Banished rewards those who play the long game. Better to expand slowly and put the infrastructure in place to support population growth than to have your citizens starving or freezing to death. The children are the future in Banished, unlike other city simulation games where people just appear from the digital beyond, your population (mostly) only grows when it reproduces. The exception to this rule is the arrival of nomads, who will occasionally show up and attempt to join your city. You’ll welcome them with open arms at first, especially as your population begins to age and it seems that there are nowhere enough young people coming through to join the workforce.

This, of course, also means that your population growth is likely to be exponential.Two couples with three children can swell to twenty or more within three generations, and hundreds a few generations after that.

Live off the land, or become sustainable.

So, though initial stages of the game may seem slow due to the fact that there aren’t enough people to farm the land, or man the fishing station (fishing is an excellent way of keeping your citizens fed, as is hunting and gathering), don’t concentrate on creating more Citizens via more houses. Concentrate on having sustainable farms, forests, mines and quarries whose capacities grow with your population.

Long walks = Starving Citizens

Also ensure that you do not build all houses in one location, with food sources a long trek away. At the beginning of the game, it is a good idea to place crop fields near houses. A market will help when you start to build up the center of cities and it no longer becomes possible to have fields near every home.

Winter is coming!

Winter is always coming in Banished. From the outset, you must be warding against the coming of the cold by making sure there is plenty of food stocked in citizen’s houses (using the techniques above) and making sure that there is plenty of firewood available to heat their homes. Here’s a guide to getting lots of firewood in Banished.

Firewood is an important resource in Banished. To get firewood, just clearing trees isn’t enough. You need to make sure that your city has a Wood Cutter. The Wood Cutter is a building which can be placed from the resource production tab (F8 and then 1 for the Wood Cutter). Once the woodcutter has been built, you’ll need to assign a citizen to it through the jobs panel. (F2 for jobs and then 4 for the Professions panel.)

The wood cutter (citizen) will turn wooden logs into firewood which will be burned by other citizens to keep their houses warm. Building stone houses instead of wooden houses will reduce your citizens’ need for firewood.

How To Get More Firewood (Citizens Are Freezing!)

If you’re running low on firewood, you can try two things. 1) Increasing production at your wood cutter. It’s possible that your wood cutter is stopping before you have enough to last the winter. Or 2) ensuring that you have more logs to turn into fire wood. Once you’re past the initial tree clearing stage of the game, you’ll need to set up Forester Lodges (F8 and then 2 for the Forester Lodge). Forester lodges ensure a steady supply of wood logs which can be turned into firewood by the wood cutter.