Set up your base: your first income

A new save starts with 500 gold, 50 gems, 100 supplies, and a few materials: 100 Driftwood (wood tier 0), 50 Fieldstone (stone tier 0), 25 Tin Ore and 200 Wheat. Your Headquarters is placed for you in your home region and finishes three minutes after the wizard.

Where to build: open the Map tab, tap your city, and switch to the Districts tab. Each empty plot has a + Build button. Construction is instant: the building data still lists build times, but nothing in the game uses them.

No chapter gate. Basic producers can be built from minute one. Some building data lists an unlock chapter, but only the Adventurers Guild and University actually enforce one (Chapter 5).

Money first. 500 gold is not enough for any producer (the cheapest is 720). The tutorial's First Steps payouts and your first few quests usually cover it; if not, run a couple more quests.

Your home region comes from your founder's profession in the wizard. If you are not sure which it is:

Production Focus is a faction setting, not a building. A new faction has one empty slot. Any resource category that is not in a focus slot produces at −50% (and can't be refined past tier 3). Nothing in the build flow tells you this except a small "unfocused" note on some buildings.

• Filling an empty slot is free. The picker asks you to tap twice to confirm.
• Changing a filled slot later is free once before Chapter 5. After that it costs 2,000 gold plus 150 per chapter and 50 Proving Crests, with a 7-day cooldown.
• A second slot opens at Chapter 5, a third at Chapter 12. Some pairs (for example Wood with Fiber, or Ore with Stone) add +15% when both are focused.
• Gold Mines are not affected: gold is not a resource category.

Which to pick: the category of the producer you build first (Wood for Forest and most Plains starts, Stone for Mountains and Desert, Crop for a Swamp Farm).

a. The region allows it

Each region only allows certain producers. The Herbalist Hut is the one producer every region allows, and a Gold Mine needs gold in the region, which rules out Greenwood Forest, Ironpeak Mountains and The Bleakfen Marsh.

b. Someone on your roster has the matching profession

Any one member with the listed profession unlocks the building: your founder, a companion or a recruit. They do not need to be assigned to it. Without one, the game refuses with "Requires a member with profession: X".

c. You have the gold

Level 1 costs gold only, except Housing:

Output is the building's base rate before Production Focus, Housing and other modifiers. Every building page lists its own requirements: Buildings.

Check your companions, not just your founder. Some founder professions can't build a producer at home (a Miner in Ironpeak Mountains, a Bard in Greenwood Forest, a Healer in The Bleakfen Marsh, and others). Your two companions have professions of their own; one of them may already fit.

If nobody fits, recruit. Roster, Tavern, then Seek a Profession (200 gold) rerolls every candidate to the profession you pick. Hiring costs extra on top of that. Your roster starts with room for 4 and you already have 3, so you have one open slot: spend it on the profession that unlocks income. More on this in Recruiting.

Mountains, Desert or Swamp start? Your producers start above tier 0 (Sandstone, Limestone, Barley). Early upgrades and Housing ask for tier 0 materials (Driftwood, Fieldstone, Rat Hide), and only tier 0 Wheat counts as food. Open the building's detail screen and set Production Tier down to T0 when you need it: it also runs 25% faster per tier below its maximum.

Optional boost: on the building's detail screen, Assign Lead to a member with the building's main profession for +10% production, plus 2% per profession level.

Your Headquarters already uses 1 population. The first producer tips the region over. Build the producer anyway (75% beats nothing), then work toward one Housing:

1. An Architect on your roster (Tavern, Seek a Profession).
2. A Residential plot. Your two free plots are Industrial. Either open a new lot once the city is level 2 and pick Residential on the + Open Lot card (the choice is free, the lot costs 800 gold), or use Swap District (50 gems) on an empty plot. You start with 50 gems.
3. 1,350 gold, 120 Driftwood and 60 Rat Hide. You start with only 100 Driftwood. Rat Hide comes from quests in Greenwood Forest or Sunlit Steppe, or a Hunter Lodge in Sunlit Steppe.

Level 1 Housing adds 4 population capacity: enough for the Headquarters plus three producer levels. Each producer level uses 1, so upgrade Housing as you upgrade producers. It also adds a roster slot. Full rules: Population & Housing.

Producers fill their own storage every minute. At base rate a level 1 Lumber Mill fills its 130 in about 52 minutes, a Farm its 150 in 50, a Quarry its 100 in about 67. Once storage is full, production stops until you collect.

Collect one building with its Collect button, or every building in the region with Collect All. There is no auto-collect setting. When you come back after time away, the game does sweep whatever your buildings stored into your stockpile as part of the offline summary.

• Two free plots per region, on top of your Headquarters' own plot. In all five starting regions they are Industrial.
• City level is the number of quests you have completed in that region: level 2 at 10, level 3 at 25, level 4 at 50. Each level allows two more plots (4, 6, 8...), up to 5 plots until your reputation reaches level 3.
• New lots cost gold: 800 for the first, then 2.1 times the previous (1,680, then 3,528). You pick the district kind when you open one.
• Upgrades roughly double output and storage. Lumber Mill level 2 costs 600 gold, 150 Driftwood and 90 Fieldstone, and goes from 2.5 to 5 per minute. That is usually better value than a new lot, but it adds 1 population used.
• Tiers climb with level. A producer's output tier is the region's minimum plus one per 2.5 levels, capped at the region's maximum. In Greenwood Forest and Sunlit Steppe, levels 1 and 2 make Driftwood, Fieldstone and Wheat; from level 3 they make Birchwood, Sandstone and Barley. If you still need tier 0, switch Production Tier back down.

Which buildings fit which plot kind: Districts.

• Caps. Each material tier has its own cap (300 for tier 0, +150 per tier) and gold caps at 25,000. A Warehouse (1,800 gold, 150 Driftwood, 90 Fieldstone; Civic or Residential plot, no profession needed) adds 2,500 gold cap and 200 resource cap at level 1.
• Overflow. You can go up to 150% of a cap. After 5 minutes the excess decays at 3% a minute, and each lost unit refunds 2 × (tier + 1) gold. Spend or upgrade before you overflow.
• Salary is charged every hour in gold, food (your Wheat) and supplies. A fresh member costs about 1 gold, 0.5 Wheat and 0.25 supplies an hour; it rises with essence rank and gear. Salary keeps being charged while you are offline.

Full reference: Core Resources.

Offline production uses the same rates as live play, but only part of the time you were away counts: the first 30 minutes at 50%, up to 4 hours at 75%, 4 to 12 hours at 100%, and 12 to 24 hours at 50%.

• Your first two sessions back are credited at 100% of the time away.
• Storage still caps it. A level 1 Lumber Mill holds about an hour of output, so a night away fills it once and no more. Upgrades (and the storage specialization) are what make long absences pay.
• Salary is charged for the credited time too, and the gold it takes while you are away can't exceed the gold you earned.
• Away for 3 days or more, a comeback rate applies instead (flat 85% with a multiplier that grows the longer you were gone).

• Quests and bounties pay gold plus a spread of the region's materials at its lowest tier (for example Greenwood Forest pays wood, Wheat, Rat Hide, fiber, a little stone and ore). See Quests.
• Errands open partway through Chapter 2, when the First Steps chain reaches "Send Your First Errand". See Errands.
• Building Missions and Profession Quests unlock when you clear Chapter 2.
• The Founder's Blessing adds 25% building production (and 50% gold) for your first 72 hours, so early buildings pay off faster.