All he ever brings is livestock. I'm stuck with 2 different kinds of grains and 2 different kinds of orchards. How do you expand your choices?

Hi everyone,

I'm playing Vanilla Banished on Hard difficulty (vanilla, no mods) and I'm looking for advice on early-game priorities.

My main issue is that I start with no seeds or animals, so farming isn't available at the beginning. Resources are tight, labor is scarce, and every worker assignment feels like a major decision.

Any advice?

What does your typical build order look like, and what are the biggest mistakes that lead to early collapse on Hard?

Banished never had multiplayer, so my buddy Claude and I made a mod for it. You can play two ways:

• Separate towns: everybody builds their own town on the same map. You can trade goods (once or every season/year), let each other use your storage barns, and lend workplaces. Each player can pick where their town starts.
• Share one town: everybody runs the same town together.

You can also see each other: the other players’ mouse cursors show on the map, and Alt + click pings a spot for everybody (with an arrow at the screen edge if it’s off screen).

How it works: every player’s game runs the whole simulation in sync, and only your actions travel over the network. If the games ever drift apart, the host’s game is reloaded on everyone’s PC automatically. People can join a game that’s already running, and game speed and pause are shared.

Connecting: Steam invites, a relay server (one person in your group runs the included BanishedRelay.exe and the others enter a room code), or a direct IP connection.

Requirements: Banished 1.0.7, Steam or GOG version (Steam and GOG players can play together), Windows 10/11. Everybody needs the same version of the mod.

About the install: Banished’s mod kit can’t add new code, so the multiplayer part is a DLL (dinput8.dll) that the game loads at start-up. Antivirus programs sometimes flag DLLs like that, so the full source code is on GitHub (MIT license). There’s also a normal mod file for the windows and buttons. Install.bat sets up both, and Uninstall.bat removes them.

Download / source: https://github.com/BarryBareth/banished-multiplayer

Also on the Steam Workshop (the mod file only, you still need the DLL from GitHub), Nexus(whenever they lift the quarantine) and banishedinfo.

I’ve played it a lot with a couple of friends, but more players will find things we didn’t. There’s a bug-report button in the game, or open an issue on GitHub. Feedback welcome!

Word of warning: both of these releases are from yesterday and today, so i think its all experimental, proceed with caution!

Rust version: https://github.com/tanepiper/unbanished/tree/main

"Un-Banished is a new engine for this game. All of its code is new. It contains no code, art, sound or text from the original game. It reads the data files from your copy of Banished, and it rebuilds the game's rules, menus, graphics and sound around them.

The goal is to match the original exactly. The same seed gives the same map. The citizens, the timings and the save files are the same.

• 🖥️ Desktop: Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux.
• 🌐 Browser: through WebAssembly. The page reads your game files on your computer. It does not upload them.
• 💾 Saves: saves from the original game load without changes. Un-Banished uses the same save format and the same save folder.
• 🧩 Mods: mods made with the BanishedKit (.pkm files) work through the Mods menu, as in the original.
• 🎓 Tutorials, scenarios and achievements work as in the original."

Thanks to u/tanepiper , amazing!

C++ version: https://github.com/fran-cap/OpenBA

"OpenBA aims to rebuild Banished as a open source, readable, C++ codebase.
This project is designed along the lines of OpenRCT2, divilutionX etc where the aim is
to have baseline parity with the game's 1.0.7 release, but allowing for under the hood changes that still match retial. The project is designed to drop into the game's directory and run, and uses no game assets or code. Optional extensions are supported (see below).

Project goals: readable C++ with classes, decent comments, and no "function is byte identical" slop. The engine also supports basic multithreading, higher performance, and various rendering fixes. OpenBA delivers a sharp experience even on 4k displays, and the ability to hit 140fps+ at 50x speed with over 2k citizens. (Tested on a 5080/9800x3d)"

Thanks to https://github.com/fran-cap

Everyone who plays Banished knows the dance: roll a seed, check the start, reroll, repeat. I wanted a way to skip that, so I built a Seed Finder.

Banished Seed Finder

It's a searchable collection of scanned map seeds, about 4.5 million so far. You pick a terrain and map size, then sort or filter by what the map is actually like around where your settlers start:

• most open start area
• most buildable land connected to the start
• water closest to or farthest from the start
• hilliest, flattest, or tallest peak

Every seed is drawn in your browser using the same terrain generator as the game, so what you see is the real map for that seed. The tags are measured from the map, not opinions, and hovering over one shows its exact rule.

There's also a Seed Previewer if you just have a seed and want to see it:

Banished Seed Previewer.

The generator is a port of the game's own code and was checked against the real game cell by cell. (Big maps take 10 to 30 seconds to draw.)

It's still in beta, and coverage varies. Some terrain and size combinations have far more seeds scanned than others. It currently scans the start location the game picks for the common 13-tile starting area.

The scanning is done by volunteers lending spare computer time. If you'd like to help fill in the gaps, there's a small Windows scanner that runs short, low-priority jobs in the background: Seed Scanning Volunteers

This is part of Project BAMBOOZLE, a hobby project of Banished tools. It isn't affiliated with Shining Rock Software.

Feedback is welcome. If a map looks wrong, or you want a different filter, tell me.

Every time I play a game, once I clear entire sections of land of all resources, if I want an area with a wooded area (say for gathering and herbs ect), Il leave some oak trees behind, ensure all of the other types of trees are cut down, and leave it to grow an entire forest using one tree type. After about 30 years it fills in quite nicely. After another 30 or so it will spread a reasonable distance and keep doing that.

