I will assume you're on medium difficulty for this mod, with disasters on, and the climate in fair or mild I have never played in "easy", and "hard" is a whole new beast you don't want to tackle if you're looking up beginner's guides.

I am not the developer, designer, or in anyway affiliated with Banished. I am not responsible for any damages to your game, save files, computer, or otherwise.

Starting out, you'll have a small stockpile, a barn with some tools, food, clothes and 5 families. You will also have 2 crop seeds and 1 orchard seed for farming. You will start out in spring, which is the point where your citizens can survive without a home. Winter is harsh, so you need to get them a place to live ASAP. Your first priority is a sustainable source of food, next is shelter.

You will want to build several buildings. I have listed them in order of how I recommend they be built:

01) Hunter's Lodge (Provides Leather and Venison to eat)
02) Gatherer's Hut (Gathers vegetables for your citizens)
03) Housing: A Boarding House (A place for up to 5 families live, eat & get warm), or 1 house for each family.
04) Blacksmith (Makes your tools)
05) Woodcutter (Cuts firewood to keep citizens warm)
06) Fisherman's dock (Catches fish to eat)
07) Fields & Orchards (Provides produce for your citizens to eat or your trader to trade)
08) Tailor (Makes clothes from leather to keep your citizens warm)
09) Stockpiles (generic or specialized ones as described in the mod section below if you have it installed)
10) Stone/Dirt roads to & from food sources (Makes citizens walk faster)


Food Resources: it's best pick a place away from the main area, but still on screen. You don't want your workers to have to travel too far to pick up tools or store their goods. Later on in the game, as you expand, you can always move them. I always place the Hunter's Lodge, Gatherer's Hut, Herbalist & Forester next to one another (I just place the footprint for the Herbalist & Forester, and put the building on hold). I always assign 2 gatherers & 2 hunters in the beginning, and once my farms are producing a surplus of food, I drop the hunters to 1, and the gatherer's I keep the same unless I need laborers. I call the hunter/gatherer/forester/herbalist/fisherman areas "outposts". I try to keep the fisherman near the main outpost if possible; but he will go where the fishies are.

Here is a SS of one of my farms & pastures, as you can see, the town centre is in view, and I have a general store next to them (barn placed there soon too!):


Here's an image of a Farm design which I found to consistently produce the max (or near max) yield, most years (excluding when the orchards are in the process of regrowing trees) with only one farmer assigned to each field:

Here is a SS of one of my Hunter/Gatherer area, again in view of the town centre, with a farm stand next to them:


Housing: How this is handled depends on your map size. I typically use a large map. The boarding house can contain up to 5 families. I build a boarding house first thing (large map), because despite it taking more materials to build, it also means that the food, and firewood is in one place. No families will starve or go cold because the materials were all taken by other citizens. This allows you to build a stockpile of food and materials for a few years to better support your citizens once they're ready to move into individual homes. Sometimes you'll still have a homeless family since the limit to the families is 5, I simply just build one home near to the hunter's lodge/gatherer's hut area. If you prefer the 5 houses, I suggest you place these near the areas your citizens will work but close to your storage.

• Small Map: Houses in this case are the best way to go; you'll likely have limited resources and want to use wooden houses to start until you have a stockpile of what you need and a mine/quarry built. Then you can upgrade the homes.
  
• Medium Map: Houses or Boarding house will do. Neither outweigh the other in benefits at this point.
  
• Large Map: I recommend a boarding house once you use a large map; the benefits outweigh the costs, in my opinion.

Fields & Orchards: How to build your fields/orchards depends on whether you have better harvesting and better fields mods installed or not, so I'll put in a Vanilla set of tips, and a modded set of tips. An uneducated worker will yield a max of 5 food per tile; an educated worker will yield a max of 7. Sources: Crop Size Calculator[banishedinfo.com]. Orchard size Calculator[banishedinfo.com].

• Both: The most efficient plot for a crop is a long and narrow plot with a north/south placement, so the farmers harvest across the most narrow part of the plot; and for an orchard is long and very narrow with an east/west placement. You will get more food per worker out of making more crop fields/orchards that only one farmer needs to harvest than a large field/orchard that multiple farmers need to harvest.
  
