Building Your First City

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A neatly built downtown area of a city.

After getting used to the basic controls and having maybe explored your world a little, you are ready to found your civilization's first city.

This guide assumes that there are no other cities, and that you are on your starting habitable world.

It also assumes you've used the Reach for the Stars or The Savage State start types.

Gathering Age

The construction menu, with Mine selected.

The first step to start a civilization is the construction of buildings; houses, farms, mines, workshops and so on. But to start any construction you first need construction materials.

Press Backspace to enter the top-down view and use \ and Shift + \ to cycle through the different overlays. The first thing you will need to find is stone or wood.

Stone icon Log icon

Once you have found one of the basic construction material resources, open your Construction (F11) window, by pressing either F11 or by clicking on the sidebar icon. Now, in the building menu, select the Manufacture category at the top, and then select either the mine or logging camp depending on your choice. It is important to select a small building blueprint, bigger buildings cost a lot of materials and you currently have none. Place the building in an area that has the resources.

Hint: A recommended building blueprint for a mine is the Quarry by Haxus. It is very cheap and quick to construct. There is also a default logging camp blueprint, but it's more expensive, so it's generally recommended to use stone instead if possible.

Material Foraging

With the construction site of your first building down, you need to collect a few construction materials manually. This is done by foraging the stone or wood needed.

Go to the construction site and open the Building (F10) window. In the construction tab, the left box will show what is needed to construct the building.

Use the top-down view to locate the needed materials and move to them. In first-person view, you should be able to find the resources and click it with the hand cursor.

Construction

Once you have have the needed materials, go back to the construction site. While on the construction site, open your Gear (F4) window and then drop the materials on the ground.

Open the Building (F10) window again and press the "Work Construction Site" button. Stay at the construction site and keep the Building window open until the building is fully constructed.

A number at the bottom right shows the amount of labor needed. Working the construction site applies labor and lowers it. Construction is complete when all labor has been applied.

There is a small chance that some of the materials are wasted when applying them to the construction site. If so you will have to go forage replacements to the lost materials.

Basic Tools

Some building blueprints might require some tools to construct, or might be faster to construct if specific tools are available. Basic tools are hammers and shovels, and they can both be handcrafted using stone and logs.

Any required or optional tools for construction are shown in the right box of the Construction tab of the Building (F10) window.

To use a tool it most be in either a ready inventory slot, or in a utility pouch in the belt slot.

Stone Age

With a basic mine or logging camp constructed, you now have a source of construction materials so you don't need to forage anymore. Any construction site connected to you building will be able to automatically fetch needed construction materials from it.

While you are standing at the mine or logging camp the Building (F10) window will have a tab for manufacturing. There should be a manufacturing line set to produce stone or logs, if not then delete the manufacturing line and create a new one for stone or logs by clicking this button:

Start the manufacturing line by clicking the "Run" button. It will then count down for the process to finish. You do not have to stay at the building while the manufacturing line is being run, you can even construct a second building of the same type and alternate between multiple buildings to speed up production.

Mine a large amount of stone. 100 units of stone is a good start. This is the most tedious step of getting your first town going. After the first town, you should rarely ever need to do this again.

If you want, you can temporarily skip to the nation age part of this guide and build a capitol to allow you to remotely switch between buildings without running there.

Hint: On the Building (F10) window's building tab you can see the current inventory of the building.

Food and Shelter

The construction menu, with Farm selected.

Next, you'll need to build homes and a basic farm. A town with homes attracts people to become its citizens. Citizens fetch materials and apply labor to construction and manufacturing jobs of your town, freeing you from that tedium. Citizens need to have food to eat or they will not be very happy; they might even die.

Use the Construction (F11) window to build a farm near your other buildings. Go to the construction site and push the Work Construction Site button on the Building (F10) window to start manually constructing the farm, construction materials will automatically be fetched from the other buildings' inventories; you may have to go back to your other buildings if you run out of construction materials.

You may have noticed a check box labelled Employ Citizen when constructing buildings. This has no effect if your town has no citizens, but if you do this will allow citizens to construct things for you.

Homes will be needed. Most farm building blueprints have homes included, but it is not a requirement. Make sure to look above the "Jobs" section of the Construction window to check if the design you're using has homes, as seen on the right.

