by theygamesAs with any city-building game, getting things wrong at the beginning can cause problems later on. With this list of beginner tips, you’ll be sure to have the best start possible in Fabledom.
How to build the best town in Fabledom
As the new lord of the settlement, it is up to you to build and manage your little people to the best of your ability. This means ensuring everyone is fed, you have enough money, and your residents are happy. It isn’t as easy as it looks, and there are a number of elements you will need to take into consideration in Fabledom for true success in this simulation game.
Town layout
This is an important element for any beginner in Fabledom. Mess this up too badly and you’re going to be spending a lot of time trying to sort it later. There are a few things to think about.
- Desirability – This is how nice the area your residents live in. Many buildings, like stone mines, will lower the desirability of the area, resulting in sad residents.
- Travel time – Your residents have little legs, so distance to and from things like home, work, and resources is important. They will become less effective with long travel times.
- Resources – These are key, and you need to be collecting them to get ahead. Make sure you are working on all available resources as soon as you can.
- Fed and watered – Water and resources need to be available to every homestead, covering them with a well and, later, drainage.
So, when starting out in Fabledom, make sure you plan your town. As a beginner, you should use some of the open space for your housing and use the farms as a buffer between the homes and industry. Then, make sure you have lumber yards by your tree area. Try to keep your stone masons and industry far from your housing.
Bare in mind as a beginner, you won’t have much space on the Fabledom map. Look around the adjacent tiles and decide in which directions you’re likely to expand. I suggest keeping each of the areas separate but with room to grow outward from the centre as you buy more plots.
Building homes
In the early game, building homes in Fabledom will be one of your biggest priorities like any city builder. Houses provide one worker but two residents. Each home needs a plot of land with some items that make the house desirable. This plot can be up to 3×3 with three nice little extras.
Building size and wells
However, there is absolutely no benefit to building a 3×3 plot apart from the appearance. You will save a lot of space and money as a beginner in Fabledom by simply building a 2×2 plot. This reduces walking time, costs, and area.
Keeping your plot sizes small will not only reduce walk time to work but also allow you to build less inns and wells to cover the homes. Leave small plots open for wells; you can fill an extra space with decorations to further boost happiness.
Sub buildings
In each home, you need to select the sub-buildings they have. This is usually set to random, so make sure you deselect this option when constructing your housing. I suggest using the garden plots that give food, such as the chicken coop and greenhouse. This will help your residents stay fed, even during winter. This will take a hit to desirability, but I’ll cover that next.
Desirability
Some of your buildings will inevitably end up in areas that aren’t all that desirable. You can select the overlay using the menu at the bottom of the screen to view the desirability. A lot of your early-game properties will be grouped up and probably close to the industry. However, raising desirability can be done in a number of ways.
Inns are the best bet for a beginner in Fabledom; they only use one worker and cover a large area. Try to place them right in the middle of an area for a huge boost to happiness. For the houses on the outskirts, you can use the decorations to prop up desirability before you unlock other amenities.
It is essential to keep happiness above 60%. Anything below this, and new residents won’t arrive in your town in Fabledom. Keep an eye on this and build Inns as necessary. Everyone loves a good pint of lemonade every so often.
Farms
Farms are necessary for your success as a beginner in Fabledom, and there are a few key tips to follow. First off, build yourself a few farms of medium size working only vegetables. As a beginner, this should be enough to get you through winter in Fabledom. I would suggest about 40 tiles for success.
Vegetables are the cheapest to upkeep and will be produced until the winter comes around. Building a farm of 40 tiles will cost a lot and slow things down, but you will be thankful for it in the long run. These farms will be your lifeblood along with your little garden farms. Combined, you should have more than enough to survive the year.
Your farm placement is key. If your residents live too far from the farm, they will work less. Use farms as a buffer between homes and other things as they have no negative effect on happiness. Make sure to build roads directly from homes to the farms and even through them. I noticed the residents in Fabledom love to walk around the farm plots. I guess they’re precious about their shoes.
Winter
When winter rolls around, your farms are dead. A common beginner mistake is to keep your farms running during Fabledom winter. Remove all your workers and put them somewhere better, like coal mines.
Industry
Try to keep this tucked away from your residences. The struggle is keeping it far away enough to keep desirability up, yet not so far your workers hate the walk. Either way, you need to group them all together and keep them separate from housing. I suggest farms as a buffer.
Make sure you have plenty of all your industrial buildings placed. When winter comes around, you will need plenty of coal, and the stone becomes a huge element in the later game Fabledom. Wood is also essential.
Unless you are purposefully trying to clear a patch of trees, build the forester attachment to continue planting after felling. Meeting Bob Barkskin will also help with the replanting.
Don’t be afraid to move your workers around the various industries at the beginning of Fabledom. It is unlikely you will have enough residents to keep everything running, so use the overview menu to chop and change. You can also pull people from places like the inns if happiness is high enough, this will prevent the building costing upkeep and give you another pair of hands.
Understanding the Fabledom menus
The overview menu is your friend. As a beginner in Fabledom, you can use this to see all of your current residents and all the buildings you have constructed. I would suggest this as your main resource for distributing your workers around the various jobs.
I used this menu to pull workers from farms in the winter and quickly place them in other positions, such as iron works and other lacking industries. From here, you can also see the happiness and outgoings of your town.
Making money as a beginner in Fabledom
This is where a lot of beginners will struggle in Fabledom. Until you reach small town level and can start building Condominiums, money can be hard to come by. However, there are a few tips you can use to keep the cash flow strong.
- Upkeep of buildings – This is where a lot of money will disappear. If your residents in Fabledom are happy, you can remove workers from places like inns and other amenities. This will stop the building’s cost upkeep.
- Shorten distances – When assigning someone to a job, you will notice a red, yellow, or green dot by their names. This signifies how far they are from their workplace. The further they are the less productive they will be. So, move residents around and maybe build some closer houses.
- Family Aid – You may have noticed that your income drops as you level up. This is due to family aid which increases with each new town level. Don’t worry about this, you will quickly compensate with your bigger town.
Keep your eyes on your resources, and make sure you always have space for new residents, and you’ll be fine and dandy. This is supposed to be a cosy game after all, just try to relax.