Guide
How to play
You do not need to read this first: in your first games a coach points at the world itself — the workers to click, the tree to right-click, the button to press — and every button explains itself when you hover it. This page is for reading on the side.
Your first ten minutes
- Pick a clan — Humans, Orcs or Elves — and a difficulty. Warden is the normal game; Settler is gentle, Bloodmoon is not.
- Put your workers to work. Drag a box around them, right-click a tree for lumber, then send a few to the gold mine. Lumber builds; gold trains.
- Train more workers. Click your hall and press Q (Shift+Q queues five). With the hall selected, right-click the mine or a tree: every new worker walks straight there.
- Build a farm with a worker selected: F, then click open ground inside your border. Every unit eats, and farms raise how many you can feed.
- Build a barracks (R) and train soldiers (Q) and archers (W) from it.
- Make an army. , selects every fighter you own; Ctrl+1 makes them army 1. Press 1 to pick it again, twice to fly the camera to it.
- Get ready for the first raid. The top bar counts it down and the coach says where it comes from. Gather the army by the hall; a tower (T) helps. The first wave is an introduction — the ones after it are not.
- Scout and clear a camp. Send one soldier toward the dark edge of the map. When you find a camp, select the army, press A and click it: they fight everything on the way. A cleared camp pays out its chest and frees its land.
- Found an outpost (O) on the cleared ruins. Your border grows there, and your workers can gather and drop off around it.
After that, the goal map (Tab) shows sixty-odd goals as a graph of what leads to what, and says in red what blocks one right now — “Needs 40 more stone”, “Requires a Keep”. Click a goal to pin it to the card under the top bar.
Keys
The same list is in the game: Esc → Keys.
Selecting and ordering
- Left click
- select · drag a box · double-click selects all of a type on screen · Shift+click adds a unit
- Right click
- move · attack · gather · help build · repair · pick up or deliver an item
- Right click + drag
- drag out the line your army forms up on
- Shift+Right click
- queue waypoints the group walks in turn
- A S H
- attack-move · stop · hold (H builds a hall while workers are selected)
- .
- next idle worker (Shift+. all of them)
- ,
- every fighter you own
Armies
- Ctrl+1-9
- make the selection army 1-9 (they leave their old army, so this also splits one) · Ctrl+Shift+1-9 adds them
- 1-9
- select that army · twice to fly there · Shift+1-9 adds it to the selection
- Ctrl+0
- the selected units leave their army
On a Mac use Ctrl or Alt — Cmd+digit belongs to the browser.
Building and training
- F R T O H
- farm · barracks · tower · outpost · hall (with a worker selected)
- G E C
- archery range · stable · arcane building
- B V M
- forge · shrine · market
- Z X
- wall (drag a run) · gate
- P
- the road tool: drag to lay a free road, Shift+drag to tear one up
- Q W E R
- train from the selected building (Shift queues up to five)
- U
- upgrade the hall, a wall or a tower
- Del
- demolish the selected building (asks twice)
Camera and panels
- WASD / arrows
- scroll (the screen edge and a middle-button drag work too; Shift scrolls faster) · the wheel zooms
- Space
- jump to an alarm, or your hall when nothing is ringing
- Home · Bksp
- your hall · press again for the next hall or outpost
- § (` on US keyboards)
- the realm map: hold to look, click where to go, let go to land there · tap to keep it open
- F1-F4
- jump to a saved view · Ctrl+F1-F4 saves the current one (fn+F1 on a Mac laptop)
- Shift + minimap
- drag on the minimap to move the view finely
- Tab
- the goal map
- J
- the chronicle — your hold's story
- K
- renown boons
- Alt (hold)
- hide town folk, carts and ambient life for a clear look
- Alt+Enter
- full screen
- Esc
- menu · cancel · deselect
The long game
- Work hard at home. Gold from mines, lumber from trees, stone from outcrops, iron from veins. Stone builds anything meant to last; iron arms your soldiers. One small outcrop stands near home — the rest lies in ground you have to clear.
- Keep one army home. Towers, walls and a garrison keep the hold alive while you are away. Give an army a post and a defensive stance and it answers attacks around it.
- Ride out with a few. Every site tells you what it guards and what it gives before you fight it. The further from home, the harder.
- Take and hold valuable ground. Iron hills, stone outcrops and runestones make your troops stronger and your mages possible. Ground can be lost again.
- Mind the night. Sight shrinks outside the light and the unquiet rise on dark ground. Torches, lamps and lit buildings keep them off.
Raids come out of the camps around you, and an enemy town that has seen your hold will send war bands of its own. A building that survived a raid stays hurt: select workers and right-click it to repair.
Earned, not trained
- Mages. The arcane building trains nothing. About one unit in ten is born Gifted. Find a scroll in an Elder Ruin (it is guarded), carry it to the arcane building, and awaken the Gifted unit there. A mage's death is permanent.
- Runestones. Four runes glow through the fog, each with a warden. Clear one and found a shrine (V) on it: you gain its passive, your mages can attune to learn its spell, and a second mage slot opens.
- Horses. The stable trains nothing. Find a wild herd, send one unit to tame an animal (alone — company makes the herd bolt), walk it home to the stable, and a soldier mounts up.
- Iron gear. The forge researches iron arms, mail and heads for every unit you own, and steel once you carry a dragon's relic into it.
- Items. Scrolls and relics lie where a site falls or a carrier dies. Anyone can take them — your rival too.
Playing with a friend
A shared world lives on a server and is saved there. It stands whether anybody is in it, so you can play together in the evening and alone on a Tuesday, from the app or the browser.
- In the main menu, under playing together, type a name, pick a clan and create a world. Choose allies (one team, you can build on each other's land) or rivals (each for their own), and the difficulty.
- The world gets a code. Read it out to your friend.
- Your friend enters the code, picks their own clan and joins. Their hold stands a long march from yours — far enough that the ground between is nobody's.
- After that the code is the world: either of you enters whenever you like and finds it exactly where it was left.
While you are away your raid clock stops, so no wave lands on an empty hold, and you get three minutes of grace when you come back. With holds sleep safely on (the default for rivals), nothing of yours can be damaged while you are gone. Leave through the menu's Leave world so it saves first.
Tips
- Hover anything. A greyed-out button tells you in one sentence why you cannot use it yet.
- Gold in the bank does not fight: spend it on soldiers, towers, a hall upgrade, or a feast for renown.
- Stone walls shrug off swords. To take a walled town, bring rams.
- Single-player saves live on your computer (in the app) or in your browser, with checkpoints you can roll back to from the menu.
- Lost the thread? J opens the chronicle, Tab the goal map.