Tip: A basic farm design is the Pioneer Cabin by Haxus. It is fairly cheap to build and has homes.

It may also be a good idea to build a few homes and apartments at this point, to allow space for even more civilians to move in.

Time is needed for citizens to move into your burgeoning town. Now is a good time to take a break from building the town. Explore the surroundings. Hunt animals. Go eat lunch or dinner, etc. Alternatively, you can continue progressing and manually running the processes until citizens have moved in.

After some time, the town will have an abundant supply of food and construction materials, because citizens are running the manufacturing lines. Your little town will be ready for growth. From now on, you should only have to plan the buildings and roads and your citizens will do the work.

Roads

Roads are used to connect buildings together. On the Construction (F11) window, click a road type button to start building a road.

Dirt and stone roads are cheap and easy to build, so it's recommended to use these. Asphalt roads require oil, so it's not recommended to use these.

Use the hand cursor to select a location. Click the terrain to establish the starting point for the road segment. Click the terrain somewhere else to finish planning the road.

The "Level grade" option makes roads level the terrain by forcing the second end of the road segment to be at the same altitude as the first end, which significantly increases the labor required to build them.

After clicking both ends of the road segment on the ground, the terrain changes to a road construction appearance. Move your character to stand within the road construction area.

To construct the road you have planned, use the Building (F10) window like you did for your other buildings. Stone for concrete roads is automatically fetched from the environment if available.

Hints and Tip

  • Place all buildings and roads using the top-down view. This will make planning, placement and organization a lot easier. It is essential when you are placing resource harvesting building because it lets you see where the natural resources are.
  • Hold the Shift key to snap the road angle, to make cleaner city layouts.
  • When placing a building, you can press the Space key to auto-align it to the road.
  • Also, when placing, you can pause and hover buildings over an area for a second to get a pop-up showing the resources it would have access to. This is useful for optimizing your mine production.
  • A tooltip showing the amount of construction materials needed appears if you hold the cursor over the row of "Construction Materials" icons in the Construction window.

Metal Age

Hovering the mouse over a resource to see what the building would have access to.

Metal production is needed to advance further. Metal is an essential component needed for producing electricity and manufacturing vehicles and spacecraft. Your city cannot progress without metal.

Metal is smelted from ore. Ore is a mineral resource that is mined from the environment. Use top-down view to locate ore. Build a mine there. You may need to do some exploring to locate ore.

Ore icon

Note: The Quarry by Haxus can only mine stone. You will need to use a different mine blueprint to mine ore.

The icons on the top-down view just indicates that there are ore rocks in that area, but not how many or exactly where. When you are placing a mine, hover it over an area for a second and it will show how many rocks are within the mine's site. The mine won't be able to have more ore mining workshops than there are ore rocks at the mine's site.

When using a large mine blueprint for ore, but there aren't enough ore rocks to fill all the workshops, consider using the spares for stone and retiring your old stone mines.

Build a smelter. The smelter will create metal using ore gathered by the mine. The resulting metal is stored in the smelter's inventory.

Tools

The Building window showing manufacturing lines of a machine shop.

With metal it becomes possible to manufacture a wide range of metal tools. Tools are required in some more advanced building construction and manufacturing processes. Some tools also increase the efficiency of manufacturing processes or construct speed of new buildings.

Construct a machine shop in order to start producing tools. Configure manufacturing lines to produce some basic tools. The most important tools at this stage are hammers, shovels, and sew needles, but having all types of tools is always good.

Tip: Tools aren't directly consumed when used, instead they have a chance to take durability damage. Tools made from good quality materials will be more durable.

Nation Age

With metal available your town is ready to become a real city and a capital. Do note that you can still create a city without metal if the capitol design allows so.

If you haven't already created an empire, you need to either handcraft or otherwise acquire a flag in order to create a new empire. You will be unable to turn your town into a real city if you aren't in an empire.

For more information, see the Starting as an Emperor.

City

Build a capitol building in your town. When you place it you will be prompted to give it a name and possibly name the solar system and sector if they aren't named already.

The capitol building has a small jurisdiction radius around it, buildings inside this area are considered part of the city. This jurisdiction area can be extended by constructing police stations.