• Vanilla: Fields and Orchards are limited to a max length and/or width of 15 tiles. Single Farmer: Crops - 11x11 -- n/s or e/w doesn't matter (847 food/educated worker); Orchards - 15x4 -- e/w only (520 food/educated worker). Two Farmers: Crops 15x15 (787 food/educated worker); Orchards - 12x12 (390 food/educated worker).
  
• Modded: I've found the most efficient size for one farmer is 10x20 for fields, and 15x30 for orchards; I haven't figured out the food for these yet; I'll get back to you (I'm working on my achievements at the moment; so this may take a while).

Note: you do not have to rotate crops, this does not effect the production or how susceptible they are to pests.

I recommend expanding once your town meets the following critera:

01) About 500 stored food for every home you have AND you'll be building.
02) About 50 stored firewood for every home you'll be building.
03) Stored tools, which total 2x your population (e.g. population of 50, 100 stored tools).
04) 200+ stored stone.
05) 200+ stored iron.
06) 200+ stored wood.
07) 2 Crops & 1 Orchard planted and yielding product.

Notes:

• The purpose of the stored food & firewood is so that when your citizens remove those from storage your stores won't be completely drained and you won't have to scramble to rebuild them, risking starvation/freezing. Each citizen requires 5 fuel and 100 food per "calendar" year.
  
• The purpose of the other materials is to ensure you won't run out of materials when building the houses! Makes things move faster so your laborer's won't take too much time away from harvesting fields or whatnot.
  
• I recommend building houses/buildings in the winter when the farmers can act as laborers and your citizens have less to do!

Once you have those items stored away it's time to expand!
This is what I recommend building in order:

01) Herbalist (Helps keep your citizens healthy, until you have a more varied diet)
02) Trading Post (allows you to trade for food, livestock, seeds, clothes, and other materials)
03) Forester's Lodge (automatic planting and harvesting of trees)
05) Citizens Homes (a place for them to eat, get warm, and rest)
06) Brewery (makes ale, which is useful in trade and keeps your citizens happy)
07) School House (educates your citizens' children so they work better!)
08) Town Hall (to keep track of your statistics and citizen's needs)
09) Hospital (to heal your citizens when they get sick or your nomads appear)

After these are built, you'll want to add buildings based on your citizen's needs. The town hall will help you determine what your citizens need, and you can easily keep track of your town's progress.


Trading Post: Best to place this close to your barn, and right on a river versus a lake. The traders come visit your post about every 5 seasons to start (increasing as your population does), and use the rivers to travel. Seeds and livestock are mainly what you want, and seeds are 2500T (T stands for 'trade items value') or about 3250T for some seeds on certain mods, livestock you will need to purchase a minimum of 2 in order to have them reproduce, livestock varies on animal: Chicken 400T, Sheep 600T, Cows 800T. If a merchant doesn't have the exact item you need, you can click the tab for "orders" and always mark items for ordering every time, or just once. This is especially useful for seeds & livestock. You can always remove an order once you have that item. Keep in mind, you'll have several merchants come by that carry the same type of items (e.g. seeds, livestock, produce, meat, stone/iron/tools, etc); so even though you have ordered seeds from one, doesn't mean that next seed merchant will bring those seeds, and have your orders. You need to check every time!

Forester's Lodge: When this is built, the foresters will automatically plant and cut trees to avoid deforestation. It is a consistent supply of wood. You will likely need to continue cutting wood in order to get enough to build, but eventually you won't need to. Once you have everything build two fully staffed forester lodges is enough to supply a town of up to 300 with all the wood they need to keep warm; but won't keep up with your building needs.

Citizen's Homes: Best to place these near where they work. I try to place one house for every two citizens as close to the workplace as possible. This ensures your citizens don't have to travel very far to pick up tools, eat, and get warm in the winter. I tend to stick to making the homes the stone homes, or I use one of my favorite mods "Colorful Two Story House" and I put the second story on top of the building they work at. The pathing* of your citizens is extremely important to a successful town. (*Pathing is explained in strategy section).

School House: This will slow down how quickly your citizens mature into laborers. Children will become students at around 10 years of age, and will remain so until about 16-22 years of age. Make sure you have enough laborers to account for that slow down, students will "pair up" with other citizens and reproduce once they reach the "appropriate" age. Educated citizens yield more product (e.g. An uneducated farmer yields 5 food per tile, an educated farmer yields 7), break tools less often, and idle less often. It is a great advantage to get the school house up as soon as your supplies are stabilized.

