Tips and Tricks

General

• Depending on how many families you begin with (based on difficulty level) it is a very good idea to build a boarding house instead of individual homes before your first winter. In addition, having a good source of food, as well as a forester, a woodcutter, and a blacksmith will help to ensure your survival.
• Generally speaking, it is best to keep your houses close to where your citizens are working in order to keep their walking distances to a minimum.
• Currently, gatherers are the best means of producing food, generating up to 3,000 food per season. They also help to keep people happy and healthy by producing 4 types of food.
• Until you can afford cows or sheep(wool), hunters will be your only source of leather, which is needed for making most clothing.
• Both gatherers and herbalists need a forest to work in, and deer are often found in a forest. As there seems to be no "ancient forest" restriction on herbalists, a forester will make a great combo with a gatherer, herbalist, and hunter.
• Plants and herbs grow only under mature trees, and there is no such thing as an "ancient forest". This results in a situation where it is actually more efficient to place herbalists and gatherers near forester's lodges than in young forests, which are less dense. Another method is to build a lodge and disable cutting, then to build up to maximum tree density. Once that's done, replace the forester with the other buildings, conserving space.
• Firewood is remarkably valuable for trading, considering the amount that is needed for the town and what is produced. Selling tools or leather clothing may be tempting, but firewood is far more plentiful.
• Once you've increased your population, keep a few laborers available in your town. They will replace specialized workers that are lost. Any specialized workers who aren't currently working will do the same tasks as laborers.
• Farming is rather inefficient when compared to gathering. One farm plot needs around 4 workers and produces up to 1k food per season. Therefore, gatherers are the recommended source of food early on.
• Building a forester lodge within range of an orchard will cause the foresters to cut the orchard's trees. [Edit: Patch 1.02 says foresters will no longer cut down orchards)
• When possible, don't build any structures unless you have all the materials needed for its construction already in stock. When materials are trickling in, workers might make lots of wasteful trips to the building site, carrying only 1 or 2 units of materials. If you have everything you need in the stockpile, workers will bring as much as they can carry to the job site, thus ensuring the building is finished in as few trips as possible.
• If you avoid exporting your iron tools, you can put off building an iron mine for a very long time and just live off surface iron to keep your tool supply healthy. However, surface stone is unlikely to last long enough to cover your stone needs, so your first mining type building should be a quarry.
• A single woodcutter seems to be able to go through a single fully-staffed forester's log production by himself. If you need a supply of logs for building, it is best to either pause the woodcutter, clear additional forests with laborers, or build a second forester lodge.
• For every additional square's distance from the stockpile, a steel-using wood cutter produces 3 fewer firewood per season
• Another Tip is to place a forester lodge set it to only plant and not cut, then within a couple years task the town with cutting down the newly made forest. you will find that by the time that the trees are gone it is almost time to start cutting again. Tasking the town with clearing the trees is far faster than the lodge itself.

Advanced

• When you can comfortably achieve a town with the resources it needs, high health, and high happiness, you may find that without continually expanding, your population tends to suddenly die out. This can be avoided by altering your thinking with regard to your population.
  • The number of working adults does not matter as much as your sustained number of children, laborers, and the rate of death.
  • It is tempting to put new laborers to work immediately even when you have everything you need right now, but maintaining a sustained number of laborers means that sudden deaths won't send you scrambling to manually fill jobs. You want to maintain enough laborers to handle mass deaths.
  • It is also tempting to accept nomads or build chunks of new homes when the number of children is dipping. This is not necessarily the best course of action.
  • You can't prevent population fluctuations, but you can achieve a basic sustainable curve. The best way to do this is to grow your population slowly. Avoid accepting nomads for the sake of general population growth; though if you just suffered a mass death with no laborers, you may have no choice. Rather, choose arbitrary minimums of children and laborers to maintain. For each year that your number of children is below the minimum, build a single new home (a new home generally means more children, even if this takes some time). If children are born gradually, adults will then die gradually, rather than hitting you with mass deaths that cripple your town. Don't put adult laborers to work immediately, but maintain a buffer minimum, and put laborers over that number to work only if absolutely necessary.
  • For example, if grown slowly, a population that fluctuates around 350 adults can be sustained with a child minimum of 70 and a laborer minimum of 50.
• Consolidate your workers by relying more on trade. With a high population, it can take many workers and much land area to produce the resources they need. Rather than expanding your own production, start using trading posts. They can get most anything you need (aside from services like teaching, cleric, and physician), and consume very few workers and little land area. A good resource to use for trade is hide coats.
  • Using large herds of cows (and some hunters) as part of your food supply also means a surplus of leather.
  • Build several tailors to craft hide coats from these, which are valuable trade items (warm coats are even more valuable, but require wool, which is produced much more slowly).
  • Build 3-5 trading posts, which means steady visits from merchants. Keep the trading posts stocked with your hide coats.
  • Set up automatic recurring purchases for things like stone, iron and coal, so you don't need to worry about maintaining mines. Do the same for anything else you might need. Fruits and vegetables are a good idea, as they are cheap, and getting them from merchants means a constant variety, which is good for your population's health and happiness.
• If you find that people are dying of starvation even when the food supply is high, you may have houses that are out of range of markets -- or, if all houses are within range of a market, you may not have enough vendors assigned to them. While small populations can get away with a single vendor at each market, large populations require many vendors to keep markets stocked; high food supply is useless when the markets are not stocked quickly. Whenever the hunger indicator appears, increase the number of assigned vendors.