Dawn of Man Dawn of Man - Starting Guide (Tips and Tricks)

What to do after the tutorial?

Other Dawn Of Man Guides:

Beginner's Tips, Tricks and Strategies.
Advanced Tips and Tricks.

First

To be on the same level, please play through the tutorial where you learn the basics. This guide is just for the first steps after it plus some tips.

The Beginning

After the game finished generating the map, pause immediately (space) and look around your starting area. It's important to find flint and sticks, and get an overview about available building space.

Resources are best discovered with the primal vision. Flint has a dark gray color, edible plants glowing green and sticks are white (actually a very bright mint green). Place work areas as near at the sarting point as possible. At bodies of water the work area should include two banks.

If there aren't any, build wood piles and rock piles. Now the children should start gathering sticks and flint.

If necessary, place tents, crafter, hearth and skin dryer. Unfortunately children can't deliver materials to buliding grounds.

Earning Knowledge Points

When done all of the above (it isn't necessary to start building), it's time to gather points. Hunting diffrent animals is the fastestt way. Hold the key "h", hold the mouse button, drag the selection over your settlers. This should select everyone with a hunting weapon.

Switch to primal vision, search for game nearby. Rightclick on the desired animal. Now every selected hunter should start hunting. This way the animal dies faster and you hunters doesn`t ahve to run across the map to finally kill it.

Let your hunting party go after different animals (boar, deer, ibex and mouflon are a good choice) to get the "first hunt" knowledge points.

Now you should have enough points to unlock your first tech. This should be, in any new game, the food dryer. With this built in your settlement, raw food will be delivered to it instead of your people walking to the butcher place one at a time.

Expand Your Settlement

Build at least one food dryer and let your people start expand the settlement. High priorize the crafter (building and crafting) to craft some bifaces, spears and skins outfits for migrants and settlers.

Leather outfits aren't that crucial at the beginning, you need tannin for tanning. And this is only gatherable in the spring anyway, but doable if you are fast enough gathering knowledge points to unlock the tech.

Manual Orders

You can order any human settler to do any task they ought to be able to do (children will only be able to do hauling and non-toolrequiring gathering). If your adult settlers need a tool for a task, they go and get one. Normally.

By right-clicking on the ground they move there (double clicking makes them run).

With the same method you can make them pick up items (children won't haul logs or stone).

A successful assignment will be highlight the task icon or building outline in green. Task, that can't be assigned - or the right tools aren't carried with them - will highlight in red. See further behaviour above.

Task Priority Over Welfare?

I'm noticing villagers will work themselves literally to death despite having plenty of whatever they need. I had a villager starve to death with 2 dozen fish sitting in storage and I have villagers who need sleep working at the crafting hut. I'm all for micro but I don't want to have to micro common sense. Is there some way to get villagers to prioritize eating their meals over working because that seems like it should be default.

If you noticed floating red icons above their heads, you can manually order them to run back to the settlement. Select them and double rightclick on the ground (for best results near the desired building like hearth or tent). This should clear their work load and they should look around stuff to satisfy their needs. If they are too far away, you have to monitor them, because they have only that much stamina to run.

Yes, it's more of an early game tip. Once the settlement is big enough, this shouldn't be much of a problem anymore. And you can place wells, hearths, food dryers and totems further away from the settlements, so your people can satisfy their needs there.

You should find out why your people ignoring their needs:

Is/was the work load too high?
Were there too far away for longer periods of time?
Do they have the right equipment (clothing)?
Did the AI-director acted in a weird way?

The fastest way last point can be fixed is activating the alert. Every settler will stop their current work and rushes as fast as possible to the settlement. With a bit of testing you should find out how long you have to raise the alarm until the AI-director assigns the work load in a reasonable fashion.

Leather Not Getting Tanned?

You need two ingredients to tan leather: Raw skins and tannin.

You get tannin trough gathering it from certain trees. After you unlock the tanning tech, a new work area got unlocked, too. Oak trees and fir trees can be harvested for this, but only in spring. Children can harvested is, at least.

Manual hunting party and transporting the prey. I explained how to build a hunting party earlier on. Now some words about bringing home the prey:

I night have noticed that after the butcher task will immediately be set. Now, if you rightclick on the dead animal, you can order your selected hunters to start butcher it right away - if they have butchering tools like biface or any other type of knife in their inventory. The butcher icon will turn green, if even one has one.

What type of tool your manual selected hunters have equipped is random. Because how the game works, you can't assign them manually what type of tool they have.

But: If you order them to pick up the desired tool they will have them in their inventory (and took up a slot), but they can use them from there. This is admittedly extreme mircomanaging, but reasonable for early game play. Or desperated times.

And: After you assigned your hunters a target, everyone without a hunting weapon (if you haven't hold the key "H" during selection, for example) will fetch one. This means of course, some parts of your hunting party will have to run back and forth to catch up.

Basically the same applies for the butchering part. If you assigned your hunting party to butcher, the ones without knifes will go fetch one - if the AI-director is working correctly.

And yes, all that means that there can be more than one butchering an animal. But having to manually pick up tools means that there will be less space for transporting the prey back to the settlement.

Setting work areas for hunting and increasing the maximum amount of workers resolves in multiple hunted animals, with one hunter after them each (haven't seen any other behaviour myself. Please correct me if I'm wrong).

