You start this game and begin by picking those nice blueprints for building materials to get the snowball rolling like you do in every builder game. Then you start working on your collection of recipes so you can grow your sprawling settlement ready to produce all sorts of food, tools, and luxury goods. Finally you top it off with those expensive service buildings.

Yeh, thats not this game. This is not the settlers, anno, sim city or anything of the like. At the very lowest levels people often mistakenly believe it is and are disappointed when they are lacking some buildings. At higher levels trying to build everything is a sure way to failure. The forest gets angry while you're cutting your way to make space for that sprawling city, the queen gets impatient waiting for you to get to the point and blight goes rampant. In this game less = more.

So this is not a builder game as you might be used to. It's a survival game. Your primary focus is to set yourself up to survive as long as possible. You do that by ensuring food for your people, by keeping the forest's hostility low by opening no more glades than you need and you avoid the queens wrath by focusing at he task at hand, which is fulfilling her orders.

When all that is under control comes the secondary task: gathering the needed reputation points for victory by doing not everything at once, but focusing on one thing instead. Either you produce tools to open a dozen cashes, or you produce 1 or 2 advanced foods to get reputation trough resolve, or you build and supply one of those service buildings or you mass produce something profitable to get the amber to buy your way to victory.

I am not saying you cant mix and match a little bit, but early in the game you don't have the blueprints to complete all different production chains and you don't have the man power to effectively do multiple things at once. So with the options you get dealt, you find something you can do effectively and you go for it all the way. Don't be shy of building multiple production facilities for this one thing you are producing.

Later in the game you will be able to add more production chains and get the people to man those, but very likely it doesn't really matter anyway. The game is not very long, it takes time to set it all up and you have probably achieved victory by the time your multiple chains are up and running.

Now while i am telling you to focus like this, you may feel like you are in a great hurry and a race against the clock. The impatience bar and the growing hostility per year sure do make you feel like that. Yet, that is not entirely true either. The game sets it's own pace. You start with a pitiful amount of workers, even fewer blueprints and just 1 corner stone. Every year that goes by, the forest doesn't only get more hostile, it also throws a bunch of goodies at you that far outweigh the hostility. The longer the game lasts, the easier it all gets, the more options you have etc. So with that in mind, we get back to that first thing. When you start out your game, survival is enough. Maybe you get something amazing right at the start, maybe not. If not, no worries, it will come.

What we need is a plan. And for a plan we need information. That's why instead of grabbing everything that's offered to us like a child in the candy store, we're gonna wait until we have some information to make better choices. The first year therefore is our setup year. We don't even look at any orders nor corner stones because some of the best choices demand us to make them before unpausing the game, and we are not prepared for those yet.

We do look at the first blueprint, but most likely, we don't take it. Only if we see a workshop or carpenter, we might take it right away if the other options are unlikely to be crucial (farms/camps for food supply). Maybe a lumber mill if the other options really look like there's no way in hell you're gonna need those. (but thinking that about anything often means you don't yet know how to properly use it).

We start planning our town while we're still on pause. Highlight 3 paths to dangerous glades except the last tree (use the ctrl key). Put a woodcutter camp at each path. Set building priority to 5 for them and select the "avoid glades unless highlighted" setting.

Plan a road in front of your storehouse, all your industry will be build along this road. Keep this area clear for that, this is your prime real estate. Build a crude workstation on it and set its priority to 4. It's movable, so set it as close to the storehouse as possible for now.

Plan housing for 8 villagers and 1 park. Usually you want to use a combination of general and race specific houses. A race with few members can very cheaply gain extra resolve by using the race specific houses. Keep in mind that you can favor the race with lowest resolve, so even if you have for example 8 harpies and 2 beavers, it can still be useful to put those beavers in a beaver house and give the harpies general housing for now. Set these houses and park to building priority 3.

Plan a trading post. Set its building priority to 2. Both the houses and trading posts are not really visited by your people. You don't need roads to it and they don't need to be close to anything, so build them somewhere out of the way.

Build 2 or 3 makeshift posts with building priority 1. We'll get back to this later.

