I wrote this guide when the game version was v63. New features like the new water system are missing and some mechanics changed. There's still some wisdom to gain here. If you are new though, you might get more confused than enlightened from this =/

I'm currently heavily involved into modding the game and didn't have time to play it enough for updating this guide. Don't expect any updates soon :x

The demo of the game is always the full game 3 updates ago (because the dev is awesome o.o). So play the demo if you are unsure and buy the game if you like it ;D

[V64]UI change

Most of it is self explanatory.

(1) Difficulty Settings

• +% means easier
  
• Do not change in your first runs
  
• Increase Pacifism to lower chance of battles

(2) Map

• Bigger map = more choices for starting place
  
• Latitude changes the overal climate of your generated world

(3) Starting Race

• (Recommended) Human: Needs are easy to fulfill, they are well rounded and excel in Knowledge (reasearch) and Administration (various bonuses)
  
• (Recommended) Cretonian: Needs are easy to fulfill and they are good at farming

(4) Scripts

Enable mods for this game session (if you want to spice up some things).


Each race in Songs of Syx has different needs and skills. When choosing a race to live in your city, you have to consider this.
Humans and Cretonians are the beginner friendliest to start out with. So I will focus on the most important facts of two races here.
For more information on the races you can check the ingame wiki via the questionmark icon in the upper right hand corner.



At the beginning you have to consider Food Preferences, Buildings and Others species.

• Food Pref.: Meat, Bread, Eggs, Mushrooms
  
• Buildings: Stone, Grand
  
• Others: likes all

Build buildings with stone in the beginning and later with grand walls.
Focus on Meat and Bread for food production. Eggs and Mushrooms are a little bit harder to get.
For other races just check whether they like Humans.

• Food Pref.: Vegetable,Fruit, Bread
  
• Buildings: Wood
  
• Others: likes all

Build buildings with wood walls.
Focus on Vegetable, Fruit and Bread for food production.
For other races just check whether they like Cretonians.

[V64]The overworld changed quiet a bit. So the criteria for a good starting location may have changed...

Things you should keep an eye on:

• Fertility: 80%+
  
• Sweet Water: 5-10%+
  
• Population: your chosen race should be full
  
• Deposits: at least 1/4 of coal, ore and stone

Since version A63 the way how fertility works has changed. Now you can dig water canals and fertility around it will grow. BUT there are only so many tiles you can terraform to water. The buzzword for this is "Watertable". Each map has a set max amount of water it can have. This depends on how many % of it is sweet water (and ocean?) in the first place.

Why does water matter?

Maps got way less fertile overal since A63, but you can now place you own hotspots. The amount of it is kinda limited though.
The way to place more, is to remove water form somewhere else. On a map with ~3% of sweet water you can place roughly 100 new tiles of water. So you will have to remove water very soon and be very thoughtful with your placement.

I would recommend to choose a map with high % (10+) of sweet water to be flexible in your water placements. You will learn more on that in the "Fields and Farms" section =D

(TIP)
You can see the amount of placable water tiles (Water-table) when using the Dig Canal command in your chosen map:





I like to choose a place between a mountain and a lake, because it has a lot of water for farming, nice base fertility and some good amount of ores.
So you won't have to import missing wares for too much money. I guess the mountain will also protect you somewhat from raids coming from all sides.

There are the three big Fs, which can f' you up really bad if you don't take care of them all the time. They are Food, Freeze and Fight.

Food: Without it, your city will die. So keep pumping these farms and the production chain behind it. Some say around 50% of your population should work in food production. This is kinda true, if you don't put in some reasearch into food production. More in "Fields and Farms".

Freeze: Clothes everywhere! Without enough clothes your citizen will freeze to death when winter is coming. Have a decent amount of cotton fields, weavers and tailors to fill this gap. Use leather only in the beginning and later for armour production. Via the race "Access" window you can give them more clothes, but only the first one is important for freeting and heating. The rest is for happiness. More in "Fields and Farms".

Fight: I haven't played enough with battles enabled to give you some wisdom here... but it's important, if you choose to play with it. There's always the option to pay the raiders of, but this will require a good economy with enough wares to export.

Since version A63 you can now control fertility through digging water canals. This means fields will benefit from being near water. Pastures on the other hand will not be influenced by the fertility change (this might change). They only seem to be affected by the fertility-base. You can view the different fertilities via the oberlays eye icon under the minimap:




No overlay



Fertility



Fertility-Base



The fertility is highest near and in the water. While the fertility-base location is part of the map generation.



