As soon as you start a new game hit space to stop time, explore the map, turn on the mini map to help with this.Try and see what direction you want your village to head. Then start placing your buildings, ALL OF THEM, or at least as much as you can plan into the future. Start laying dirt roads to the areas your villagers will be travelling the most, if you lay too much road you can find that your builders will prioritize the road before other buildings, you can use the increase priority(F2,6) tool to counter this, or have a few more builders than you need assigned and they will cover the roads while your others handle building. You can use this time to tweak placements for buildings and roads because footprints are instantly removed by the remove building(F9,1) and remove road(F9,6) tools. This comes in handy when placing those tricky mines and quarries, when trying to get them to fit in as little space as possible, or setting up your farming areas so that you know which way you will need to expand to get to them and can get as many as you need ploted before you need them.

Build a boarding house as your first housing solution and build it as close to your planned town hall as you can. Yes, build it before houses, heres why:

• Early on a boarding house is much easier to heat than multiple houses alowing you to stock up on fire wood.
  
• With houses, unless you have a market, people will hoard food causing the village as a whole to die of starvation rather quickly. This will bring your population down too low to survive. This isn't an issue with a boarding house; it centralizes your food distribution until you can get a market up and running.
  
• The boarding house will never loose its usefullness, as i go into in the tips section below about nomads.
  
• Babies will still be born in a boarding house just much slower. This lets you manage your population growth by adding houses slowly to keep a stable'ish number of children. I'll talk more about children below in the tips section.

Once done placing buildings, or as you place them, click on the foot print for a building and in the bottom right hand side of the buildings dialog box there is a pause button, click it for each structure. Now that you have that taken care of you can assign a few builders and start taking buildings off of pause slowly as you need them.

The final result will be a city that looks as good as it hopefully functions.

There are plenty of guides on how this setup works and the best ways to arrange it; this is just to help give you more visual aids in setting up functioning clumps with full market coverage.

As you set up your markets, gatherers, hunters, foresters, etc. click the footprint to bring up the dialog box the drag/move the box out of the way, a corner of the screen works for me, then either click on the next structure or RIGHT click the open ground to regain focus on the game. For each box you keep up this way the area that the building affects will remain up as well, allowing you an easy visual aid for placing your other buildings to maximize affective gathering and hunting areas, also for planning the placement of houses in your clump to still allow markets to hit the houses. I like to leave these rings up for most of my game I just hide them behind the town hall or job assignment screen, that way I don't build in my gathering spaces and can make sure to expand housing inside market areas.


I've been testing some different gathering setups to see if having foresters harvest trees would hurt gathering rates, and i was suprised by the results since most things that ive read say this is a bad idea.
All three groups were set up in the same configuration:

• 1 forester hut variable workers
  
• 1 gatherer with 4 workers
  
• 1 hunter with 3 workers,
  
• 3-4 stone houses all within a market circle
  
• a storage barn and small stock pile outside the radius closest to town
  
  
  
  • The top group was set with four foresters only planting trees.
    
  • The middle group had one foresters only planting trees.
    
  • The bottom group had four foresters both planting and cutting trees.
    
  • After 10 years I could see no difference in the amounts gathered across the three.
  
  
  I got the idea for these tests after I set up a forester clump on a piece of land I had previously clearcut, as soon as the foresters planted saplings i noticed mushrooms everywhere. It apears that mushrooms and barries pop up under any trees, from sapling on up. It does look like herbs, however, do require mature trees to spawn. So alowing for only one forester in your herbalist group and setting him to plant only might be the way to go, but as for your other clumps they can be wood producers as well as food. It's worth noting you only need one herbalist building and one worker in it, just add more workers if you need faster production of herbs.

Farms and Orchards have a max size of 15x15, and need 3-4 workers each to keep them up, so when planning your farming zone try and get a space that can hold as many as possible. I was made aware by a forum poster, muffinman, that crops do not need any rotation as shown here[www.shiningrocksoftware.com], the dev didn't find crop rotation to be fun so he took it out of the game in an earlier build.

http://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230146947
This is a screenshot of a field that has been producing steadily for 30+ years never having been rotated. Notice also, how close his storage and housing(in the bottom right) is to his work places, allowing for his farmers to get on with the job of farming. I assume he was playing with disasters off or just got lucky with crop diseases.

Orchards don't need rotation so setting them up is easy just leave space for roads so you farmers can get to work faster. Also make sure to not have your orchards inside the range of a forester or they will harvest your fruit trees.

Keep in mind if you dont have enough farmers or they have to much travel time between the fields and where they drop off the product, or between the fields and home, it can cause your fields to not yield at what they should becuse they can't spend the time needed to care for the crops. Be sure to also watch for diseased crops if you see a crop become diseased after harvest change crops. Disease only effects one type of crop at a time, so its a good idea to diversify your crop types so that no like crops are bordering each other. If you do get deseased crops just wait till winter then rotate what crop went where and you shoulden't have the problem come spring.

Muffinman also gave some good figures for crop size and workers needed
Maximum farm size is 15x15. The smallest is 4x4.
Number of workers needed depends on field size.

• 4x4 - 7x7 needs 1 worker
  
• 8x8 - 10x10 needs 2 workers
  
• 11x11 - 12x12 needs 3 workers
  
• 13x13 - 15x15 needs 4 workes.

You can assign more workers but that won't make them grow faster simply harvest faster.
You should make your farm size according to how much you need to feed +/- excess for stashing in the trade dock.

