Getting started in Banished

This guide as a whole is intended for people who have little or no experience with the game. If you've played a bit and think you're doing everything right but still have failing settlements, the "Distribution" and "Miscellaneous advice" sections might be good places to check.

The PC strategy game Banished from one-man-show Shining Rock Software was released last week. I'd been looking forward to the game for quite some time, as it scratches a particular city-building itch that I've had for years. Part of why I've anticipated it so much is that to group it in with traditional "city-builder" games is actually a bit of a misnomer: it's decidedly a village- and town-builder. The goal isn't to expand into a bustling metropolis through long ages: it's simply to get your small group of settlers to survive through each winter.

The game's causality and timing are also more realistic than your typical city-builder. For instance, plopping down a house doesn't cause a new family to materialize from nowhere, and instead gives one of your young couples a place where they'd be comfortable to raise some kids, encouraging natural population growth. And planting that orchard today will give you a nice yield of fruit, sure... three or four years from now when the trees have grown. To some this may sound tedious, but for others of us it's a godsend.

It's not flashy, it's not grand—but it's committed and it's grounded. It has no combat, but you'll instead find yourself locked in battle with the elements. When things go wrong it's brutal: an early frost can destroy your yield from farms, and whole families and neighborhoods can succumb to disease. But when things are going well it's downright cozy: smoke drifts up from chimneys and the townsfolk go about their work in the fields and forests. If you ask me, it's the perfect game to play with a big mug of tea.

It's not a game I'd necessarily recommend to everyone, but if what I've described sounds appealing to you, I'm here to offer a few tips for getting started in Banished. I'll note that these tips are based on my experience with the game so far and advice I've seen on the forums and wiki (and you should definitely play the in-game tutorials to learn about the interface, building placement, etc.). There may well be other approaches to the game, but they're likely more challenging and could discourage new players from the game. I'd recommend starting according to the following suggestions, and then after you've gotten a feel for the game, if you want to see if you can get away with breaking these rules, by all means do so (I know I will be). My suggestions also assume that you're on a valleys map with a fair climate and disasters turned on.

My primary piece of over-arching advice for this game is this: You're better off drawing your assumptions from the real world instead of other strategy games. Specifically, make sure you keep in mind that Banished takes place in the pre-industrial world (most people seem to think it's medieval-era while it strikes me as clearly colonial-era, but at this scale they're not terribly different). The game's not perfectly realistic but it skews farther that way than many others, and so by remembering the setting you'll have a much better chance of guessing the proper course of action. We'll see how this applies in several particular cases below.

Your settlers have three main needs: food, warmth, and shelter. Most of what you do in the game is going to be related—directly or indirectly—to keeping up with those needs as your population grows. We'll start with the basics of those needs and then move on to other important concepts.

Here There Be Chickens: GeoGuessr

This post is going to have a lot of pictures. Click any of them to enlarge.

A couple of the PC gaming sites I visit pointed out this lovely browser-based game today: GeoGuessr. Basically it takes you to a random street somewhere in the world using Google Street View, and you have to figure out where you are. It's a simple idea but quite fun: it gives you a new way to experience the already-addicting Street View by testing your general geography knowledge and deduction skills. Wondering whether I'd get able to get around in a random place is the kind of thing I tend to daydream about, so I love the idea of the game.

Since it's based on Google Street View* you won't find yourself in the middle of an untraversable desert or stranded on an iceberg; you'll always be on a street. That still leaves a lot of places for you to find yourself, though. It could be in a city:

Or someplace a little more remote:

And then it's up to you to look around for clues. The most obvious one is often the vegetation. That and the color of the soil in the second image led me to believe I was in Australia. That was correct, but since I don't have much familiarity with that country and because I couldn't find anything else useful nearby, my guess was pretty imprecise (I basically clicked in the middle of the country, whereas I was actually in the north).

Cities offer a lot more information, though, and I'll take you through my process for that first image:

A Game of High-Stakes Bureaucracy

I suppose you'd be justified if you think the idea of a game based on checking papers at a border-crossing sounds like it could be a little boring. But if you're like me, then the forthcoming game Papers, Please will quickly start to win you over. It begins when you realize that far from simply pestering commuters at a rather benign border-crossing in Northern Europe or some such place, you're actually working for the paranoid government of a fictional Soviet-era republic just reopening its borders after a bitter war. Then there are the visuals, the stark simplicity of which evoke both old school gaming and the bleak, repressive world in which the characters live. And while it does of course involve the repetitive, machine-like tasks that constitute the job, the game is primarily concerned with capturing the humanity of the situation—that of your character and of the countless souls who come before you with the hope of making it into the country.

I first heard about the game over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and was very much intrigued, but instead of trying the beta I decided to hold off until the full game was released. Then tonight Nerd³ posted a play-through of the first few levels and I was at the download page before the video was done. As the RPS article extolls (but which I couldn't really appreciate until I saw it in action) there's a certain appeal just in the "tangibility" of the game. Despite it being about checking forms it's actually quite engaging to play, both from the interactivity and the sense of power over people's lives. You manually take their documents and spread them on your desk as you compare names with names, numbers with numbers, and photos with faces. And then of course there's punching down that great big stamp, leaving an indelible mark of your judgment and sealing their fate one way or the other.

