If you’re reading this, that most likely means you’ve begun playing the city-building survival game, Banished, and have encountered one of the following problems: lack of food, lack of logs or other building materials, lack of tools, or just an overall implosion of your city due to several factors.
Many of these problems will result from a kink in your supply chain. A faulty supply chain can affect your citizens’ ability to feed themselves and maximize production.
While veteran players may have a system down that fits with their style of play and city design, new fans of Banished may struggle at first to keep a steady supply. This guide is designed to provide some beginner’s tips for those new players trying to keep their city running smoothly.
Laborers
In Banished, your citizens can enter into several different professions and roles in their society; one of which is the role of a laborer. While laborers do not have a specialized task such as woodcutters or blacksmiths, they will be vital to a healthy supply chain.
There are no trains or automobiles to transport goods in Banished, but you should imagine the laborers as such. The laborers will be the workers who will transport materials to construction sites or into storage.
As you assign roles to your citizens, this task can often be overlooked but it will be vital to a smooth operation. Put simply, a healthy force of laborers will help ensure that your materials or goods go where they need to go.
Houses
You may have figured out by now that your citizens will require homes to live in. This will protect them from the bitter cold of winter and will also play a crucial role in your city’s supply chain.
Building your city in Banished requires balance between designing a neighborhood that is aesthetically pleasing to you and ensuring that citizens are close to key sites they will need to visit during their lifetimes, such as the storage barn or their work.
With no form of travel but their own two feet, citizens have to walk everywhere they go. This means that when a fisherman must either travel to the dock to catch fish or travel back home from work to eat, distance becomes a significant factor in ensuring a productive supply chain.
Citizens seem to naturally move into houses near their assigned jobs, though sometimes this needs to be reset. If you find that many of your workers are living in houses far away from their assigned role despite there being several available houses closer to their workplace, you can always force everyone to become a laborer and then reassign the workforce. This should ensure that everyone takes up a house much nearer to where they need to work.
Still, it’s important to be sure that houses are always being built nearby any newly constructed production building. For example, if you construct a gatherer’s hut out in the forest, you will also want to be sure to build one or two homes close enough to it so that the workers’ commute is limited and productivity is maximized.
Overall Proximity
Just as houses should be built nearby any workplace, they should also be built in close proximity to important materials, such as food found in storage barns.
It can be tempting to design your city in such a way where homes are in their own residential neighborhood, while markets and tailors are in their own shopping district, and production facilities such as a wood cutter or hunting cabin are further tucked away in their own corner of the forest. Although this may work for a while, as your city expands you will soon find that it may be necessary to include a storage area next to your homes or houses near a mine.
Think Production First, and Always One Step Ahead
Material gathering and goods production are not the only types of buildings that can be constructed in Banished. You can also go into a bit of detail in your city design, adding bridges or tunnels, mapping roads, and building schools or a chapel, but you always want to ensure that your city is stable and your production of crucial goods is constant before diving in a little deeper.
Be sure that you always have a steady amount of food being stockpiled for your citizens before branching out to build new and more exciting things. One way to get a quick head start on this is to construct a gatherer’s hut and a forester lodge almost immediately after beginning a new game. The gatherer’s hut will produce a sizable amount of food for a budding population and the forester lodge will not only produce logs but also maintain the nearby forest by planting new trees to keep a steady supply.
Also, you should always be monitoring your production values and thinking one step ahead. When you see your food numbers dropping, it’s probably time to find another food source. Likewise, when you construct a blacksmith to make tools you should know that it won’t be too long before you will need more iron to make those tools, thereby making the construction of a mine a smart move in the near future.
These tips are by no means the blueprint for launching your civilization’s population toward the 1,000 person mark, but they do provide a helpful guide if you’re a beginning player looking to simply achieve a stabilized society before expanding your world. Don’t forget, however, that part of the fun of Banished is finding your own unique way to successfully craft your city.