Butchering killed game will be a lot easier after unlocking the sledge. Then the AI-director will assign such work (and hauling in general) a lot better (for now).

Change / Upgrade Tools

How can I change or upgrade the tools already equipped? I have plenty of flint spears in my stocks but my humans preffer the damn harpoons...

Harpoons are solely used for fishing. They should equip spears if they go on hunts. Best you craft slings or bows when possible. They are better anyways.

And it takes time before they switch to the new tools. I sell the old ones as quickly as possible. It's one way to stop the use of them.

Each time that they're command to perform a task they get the best tool available for it so you just take care that there is new tools on the villange and as the characters rotate the tasks/tools they will use the good ones if they're available.

Even if a character is doing the same task always (so use the same tool), the tools decay with use so when the old tool is broken he will replace it with the best equivalent tool available.

A good practice is to give the old tech tools to the traders in exchange of new ones or other items, by this way you force your characters to create new tools to replace the old ones until reach the limits stablished for each one (you also can recycle the old tools directly, but by this way you get nothing from it).

Time Progression

I saw one reviewer state that his best hunter was getting old and becoming a burden on the tribe - and he had less than two hours in game. So the question is, how quickly does time pass in the game - says you go until the Iron Age, but how much time will that normally take and can you speed through time to get there quicker.

Basically asking if there is enough content or researchable content to keep you from hitting the end age too quickly.

Also, once you hit the Iron Age, is that it or do you just keep playing along with no progression at that point?

Each year will be 5 years for your people's age. How fast it takes you to get to the Iron Age is dependent on your play style. The Ages are getting reached by unlocking them in the tech tree.

To speed trough it, you have to actively hunt down the knowledge requirements - figuratively and literally speaking. Press "8" to jump right to the progress view.

And if there is enough game content to keep to interested - thats up to you. In my opinion, it hits 95% of it. You won't play this game forever, but long enough.

Trading

After building a hearth (which will also define your settlement center - jump to it with "Return"), Traders will visit your settlements regularly.

There are three types of traders: Low, average, high. This will define the exchange rate, the amount and tier of items.

With time you will learn intricacies of trading. Buying low and selling high is standard approach of course. But here are some tips:

Observe the prices; some of them have invisible decimal digits, e.g. adding a second unit of straw will seemingly double the price of one. No such thing vice versa.

Buying raw materials rather than the end product is better, of course. Buying, for example, bones then selling them bone harpoons will make you "rich" fast. Same with slings and the early outfits (two out of one skin/leather). Shouldn't sell flint tools, because flint is finite (but tradeable)!

Prices fluctuate depending on your era progress. Bifaces won't be much of worth in the Iron Ages.

If the conditions of items are too low, traders won't buy it.

Only things that are stored in buildings will be tradeable. So, don't hesitate building them. TIP: It's a good way to sell them soon to be spoiled stuff in exchange of "fresh" one, with a price of course. Doesn't work for stuff which is too decayed.

Traders will progress alongside of you.

Customizable Panels

I can't give you a generalised tip, which of those you have to pick or any. But I will share my settings:

On the left:

Grouped ressources; because it looks better.
Food chart; beacuse you see a graph of your food level.
Animals.

On the right:

General.
Speed; even if I don't use it that much - I'm playing on normal speed.
Defense; quicker way to handle alerts.

Limiting Production

Under Manage --> Limits (or Press F4) you can set limits to all resources.

It goes from 0 to 1,2,3,4,5,10,15,20,25,30,40,50,100 then 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%, 150%.

The first row of numbers stand for the exact amount.

The second is the percentage of people in total. That means, If you have 100 settlers, they will accumulate 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150 of this particular item.

How To Master Fishing

How is your people fishing masters, Ive almost 20 harpoons and atleast 15 people on job. I dont even get more than 15 fish at a time, which gets consumed instantly in winter. It's mostly a number of 5-10 fish at inventory but never abundance like bread and meat. :O

For fishing: I try to place work areas in such a way that one will highlight at least two banks, prefeable three. One worker each area and then place them along the river. They mustn't overlap! Operating with one work area per 10 people and you will swim in fish.

The AI-Director

After I mentioned it a few times now, let's get to the AI-Director:

This is actually the processing code which handles every task the player (may) give. Every game has one. Progressing the day/night cycle correctly, making that zombie stalking you, slamming NPC cars into yours to prevent you from winning the race or assign crafting task to your settlers - those are just a few things AI-Directors are handling.

The AI-Director of Dawn of Man works normally very good. But with time and progress it will fail to work properly. This will happen in every game, no matter how well it's programmed. The AI-Director is limited by your platform specs (the hardware and software) and the game engine including program language etc.

What I want to say is: Don't be taken aback if I blame the AI-Director for not working properly. And it's not blaming the developers for every little thing going wrong with the game. You can only do so much.

If I recommend to:

Cancel task trough the workload viewer (Press "7").
Or raising the alarm to let every settler and animal drop what they are doing and running towards the settlement.
Or manually assign settlers to do something different, it is just a method to get the AI-Director out of a rut.

Source: https://gameplay.tips/guides/3893-dawn-of-man.html

Dawn of Man - Starting Guide (Tips and Tricks)