The world of Going Medieval is unforgiving. Emerging from the ashes of a catastrophic plague, players are tasked with rebuilding civilization with a handful of survivors in a harsh, dark-age landscape. Developed by Foxy Voxel, this colony-building strategy game draws inspiration from deep management sims like RimWorld, wrapping its complex systems in a distinct medieval aesthetic. For newcomers, the depth can be overwhelming, but mastering a core set of foundational principles is the key to transforming a vulnerable camp into a formidable stronghold.
Establishing Your Colony’s Foundation
The journey begins with critical choices that set the trajectory for your entire campaign. Your initial decisions regarding scenario, biome, and settlers will define your early challenges and opportunities, making this phase arguably the most important for long-term survival.
Selecting the Right Scenario and Difficulty
Going Medieval offers several starting scenarios, each tailored to different playstyles and experience levels. ‘A New Life’ is the recommended beginner path, providing three settlers in the forgiving spring season to learn the game’s rhythms. ‘Peaceful’ mode removes the threat of enemy raids, allowing players to focus purely on construction and settlement management. For a more brutal challenge, ‘Lone Wolf’ starts a single settler in winter with scant resources, while ‘Pioneer’ throws three settlers into autumn with the promise of frequent, unpredictable attacks.
Choosing a Strategic Biome
The map type you select acts as your permanent world, each with unique resource distributions and climatic challenges. The ‘Valley’ offers plentiful vegetation and fertile soil with mild winters, ideal for agricultural-focused settlements. The ‘Hillside’ provides uneven terrain advantageous for defense, with fair resources. The ‘Mountain’ biome is rich in limestone, gold, iron, and silver but suffers harsh winters and scarce soil. Finally, the ‘Marsh’ presents a watery landscape teeming with fish and plants but scarce in land animals and mineable minerals.
Assembling Your Core Settler Team
You begin with three followers, and their skills and traits are paramount. A balanced starting group should cover three essential early-game pillars: construction, food production, and defense. Aim for one settler with high Construction and Mining skill to build and excavate. Another should possess strong Farming and Cooking capabilities to manage food security. A third with competent Melee or Ranged skill will defend against early raids and hunt game.
Beyond skills, traits significantly impact efficiency and risk. Positive traits like Hard Worker, Industrious, or Iron Gut provide substantial boosts to productivity and resilience. Conversely, negative traits such as Glutton, which increases food consumption, or Pyromaniac, which poses a constant fire hazard, can cripple a fledgling colony. It is often worth rerolling or manually selecting settlers to secure a solid foundational team.
The Critical First Hours: Survival Priorities
The opening phase of Going Medieval follows a predictable but urgent sequence. Success hinges on completing a series of foundational goals rapidly to establish stability before external threats escalate. As your colony grows and its wealth increases, it attracts more attention and more formidable raids, making early efficiency a defensive measure.
Immediate Resource Gathering and Stockpiling
Your first action must be to create a designated stockpile zone and command your settlers to gather all loose resources scattered around the starting area. Prioritize wood, stone, and berries, but collect everything useful. Uncollected resources will decay, representing a permanent loss of valuable early-game materials.
Constructing Basic Shelter Before Nightfall
Settlers sleeping outdoors face risks from animal attacks and exposure, leading to severe mood penalties. A simple, rectangular wooden structure with walls, a roof, a door, and a few beds is sufficient for the first night. Avoid overengineering; functionality and speed are paramount.
Establishing a Sustainable Food Source
Food is the most pressing ongoing concern. Initially, you will rely on foraging for berries and hunting wild game with ranged settlers. Quickly build a campfire or clay oven to cook raw ingredients, as cooked meals provide superior nutrition and grant mood bonuses. Simultaneously, plan for a farm plot, though planting will depend on season and unlocked research.
Initiating Research from Day One
Construct a research bench early and assign your highest-skilled researcher. The initial research tree unlocks technologies critical for survival, including improved farming tools, advanced food production, stronger building materials, and essential defensive structures. A fundamental tip is to never leave the research queue empty; always have a project lined up for when your researcher has downtime.
