So you've landed in the forest and you're wondering where to build. first figure out what you want to build then find that place before you place your flag, soon as you place that flag, your flag is up for grabs by the zombies.

Step 1: Find where you want to live.

But where?, I'd recommend somewhere flat, i had to flatten a massive hill. It was horrible, as i wanted to have a nice flat castle wall to house all my people. i knew i was going for a lot of people capacity.

Step 2: Build a farm

Food is the main currency of the game
a villager eats 5 food a day, even when they sleep. it costs 50 food to spawn 1 villager.
Wheat = 0.5 food, bread = 1 food. bakers bake bread in the oven (simple) but starting off i'd focus just on wheat. a 10x10 field gives 100 wheat. to make wheat you need seeds, you get these by smashing grass or there's a chance a fully grown wheat plant yields 2 seeds rather than the standard one.
Quick tip: your villagers are lazy and sleep alot, you can smash those fully grown golden plants and replant them while they're sleeping meaning you can speed up the veggies.

Step 3: Build a 2 storey basic wall.

I dunno about you, but i wanted a pretty castle. but sometimes you gotta be dirty and cheap to get what you want. build a large defence around the basics. as you see here i built my heart (with my flag) with all the basics and some sleazy beds and then surrounded it with an even larger wall with my aesthetic builds.


















Step 4: Get those crafters going
You need arrows, before we get onto basic defence you need to find ore, and get crafters auto crafting arrows. by digging down to the lowest level of the game you find the unmineable blocks, on these blocks there are different ores, you can assign mining tasks to these blocks

Quick Tip: build a bed per mined block down in the mine and have a crate nearby. Miner's will live down here like the filthy peasants they are. to this day, No miner has died on my watch. because noone's seen them since the start of the game.

So you've got some wheat, bread, crafted some arrows (or your peasants have) and you've got a little wall around your base... with this one annoying hole full of zombies. Here's some quick tips.

Tip 1: Build a Moat, zombies cant jump (yet?). so treat them like any tower defence and make them run around whatever wierd thing you craft. so long as theirs a 2 block drop between them and your archers. I opted for a bridge.











Tip 2: Heart and loop
This Brings me to Tip 2, a castle heart is where all your goodies are kept (your flag, your back up production). if zombies reach your inner walls, don't let them in, make them walk the long way around. your archers are more effective having longer firing periods against fewer targets. 100 zombies can breach 10 archers over 10 seconds. 100 zombies can't breach 10 archers over 100 seconds.










Tip 3: Kill zone
But that doesn't stop hordes (intentional or otherwise, sometimes i've had 100 clump glitched out on one spot only to all come to life when i came near). You need to be ready for that,
so build a kill zone, a centralised area with heavy amount of archers.










early on 8 archers focusing fire on one bridge sufficed for me.










Tip 4: arrow slits













Zombies can't jump over holes, but they also can't fit in 1 storey high windows, you can shoot through them however.

Tip 5: Guardian Angel
Always have one man covering the door. if all your archers are looking at the kill zone, have one man looking at the door so he can't see the kill zone. He'll hold of the random spawn stragglers.

Summary:
One man on the door, Kill zone for hordes but have a spread of archers weening the herd through their journey rather than clumped ready for one fight.

here are some more simple tricks to help build up some efficiency


First of all if you place crates near your fields or any of your jobs your workers will have less of a walk to go to get to their work and deliver their products (wheat and craftables)












Bed's can be placed any way you want, if you don't mind having a 20x20 room of beds (or field) then thats fine, workers will do whatever you put on the ground for sleeping. hell you can even have them half flying like bats.

Importantly i would recommend that if you expand beyond the basic no spawn zone of your flag that you invest in some Guardian Angels, these are archers who watchover typical spawns of zombies in your base. I mean just look at this guy below, nothing says sleep tight like 'If one of you turn into a zombie i will literally shoot you in the face.'

What this means archers covering every road and most mega bed buildings.

Feel free to comment if you have any ideas you'd like to add or any questions i might be able to answer.


Cheers


Moto



P.S in case you're wondering

Gold makes gold coins, coins are used in the shop to buy flax seeds, a flax farmer farms the flax, flax makes linseed oil, which makes waxed wood and adobe (fancy dirt)