Plan gathering camps for the resources available in your starting glade. Leave their build priority on 0 unless you embarked without stones/clay and reed/leather/fiber, in that case put priority for those camps on 4. (And man them when they are done.)

Turn of coal and oil consumption in the hearth. Now we unpause the game. We fill the woodcutters as soon as they are done, leaving 1 guy for building.

We let this run for a minute or 2 and then move 2 woodcutters to the crude workstation where they produce the materials needed for our current building projects and start working on a sizable stack of planks (20-30) which may also be needed for glade events. Meanwhile our sole builder is working on the houses, trade post, and camps while building roads when he has no building materials available for buildings. If we didn't start with Fabric and Bricks or the materials to produce those, you may also need to move a few guys to farm those. (as in that case i told you to set those building priorities to 4, they should be ready)

We do want everything to be ready before the end of the first storm, so if needed, make some more builders available by the time the storm starts. Beware though, having a large stack of wood is also one of our main goals for year 1 because your people are going too busy to do much woodcutting during year 2.

Just before the first storm ends, highlight a tree to open a large glade. We aim to open this glade ~30s before the storm ends unless we have modifiers punishing us for opening glades during the storm. As soon as the glade is opened, pause again. Look at the glade event. Some glade events cost a bunch of resources to solve, some will lower our resolve a bunch while we solve them. Some do both, but remarkably many do neither. In that case, or otherwise if we feel we can deal with this one and still be prepared, we open another glade right away. And maybe even a third if the second one was also an easy one.

The goal of opening multiple glades is to gain all the information we can get. We need to know what resources are available to us. We are hoping to get some fertile ground, and/or some large food nodes to feed our people, some coal or marrow if its available in the biome to provide fuel, and maybe some copper. Nice ruins are a bonus. If after 2 large glades we have both food and fuel, there is no reason to open a third even if we can.

As the storm clears, everything comes together. We now have a whole lot of stuff going all at once and that was exactly what we intended for. We have 1 or more glades opened, we have a trader arriving, we have 3 or 5 (depending on prestige level) orders waiting for us, 2 corner stones and a bunch of blueprints. All this information comes together so that we can make the best choices on each of them.

Start looking at the orders now. The first ones are often insignificant choices. Get those out of the way until you run into one that is actually significant like a timed order with great reward that might be hard to complete.

Before actually choosing anything else, look carefully at all the options available. Don't forget the blueprints and cornerstones the trader has on offer.

The first priority is to find a way to feed your people, Some sort of farm on fertile ground is best. A gathering camp with a handful of large nodes for it is fine too.

Next pay some attention to the wood and fuel situation. Make note of your wood production, some biomes have 60% bonus to wood production, some have double wood production. There are also cornerstones providing +1 to woodcutting. All together your woodcutting will between 1.0 and 3.0 wood per cut. If it is 3.0, you don't need any other fuel, you can consider wood an unlimited resource. If its 1.6 or 2.0, you should try to find another fuel, but there is not a lot of pressure to limit your wood consumption. If it's only 1.0 wood consumption is a main concern. Tool production is going to be difficult. If the map has coal or marrow, we hopefully have that in our glades. If neither of this is the case, maybe we can produce some oil.

How about that timed order ? Can we do it ? Maybe we can instantly complete some of the other orders and use the rewards from those ?

Finally we see what we have available for victory condition and any synergies. Knowing what our basic food source is, see if you can turn that into an advanced food. Maybe you have cornerstone bonuses available to something you can actually produce. Maybe you can produce tools. You need to be open minded here, when there are things you have never produced before, doesn't mean it can't be good to build your game around them now.

And i mentioned it last because you already payed attention to it while opening the glades, what resources are you going to use to do the glade events ? This is also where the 2-3 makeshift posts come into play. If you have any living matter to solve, you're gonna have to do some micro management to save your food. Turn on all the ingredients for the pack of rations and pack of crops, set 2 guys into each makeshift post and watch them carry your food in there. As soon as they are on their way with the food from the storehouse, deselect that item from the ingredient options so they will go and get the next instead of start producing the packs. If they do start production, you can simply cancel that with a mouse click and the resources go back into the buildings store. After you completed the living matter, click the red X at each of the resources and they all go back into the storehouse instantly.