Grimes - "Oblivion"

I think part of what originally drew me to this song was that the second half reminds me of the old GoldenEye and Perfect Dark soundtracks from the N64. :P

Even apart from that I like the song, though, and quite a few others from Grimes. Both she and her music are cute and goofy, with a nice hint of creepy.

(If you want a comparison for the old N64 games, I think the similarities are especially obvious in this one from GoldenEye and in this one from Perfect Dark. It's actually to the point where I really wonder if it can be a total coincidence, but even if it's not I'm totally okay with that; I think those games' soundtracks are an excellent place to draw influence from. Their music [by Grant Kirkhope] was one of the better parts of games that were already fantastic to begin with.)

A thing I made, because reasons

(Click for larger)

I was playing the lovely game FTL and as my hopes and dreams were being sucked into the void through a horrifying number of hull breaches I remarked to a friend, "Space is full of jerks."

His fantastic reply was simply "- Carl Sagan." This led to us modifying a bunch of Sagan's quotes. Billions and billions of jerks, jerks making apple pies from scratch, and of course, "Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group... of jerks."

The above picture was a parting shot of sorts. I giggled all the way through making it, and while I'll admit it's not quite the same comedy gold now that I've had adequate sleep, I'm still quite fond of it. And now it's my gift to you, internet.

The humor (as it were) comes from the fact that Sagan was of course an immensely positive person. And so that I don't feel like I'm entirely besmirching the man's memory, I've included a positive alternative below the fold.

"Launching little green idiots into space."

That was my reply when somebody asked me what I was doing the other day. And lo, I was telling the truth, because I was playing the alpha build of the fantastic game-in-progress Kerbal Space Program. Read on for all the details and pictures of things blowing up.

Space: as beautiful as it is pants-shittingly horrifying (notice 2/3 of the crew in the lower right). (Image Source)

Shut up about Skyrim, Steam

Ya, I get it, everyone is.

Gah, just be quiet!

Skyrim SKYRIM OMGSKYRIM, etc.

Ya, ya, I get it, it's amazing and you're playing it and I'm not. Once I have the money (and of course, no longer the time) I'll be right there with you, and until then I'll do my best not to be bitter.

I've been pleasantly surprised to learn from reviews about a few features that I never saw mentioned in the lead-up to the game, such as hiring or befriending companions and having a dog. The fact that it's already pleasantly surprising me before I've even played it isn't going to make the wait any easier.

And speaking of surprising:

On the one hand, it's pretty dumb that you can put a bucket over someone's head without them reacting. On the other hand, it's nice to see that the NPCs' perception of the world seems to in fact be based significantly on their line-of-sight in the rendered world, instead of simply on dice rolls in the background.

But the best news I've heard so far about Skyrim is that dragons don't start appearing at random until a few missions into the main quest. In Oblivion I barely did the main quest at all, and instead created a bunch of side-characters to take on things like the Thieves or Mages Guild or just running around in the woods like an idiot. In that game the main quest was really easy to ignore; the only clue that you were supposed to be doing something else being the amulet in your inventory. I was worried that in Skyrim it would be impossible to ignore the whole "dragonborn" thing if dragons kept appearing where you character was, but thankfully you can opt out of that. Huzzah!

And now if you would kindly just shut up about the game until I get it, that'd be great.

Laugh at these guys, then put their skin on your body

So I StumbledUpon a delightfully morbid Minecraft webcomic called Creeps. It's only just started, but I'm already a fan. Another fan made some skins of the characters, and I'm a jerk so I made some, too. I'm no skinologist but they're pretty okay maybe? (The large preview images were made using Miners Need Cool Shoes.)

 Jensen:

Jensen's friend:

If you've never used a custom skin for Minecraft, here's what you do: Copy the smaller image and save it to your computer (as a .png would be good), then make sure you're logged in at minecraft.net, change it so it reads minecraft.net/profile at the top of the page, and upload the skin file. Woohoo! If it doesn't work right away try quitting and the restarting the game.

And check out Creeps, dummy.

Minecraft is getting wolves/dogs; also, achievements

(Updates below the fold, including a video of the wolves in action.)

During GDC earlier this month, Notch, the lead developer of Minecraft, tweeted that he had promised a well-known developer that he would add dogs to the game. That tweet came a short time after another stating he had just met Peter Molyneaux (the guy behind the Fable games), and I'm inclined to think that it wasn't mere coincidence. My initial hope was that even if they were committed to adding dogs they would put it off in favor of other additions to the game, such as the "hardcore" option they've been talking about, wherein you'd need to eat to survive.

But a recent tweet from Jens Bergensten, another of the game's developers, strongly suggests that dogs and/or wolves will be added to the game fairly soon. The tweet included a link to a screenshot of the animals in-game (click for full size):

(Source)

Read on for some more details on the dogs, what's been said about achievements, and my opinions on it all.

I like to keep you on your toes...

So from Feist, here we go into Fantomenk:

The genre is chiptune, which basically makes use of a lot of the sounds that can be created on an old gaming console. If you can listen to this song only once at a time, you're stronger willed than I am. Same if you're able to restrain yourself from flailing around in your chair while listening to it, because I sure can't. :D

The Minecraft Apocalypse

I love the mix of stupid cardboard costumes with some pretty sweet effects during the fight.