-stop route between a processing building and your Base or a warehouse, and sets the input limits from the recipe and the cart's capacity, plus the trip back with the finished product. The cart waits at the pickup until it has all the inputs, so it always brings the right ratio.

Nearby mines do not need an expensive cart. The Handcart from a level 1 workshop carries only a few pieces up to 300 m, but it travels for free. A route can run only one handcart. The Ox Cart (workshop level 3) hauls a lot for a small fare, but it is slow, so it spends a long time on the road and is easier to ambush. The Collector Wagon (workshop level 5) visits up to six stops, so one route gathers resources from several small mines.

Ordinary carts cover short distances, a few kilometres between stops at most. For trips between towns, the workshop builds long-haul wagons from level 6 — from the quick mail coach to the merchant caravan that reaches up to 40 km. A long-haul wagon will not drive legs shorter than 2 km, though; those stay with ordinary carts. Better wagons need parts on top of resources: wheel grease, an oak drawbar, iron-rimmed wheels, waxed canvas and leaf springs. The workshop makes them itself and a wagon's production takes them from its storage. Cancel the production and the parts come back whole.

A long-haul wagon pays per kilometre and moves a unit of cargo far more cheaply than an ordinary cart: a fully loaded salt wagon takes it 25 km for about a third of a gold coin. You save the most by building a warehouse next to distant mines, gathering resources into it with a handcart or a collector wagon and letting the wagon load to the full there, because a half-empty wagon pays at least half the fare. Shorter wagons can be chained through warehouses along the way. Over the longest distances, processed resources such as steel pay off best. When you set up a route, you see what moving one unit costs.

Free Settlers with a level 2 Banner Hall can also stop a route at a faction mate's storage in their region and unload resources there, up to 2000 resources a day (4000 with a level 3 hall).

Trading

The Market (available from level 3) lets you buy and sell resources — with other players and with the market itself. Bricks, planks and steel are traded between players only, not with NPC traders.

A Free Settler with a level 3 Banner Hall pays half the tax when selling to another Settler.