Songs of Syx – Guide for New Players

This is a newbie guide for v60 game version.

Beginners Guide

Please note: all credit goes to John Moridin!

Map Selection

Just pick a temperate area with lots of trees.

Having a lot of coal is nice since it saves you from importing later on

Placing Your Throne

Place it near some forests and near wild food. Although, you should be picking a map where that’s pretty much everywhere.

If you have coal then being closer is good as long as you still have a lot of trees and food.

Building Sizes and Roads

I have two different building sizes. Small 8×8 and large 20×20. This size does not include the walls.

I start with small buildings and surround each building with 2 lane roads. Later on when I switch to a 20×20 building. All you need to do is delete four 8×8 building and replace it with one 20×20 building.

Well, you can layout your city however you like. I just like grids and it makes upgrading to bigger buildings easy.

You want 2 tile roads at a minimum regardless of your layout preference, a single tile isn’t enough.

Producing Food

As Community Cheeseburger’s guide mentioned, there is no need to build farms early on.

Go to the top left corner of the map, select harvest plants and just drag-select so it covers the entire map.

You’ll have enough food for at least 200 people and you can make a lot of money exporting all your excess.

After that, build a small warehouse and a small hunter.

For the warehouse make sure you have storage for everything e.g. wood, stone, fruit, vegetable, grain, cotton, meat, leather, livestock.

Exporting Everything

Ultimately you want to set your export all the excess from gathering and your hunter like this:

  • Fruit, vegetable, meat: 20% (meaning it keeps 80% in the warehouse).
  • Grain, cotton, leather, livestock: 100% (meaning it sells everything).

Each export depot requires a single employee so you won’t have enough employees early on for all of them. You can start with just two. One for meat and the other you can switch between exporting grain, cotton, leather and livestock.

Check the costs of exports but generally, meat, leather and livestock are worth the most. Fruit and vegetables are worth the least.

Carpenters and Libraries

Now build a small carpenter. Once you have enough furniture build a small library. You can first build a single research table and expand the library later. Don’t bother with shelves, you should just add carpets later on.

Do not build a woodcutter. Just use the fell tree command whenever you run out of wood.

Expanding Your Population

To increase your population you want to keep your people fulfilled to encourage more people to come.

To start off with you want two hearths and two wells. Then you’ll need to add dormitories, lavatories (requires research) and eateries (requires research).

You have essentially infinite amounts of food you should have time to figure out expanding the population with service buildings and managing employees.

Avoid anything that requires coal (canteen, bakery, bathhouse) since it’s expensive, either in money or people.

Making Money with Furniture

Even though it’s easy to make, furniture sells quite a lot. And you only need it for new buildings and for maintenance.

So you want to build another small carpenter and then an export depot for furniture at 20%.

Do not build a woodcutter. Just get all the wood you need with the fell tree command

Expanding Your Research

Now you want to increase your research. There are three ways and you should eventually do all three

  • (a) Import fabric so you can build carpets. You’ll also need to keep some around for maintenance.
  • (b) Import paper. You need to have enough money to support a constant supply of this, forever.
  • (c) Build another small library

You can spend the research on whatever buildings you need to expand your city but otherwise, you want to concentrate on getting Foreign Investment to #5. This will massively improve prices for imports and exports.

After that get Carpentry to #3, Knowledge to #5, max out Foreign Investment, max out Carpentry and then max out Knowledge.

To get all this you’ll need at least one, maybe two large libraries.

Expanding Your Carpenters

While expanding your research you also want to expand your carpenters to earn more money.

Once you start building large carpenters, you will run out of trees. At this point, you want to start importing wood.

In my current game my carpenter set up ended up as:

  • 3 20×20 Carpenters
  • 1 3×20 Warehouse
  • 2 Export Depots (Furniture at 50%)
  • 14 Import Depots (Wood at 100%)
  • Total employees = 150

Wood imports cost me 14k (this includes wood used for construction) while furniture exports are 54k in profit.

You don’t need to fill up the warehouse with wood and furniture. I normally only dedicate 4 crates to each. It’s just more efficient to have a warehouse nearby.

Remember Farms?

At this point, you should probably think about farming. Just check your food reserves in winter, if they are low build some farms until they stop being low. For farms, just create 10×25 farms with canals mentioned in “Warden1221’s Guide to a good start” by Taxidermy Minotaur.

Also, you should have a lot of research available to spend on farms. Up to #5 is normally cheap.

Jewellery Production Is Crazy Money

I don’t mean mining the jewels. Import the gems and export the jewellery. In my current game, I’m importing 90k gems, 20k coal and exporting 470k in jewellery. I’ve got 90 employees in my two large jewellers.

I’m just importing everything else I need. Drinks, clothes, tools, weapons and even bread.

What About Other Industries

So ignoring the jewellery, which honestly I think I’ll do in the future, you can just keep expanding your carpenters and use the profits to buy everything you need.

That’s kind of boring though.

Generally speaking, you should avoid getting into an industry unless you want to spend a lot of research on it. Max carpenter research increases the production from 1 per worker per day to 3.5 per worker per day. That’s massive!

I would also avoid importing raw materials and turning them into processed goods. If you are going to do that, just import more wood and build more carpenters. Only produce drinks if you have clay pits. Only produce metal/weapons/tools if you have ore.

TLDR;

Avoid farms and harvest wild food at the start.

Concentrate research to improve the bartering prices.

Export furniture to make lots of money.

FAQ

Not every map has lots of wild food!

Yeah, in that case, you’ll need farms from the beginning.

If you aren’t a newbie, I’m sure you know how to do food.

Clothes/drinks sell for higher than Furniture on my map!

You consider making clothes/drinks instead of furniture.

Clothes/drinks are more complicated to make so I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Especially since you have to split research to cover it all.

A city of 8×8 and 20×20 buildings is very boring

Yeah, that’s just my personal preference. As long as you spread out your service buildings in the right places and set up warehouses properly, the layout doesn’t matter that much.

Egor Opleuha
About Egor Opleuha 8085 Articles
Egor Opleuha, also known as Juzzzie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Gameplay Tips. He is a writer with more than 12 years of experience in writing and editing online content. His favorite game was and still is the third part of the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic saga. He prefers to spend all his free time playing retro games and new indie games.

1 Comment

  1. Excellent guide… on how to ignore 3/4 of the game and min/max everything by exploiting carpenters.

    It does contain some useful newbie information if you can read between lines, but this is more of “how to earn 1M per day” guide.

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