You're going to want to keep expanding, depending on the mods you have installed, you'll have more or less options for buildings to create.


Town Hall: The town hall is where you can get an overview of how your town is doing. It tells you what percent of the population is clothed & educated. It tells you how many families there are and how many homes. It is a very useful tool for balancing the needs of your town. There is a catch though! With a town hall comes the chance of Nomads. Nomads are wanderers looking to settle in a town -- your town. They sometimes come with diseases. This means you need to build a Hospital right before or right after you build a town hall. You can deny nomads entry, so you don't have to accept any if you're not ready.

Hospital: I recommend building this when your population hit 100 or before you build the Town Hall. This is where you citizens go to get better when they get sick. They won't heal a citizen crushed to death by a rock, but if they get ill, they typically will survive. It is essential to have this prior to accepting any nomads into your town. Note: Diseases can show up even if disasters are off and you have no nomads in your town.

Mine: I would recommend that you build a mine as soon as you have enough resources, but don't man it until you have at least 10 laborers. You'll want to assign 5 laborers to start to get any steady amount of coal or iron. I typically make 2 Mines, one for coal, one for iron, and I assign 3 to each and add 2 more when the laborer population increases.

Quarry: I would recommend that you build a quarry as soon as you can and assign 2-3 stonecutters as soon as you have at least 8 laborers. You'll need the stone to make buildings, and having a "renewable" source (they eventually run out unless you have 'unlimited mines and quarries' mod installed), will be a necessity.

Chapel: This is best to get up once your villager's happiness is down by 1.5 Stars, you can certainly put this up sooner if you have the materials but it takes a lot of stone. This will keep your citizens happier!

School House: Once you have a steady population of 4-6 laborers you should build a school house. Educated citizens work more efficiently, and are happier. A schoolhouse will slow down the influx of adult citizens as a child will become a student at the age of 10 and will remain so until about 16-22 years of age. Students can pair up to create families. A school house holds 20 students so you'll want to make sure that you build new ones when your school house hits 15 students, or use a mod to either expand or replace the building (like Adriana's College). As mentioned earlier, educated citizens produce more (or more efficiently) than uneducated citizens, break tools less often, and idle less.

Cemetary: I recommend placing one of these once your population hits 100. This will prevent your citizens from becoming very sad when someone dies.

Market: This should be built once your population hits 150. This is an area where your citizens can collect tools, food, and other resources. I typically place mine where I have a lot of workers that are a distance from my storage barn.

Citizen's Houses: I like to place these near where the citizens work. I used to make an area just for houses, but my citizens would have to travel to get to work, and it caused work to take longer. The closer the citizen's homes are to their workplace the more efficiently they work. You want to keep a happy medium of this... too many houses and your citizens won't pair up to reproduce, and too few and they will stop reproducing and their house is full! Find a balance that works for you! The town hall will help you detemine how many houses you need.

Pasture: I tend to place these on the outskirts of town. Best to go with the max size as your default. If you need to make a smaller pen, you can use that as a holding pen or for chickens. As your population increases you can split the herd, into the holding pen (assigning a herdsman), and build another pasture to expand. Once the pasture is built, just move them to their new home! I try to make these as soon as I have the spare materials, you never know when the trader will come with livestock! The smaller the animal, the more will fit in a pasture; keep this in mind when building pastures for your animals!

Food Storage: For every home you should have at least 500 stored food, for every citizen you should have 100 stored food, whichever is greater. This allows the fluctuation of crops in storage to not cause your citizens to starve, as there is a several season's supply put away. Stored food includes Venison, Beef, Mutton, Chicken, Eggs, Crops, Fruits, etc. You want a variety of food to keep your citizens healthier. A diversity in diet ensures they get all those vitamins and minerals!

Firewood Storage: For every home you should have 200 stored firewood. This ensures that as you expand you won't run out of firewood and your woodcutter can keep up with the demand.

Pathing: I'm sure you've seen me refer to pathing a few times. Pathing is the combination of the distance, and how direct the path is for each citizen from workplace to home to storage. The less distance & more direct the path is between these 3 essential things, the more efficiently they work. Your citizens will need to travel to pick up tools when their's breaks, and home to eat (in the winter to get warm, too). The less distance between these, the better. If the path is direct (e.g. a mostly straight line), that simply increases that efficiency even more. Bad pathing is very often a death sentence for any town after you get over 100 citizens (50 for a small map). You will want to build storage near every production area (farms, mines, gatherers/hunters area, quarry, pastures, etc). If you use mods installed this can easily be a general store, farm stand, etc. If you don't this can simple be a storage barn or a market. I usually put a farm stand by the gatherers/hunters area and general stores next to the farms, pastures, quarries, mines, and sprinkled near the village center where the market doesn't cover it.

