This guide began as a thread on the community forum: the initial purpose was to offer a simple FAQ to address some of the most common queries and issues brought to the community in the hopes of lessening the number of repeat posts.

Quickly enough, it became evident that covering everything needed was more than just a "simple post", so here we are.

For those of you who aren't aware, Banished was made by one man, Luke Hodorowicz (with a little help from his brother*, Joseph, who did the music and helped with testing), in just a bit under 3 years[www.shiningrocksoftware.com].

*I think it's his brother? Having a hard time finding confirmation of this. If someone can confirm, that would be appreciated.

Note: Sections marked as being "under construction" still need a lot of work done to them. Other sections are likely to change as I get more/better info, but are mostly done.

Some of the most frequently asked questions are actually answered on the official Shining Rock Software FAQ[www.shiningrocksoftware.com]. I know... crazy, right?! Who'd have guessed!

The last two (multiplayer & more content), in particular, account for a very considerable chunk of the posts made on the community board.

Is the game available for Mac or Linux?

Banished is currently only for PC’s running Windows. However, I’d like to make Mac, Linux, and SteamOS versions in the future.

What languages are available for the game?

English is currently the only supported language. When available, the mod kit will allow the community to create translations and language packs.

Will there be more features added to Banished in the future?

It’s possible, but undecided at the moment. I have a lot of ideas for expansions but I also want to prototype and make new games as well. The focus after release is going to be on the mod-kit and ports to other platforms. After that’s done I’ll decide what’s next.

Does the game have multiplayer? Will it ever have multiplayer?

Banished does not have multiplayer. The code for Banished wasn’t built with multiplayer in mind, so it’s very unlikely that it will be added in the future.

Sadly, a lot of the game's features are mistaken as bugs by some players simply because they don't understand the mechanics. Hopefully after reading this guide, you'll avoid that pitfall.

That said, no game is perfect; every game has bugs.

Don't forget that this game was made by one man, so please try to be understanding. At the time of this writing, he's hard at work on a patch to fix the known issues.

If you encounter something that you think is a bug, please visit the official Shining Rock Software forums[shiningrocksoftware.com] and check out the Bug Reports[shiningrocksoftware.com] board.

Here you can read about Known Issues[shiningrocksoftware.com] and How To Report Bugs & Issues[shiningrocksoftware.com]. Hopefully, whatever problem you're having will soon be fixed.

In the meantime, please take a look at this excellent thread by McRib which lists various known bugs and workarounds. This might let you play until the problems can be properly patched.

Citizens eat roughly 100 food units/year. Children eat as much as adults.

You only need one food type to survive, but having a variety of foodstuffs helps keep your citizens healthy (see the "Health & Happiness" section for more info).

Firewood is your primary means of keeping warm. Under certain circumstances (TBD), citizens will also use coal as fuel.

Clothes are also important. Hide coats (leather) are the most basic kind, with Wool Coats (wool) acting as the intermediary clothing type and Warm Coats (leather + wool) being the best.

As far as I know, only tornadoes and fires count as disasters.

If you toggle disasters off, you can still get outbreaks and infestations.

Until I get around to doing this properly, here are some basic numbers (taken from OP of this thread; read the rest of the thread too):

Originally posted by proAkdag:

Orchards

16-72 units: 1 Farmer (72=6x12)
73-144 units: 2 Farmer (144=12x12)
145+ units: 3 Farmer

Crop-Field

16-56 units: 1 Farmer (56=7x8=14x4)
73-112 units: 2 Farmer (112=14x8)
113-168 units: 3 Farmer (168=14x12)
169+ units: 4 Farmer

Pasture

<198 units: 1 Herdsman (198=11x18)
199+ units: 2 Herdsman

"Forest Clusters" are the practice of building a forester, gatherer, hunting cabin and herbalist in close proximity to each other.

Gatherers, hunting cabins and herbalists all benefit from being surrounded by dense forest, which the forester provides.

If you want to harvest logs from your forest, consider not building a herbalist, as herbalists need old/mature trees to gather their herbs. If you really insist, you can build the herbalist anyway, and toggle on/off the herbalist and the cutting option.

But if you have enough resources and space, consider having clusters which you don't cut for your herbalists.

Gatherers and hunting cabins don't require old/mature trees, so it doesn't matter if your foresters are cutting trees as long as they're planting enough to maintain a good density.

For optimal efficiency, consider not allowing foresters to cut trees in your forest clusters and simply build foresters alone somewhere else whose sole purpose is to provide you with logs.

Xtorma suggests building three foresters close to each other and setting the middle one to plant and the other two to cut. This should give you plenty of logs even for a large town.

From the ingame help:

Health

A healthy town has a variety of foods and an ample suppy of medicinal herbs harvested by an herbalist. Health is essential to the prevention of disease outbreaks. When diseases occur, hospitals can be used to keep the disease from spreading and reducing the chance of death.

