dotAGE Beginner’s Tips and Tricks

A point form list of tips that answer a new player’s most commonly asked questions.

Important

• Signposts expand build-able terrain.
• Most memory unlocks add new features to your next run, not your current one. If you unlock fish, for instance, it will not add fish to your current map. Memory unlocks are a meta-progression, while the tech tree is for your current run.
• At the start of a game, look at which techs you have available to unlock. Make a note of which resources they take as inputs–you might assume your heating will take wood as an input, but it turns out this run it takes hemp. If you don’t notice this until you need the heating, you could end up in trouble.
• Do you have wells (which use a water source) or mountain springs (which require a rock to place)?
• Do you have pools (which take water as an input) or fans (which have no input but require hemp to build)?

Buildings

• Some buildings have the requirement ‘path to dwelling.’ This means that there must be a nearby house and all tiles between the two buildings must be cleared.
• Fancier buildings require cobblestone paths that lead to your town centre. Similar to the ‘path to dwelling’ these must have a path paved in cobblestone to be placed.

Resources

• You can use a resource the same turn as it’s produced.
• Because you can use a resource the same turn it’s produced, you can move workers around to prevent a shortfall immediately.
  Example: If you have zero hemp, but you have a forager producing hemp this turn, you can use the hemp in any building that takes it as an input.
• A segmented arrow on a building’s production means that the production takes multiple turns. Example: The initial hunter’s tent takes three turns to produce anything, while the upgrade does it in one turn.
• You can milk sheep.
• Tilled soil gives a bonus to many (though not all crops), but you do not need to till soil to plant. This means you can research and plant crops before you unlock tilling.
• You can till soil under trees to boost their production. (This works for any fully-grown fruit tree, even if it generated as part of the map.)
• Tilled soil and fertile soil bonuses do not stack. There’s no benefit to tilling fertile soil.

Prophesy – Omens, Events, and Dooms

• One of the domains is stronger than the others every run, so focus your initial efforts in preparing to counter that domain.
• You can ‘store’ hope/health/etc for future events. For example, you can produce hope even when there are no negative events looming. This gives you a bit of a buffer against your next fear event. (The counter will reset to zero at the end of the event, so you can only store for the next event, not any after that.)
• There is no way to stop or influence omens, so you don’t need to focus production in preventing them. Instead, focus on buildings that let you cure negative conditions related to the domain of the omen. (e.g. Sick for the Health domain)

Seasons

• The season change always triggers a hot/cold countdown, even if you can’t see it on the prophesy. Changing to fall flips to ‘cold’ events and changing to spring changes back to ‘hot’ events. For other domains, you may get lucky and not need counter them this season, but there will always be seasonal events.
• Because of how seasonal events work, you’ll need ‘cooling’ buildings for your first two seasons no matter which domain is dominant.
• You will also need to create some ‘heating’ buildings before fall. Knowing this allows you to plan ahead before fall arrives.
• Snow will not melt in the spring/summer. Every snowy tile will get a -1 penalty, so events that fill the whole map are tough to recover from. (On the plus side, snow is only created by random events or failing dooms.)
• You can dig up snow using tools, but if you don’t have any yet you can also clear snow by building ‘clearings’ or placing buildings that come with clearings underneath automatically.
• In winter, animals do not respawn on the map after they’ve been killed and most crops will not grow.
• Winter is shorter than the other seasons.

Pips

• If you don’t feed pips, they will get sick.
• You can remove a Pip’s job from the ‘Pips Recap’ in the top right corner of the screen. Click the red X next to the pip’s job to remove it, allowing you to train them to do something else.
• You can also shift-click to open a pip’s summary directly.
• Unlock buildings that allow you to cure negative conditions before you need them. For example: if you wait until your pip is sick to research a way to heal them, you may collect too much illness to prevent the next event.
• If you have an injured/sick pip and you don’t have the tech to heal them right now, you can remove their job and train another pip rather than waiting for them to recover.