Songs of Syx - Guide on Getting Past 100/200 Population

Been struggling with how to get past 100 or 200 population, and finally figured it out, here’s a wholesome guide.

How to Get Over 200 Population in Songs of Syx

Сrеdit gоеs to Origin!

Hi everyone who’s struggling to build something more than a village in Song of Syx, and finds it absurd that it takes 95 people to feed 100 people.

Here’s a quick and dirty overview of what you’re doing wrong and what all the other Reddit threads i’ve googled have not told you.

I am going 100% Cretonians for my walkthrough and it might appear hard to get more pop, even though they have a farming bonus.

Here’s the secret:

Only build wheat farms!

Yes, that’s right, let me explain.

See what’s wrong with the above image? Disregarding Fertility (guide below), it’s taking me 18 citizens to produce 490 vegetables.

Now let’s take a look at my smaller wheat farm.

Do you notice something? Using only 17 farmers i produce 1.4k wheat, almost triple of the veggie farm.

Even with a big orchard, i outproduce it by 2 times with about 1/3 the size and fewer pigmen working on it. Also, don’t do fishing with Cretonians, they catch them at 0.75 efficiency, it’s far better to get more wheat farmers for that manpower.

But, but, my food pallet.

You don’t need to worry about food diversification until far later in the game when you have over 500 people. I suggest limiting their food intake to only bread, this will make all Cretonians a lot happier actually, and you can then spend the extra produced veggies to grow new Cretonians, instead of wasting the 1/5 of the created product as regular food.

If you’re ever wondering, just check manpower / product and you’ll see what’s best to make (hint hint for pastures).

Efficiency and Fertility

A question not answered in the above section is, the wheat requires a bakery, and that takes workers.

Well, yes but not as many!

What you want to know is how to make the most efficient building possible:

Let’s take a look at me building a new bakery, do you notice in the top right where it says Efficiency and Production?

What you want to know is that each new production structure (Oven) increases production, but decreases efficiency:

So you want to offset that decrease of efficiency with support structures (Auxiliary Oven)

To know what the buildings do, just hover the mouse over it.

Fertility

There are two things you need to know about Fertility. First, when you place a canal, the Fertility of the farm increases, not the Moisture (which was weird to me, but ok). So it can go from a bad farm that only produces 50% of crop, to the one that has fertility of 100%.

Second, moats, ponds, pools, and technically the culverts, don’t work! The item must emit “Sweet water” at least 1 tile away from the farm.

Currently, the pump only reaches up to 64 tiles when manned by 6 workers and then that is usually decreased by groundwater levels (i think there’s an overlay issue right now), which is usually around 50%, so in the end you can only reach about 20~ tiles, which is ridiculous.

Please fix this dev, can you make the canals actually reach some length, like in real world?

I wouldn’t mind making a mod where a single pump reaches like 256 length, would be much better, and even that doesn’t seem all that much imho.

I suggest making a thicker canal, that way the sweet water reach goes farther, i have found that 3 tiles are quite a lot of thickness to permeate the whole farm.

There are so many other guides about fertility out there, i’ll let you google them out.

Just try to hit about 75% of base fertility when placing a farm.

Tools

Once you either trade in or start producing tools yourself, you’ll notice that farms take a lot of tools compared to other buildings. It increases it’s efficiency, allowing you to build bigger wheat farms and reduce the number of people working on them, and having them pump that water instead.

I also suggest researching the first bread upgrade, it gives twice the output from bakeries, but you must have some iron saved up.

Building Maintenance

Don’t be like Sseth, make walls and wooden buildings from the start.

Use the auto toggle, to have them already be build when you construct the building.

Create bigger buildings in the middle, eg; Make a janitorial building that can have 20 janitors, instead of a few smaller ones. They usually go out of reach anyhow and fix in a big radius. Farms don’t require maintenance so you can build them a bit farther.

I haven’t tested it yet, but i think making stone roads might be a good way to reduce some maintenance.

One final tip in making your city look better.

When placing a road, select the line mode, that way you’ll make some curvy roads, rather than the American grid system, it’ll feel more natural and better as a European, you can also increase and decrease the thickness with E and Q.