Happiness

Happiness affects productivity. An unhappy population will idle frequently, decreasing overall production. Some structures increase happiness, such as markets, wells, taverns, trading posts, cemetaries and chapels. Industrial structures such as mines and quarries will decrease the happiness of those who live nearby. Births and marriages increase happiness, while deaths, sickness, starvation, and freezing will decrease it.

Diet

The ideal diet for maximum health of a citizen consists of grain (corn or wheat), fruit, vegetables, and protein - (meat or nuts). Medicinal herbs can help increase the health where diet falls short.

This causes a lot of people a lot of problems. Population management is arguably one of the most important aspects of the game.

Very roughly, you want 1 house per 2 adults.

One wooden/stone house will hold 1 family of 8.

Boarding houses can hold 5 families. Your citizens will still have children if they live in a boarding house, but not as much as if they live in their own house.

Wooden houses need more firewood to heat than stone houses.

Consider building a boarding house when you start the game (on Medium & Hard difficulty, not on Easy). This will avoid early-game hoarding, and keep you from having a population boom too early, which can be hard to handle until you have your basic production buildings up.

Marketplaces spread resources out efficiently.

Without a marketplace, your citizens will walk over to stockpiles and barn and grab whatever they need/want. This can lead to imbalances: hoarding.

Hoarding is especially dangerous early-game when your production is limited. Some families might grab more food and/or firewood than they need, leaving other families with not enough. At best, this lowers efficiency. At worst, some of your citizens might starve or freeze to death.

When you place a marketplace, you'll notice a yellow circle. To keep things optimal, make sure that houses and production buildings that use goods (like wood cutters and blacksmiths, but not farmers, for example) are within the market's radius.

Exact number of vendors needed is unknown at this point, but the best estimate I've seen is roughly 1 per population of 50. Play around with it a bit, see what works for you. But no, don't worry, you don't need 12 vendors.

The more vendors you assign to a market, the faster they'll stock it.

Vendors will travel all over the map (yes, even outside the radius) to go get goods. This can be problematic if your town center has a market but you have some outlying houses outside of the market's radius.

Because of this, it's best to have multiple market clusters, once your town grows enough to support/warrant far-flung houses.

I've read that people outside of a market's radius will travel to the market to get goods if the market is closer to them than the nearest barn/stockpile which has what they need.

First of all, how do you get nomads? Here's what the ingame help has to say about that:

Once your city has a town hall, a trading post, and a market, groups of nomads will occasionally arrive at the town hall to request citizenship and join your people. This is a great way to boost your population quickly.

And now that that's out of the way, the question remains: should you accept them into your town when they come a-knockin'?

That depends on your situation. Nomads can save your town just as easily as they can ruin it.

The first question you should ask yourself is "Do I want a bunch of new people I'll have to house, feed, clothe and equip? Can my economy take that hit?". If the answer is no, simple, send them away.

If the answer is yes, well... you might still want to send them away. But you might want to let them stay.

Nomads will be a mix of adults and children, all uneducated. They can also bring disease and possibly cause trouble in your town.

Diseases are confirmed. Here's the ingame help again:

The likelihood of a disease outbreak may be increased after a group of nomads joins your people.

Other sorts of trouble, though, I can't say for sure. That's just hearsay.

Now, the uneducated thing... if your population is already uneducated or only partly educated, this might not matter too much. If everybody's educated, though, and you don't particularly need the population boost, you might want to consider turning them away even if you have the resources.

Educated citizens = win. Seriously. Educated workers work more efficiently than uneducated workers.

Students are in school from roughly age 10 to 15, and life expectancy is roughly 80 (I've seen 85 personally, I've heard of 92). It's totally worth it.

Very important topic.

Until I get around to doing this properly, you can start with this:

Originally posted by TemplarGFX:

Tasks and Priorities


From my understanding of the game, here are the priorities of different professions :
Items at the top will be done first always


Townsfolk (regardless of profession, these are above all other priorities)
Get Food
Get Clothes
Get Tools
Go Home to warm up

Laborer
Retrieve/Return Resources that are on the ground*
Harvest Wood/Stone/Iron*

Builder
Build Roads
Build Other

Forester/Hunter/Gatherer/Fisherman/Blacksmith/Tailor/Miner/Farmer/Herbalist/Herder
Harvest Resource
Plant Resource (Forester/Farmer/Herder)
Process Land Tile (Farmer/Herder)

Vendor/Trader
Retrieve Goods from Stock

Teacher/Doctor/Priest
Occupy Building

Tasks and Assignment
To understand how it works (and why it seems alot of things are missing from professions above), you need to know how tasks are assigned

There are 2 global task groups that are assigned on a first in/first out basis (new commands are placed at the end of the queue) :

Convert to Resource
This is the queue that any tree/rock/iron removal request is placed into through the remove resource menu option. This is separate to profession based gathering

Retrieve Resource into stock
When a usable resource is placed on the ground, it goes into this queue for collection. This includes ALL resource based professions.

*current laborers are split evenly across these queues and take the first entry in the queue the moment they finish their current task. As tasks are removed and added, laborers will switch between queues as required.