After you have pondered all this and plans are starting to form, is the time to actually make some choices. Start with whatever you are most certain about (blueprint, corner stone, order) and see whats the next option you will get. To see the next cornerstone, you will have to unpause and repause for 1 second. Whenever you made a choice, reconsider the situation with the new options available. Keep doing this until you made most choices. Not necessarily all choices though. Making the decision on the last of each does not provide you new information, so only make the last pick if you actually plan to use that right now. Else, leave it there until you are going to use it. You never know if new information causes you to change plans.

With a little luck, you now have a way to feed your people and you have control over your fuel situation. If you also have a victory condition ready to execute, (a complete production chain basically), that's a bonus.

If you don't have a little luck, you may not yet have a way to feed your people. Well, no worries, keep going, maybe it comes with the next batch of options next year. (you can also call in a trader early, they have camp or farm blueprints for sale relatively often). If it does seem you are going to run out of food before you found a solution, you'll have to open small glades so you can farm with small camps. In this case you may want to hold off on new incomers a bit. (especially those from order rewards as those can wait and still be there for you when you did solve the food situation)

From here it should be smooth sailing really. The whole game resolves about all the choices you make in the second year. If you don't have a victory condition yet, just keep going, keep being reluctant to actually make choices and try to make multiple different ones coincide a bit. At some point a victory condition will present itself. Just survive till then. You can by the way very well win without a real victory condition ever presenting itself. A bunch of hearths, maybe some cornerstones and a Tavern / Guild house can bring your global resolve to game winning levels even without the foods or luxury goods.

Yes the first part comes last because you first need to know what you are going to do in order to choose the tools to do it with. The goal of our embark caravan is to help us solve glade events reliably.

Having a high number of citizens is absolutely top on my priority list. While i often stop accepting any more when i'm somewhere in the 30s' i value extra citizens very highly early on. (also in order choices).

Next on the list is the ability to complete glade events. For this you want a oil and/or amber. (if you unlocked that). At the very highest prestige levels, amber is a must as you need to pay for each opened glade.

If you have 2 points to spare, you can use that for fabric or bricks or the ingredients to produce them.
If the trees in your biome have 10% to fiber, you can count on that. 5% not so. Going without these resources isn't a big problem though, the only thing we need them for in year 1 is that 1 special house. By year 2 you have extra glades opened, so you will almost surely have access to the needed materials.

If you have a single point remaining, take some food source that offers 42 for 1 point, preferably one that you don't yet have. Yes, you can also take the plantation, but i feel its rather expensive at 5-6 points, usually leaving you to choose nothing for your glade events.

Manage your purging fire production carefully, it can drain your fuel rapidly. On low prestige, blight is an actual boost. You can leave up to 4!! buildings with 3 cysts for a 25% production boost each. Prestige 10 and up, that becomes 2 buildings max. From prestige 15 and up, you need to burn everything asap. (and you will need one blightpost per 10 cysts roughly)

With hearths, you can go “tall” or “wide”. If you are building a profit driven economy its good to aim for level 3 heaths asap so you get the 10% production bonus. Your game may end with 2 of these. If you are found a way to produce a few advanced foods for your victory, complement it with as many level 1 hearths as you can manage for 2 global resolve each. (and -30 hostility). 4 hearths goes a long way.

Never forget you get full refund when destroying a building. Don't hesitate to destroy that trappers camp when you run out of eggs and replace it with a foragers camp. You can swap back later if you find something else. Also, feel free to destroy and rebuild those small storehouses. Walking time really is half the equation for your villagers productivity. (Farms and mines of course get a permanent storehouse right next to them)

Those 2-3 glades you opened in year 2 are probably all the glades you ever need to open. If tools turn out to be your victory condition, stack up the tools and then open a hand full of large glades so you can quickly grab all the cashes before the events trigger.

Rerolls on your cornerstones and blueprints are not there to try and search for something. There are just so many that the chance you find what you want is too small. They are there to refresh when you really, really cant find a way to put any of the available options to use.

I assume a basic understanding of the game. I hope for example that you know to take your woodcutters off their task during the storm.

On low prestige levels, you can ignore all i said above, there are many other ways to play and win. But it wont keep working.