In Dungeon Settlers, your settlement is your home base. It’s the key to success in many ways, because you need to craft and prepare your party for dungeons before sending them into one. If you want to craft, then you need a settlement that’s equipped with the proper items. But crafting isn’t the only factor that you need to know about settlements. It’s useful to understand the effects of items that might not seem useful at a glance.
Priority Constructions
In addition to clearing the area for resources and space, you want to build certain structures before others. For crafting, you need:
- A Basic Workstation
- A Research Table
- A Carpenter’s Table
- A Cooking Station
- Storage chests
- Bedrolls
- Decor for mood boosts
Some of these structures will say that they are only usable when built indoors. This means that you have to build a room with wood or straw walls and a door, then place the structure inside that room in order to use it. While the room has to be enclosed, you can use natural walls in place of building walls, which can help you save materials early on.
Moving Structures in Your Settlement
Unfortunately, you can’t just pick up a structure and relocate it after it’s already built. Instead, you need to use “Deconstruct Mode” and break the structure. This returns the items that were used to craft the structure, meaning you’re able to rebuild it in the new location you want it moved to. The extra step can be annoying, but you at least aren’t losing materials when you break it apart.
Check Room Qualities
When you have your cursor hovering over a tile within a room, you find information about that room in the bottom-right corner of your screen. It tells you the quality of the room, its purpose, and if it’s giving you any benefits, such as a boost to your research capability.
To improve your rooms, you want to make them larger and add decorations to them. When you’re just starting out, Flower Pots are an easy and effective decoration to craft.
I started out with my rooms way too small, but I think that was a good decision at the time for my limited materials. Then, I just destroyed a wall later and expanded the room. So, you don’t have to be overly concerned about how big your rooms are right away. It’s something that’s easy to fix later. You just need to be able to put workstations that have to be indoors in those rooms to get started.
Recruiting Settlers
While the combat capabilities of your settlers are important for clearing dungeons, you also want to take note of the qualities they have that impact their usefulness in the settlement. Some characters are talented cooks or have other skills that you can use to decide task priority. You can only recruit a total of four characters at the beginning, but that limit increases as you make progress exploring dungeons.
Research and Expansion
Going through dungeons is important for making progress and gathering resources, but you need a solid settlement built before you can make meaningful progress. Use the Research Table to unlock new recipes as often as you can. This is how you learn to make better gear for your party so they have an easier time surviving. At the same time, make sure you’re keeping the mood up in your settlement and have items like bedrolls that help your characters recover when they return from a dungeon.
Dungeon Settlers is designed in a way that dungeons and your settlement are equally important. You can’t ignore one in favor of the other, but when you’re just starting out, building your settlement should be your first task. Then, you’ll have an easier time exploring.
