This guide is written for the player using the defaults. It's possible to customize things quite a lot, but I'm assuming default difficulty and balanced architechture.

Characters all have Conviction, which you want to keep high. This is their mental endurance, and bad things can start happening if this gets too low.

They also have Hit Points (HP), Mana, Speed, and Power.

Speed determines when they move in combat, and power is added to each of their attacks. Any of these stats can be modified with Relics, which you get most frequently from graduating students or promoting to staff.

This is one of the first pitfalls because a new player won't really know what each magic school does, and the professors only get one strong school (represented by wand type).

The important early-game tasks for each wand:

• Lightning: Charge, Augury, Research
  
• Fire: Cook, Destroy, Hunt
  
• Air: Assemble, Paint, Haul
  
• Earth: Construct, Mine, Carve, Repair
  
• Nature: Wands, Harvest, Tend, Chop
  
• Dark: Quilt, Ward
  
• Water: Alchemy, Clean

Of these tasks, the most important ones are in bold, and generally are gathering, building, cooking, and researching. (Clean and Tend are important, but can be done by students.) Some skills are required at level 3, which is the max for wand tier 1 and therefore requires specialization, such as mid-level research or summoning a gifted student.

But there's more to choosing wands than just maintaining and building a school. Combat must also be considered, and race has a big effect on that.

• Humans: Good mana, Ave HP, Ave speed, Low power
  
• Wolfkin: Low mana, Low HP, Fast speed, High power
  
• Vivified: Low mana, High HP, Low speed, Low power

Two other races, Shattered and Raven Cult can be recruited as students.

Vivified don't get penalties for bad food, and Wolfkin can hunt their own food at dinnertime and sleep anywhere without penalty. As such, I recommend the following character races, and wand types for those characters when using the defaults:

Vivified + Earth
Wolfkin + Lightning
Wolfkin + Fire


This will cover Research, Cooking, Mining, Constructing, and Hunting, and your professors won't have any food penalties and little issues with beds. Because Wolfkin also start with high Power, they will excel in combat.

You will also want someone who can chop trees, so the first student you recruit should be Nature. Nature also will add significant damage to others, by adding more power. For your starting professors, it's useful if you can get 2 points in Fire (to help with Hunting) or 2 points in Nature (for Chopping).

Using this combination in combat, you have Vivified with lots of HP using Earth magic (tanky) while the others will DPS and Buff.

The first thing you'll want to do after repelling fog, is gather everything you can, then research some required skills. Go chop trees, mine stone, and gather Gutberry and Wood, and also kill a few rats. Build an Arcane Secretary ASAP with stone and wood. For now, place it underground.


Then open the research tree and immediately set about researching "Put Stuff Here" (Storage Containers) and Braziers. (The wall sconces are ugly, and you will not use them long.) Make at least 2 containers underground.

Then make yourself a Wand Shaper when you can, and place that underground. With the Wand Shaper, you can create a wand and summon a student to use it. Create a Nature wand and summon a student. After a little bit of schooling, you have a full combat team which can beat any of the early fights.


Now you can set about building your school! Keep researching until everything in the first column is completed. The game's tutorials will lead you from here.