Preparing for the Inevitable First Raid
On standard difficulties and above, raids are a certainty, often occurring within the first in-game season. Preparation is non-optional. Before a raid arrives, ensure every settler has a viable weapon, establish a defensible position such as a wall with a choke point, and stockpile enough food and medicine to endure a prolonged conflict.
Mastering Food and Farming for Colony Stability
Managing your settlement’s food supply is a complex, ongoing challenge that involves agriculture, hunting, cooking, storage, and spoilage prevention. A reliable food system is the backbone of a healthy, productive colony.
Utilizing Early Game Food Sources
Before farming is established, exploit all available nutrition. Berries and wild plants can be foraged from across the map. Settlers with the Ranged skill can hunt animals for meat once equipped with a bow and arrows. While raw food provides minimal nutrition, it is a vital stopgap.
Designing and Optimizing Your Farm
Once the necessary farming technology is researched, designate a growing zone on level ground with rich soil to maximize crop yield and quality. Select crops appropriate to your biome and the current season; most crops only grow during warmer months, so planting in early spring is ideal. Staple crops include Wheat for bread production and its long shelf life, Turnips for cooler conditions, and Herbs for medicine, though the latter is a lower early priority.
Elevating Nutrition Through Cooking
Raw food should be avoided whenever possible. Cooking transforms ingredients into meals that provide greater nutrition per unit and confer positive mood bonuses. As you research more advanced recipes, food quality and nutritional value improve significantly. Establish a dedicated kitchen area with a stove, workbench, and adjacent storage to optimize your cook’s efficiency.
Managing Storage and Preventing Spoilage
Food spoilage is a constant threat. Construct an underground or partially buried larder to create a cooler environment that drastically slows decay. During winter, cold outdoor temperatures can act as natural refrigeration, but stored food remains vulnerable to wildlife and raiders. Always prioritize consuming the most perishable items first to minimize waste.
Building Beyond Survival Towards Prosperity
Once the immediate threats of starvation, exposure, and initial raids are mitigated, the focus shifts from sheer survival to sustainable growth and prosperity. This phase involves expanding your infrastructure, deepening your research, and fortifying your settlement against increasingly sophisticated threats.
Expanding Construction with Advanced Materials
Initial wooden structures are temporary solutions. Researching and transitioning to more durable materials like brick and stone is crucial for permanent buildings and defensive walls. These materials offer greater resilience against fire, weathering, and enemy attacks.
Developing Specialized Settler Roles
As your population grows, specialization becomes key. Assign settlers to primary roles based on their highest skills and traits—dedicated miners, builders, farmers, cooks, researchers, and soldiers. This specialization dramatically increases overall colony efficiency and output.
Creating a Layered Defense System
Raids evolve in size and strength as your colony’s wealth and time progress. A simple wall is no longer sufficient. Develop a layered defense incorporating multiple choke points, towers for ranged settlers, traps, and fallback positions. Strategic terrain use, such as building on a hillside or mountain, can provide inherent defensive advantages.
Managing Settler Mood and Mental Well-being
Settler mood is a critical, often overlooked resource. Poor morale leads to decreased productivity, conflicts, and even desertion. Ensure settlers have comfortable bedrooms, access to varied and high-quality food, recreational areas, and beautiful environments. Addressing negative traits and providing adequate rest are essential for maintaining a stable, happy workforce.
The path from a vulnerable band of survivors to a thriving medieval stronghold is a marathon, not a sprint. Progress attracts conflict, and each new level of comfort introduces fresh complexities. The core principles remain constant: a strategic start, ruthless prioritization in the early hours, a relentless focus on food security, and methodical progression toward advanced construction and defense. By mastering these foundational systems, players can not only survive the dark ages of Going Medieval but architect a legacy that endures.
/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_08fbf48bc0524877943fe86e43087e7a/internal_photos/bs/2026/B/N/5EQ9QeQAa2XoA9mRtS0w/marvels-wolverine-state-of-play.jpg "Marvel’s Wolverine Settings: What Actually Works in Combat")