There are always multiple ways on how to do things. I've chosen the farm with hole path. So your farm should be 12x12 blocks with a 4x4 hole in the middle. The hole will be terraformed to water than.


Farm blueprint



Farm built



You can place farms where the fertility-base is already very high, but I would recommend to keep the places with the highest fertility for other stuff.
The water in the middle of the farm will raise the fertility quiet a bit. You will be very flexible on where to place them.
Put the amount of workers to 1 and let it run.

Farm Layout Example



You can place farms right next to each other however you want, but put some roads in between there for faster transportation speeds.
The shape of the fields can also be bigger or totally different. As rule of thumb you will need 1 farmer for about ~100 tiles of farm.

There could be an effect on crop yield when citizin just walk all over your fields. So it can make sense to enclose your whole farms with a fence. But I'm not sure about that and I could not really find any information. Maybe someone else knows more? :>


Husbandries on the other hand only benefit from the fertility-base and not the normal fertility. So digging a small lake in the middle won't help here.
So look out for places with high fertility-base and make the size of it as big as possible. The biggest size you can have is little bit over ~2000 tiles. I tend to make 45x45 farms.

(TIP)
Check the map bonuses and see what better not to breed via the Status icon on the right hand upper side above the minimap:

Knowledge is key. With it you will unlock new stuff and make existing stuff better.
You should focus on the three Fs (Food, Freeze and Fight) at first when assigning knowledge points.



Dependending on your races preferred food, you go with what boosts its production.
So if you've chosen the Humans as starting race, you will need to boost bread and meat:

• Farming.Edible Crop Optimazation - For better grain productio
  
• Farming.Grain Farm Bonus - For even better grain production
  
• Refining.Bakery... - For the upgrade and better bread production
  
• Animal Science.Husbandry Methods - For more meat and leather production

You want to boost your clothes production with:

• Farming.Industrial Crop Optimazation - For better cotton production
  
• Farming.Cotton Farm Bonus - For even better cotton production
  
• Refining.Weaver... - For the upgrade and better fabric production
  
• Crafting.Tailoring... - For the upgrade and more clothes production

My knowlede is limited, but I've boosted armour and weapon production so I can better equip my soldiers:

Armour

• Crafting.Makeshift Armour - For beeing able to craft armour at all
  
• Crafting.Tailoring... - For the upgrade and more armour production
  
• Animal Science.Husbandry Methods - For more leather production

Weapons

• Crafting.Makeshift Weapons - For beeing able to craft basic weapons out of stone and wood
  
• Crafting.Weaponsmithing - (later) For beeing able to craft weapons out of metal
  
• Crafting.Carpetenter... - For the upgrade and more weapon production
  
• Crafting.Smithy... - (later) For the upgrade and more weapon production

General

You can also look into the Battle part of te research tree to boost your troops education or build artelry to lower your overall chance of being raided.

• Improved Labroratory - Knowledge generation boost
  
• Miscellaneous.Spoilage - Will slow down the rate stuff spoils in your warehouses and give you more buffer to work with.
  
• Miscellaneous.Paved Roads - Will boost the speed your citizens can walk, reduce amount of maintanance needed by janitors and will make citizens happier.
  
• Miscellaneous.Logistic: - More carry capacity to get things done quicker with less amount of people.

(TIP)

• If you reasearch upgrades for your building, you still have to upgrade them individually. This also consumes resources dependend on the building.
  
• Already researched knowlede can be forgotten via left-shift and click. You will get the used points back slowly.
  
• If you don't keep workers researching, you will lose points and forget knowledge

After choosing your starter map, it's time to build your settlement. With this one I struggle the most, because there are a lot of ways to do things in Songs of Syx. It all depends on what your goal is. But to know the goals, you will need some expieriencw with the game at first. So let's set goal to reach a population of about 500 citizens at first. After that you will have a better understanding on what you can achieve.

(TIP)
The game will create a save file called The New Beginning when starting a new map. So you can easily restart at another location.


Things you should keep an eye on:

• Where are some potential resources: Ore, Coal and Stone?
  
• How does the fertility-base looks like for placing your animal farms and / or crop farms?
  
• Where can I use mountains to build an easy defense with walls?

You should build near some resources when possible and some good fertility next by couldn't be bad either.