Laborers: I make a general rule to have 10% of my population working as laborers. This ensures there's enough workers to distribute and collect food and materials, sometimes I'll double the farmers come harvest season cutting the laborers down temporarily, but once harvest is in, the farmers start working as laborers, so it evens out.

Trading Post: Seeds will cost you at least 2500T and livestock runs at least 200-300T each. You'll want to slowly build up a consistent storage of 2500 Items of each of your crops & orchard produce, 500-1000 Ale, 500 Stone & Iron, 500 Venison/Meat, 250 Leather & tools, & 100 Clothes. This will ensure you have enough items in stock to trade. Note: you want to build this up without draining your stockpiles, no use having these in storage with your citizens starving, freezing or homeless! Merchants come about every 5 seasons, increasing in frequency as your population increases; if you have more trading posts, they will come more often (I have found with some mods installed more traders per post makes a difference versus more trading posts). You can make "recurring orders" from merchants, but keep in mind you'll get several merchants that carry the same types of products and your orders do not carry over. You'll want to check your orders tabs every time. Orders are especially useful for things you know you will need more of (produce/food, seeds, livestock, stone, iron, wood, etc). I typically never order stone/wood/iron unless my map has less of them and I don't have a quarry/mine or my forester isn't producing enough. Note: You can use the trading post as a backup storage for your citizens so if you're running low on something you can just reduce the inventory in your trading post and the traders will move it to storage.

Nomads: You need to have a Town Hall, and Footprints of a Market & Trading Post in order for nomads to appear. The footprints with the market & trading post can be paused, but the "plan" needs to be there. In addition, as I mentioned a gazillion times before, you should have a hospital prior to accepting any nomads into your town, as nomads often bring diseases. They are a good way to bring in adult citizens of reproductive age. However they often need clothes and are uneducated; always remember you can deny nomads if you're not ready for them!

Priority: Upping the priority of an area will be a common thing for you. The citizens of your town work on things in an "order of operation". Whatever you placed first gets highest priority. If they are working on your town hall, and you un-pause a fishing dock to be built that you placed the footprint for before the town hall, your citizens will start working on the fishing dock and then switch back to the town hall. If you need something worked on ASAP, you will need to use the priority tool to mark that area as the top priority. How the tool marks them is in reverse of the "order of operation". The most recent item you marked has the highest priority. Keep this in mind when you need to mark the priority for several items.

Mods are amazing, and I have collection myself which I constantly keep plugged in, when I'm not going for achievements. If you haven't already you can install mods that add dimension to the game without making it easier, or if making it easier is what you seek you can add those too. Browse the workshop, or browse my collection, and add what you like.


Enabling mods on an already saved game file will likely cause errors. It is best to start a new game once you install new mods. I know... this means that you have to rebuild all over again and lose all your progress. But you can always make a new save file. :) If the mods are installed, you'll need to activate them. The mods are loaded in order, so the items at the top of the list will be loaded first, and their resource files will have priority. If there are mods which are incompatible, they will be highlighted red. They are incompatible when they reference the same resource files.

Many modders have removed their mods from the steam workshop because of others re-posting their mods without authorization. Help support our modders by commenting who the original author is, reporting and voting down these "impostors".

Specialized Stockpiles:[banishedinfo.com] (by: Delver) If you have this mod installed or another mod which implements this, I recommend the following:

• Place your blacksmith across from your barn, your woodcutter 12 tiles away, and a 10x10 woodpile between them. They both need the wood, and this allows them both full access right next to the workplace. The blacksmith needs to store the tools, so being right across the from barn keeps him close to the shop.
  
• Place a firewood stockpile behind your woodcutter as wide as the building and as long as you can make it.
  
• Place an iron stockpile behind your blacksmith as wide as the building and as long as you can make it. You'll eventually want to either add a coal stockpile close by, or build a silo to hold your coal.
  
• Place a stone stockpile near where you plan to place your quarry (which I recommend being near your trader's post if you can!)

