Part 2

Learn Banished controls, how to use the menu bar, and start basic gameplay with this guide. Pause time with spacebar.

Controls:

• WASD - Move the map
• QE - Rotate the map
• Mouse Wheel - Zoom in and out
• Escape - Pause menu
• Spacebar - Start/pause time

The menu bar, located in the lower right corner, is your primary interface for controlling the game.

Menu Bar Breakdown:

• Time Controls: Pause, resume, speed up (up to x10), or slow down time.
• Utilities Button: Opens a sub-menu with the following options:
  • Information Button: Displays town population, supplies, time of year, and weather.
  • Event Log: Shows recent events, such as a cave-in at a mine that killed someone.
  • Map: Provides an overview of the game world.
  • Professions: Manage citizen job assignments. Includes a Laborer job for tasks like chopping trees and mining. Farmers become laborers in winter. Hovering over jobs shows tooltips.
  • Limits: Set production limits for items. Default limits are provided at the start.
  • Priority Button: Increase the priority of selected jobs to complete them sooner.
  • Pathing Button: Shows citizen routes between homes and workplaces to identify areas for road construction.
  • Bookmarking Buttons: For saving camera locations and other tasks.
  • In-game Help: Offers assistance on selected items or buildings.
• Building Homes (House-shaped button): Build wood or stone homes. Stone homes retain heat better, requiring less firewood in winter. A boarding house is also available for temporary housing.
• Roads and Bridges (Wheel button): Construct dirt roads (no resources needed), stone roads (require stone, faster citizen movement), bridges (to cross water), and tunnels (to pass under mountains, expensive).
• Stockpile Button: Build barns, stockpiles, market squares (for easier supply pickup), and trading posts (must be placed on a river or lake connected to the map edge for traders).
• Town Services (Hammer button): Build wells (for firefighting and water access), schools, hospitals, town halls, chapels, and cemeteries.
• Food Production (Apple button): Construct farms, orchards, pastures, fishing docks, hunting huts, and gatherers huts.
• Resource Production: Build structures for resource gathering and processing, including woodcutters (firewood), foresters (raw wood), herbalists, blacksmiths, tailors, breweries, mines, and quarries.
• Harvesting Raw Materials: Tear down buildings, harvest materials in an area, or specifically harvest wood, stone, and iron. Also includes buttons to remove roads and cancel removal.
• Pause Menu (Last button): Access the game's pause menu.

Basic Gameplay Start:

Assuming easy starting conditions, you begin with some buildings, people, and one type of animal (cows, sheep, or chickens), along with raw materials.

Initial Steps:

1. Warning: Open the job menu and assign a few citizens to the builder job.
2. Build a woodcutter's to start stockpiling firewood for winter.
3. Construct another, larger stockpile.
4. To make a woodcutter's, go to the resource production menu, select the woodcutter button, rotate it with 'T' if needed, and place it.
5. To make a stockpile, go to the stockpile menu.