Use the Harvest Wild Edibles tool and mark everything you can get. Most importantly resources you will need for food and clothes:

• (Humans, Cretonians) Grain - for farms and bread
  
• (Humans, Cretonians) Cotton - for farms, fabric and clothes
  
• (Humans, Cretonians) Opium - for farms and hospitals
  
• (Humans, Cretonians) Herbs - for farms and food rations
  
• (Cretonians) Fruits - as food / for farms
  
• (Humans) Fruits - for farms and reproduction
  
• (Cretonians) Vegitables - as food / for farms

Citizens have to have access to different service buildings. You will have to build them here and there so your citizens don't have to walk that far. At the beginning they will be:

Services

• Hearth
  
• Well
  
• Speaker
  
• Eatery
  
• Lavaotry

Iit's a good strategy to build these buildings near together and easy reachable from houses and / or work places. There will come more of these kind of buildings in the future. So keep some space inbetween them. As rule of thumb I almost leave double the space I need for the beginner service buildings for some extras.

Other Buldings

• Warehouse
  
• Janitor
  
• Hunter
  
• Import and Export
  
• Housing
  
• Mass Grave

You should begin with building warehouses, so you will have better access to resources.
I tend to built one for citizen needs like food and clothing and one for resources like stone and wood. I mostly go with these setups for the beginning and set the amount of workers to 1:

Resource warehouse




Needs warehouse






(TIP)
Disable the export buildings via the little lock icon for now, because it will cost you 1 worker to export nothing. Or build them when needed.


DON'T let immigrants come into your settlement yet. As long as you don't have build some food production. You can do it though, but keep a close eye on your remaining food days under the minimap:




As you might have already noticed does the eatery and the lavatory need some resources you don't have access to yet. The eateary needs clay and the lavatory needs furniture.

Here comes the first lesson when expanding: If you don't need much of that resource, don't bother getting it by yourself. Because this mostly requires some man power and other resources. Just import it.

I can tell you that you will not need to worry about clay for some time. Import 5% of your current storage volume (255) and you should be fine.

Furniture on the other hand is required for a lot of buildings you will need in the near future. So you are better off producing it by yourself with a carpenter.


Do you remember the beginner service buildings? I would recommend to build your working areas with space for these buildings in mind. Some nice big warehouse nearby is also a good idea. You can cluster your working areas for e.g. everything wood related or per production chain.
As long as there are enough service buildings and warehouses nearby, everything is fine.

NOISE!
Yesss... working areas will produce noise... and noise annoys your citizens. So you can either enclose your work buildings with walls and gates or build them far away from your housing.
The distance between houses and wokplace your citizens are willing to walk is about ~160 tiles.


For the beginning you will use warehouses to manage your resource distribution. Via the fetch icon next to the resource you can control wether the resource should be fetched from other wareouses:



There's also a Hauler you can build, which can be handy to transport one specific resources between over far distances. So your warehouse gatherers don't have to walk this far.

Later you will be able to research Transports, where you can transport huge amounts of wares via some kind of oxcart.


You have already built a hunter, which will provide you with various resources dependend on the hunted animal. The most important ones are meat and leather for now. When you've chosen the Cretonians as starting race, you can just export all your meat stock for profit. Humans on ther hand like meat and will get a happiness bonus when eating it. Store some of the life stock (~100 of it) and export the rest.

For Cretonians build some vegetable and fruit farms.
For Humans build some grain farms and a bakery.

I tend to build 4-8 12x12 hole farms for grain, 2-4 12x12 fruit and 2-4 12x12 vegetable farms for the beginning.




Here we will rely on leather for the beginning. Build a tailor for producing clothes.
I tend to follow path of the leather then by building a nice big Auroch Pasture, which will produce leather and meat. You will need about ~20 workers to operate a big animal farm and it will produce ~20 meat and ~20 leather at the beginning. A hunter on the other hand only needs 2 workers and can produce ~10 meat and ~5 leather a day. But this is highly dependend on how far which animal is available for hunting.

(TIP)
Since version A63 animals have a fixed spawn point and a relative small area they wander around. You can exploit that and build hunters nearby for max efficiency. They will respawn slowley after killed.


Controlling how many poeple can join your settlement is important at the beginning. You can control the amount of immigrants by righ clicking the desired race icon on the right hand side:





DON'T grow too fast. Always think about enough food and clothes first.


When you hit a certain amount of citizens, you will unlock new buildings or features. These unlocks are a hint on what you have to build next.

There are different strategies for making early game money. Dependent on your chosen starting map different resources might be worth to produce and sell early.

For importing an Import Depot and for exporting an Export Depot building is required.
You can import or export one kind of good per building. When importing any good, don't forget to assign warehouse storage for it.


(TIP)
Don't sell any produced goods, where you also don't have direct access to the resources. For example don't import cotton, make it to clothes and export them. This will most likely make you very little profit or even negative profit. Check the import and sell prices before.


