Fabledom – Getting Started

When I was a beginner, I was looking for one, coz I did a lot of mistakes. To help other ppl who just start this game, I put down a few words – hopefully helping.

Start

You start with one piece of land, and a carriage in the middle. Observe, and plan things ahead: Where are the stones, where to put the woodcutter hat, where is a good place for farms.

Also take into account the land beyond the borders. In what direction you want to expand. Is there a big stone place? Forest? (Your woodcutter and forster is able to work with trees beyond the border!).

After you made your plan, put 2 roads. One N-S and one W-O direction. Then place your first buildings. For the storage there are 2 possibilities:

• A) Close to the carriage, which is central. The carriage will soon be emptied and disapperares.
• B) Next to the quarry (and may be also close to the woodcutter).

Later, you should have both.

About Desirability of Buildings and Regions (Happiness)

There are lots of ways to increase happiness. But mostly have their price (upkeep, space, resources, building time).

Atm, happiness has only an impact on the number of newcomers (1 or 2)

At start you get 2. After the inn quest, you need to have a happiness of 60% to get 2 newcomers every time and you need 50% to get one out of 2.

Much later, with pop 150, it’s up to 3/3.

Do the balancing in a way that you stay at 62 – 65% happiness. When you take out the worker from the inn, you save the upkeep (5).

Place the well that it covers as many homesteads as possible. You might think about deleting the well to save 3 upkeep. It works, but later when you want to build your second farm, you need to have – at least – one well anywhere on the map.

Astonishingly you do not need water to run the farms with full output, but you need just this single well anywhere to build new farms.

About Size of the Homesteads

It is possible to build the landmen houses in a 2×2 format, as well as in a 3×2 format (which also might come out as a 2×2+1=5 format).

From an efficiency point of view, there is absolutely no point of having them bigger than 2×2, no advantage at all.

If one has a better feeling with 3×2, one has the freedom to do. But learners and beginners should be aware that this makes the start of the game a bit harder. This might be what beauty lovers accept, and what “challenge-seekers” look out for.

With 2×2 you save 33% space. This means: More buildings can be covered with the happiness bonus from inns and wells. There is less walking time for villagers. Players have a better overview. And 2×2 is not ugly in any way.

Unfortunately, the game tutorial doesn’t give a hint, that more than 2×2 doesn’t have any advantage. Therefor many beginners start with 3×2, coz they do not know any better.

Gardens in Homestead

You have 2 kinds of sub-buildings for the garden. One kind is for food, the other for higher desirability. Default is random, so you have a 50/50 chance to have both in the long run.

Atm, since happiness is of less importance (as long as you keep it above 60%), impo food sub-buildings are preferable. Its not a big deal to deactivate the rng and place 2 food thingies in your garden by hand. This will help a lot to bring your ppl over the winter and spring.

The alternative would be 3 desirability points per sub-building, which can be replaced with external buildings like inns.

But that’s just my very personal observation, everyone can do his own ofc.

After your village has grown, you will see a lot of homesteads, most likely in the middle of your initial square of land.

I put them in 4×2 clusters (including a central inn), surrounded by dirt roads. This ensures that ppl have short distances to walk. Service buildings for resources are also connected to the center with roads.

There is a quest to expand the land for 100 gold. Here you should succeed easily. Later expansion will be more costly (+100 every time).

Food Issues

One vegetable farm should be sufficient for the start. Atm 3 farmworkers are able to succeed with a 30 to 35 field farm (assuming they have a short distance to their home. The only eat at home. That’s valid for all ppl).

Plan the farm close to a square, to have short distances. Think about having roads around the field, so workers can walk faster. Put the farm building either in the center of the field (this way you will loose 3 to 4 farm-spots to extra roads), or at one side, directly at the road (short way home, short way for the workers who fetch the harvest and take it into the barn.

Vegetable or Bread?

There are many kinds of food in the game.

• Homegrown has a feed value of 10, same like vegetables.
• Bread has 50.
• Later we get pork (70, pigs eat vegetables)
• And we get eggs (25, hens eat wheat).

Bread looks good at first sight, but we have to consider that – until we have bread – we have to build and to run windmills and bakeries. Windmills take 9 spots (3×3), while bakeries take 6 (3×2), plus upkeep is not only 5, but 10 which is a lot.

First I was fond of the happiness bonus of bakeries (5), but when I realized that happiness is not a thing which has to be increased to “the higher the better”, I lost interest in bread.

Ofc, there are quests where you need bread, so its not wrong to keep a bit in store (later you even can trade for bread with neighbors). But no need to feed ppl with bread through expensive bakeries. Vegetables is super easy, together with lots of homegrown food, will be sufficient. Just my personal observation.

Meat you can only have when you find flying pigs in new land.

Eggs you can have as much as you want. More effective than bread impo. Hens make wheat useful. One bread vs. two eggs.

Egg farms have a happiness malus btw.

4 Vegetables . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 . . . No Upkeep In Farms
4 Wheat -> 2 Flour -> 1 Bread 50 . . . Upkeep 5+10 = 15
4 Wheat . . . . . . . . . -> 2 Eggs 50 . . . Upkeep 2x5 = 10
4 Vegetables . . . . . -> 1 Meat 70 . . . Upkeep = 10

Meat is extraordinary, but limited (rare). Chicken coop is cheap to build.

Coal Shortage in Winter

Since the happiness concept is not fully implemented with the update from July 17, freezing in winter should make ppl unhappy (as well as food shortage should do).

Now it’s not, but it will be in one of the next updates. And unlike with starving from lack of food, no one is freezing to death atm.

Money Shortage

For beginners this is an issue very often.

Hints to avoid that:

• Do not long for more happiness than necessary (short above 60%)
• Watch out for unnecessary upkeeps of buildings. Take the worker (temporally) out, and the building is instantly free of upkeep. To have unemployed ppl is no disadvantage (atm).
• Have efficient pathing to save time for the villagers.
• Watch out for short distances between workplace and home. Green point means short distance, yellow medium, and red means far, far away (should be avoided).

In the beginning everyone has green. Later, when you find someone with yellow, you can dismiss him and click again. When you are lucky, you get a worker with green (home closer).

Very useful is the “manage workers” option in the building’s menu. Here you have an overview of all unemployed ppl who can be placed in this building for work. This is especially helpful when you want to pick a commoner (black) instead of a landman (brown).

Consider that there is “family aid” beside upkeep costs. You find this in the money menu on the top of the screen (3 coins). Family aid steps up with every upgrade of the settlement (like from village to small city to big city). The value stays without change, until the next upgrade.

One might think that the income should continuously increase with increasing pop, and is surprised that also backfalls are possible. Its not that you did something wrong. It’s just temporally, and the more extra ppl come, the more income will come through tax on the inhabited homes.

This will specially apply on newcoming commoners, coz from town houses (2nd tier homes), and – even more – condominiums, you will get lots of taxes.

But remember, commoners refuse to do lower work e.g. on farms, with pigs and chicken.

And, when you have service buildings like that which are far away from the center, build some homes close to these newer working places as well.

When your settlement has grown bigger and bigger, and when you have learned your stuff and got the hang of it (might need a few start-overs), then you will have increasing income.

You will grow, expand, send your hero and … have a lot of fun.