beginner

The early game in กลายเป็นมหานคร is about turning a few basic resources into a stable city. Your first priorities are food, lumber, research, and enough citizens assigned to the right jobs so production keeps moving.

Starting a new game

Before the game begins, you can adjust the leader, settlement, flag, difficulty, and tutorial.

• The leader can be customized, and the available playstyles include Prestigious Leader, Natural-Born Warrior, Agile Explorer, City's Idol, and Prodigal Noble.
• Settlements can be renamed and generated from a random or custom seed.
• For a first run, easy is the recommended difficulty.
• peaceful is useful for learning city management without invasion pressure.

The leader’s appearance can be changed before the start, but name, gender, and personality trait are locked in from the beginning.

Your first workers and commands

Citizens who enter the city will mainly do transport work unless you give them something specific to do. Use the command window with Q to order mining, gathering, construction, demolition, and cancellation.

You can also assign citizens directly by placing them into buildings that require manpower. Open a structure’s details and use the citizen allocation and work controls to change who is responsible for it and what it produces.

The Queen can also join in construction and demolition tasks directly.

Core early resources

The first big step is to build a sawmill. It processes trees into lumber and wooden sticks, both of which are important early materials. Building several sawmills early is a good use of space and labor.

After wood, expand into other basic processing buildings:

• Textile mill for fabric and related products
• Stonemason for stone and rope
• Slaughterhouse for turning rabbits into raw meat
• Flour mill for grain flour and salt used in cooking

These materials are all broadly useful, so getting them online early makes the rest of the settlement easier.

Food in the opening

Early food usually comes from nature.

A good starting setup uses multiple gathering buildings, and if you have nearby rabbit burrows, hunting can supplement food production. Gathering only works well at the start if you keep it focused; if a gatherer is also told to collect leaves or petals, it spends less time collecting grain. Either limit mixed gathering to one building or build more gatherers.

For the first citizens, a practical food allocation is:

• 2 food workers
• 1 service worker
• 1 soldier
• 1 civil servant
• 3 material workers
• 2 free slots

As the population grows, natural food and hunting stop being enough. At that point, shift toward cultivated food with grain plantations and vegetable gardens, then process them with bakeries and kitchens. Those buildings depend on a flour mill.

Managing labor efficiently

Citizens with free time will carry out your queued orders and help with nearby tasks. If you want a city to grow smoothly, keep your workforce assigned instead of leaving everyone idle.

A useful early habit is to put citizens into the buildings that match their role and then review building details to confirm the products they are making. If a resource starts getting overused, activate the building’s working conditions and set production limits. This is especially helpful when you want a structure to stop automatically after reaching a target amount.

Research and development

Once you have wood, build a research table. Research can be reserved in advance, up to three items, and then it proceeds automatically without needing to keep citizens assigned to the table.

Research points come from two main sources:

• Discovering new resources
• Assigning citizens to laboratories

This makes early exploration and resource acquisition especially valuable, because every new material helps both production and research.

Citizens, happiness, and basic needs

When you build a City Entrance and welcome immigrants, they become citizens of your city. They are a major part of development, but they also need food and other essentials.

If citizens become unhappy, they can rebel or commit crimes, so it is important to keep their basic needs covered.

Two early support items are especially useful:

• Sack increases how much cargo a citizen can carry, which is particularly valuable early when strength is still low.
• Pottery reduces food consumption, which is very strong when food is tight.

A Royal Bed should also be prepared early, because it allows the Queen to recover health. Until it exists, there is no normal way for her to recover.

Safety and military basics

Around the time your city reaches about ten citizens, it becomes safer to start training soldiers in a Training Grounds. The default unit there is the militia, but it is much weaker than a proper guard unit.

A reason to do this early is that nearby zombie nests can appear in large numbers. A small standing military gives you a buffer while the settlement is still fragile.

Hunting rabbits

If rabbits are nearby, you can obtain them by assigning citizens to a Hunter's Hut or by hunting them yourself. The resulting rabbits can then be processed in a slaughterhouse.

Hunting uses stamina, so hunters should have beds available so they can recover properly.

A simple early growth pattern

A practical early path is:

• secure food through gathering and hunting
• build a sawmill and expand wood processing
• add textile mill and stonemason for wider material production
• unlock research with a research table
• begin food processing with flour mill, bakeries, and kitchens
• start training soldiers once the population grows
• add comfort and utility items like Sack and Pottery as soon as possible

The exact order can vary, but the key idea is the same: use your first citizens to stabilize food, convert raw resources into useful materials, and keep labor assigned so the city grows without stalling.