There are goods which have to be imported, exported and distributed in your settlement.

• For resource imports where you do produce other goods out of (e.g. ore, coal), place them near to a production warehouse
  
• For resource imports, which are needed "everywhere" (e.g. food, clothes, wood), place them next to a more bigger central warehouse

• For goods you produce place them near to a production warehouse
  
• For goods from other sources (e.g. taxes, battles) place them next to a more bigger central warehouse

I hope you've chose a somewhat fertile map =)
My get to go early strategy are animal farms and selling the produced livestock + meat + some leather.

• Look for a spot on the map with high and wide spread Fertility-Base
  
• Build Auroch Pastures for about 25 - 50 working people
  
• Build the rest of the area full of Entelodant Pastures. You should focus for a minimum of ~100 workers for the beginning.
  
• Build export depots for livestock, meat and leather near your farms warehouse
  
• Keep at least half of your animal stock capacity as buffer in your warehouses for expanding later and sudden animal death events
  
• Keep expanding your production

Use the leather and meat for early game clothes and as food source. Pump some knowledge points into Animal Signs.Husbandry Methods and Trade Negoations for maximasing your profit. And get some Cretonians to work on your animal farms. They will be more effective.

This way you won't have to produce any other food sources by yourself. Just start with importing some bread and later you can add vegetables and other foods too.

(TIP)
As long as your citizens are happy enough, they will not need their prefered food source or access to other resources like wood. So don't give them access to unnecessary stuff in the early game.

Build a laboratory and put about 10 workers into it. This will produce ~1000 knowledge points. You want to use these points to get the clothes production running. Invest them into Refining.Weaver for producing fabric and Crafting.Fine Clothes for making clothes out of fabric.


Add more food production and also cotton farms, weaver and another tailor.
The old tailor will still produce clothes out of leather, but the new one will use the fabric recipe.


If you play with normal raid chances you want to have some poeple training in a training ground. I tend to have 10% of my population as recruiters. So for 100 citizens have about 10 "workers" in your training ground.


You can craft armour for your army to wear. This is a good way to get rid of your leather when you are producing clothes out of fabric. Store at least 1 piece of armour for each of your soldiers and export the rest.


You can make weapons early out of wood and stone. It's quiet resource consuming if you don't have a steady supply of wood and stone on your hand. I tend to not bother with weapons until I can make them out of metal, but I didn't play much with battles enabled either...


My next bigger goal is always to get metal production running. And for that to work, you will need quiet some work force. We want to grow our population to support that. For that our citizens must be happy. You can see their current most desired needs by clicking on individual citizens or by hovering the race icon:




As your city grows, poeple will start to dislike each other and commit crimes. The game will give you a hint by unlocking crime related buildings at a certain amount of citizens. I would recommend to build:

• At least one dungoen with 2 cells
  
• Build scaffolds on a central place (remember the left space at the service areas?)
  
• Multiple guardposts to cover your city (remember the left space at the service areas?)
  
• On some "smaller" central places put some stocks

You can build a slaver, which will produce slaves for selling or self usage. If you don't want slaves you have to disable the punishment settings for this via litte prisoners icon in the top left hand corner:






Drag the slavery slider all the way to left and put the rest into execute or imprison.
Humans tend to like more executions and Cretonians do like imprisonment more.

Building a court is also good, but will require some gems to build and maintain. You will have to import that resource and it's quiet expensive.


You can have citizens access to some goods they want. The prefered needs varry from race.
Happiness will rise when giving them what they want. You can find it via the Citizens view in the upper left hand corner in the status bar:



Select a race on the left hand side and click on Access:



Before you start giving your citizens access to goods. Make sure you have the economy to provide a steady production for it. More citizens means a higher consumption rate.

It is recommended to not mess around with that in the early game. You can grow the happiness of your citizens with other means like new buildings via research.
I'm mostly just giving them access to more clothes when I have around 500 citizens.

You can switch to any major version of the game via the Steam Library game property beta branches. This is nice if you have an older save or mod, which is incompatible with the latest EA version of the game. More EA games should do this.


In the upper left corner of the UI you will see multiple kind of bars:



Here you can see various information:

• Green bar: everything good
  
• Yellow bar: something fishy here
  
• Yellow - Green flashing bar: it's going down
  
• Grey / No bar: feature is not relevant with your current amount of citizens

You can click on each icon to open a window with more information.

If you found a mistake, you have questions or you want to add something leave a comment and thanks a lot for reading =D


Looking for how to mod the game?
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2929622790