Picking a Settlement Location

I figure the easiest way to jog my memory about what to write about is to start a new game and use topics that come up in the course of the game as fodder.

When you start Timber & Stone your first real choice is the screen resolution to use. Although that may sound strange, it does affect gameplay – especially later, when you have more settlers all working separate tasks – as a lagging computer at critical times can get a settler killed.

I run on a Mac and it seems that performance is not as optimal as it could be as I compare my ability to move the camera to gamers on Youtube and it is nowhere near as responsive. I have a higher-end iMac with 32GB of RAM, but there seems to be little means of improving its performance. Let me know if you know how.

I generally play in a windowed screen and one size smaller than my screen resolution. As the size of the community gets larger, and especially at night or when there are fires raging, I will lower the screen size in order to get my Frames Per Second (FPS) rate back up.

The next major choice is what size map to play on. Each map comes with its own sort of challenges:

• Small – fewer resources, easier to rid enemies, quicker arrival of merchants and migrants, better FPS rate, more dangerous in the early game as enemy are upon you faster.
• Large – more resource than you will be able to exploit, hard to rid all enemies in a single day, slow arrival times of merchants and migrants (who may not always make it to your hall), poorer FPS rates, may hit road length limits, safer in the early game as enemy take longer to find and reach you.
• Medium – somewhere between the above two.

For my first game I played a small world. I figured the smaller, the better. As noted above a smaller world makes for a harder game in the early stages. A wolf pack spawning in could easily find and reach your settlement before you can prepare, or worse, spot them. Wolves can do serious damage against unarmed settlers and a pack can tear through a settlement in seconds if no one is armed. (Ironically, I have also seen a settler take out a wolf in a single blow with an axe, so it is not automatic death to the settlers. But don't count on that happening.)

For my most recent games I have taken to using Medium sized maps. They give you more than enough resources while still giving you a reasonable time to mount a defense when enemies spawn on the map. When settlers need to get to the far reaches of the map it is not a four-hour (in game time) round trip, so your foragers, herders, wood cutters, and soldiers can usually make more than two trips during daylight to accomplish their tasks.

The next choice is what kind of terrain you want to settle in. You are presented with a large map and each square represents a different combination of terrain and resources. You may not realize it, but the map displayed is much larger than shown. By using the scroll wheel on your mouse you can zoom in and out and scroll around to different parts of the land.

When you click on a block you will get information similar to the figure shown to the right. In this example, the biome selected is Grasslands, but still with ample timber (Trees = Medium) and the ability to fish (Water = River and Fish = Abundant).

What I try to find is at least Common in Copper, Iron, Coal, and Chickens. Tin can be less common than Copper as it only requires one-half the amount of Tin than Copper in order to make Bronze. Boar and Sheep can be less common as there is a limit to the number of boars, sheep, and chickens that can be on the map at one time. As will be discussed in another post, your goal will generally be to maximize the number of chickens you have, so having an abundance of boar or sheep will only make it harder for a chicken to spawn in.

Whether you have water or not is really a personal choice. Having the ability to fish certainly helps you in Day 2 through 4 with food. But, rivers tend to dominate the map, and thus dominate how you play. Also, because they take up such a large proportion of the map, it reduces the number of other resources – timber, stone, and berry bushes – you get. Additionally, crossing a river slows your settlers movement down tremendously, so collecting resources on the opposite side of a river becomes a time-consuming task. If your river takes up a map edge, that is one less side that you can easily reach with a road, lowering your chances of getting migrants and merchants until you successfully bridge your way across the water. In essence, rivers tend to lead to "turtling" strategies, which alters the way you play.

Settling on a Topography of Hills or Mountains means you will have more stone available to you and you can play more of a mining game (fewer levels on the map will be filled with air). Although it can be an interesting game, settling on Hills or Mountains can be challenging.

In the end, which you choose will depend upon the type of game you wish to play. Because Timber and Stone can be pretty unforgiving you will find yourself trying lots of different types of games until you find your niche. Once that happens you can start challenging yourself with other terrain and resource combinations, trying to master the game under any circumstances. For now, just remember that to grow you need food, so make sure that you either have access to water or plenty of berry bushes and high animal spawn rates to get you started.

Here are the stats for the world I just started. Choosing a coastal area generally means one side of the map will be water. That generally gives you a flank to rest you defense on, but cuts your chances of migrants and merchants until you bridge off that side of the map.

I wanted the Trees to be Dense as I did not want there to be a shortage of trees. Although I tend to build in stone (I mine quite a bit), dense means timber will always be close at hand. I actually chose lower rates than Common for Copper and Iron, so it will be more of a challenge. But as I tend to mine extensively, I should be able to overcome that by Day 5 or so.

With Abundant Fish and Chicken, and lower rates for Boar and Sheep, I should be able to handle my food requirements pretty easily. Of course, fishing only works if I am lucky enough to start with a Fishing Pole or some Rope ...

After clicking Confirm, you are presented with the map, where you can scroll around and see if you really like the place. After looking around I picked location about halfway between the top and bottom of the map, but close to the river. As it turned out, there was a nice hill at that spot, and a large amount of timber, so that is the spot I will settle on.

There aren't a whole lot of berry bushes on the map, so foraging for berries may not be a big strategy.

Remember, if you don't like the map once you have seen it, you can always click the Go Back button and try another spot. I believe you can also click on the same square and have it generate the map again and it will change. (I say "I believe" because I tried it once to see whether the same map would show or whether it would regenerate it, but it is hard to be sure that you are clicking in exactly the same square because they are so small.)

As soon as you place your settler's wagon quickly hit pause (the [P] key, unless you have remapped it), so you can take stock of your settlers and the contents of your wagon. You have a lot of planning to do before you actually start sending your settlers off to their tasks.

Next time: looking at your starting resources.