Obviously can't control this with foresters lodges.

The pine and birch trees are ugly to me, I like my pretty, pure, oak forests.

Hey everyone, I’m about 10 hours into Banished and loving it so far. Are there any fun mods you guys would recommend to add more content or spice things up?

Also, I’m running into a super weird bug. Whenever a house catches fire, my villagers just stand there completely frozen. The game keeps running normally and time passes, but they just stay stuck in place until they eventually die. It’s like they’ve completely given up on life lmao.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Is it a known vanilla bug?. Any fixes would be appreciated. Thanks!

I've been using a mod called RK Editor's Choice 1.3.1 - Full. However, laborers are just permanently idling. Their health and happiness is max, there's resources set up for them to gather, and space in stockpiles to store them. I've tried various resources, cycling who's laborer, clearing resource requests and adding back but nothing seems to work. Does anyone happen to know of a solution to this?

Genuinely curious if anyone else would be interested in a mod and a compiler that would do these. been working on them and they're almost done plus I need testers

Edit 1: 70% parity screenshot of Banished running on an M4 Macbook

We can try pointing all our claude, chatgpt, gemini, kimi, muse and etc subscriptions together into a single project, and pray for the best

I'm building a Banished Seed Finder: a searchable webpage where you could look for maps by what's around the start, like rivers, lakes, flat land or mountains, instead of loading one seed at a time in game and hoping.

The catch is that someone has to pre-generate those maps and measure them. Every Banished map comes from a seed number (up to 999,999,999). With all of MegaMod's terrains and sizes, that's roughly 200 billion distinct maps. We've scanned a few hundred thousand so far, so there's a lot left, and more computers would help a lot.

What you'd run: a small Windows program (about 100 KB, no installer). It asks my server for a job sized to take about 10 minutes on your PC, scans those seeds, sends the results back, and asks for the next job. You can pause, stop after the current job, or close it any time.

What it sends: a random ID made on first run, your PC's measured speed, the thread count you picked, and the scan results (numbers about each map seed). If you type a name for the credits, that too. It never downloads or runs code, and it doesn't touch your files or your game.

Low impact: the scanning threads run at below-normal priority, so your computer stays usable. You choose how many threads to use (half of yours is gentle).

Credits: there's an optional name field, a points system and a top-volunteers list on the page. Points follow computing time, so bigger maps earn more per seed.

Heads up: it's a small free hobby tool and it isn't code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen or an antivirus may say "unrecognized app". The page lists the file's SHA-256 so you can check you have the genuine file. It only talks to one address, listed on the page.

Download and details: https://worldofbanished.com/bamboozle/volunteer/

You do not need to have the game running (or even installed) in order to run this program.

Happy to answer questions. If you try it, let me know how it runs on your PC.

Veteran here, been playing for 10ish years.

Usually if I ever struggle it's always early game, once everyone's spread out nothing can cause any substantial harm.

This game was quite unique in that due to the terrain most of the map was blocked off from the starting point by large hills and/or lakes so I was forced to expand far in one direction before I could start evenly spreading out.

I had around 120/20/20, year 84.

Anyway i foolishly focused most of my blacksmiths in one area. Fire broke out because I forgot to put a well down and now my tools are going down, no big deal Il just rebuild them. However my food supply was also getting a little low, again no big deal Il just cull half of my livestock for now and deal with it later. Big mistake.

By the time my blacksmiths were rebuilt, tools and food were low. Because I now had few sources of textiles due to less livestock I had to rebuild my food supply, clothes and tools. Had 30 untooled workers.

By the end of it i had around 30/0/10

Now my entire population is scattered, not optimized for settlements this large. I've stabilized resources and have a healthy store of food, clothes and tools. My livestock are all maxed out again. My pop is now slowly regrowing.

Most fun I've had in a long time on this game.

as the title is saying, I have just hit 720 citizens, year 55.

- Homes: 199, 97% clothed, 94% educated, 55.000 stored food, 3500 stored firewood, 4500 stored stone, 700 stored clothes, 500 stored tools, 12.000 wood, plenty of storage, 5 markets in different areas of the map, a lot of cattle and sheep (8 max sized sheep / 8 max sized cattle / 8 max sized chicken) a lot of crops and orchards (max size all of them) and a lot of foresters, trees everywhere in between plots, houses, everywhere. Happiness was at 5 stars, health 5 hearts.

all of a sudden my food drops to 900, literally took 2 minutes, and had around 500 people dying of starvation.
FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

also are colonial charter, the north, fancy houses more warm than stone houses.

I wonder if in baseline banished, would it be effective to set up a trading post to auto buy food and logs, and fuel it with several wood cutters.

Basically, right now my students are turning into laborers as they exit school. Obviously I want them to do a certain job as they are X times better at it than uneducated workers. I rather my uneducated population stay laborers and educated ones work at job sites.

My question is, does the game handle this on its own? Or are there some hidden steps I have to take?

I know the basic key to half decent hut is barn must be right next to hut. but how many fishers should I have if it next to a river or pond. how bad is it to take up part of the space with trading market.

what it food per water tile?

also I caught my fishers grabbing just three fish and leaving to put it in storage. Was that just a death spiral from a starving village, or something fisher normally do, they seem to not often grab the max amount of fish they can carry.