Becoming a temporary laborer
To efficiently manage everything between all your townsfolk, professions have points where the townsfolk will switch to temporarily be a laborer for a single task

This is when each profession switches :

Builder
Build sites with assigned workers do not have all required resources
After Resting

Hunter/Gatherer/Fisherman/Blacksmith/Tailor/Miner/Farmer/Herbalist
After harvesting the resource and placing it on the ground to be collected

Vendor/Trader
After placing resource into Market Place/Trading Post

Teacher/Doctor/Priest
After getting food/tool/clothes/heat
After Resting

This is very important to understand as it explains why your townsfolk seem to sometimes do things completely not related to their profession.

For example, a gatherer may pick some mushrooms, but instead of taking those mushrooms to a barn, the gatherer becomes a temporary laborer.
If there are other available laborers another townsfolk may be assigned to collect the mushrooms, and the gatherer may be assigned to collect a different resource, or chop a tree/cut rock.


To summarize, Hunter/Gatherer/Fisherman/Blacksmith/Tailor/Miner/Farmer/Herbalist workers will turn into temporary laborers every time they successfully harvest. This does not mean they will always be assigned an unrelated laborer task, however it does if there are more tasks in queue(s) than their are laborers. The result can be more efficient than exclusive professions but sometimes it has the opposite effect.

Place your trading posts on the banks of the large river that runs through your map. In theory, merchants might come if you place the market on a lake, but placement can be tricky in such cases. If you insist on placing it on a lake, try to keep it close to the mouth of the river; some people have reported trouble attracting merchants if the trading post was on a lake but too far from the main river.

It can take a while before your first merchant arrives, so be patient. You might get lucky and it'll come quickly, or it might take many seasons (possibly even a few years? more testing needed).

Merchants will come to your trading post even if you have no traders assigned. As long as you have enough goods to trade, you can still make a trade even if you have no traders. Traders only serve to move goods to/from the trading post.

Because of this, under most circumstances, keeping 1 or 2 traders per market is more than enough. If you're moving large quantities of goods to/from your trading posts, though, consider assigning more traders.

There are multiple types of merchants: food, general goods, livestock, seed and resources.

Each merchant type will accept different trade goods, and you can only place orders for a type of thing that a merchant can carry (for example, you can't place an order for seeds with a food merchant).

• Food merchants will accept any type of goods, but firewood is only worth 3 (it is worth 4 in all other cases).
  
  
• General Goods merchants will accept all goods.
  
  
• Resource merchants will accept all non-food items, as well as ale.
  
  
• Livestock and Seed merchants will accept all non-food items.

Because of this, the most efficient trade goods are firewood (worth 3 or 4, depending) and coats (hide & leather coats are worth 15 and warm coats are worth 20), since all merchants accept these.

Ale is also a good trade item, having a value of 8 and being accepted by most merchants.

For Food & General Goods merchants, herbs are an excellent trading item (value of 4) as well as venison, beef and mutton (value of 3). Chicken is only worth 2, though, and fish is only worth 1.

Note: Bit of a cheaty thing...

Merchants & their stock are only determined once they dock. So if you see a boat approach before it actually docks, you can save your game and reload if you don't like what they have.

The Town Hall is moderately expensive and not directly useful, so it's not something you want to rush building.

That said, once your town's grown a bit and you can afford it, it can be very useful.

What the Town Hall does, basically, is give you access to various bits of information about your town.

Yearly production/consumption values for various things (food is especially useful to know about), graphs about your town growth, total town inventory of goods (so you don't have to look in every barn n' market), etc.

Press "R" to rotate buildings.

Press "F" to change what houses look like (both wooden and stone).

Once you've place a building down, you can pause it. Buildings don't cost you any resources until you start building them, so if you pause construction as soon as you place it, it won't cost you anything. This is good for planning out your city. You can cancel the construction at any time, and it won't have cost you anything.

Be careful about placing roads: you can't pause them, and builders will prioritize road-building over other things.

Also note that if you place a road under something (like a tree or a rock or whatever) and try to cancel the road, it won't go away until someone cuts/mines the offending object. This is probably a bug.

You need builders to build roads, but laborers can destroy them.

You can place stockpiles to flatten land, then destroy them right away. This costs nothing. A bit of cheap terraforming.

If you have enough people running around and can spare the workers, consider building dirt roads on all those random little patches of ground in your city that are too small to build: your citizens will go about their work a bit faster because of it, and it can look cool.

Let's start with an excellent (IMHO, of course) review (thanks to Coup d'oeil for the link):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8HG8bD5QKI

Next, here's the first in a series of video tutorials from Edaeloth (you can check out his thread on the forums here):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDx2NnrPxWU

Of course, we shouldn't forget the official Shining Rock Software site[shiningrocksoftware.com] and forum[shiningrocksoftware.com].

You might also be interested in this[banished-wiki.com] wiki, or this[banished.gamepedia.com] wiki. Personally, I've found the first one more useful, but these things change, so who knows.

I'm not sure what this[www.banishedforum.com] forum is, exactly (fan forum, I guess?), but it has some good information.