The capitol building allows easy remote access to all factory manufacturing lines in the city's jurisdiction. It is also possible to remotely do construction using the capitol building.

If you skipped here from the stone age part of this guide, you should now go back and continue from there.

Capital

Setting your city to be the empire capital.

To declare the city as your capital you need to go to your capitol building.

Declare it as both an empire capital and a sector capital. To do this, stand at the capitol building's site, open the Building (F10) window, on the Capitol tab click the two buttons in the upper-right corner.

The empire capital city will be the city that you respawn at after dying.

City Report

Every 13 minutes, your city creates a status report for you, commonly referred to as a city report. To request a city report, use the Governance (F12) window, Cities and Bases tab; then right-click a city. City reports provide all the information needed to manage a city.

City reports show factors affecting the morale of the citizens. Morale determines whether the population will grow or shrink. A positive morale causes citizens to immigrate into the city faster. A negative moral causes citizens to emigrate out of the city.

Review the status report periodically as you continue building the city. Each new building will add jobs to the city. More homes and food will be needed as the number of jobs increases. The demands of the citizens will change as the city grows.

Make sure to keep an eye on the morale demands and build them as needed. This will keep your city stable.

Economy

Build a bank and start minting metal bullion. Money is useful for trading later on.

Airport Immigration

Constructing an airport terminal allows for citizens to immigrate into your city from outside your city's local wilderness. Citizens immigrating via an airport can double your immigration rate. This works even if you don't have any actual aircraft in your city.

An airport terminal can be built using a basic building blueprint that doesn't use anything else than metal. So making it early can greatly increase your city's growth rate.

Electrical Age

Your city will grow very slowly until electrical power is generated. This is because the citizens do not work at night when there is no electricity. Once the city has electricity, the citizens work all the time. The pace of development in the city increases dramatically once it has electricity.

Resources and terrain near your city will determine which power plant is best to build first. If you are near a coast line, build a hydroelectric power plant. It is built with relatively simple materials and it does not consume any fuel.

If you are not near a coast line, the coal power plant is probably the next best choice. This requires you to locate coal in your area and to build a mine there. Coal is also a necessary component of gun powder, if you decide to make firearms.

If you don't have a coast or coal, consider a wind power plant.

Note: Most power plant blueprints require quite a lot of resources and labor to construct. You may need to scale up your mining and smelting operations for this.

Industrial Age

The first step to advance your civilization towards the stars has been taken. Now your civilization will start its industrial revolution. Electricity allows for faster manufacturing and working at night, but it also opens up the possibility for electronic parts and computers.

An airport radar is a good example of a building that your civilization should be able to build at the end of this stage. Place down an airport radar construction site; once constructed it will allow your civilization to watch the skies for threats and greet visitors.

Look at the Building (F10) window to see the requirements for the airport radar. You do not have all that is needed. Build the industries that are necessary to make those things needed to complete construction of the airport radar.

Your town will grow to considerable size by the time you complete this stage. As you place each new building, the Building (F10) window will show what is required to build that new building and also what is required to manufacture that new industry's products.

Keep working your way down the production chain until everything needed to complete construction of the airport radar is being manufactured. It's not hard to figure out now that you have learned the basics of construction and manufacturing.

Industrial Resources

A few additional resources will be required in this stage of development. Most notably oil, but also minerals and crystals.

Oil icon Minerals icon Crystals icon

Some of the resources can be rarer than others depending on the randomly generated world. Oil is especially critical and can be a hindrance. Exploring the other resource zones of your world might ne necessary.

Trade Connections

Trade routes allow for cities connected together to trade and share commodities with each other.

Cities can be connected by road, sea, or air.

  • Two cities that are connected by road will have the fastest trade connection. It also allows the two cities to share electricity.
  • Any city with a wharf is connected to all other cities on the same world that also have a wharf.
  • All cities with an airport terminal in the same solar system are connected.

This allows you to travel to other resource zones on your homeworld and get any resources you might be missing or resources of better quality.

For more information, see the City Trade page.

Next Steps

At this point, you're ready to start thinking about space travel.

It's helpful to start production of EV Suits and Space Rockets.

For the next part, see Building Your First Moon Colony.