Decorative Items Pack:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) This also comes bundled in the Colonial Charter Turbo pack I have linked below. The fences in this will be your best friend. I put a fence up around the path to and from my Hunter's Lodge/Gatherer's Hut/Forester/Herbalist area, along with stone roads. This keeps them on the path and moving much faster. The efficiency boost is just awesome. You can also utilize this to keep people on paths in general when building your village, but don't overuse them or you make it harder to build things, since you'll need to remove the fence before placing anything. Note: In this, I've noticed removing the fence gates tends to bug out. Once they're placed, you can't remove them, so be careful when you use this. The developer may have addressed this in an update which I don't have yet.

General Store: [banishedinfo.com] (by: Elfecutioner) I love this mod. It takes up so much less space than a marketplace, has a lot of storage, and looks just lovely. It is an efficient little mod, and I like to place one general store next to my fields, one next to my pastures, and one eventually replaces my barn in the town center (barn is moved near fields and pastures). Remember you need to place a marketplace footprint as well as a trading post in order to get nomads!

Faster Roads:[banishedinfo.com] (by: Voidus) I feel this is a "must have" for this game. It increases how fast your citizens travel on roads. It makes the game much less... slow. LOL With this mod I keep the "speed" only on 2x.

Adriana's College[worldofbanished.com]: (by: RedKetchup) I love this mod, it's an excellent upgrade for schools, and is well balanced, well designed and looks just lovely.

Colorful Two-Story House[worldofbanished.com]: (by: RedKetchup) These are two separate houses, a bottom house, and a top house on stilts. The top home is useful for placing on top of some workplaces (where it'll fit and not look funny), to help your citizens live close to work!

Adriana's Library[worldofbanished.com]: (by: RedKetchup) This is a library for your citizens, increases happiness!

Pangaea's Root Cellar:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) This is a storage unit that has to go into a hill, just for your food!

Warehouse Inc.:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) This is an extra storage unit like the trading post, you can assign workers to it to keep items in storage for emergencies, and your citizens and traders won't touch it! Very useful for those bad harvest years!

Small Chapel:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) This chapel has a smaller capacity, smaller size, and takes less materials to build. Great for when you're just starting out!

Creamery Dairy Products:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) Pretty self-explainatory. Creamery products: Cream, Yogurt, Butter, Cheese.

Steph's Grain Silos:[worldofbanished.com] (by: RedKetchup) A place to store your grain or coal.

Colonial Charter Turbo: (by: Shockpuppet & Team) This mod is a combination of many mods that I used to have installed individually, and the orginal creators of the mods worked together to bring you Colonial Charter Turbo. It adds a ton of new buildings and professions, and combines a ton of older more popular mods. Kudos to the original Developers.

Delete Quarries & Mines:[banishedinfo.com] (by: Draethar) This is a good mod if you're more into balancing things. This allows you to delete a quarry or mine after it's been exhausted so you can use the land for other things! I recommend this mod to anyone who is disinclined to use Unlimited Quarries & Mines[banishedinfo.com] (Author: sharka), but wanted an in-between.

Quarry & Mine Pickup Fix:[banishedinfo.com] (by: GimmeCat) This corrects the behavior so the laborers will move the stone/iron/coal to the stockpiles, instead of the materials just sitting there. I always have this installed.

Better Harvesting Behavior:[banishedinfo.com] (by: Avernakis) This mod fixes some of the odd harvesting behaviors of your farmers where it ends up leaving crops rotting on the field. I highly recommend this for anyone playing the game.

Better Fields:[banishedinfo.com] (by: rageingnonsense) Better fields allows you to make bigger (and smaller) fields and put more farmers per field. I always have this installed.

Sawmill:[banishedinfo.com] (by: rageingnonsense) This adds a sawmill building which is a more efficient replacement for the woodcutter yard. It allows up to three woodcutters, and woodcutters will produce twice as fast when working from here*. It is meant to be a tier 2 type building that is not easily built until you have your basic town infrastructure up.

Log Cabins:[banishedinfo.com] (by: rageingnonsense) Log Cabins. 'Nuff said.

Longer Living Orchards:[banishedinfo.com] (by: Pangaea) This changes how long orchards live before dying off to 25 Years (a more realistic number). Now you don't have to replant your orchards every 8 years. I always have this installed.