AltTab

Songs of Syx: what to build first in a new city

Songs of Syx Guide 6 min read

The single fact that ruins most first cities: all farms produce goods once per year, during the harvesting season. You can lay out perfect fields on day one and still starve, because nothing comes out of them until the harvest. So the first thing you build is not a farm. It is a bridge to the harvest — forage and hunting — and everything below is ordered around that.

This is written against V71 “Reign of Terror”, live on Steam since 16 June 2026. The build order follows the official beginner walkthrough’s structure; the explanations are the mechanics behind it.

Gate 0 — before you place a single building

Two placement decisions bind everything after them, so make them deliberately:

  • Throne on infertile soil, near the river. The walkthrough is explicit about this. Riverside rich soil is your scarcest tile type and a throne standing on it is farmland you will never get back.
  • Leave five tiles between future industry and future housing. Noise drops in intensity every 5 tiles and stops entirely at 15. Retrofitting that gap later means demolishing housing.

Gate 1 — survive to the first harvest

Release condition: you have a food income that does not depend on a harvest date.

  1. Forage and hunt immediately. Use the forage tool to harvest fruit and vegetables, or the hunting tool for meat, while farms are under construction. This is not a fallback, it is step one.
  2. Hearth, then Well. Extreme temperatures can kill large numbers of citizens if the city is unprepared. Hearths let citizens warm up, Wells let them cool off, and both are range-limited — a citizen working far from one may simply not survive a spike. Clothes are the only location-independent defence, and you cannot make Clothes yet.
  3. Housing for about ten, in wood. Cheap and fast. You are not optimising here, you are sheltering the people who will build the farms.

If you are already past this point and losing people anyway, the symptom-to-cause sweep in the colony audit checklist is the faster route than restarting.

Gate 2 — plant, then wait a year

Release condition: farms are built and you still have stock left over.

  1. Vegetable Farm and Fruit Farm on rich soil beside the river. Check the build cost before you confirm: the farms take vegetables and fruit to construct, so make sure they cost less than you have in stock. Starving your city to build the thing that feeds it is the classic first-run mistake.
  2. Do not touch the employment sliders on farms. Farms automatically allocate the proper number of workers after construction, and autoemploy is not an option on them. Manual adjustment is not recommended.
  3. If you planted an orchard, forget about it for now. Orchards require four years of tending before they produce fruit at full efficiency. They are a decision about year five, not year one.
  4. Watch moisture, not just soil. Farms hit optimal efficiency at 90% moisture or higher, which often means pumps and canals. A Water Pump must be adjacent to freshwater; each canal tile spreads up to 15 tiles at maximum moisture value.

Whether your fields are actually big enough is arithmetic, not judgement — the food balance calculator takes your population and field numbers and tells you where the break-even sits. Days of food is a ratio, so it can fall while your barns fill.

Gate 3 — stop losing what you produce

Release condition: goods are stored, corpses are handled, and the place is clean.

  1. Two 7x7 warehouses, one for vegetables and one for fruit. Separate them by good; a single mixed store is how you discover a shortage after it has already bitten.
  2. A Janitor building with enough coverage.
  3. A Mass Grave, 7x7. Corpses are a health and fulfilment drain, and this is the cheapest option that stops the bleed.
  4. Wood and Stone warehouses once construction volume picks up.

Gate 4 — the first services, at about 25 population

Release condition: population around 25 and food no longer the binding problem.

  1. Speaker, Shrine to Crator, and a Food Stall set to auto-employ. Food Stalls give extra fulfilment when a species eats its preferred foods — and stalls give more fulfilment than Restaurants do, so the cheap building is also the better one here.
  2. Dirt roads connecting every building and farm. Roads give a speed boost, fulfilment, and protection from Werax exposure. Three effects for one cheap tile covering.
  3. If you are playing Cretonians, switch housing from square to round. Cretonians read a stat called roundness. This is species-specific, not general advice.

Fulfilment is where new players start guessing. It does not average — your happiness follows the worst-covered category, which is why five good needs cannot rescue one empty one. The need-floor calculator finds which one is actually capping you.

Gate 5 — scale, and start trading

Release condition: services in place, harvest reliable.

  1. Grow the farms toward roughly 90 fruit and 90 vegetables each, aiming at something like 20 Vegetable Farm workers and 10 Fruit Farm workers.
  2. Open trade with neighbouring factions for what your tile does not give you. Mines need Furniture to build and to maintain, so if your site is short on forest, wood is your first import, not metal.
  3. Build small mines before big ones. Undermanned large structures waste resources on maintenance.

Reaching 50 population grants the Emir title and closes the opening chapter of the game.

What is not verified here

The walkthrough’s numbers above are its own recommendations for one specific start — Cretonians, Despot difficulty, temperate river site — not universal constants. Worker counts, warehouse sizes and the 25- and 50-population marks are guidance from that chapter, and a different species or climate will move them. The wiki does not publish a general formula for farm size per citizen, harvest yield per tile, or the exact fulfilment value of a Food Stall, and none is invented here.

Sources

Related posts