The site you pick on the world map is not a difficulty setting, it is a permissions list. Freshwater decides whether you can irrigate. Mountain tiles decide whether you have ore at all. Climate decides which crops are viable and whether your Health score starts with a tailwind or without one. Everything else in your city can be rebuilt later; the tile cannot.
This page is written against V71 “Reign of Terror”, the current build on Steam since 16 June 2026. Values in Songs of Syx move between versions, so treat the relationships below as the durable part and your own Tome of Knowledge as the authority on any specific number.
The site feature matrix
Read this before you click. Each row is something you either have on the tile or do not.
| Site feature | What it unlocks | What suffers without it | Can you work around it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshwater (river or lake) | Water Pumps, which must sit adjacent to freshwater and generate the pressure canals run on | Farms and orchards want 90% moisture for full efficiency; without irrigation you are hostage to natural moisture | Partly — site on naturally wet ground, but you lose the ability to raise moisture on demand |
| Forest cover | Woodcutter zones, and wood is the input to Furniture, Coal via Charcoaler, Paper, Bows, Spears and Shields | Almost every construction and maintenance chain, because mines themselves need Furniture to build and to maintain | Yes, by trade, but you are importing the most-used bulk good in the game forever |
| Mountain tiles in the capital region | Stone, Ore, Gem and Sithilon mines; mineral deposits are “more plentiful” on mountainous world tiles | Metal Smelter, Smithy, Jeweller and every tool or armour chain downstream | Yes, by trade or slave-worked deposits, but metal becomes a permanent import bill |
| Water tiles in the capital region | Clay, which the wiki notes is the exception to the mountain rule and is more common where water tiles are included | Pottery, and through Pottery the Brewery; Laboratories are also boosted with Clay | Yes, clay is cheap to buy, but the Brewery chain stalls whenever a shipment is late |
| Rich soil / Till / Alluvium | Farm output, and Alluvium is the good case for Woodcutters at 25 square area per productivity step | Infertile ground needs 400 square area per Woodcutter productivity step versus 100 on regular soil | Only by building far bigger zones for the same output |
| Cold climate | Health is boosted; bonuses to Mushrooms, Herbs, Fish, Hunters, Warbeasts and Onx | Cotton, Opiates, Aurochs, Entelodonts and Globdiens all take a penalty | Hearths keep every species alive, so cold is survivable for anyone |
| Warm climate | Health is boosted here too; bonuses to Cotton, Globdiens and Opiates | Herbs, Mushrooms, Aurochs, Entelodonts, Warbeasts and Onx take a penalty | Wells become mandatory, not optional, because of extreme heat spikes |
| Temperate climate | Widest species overlap — Cretonians, Humans and Tilapi all prefer it | Health is not boosted, and you get both dangerous heat and dangerous cold, just less often | Nothing removes the missing Health bonus; you pay for it in Lavatories and Roads instead |
Read the matrix in the right order
Two of those rows are hard constraints and the rest are bills.
Freshwater and forest are constraints. Without a pump site you cannot raise moisture, and moisture is the thing farms, pastures, orchards and Woodcutters all read. Without wood you cannot build or maintain the buildings that would let you buy wood efficiently. The official beginner walkthrough puts both in the same sentence for a reason: it tells a first-time player to place the capital in a temperate area with 100% moisture, forest, and a river.
Mountain and water tiles are bills. A capital with no mountains still works; it just means metal, tools and armour arrive by ship and your treasury has a standing monthly commitment. Whether that commitment is worth it is not a matter of opinion — it is a worker-day comparison, and the import-or-produce calculator does exactly that conversion.
Where to put the throne once you have the tile
The walkthrough’s placement advice is the part most people skip: put the throne near the river but on infertile soil. Riverside rich soil is the scarcest thing on your map and a throne sitting on it is permanently wasted farmland. The same logic applies to your first warehouses and your first housing block. Ugly ground is where buildings go.
Keep two more distances in mind at placement time, because both are cheap now and expensive later:
- Noise. A building’s noise spreads from its zone, drops in intensity every 5 tiles, and stops at 15 tiles. Walls cut it roughly in half and proper insulation blocks at least 66%. Five tiles of gap between industry and housing is the minimum the wiki suggests.
- Species distance. Two species with less than 100% mutual preference can brawl within 58 tiles, measured doorway to doorway. If you intend to mix, you are planning a city with 58-tile districts, not a compact one. Housing distance is also a happiness input, and the need-floor calculator shows how one unmet category caps the rest.
What a bad site does not do
It does not end the run. The capital is the only city that is directly simulated, and it has no lose condition: even after total citizen death and complete resource depletion, new immigrants appear and map resources regrow, respawn, or come from deposits that do not diminish. A bad site makes your city slower and more import-dependent. It does not delete it.
That matters for how you should treat your first two or three attempts. Restarting because the tile was wrong is reasonable. Restarting because the city is currently failing usually is not — the failure is almost always a balance running negative, and the colony audit checklist will find it faster than a new map will.
What is not verified here
The wiki does not publish numeric mineral richness values per world tile, the exact moisture percentage lost per tile of distance from a canal, or a formula converting climate to a Health score change. It states the direction of each effect and, where a figure exists, this page quotes it. Where none exists, this page says so rather than estimating one. Canal spread is the one hard distance published: each canal tile can spread up to 15 tiles at maximum moisture value.
Sources
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Climate — cold, temperate and warm bonus and penalty lists, Health boosted in cold and warm, hearth and well requirements
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Irrigation — pumps adjacent to freshwater, canal spread of up to 15 tiles, culverts and water pressure
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Farming — soil ranking, 90% moisture target, once-per-year harvest, four-year orchard ramp
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Mines — mine types, mountainous world tiles for minerals, water tiles for clay, Furniture upkeep
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Woodcutter — 25/100/400 square area per productivity step by soil type, stone and furniture build cost
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Noise — 5-tile falloff, 15-tile maximum, walls halving noise, 66% insulation figure
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Capital City — capital as the only directly simulated city, absence of a lose condition
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Beginner’s Guide - Emir — temperate, 100% moisture, forest and river placement advice, throne on infertile soil
- Steam news, V71 - Reign of Terror - Available Now — current version and release date used as the baseline for this page