Livestock Pastures and Graveyards have a max size of 20x20, but pastures only require one worker each to keep up. I talked about graveyards above, so here I'll discuss livestock. There are three types of livestock, Cows, Sheep and Chickens. Cows give meat and leather, sheep give wool and meat, and chickens give meat and eggs. You will want to build between six and nine pastures, two or three for each animal type as space allows. When you start a herd, get enough to split between two pastures, so that if one pasture gets sick you can instantly slaughter them all to prevent it from spreading to other pastures. Once the other herd is large enough split it back into the other field to start growing you numbers. After a field has reached the number of animals that you set, the worker will slaughter the extras providing you with food and resources.

• Remember that the side of the building that has arrows on it is the front and will let you place a road through it, also it will overlap on other buildings front side, so that there is just enough room to put a road in between them.
  
  
• Plan markets to cover all of your houses, or better yet place the markets and hunter gatherer clumps first and plan your housing around that.
  
  
• Plan for at least two graveyards, one to start out with, a 7x7 is the smallest you can build this can later be demolished and the graves will disappear in time to allow for other buildings, and one at the max size of 20x20, this will hold 144 graves and I haven't been able to fill it yet at ~300 pop, but this could change if something does go wrong with a mass die off. If you want to be safe leave room for multiple max graveyards, but know that graves will disappear after about 20-25 years allowing more people to be buried in the same graveyard.
  
  
• Find the largest flat areas you can for future farming and livestock zones and plan for housing, storage and all the essentials in that area. If it’s not close enough to easily take advantage of your main town then your farming zone should basically be a secondary town planned just around farmers. It will need its own blacksmith for tools, woodcutter for firewood, ect.. You should always try to make your farm plots max size, just activate them only when you get enough workers for four farmers for a plot, this gets easier as your population grows.
  
  
• Bridges and tunnels are buildings as well and can be paused just like other buildings.
  
  
• Dirt roads are fine to start out with, they don't take any resources other than time to make, and later you can just lay your stone roads on top of them to upgrade, once you have some stockpiled stone that is.
  
  
• BUILD A BOARDING HOUSE! Build it early and next to and as close to your town hall as you can. When you do accept nomads they will immedeately go into this boarding house so you don't suddenly have a homelessness problem in your town. If you try to rush building houses to accommodate the new population you get into a baby boom scenario, where your food and supplies cant keep up with your growth.

• Concerning the AI, Farmers, Hunters, Gatherers, Labourers, ect. will always try to drop off thier goods at the nearest supply barn or stockpile, then your vendors from the market, or traders from your trading post, will come to get the stuff to the market. If you plan for barns and stockpiles near where your resource collectors work they will have a shorter walk to drop off resources and can get back to work faster, increasing productivity.
  
  
• Always try and keep a 2 or 3 people as labourers so they can automatically fill in a recently vacated job position due to sudden blunt force trauma to the head.
  
  
• "Herbs will only be dispensed if you have an herbalist. I noticed that my stock of herbs stayed constant in the event that my herbalist died and there was no laborer free to takeup that job...So, watchout! 300+ stock of herbs will do you no good for your sick people if you don't have an herbalist employed."-Muffinman
  
  
• "Beware of nomads bearing gifts", they can be a boon to your production by adding people to your worker pool, but those are also a sudden jump in mouths to feed. The number of nomads can be deceptive in itself. When you see that you have 9 nomads waiting to get into your village that does not mean 9 workers, that figure includes and can even be mostly children. Make sure your food suplies can take the hit.
  
  
• The number of children+students is your indicator of population growth, you can almost ignore your adult and total population numbers as long as you keep your suplies up to keep mouthes fed and backs clothed and sheltered. What you want to watch closely and manage by adding or not adding(never remove) housing is the children+students, or adolescent population. As a rule of thumb I try to keep this number between 7 and 15 until i hit ~75 total population, then as i break 100 total population I let it rise to between 20 and 30, that seems to be a good place to keep it for slow steady population growth into the upper one hundreds. After that you just scale about 10 to 20 more per 100 total population.
  
  
• Schools can be a great help or a hidden threat to your overall village health. You might not want to add a school until you are over the 20 child mark. Without a school a child becomes an adult around age 10, they then are made labourers and can have kids of their own. Once you put in a school they become students around age 10 and adults around age 15. Doesn't seem like a huge change, but if you were counting on those kids to add to your aging labor force now your set back by several years. Thats also more years of feeding them while they contribute nothing to you. Schools do have an upside though, educated people are generally happier and also have fewer work related accidents both of wich increase productivity of any given job.
  ***NOTE***
  This tip on schools isn't meant to be a strict guidline, but rather a tip that if your work force is aging because you didn't get your child production rate up fast enough. A school can screw you up by taking most of the possible new workers out of the system. This will cause your village to starve or stall out if you have alot of workers die of old age while waiting for the new generation to get out of school. If your work force is fairly young and can keep up production then by all means add a school, as an educated work is more productive. Thanks for all your comments on this i hope this clears this up for people.
  
  
• Children do have their uses as well, they will carry food and suplies from market, or from store houses if you don't have a market yet, to their respective houses. This frees up adults time to focus more on the jobs you've given them. As more of your kids enroll in school you may see a drop in production as adults have to take on this role a bit more, it will be more pronounced if your number of student's significantly out numbers you child population.

Always remember things can and will happen fast in this game try and plan ahead and don't rush things. Farming is generaly a late game 100+ population food supply so plan your city to expand toward your farming zone by that time.


I will add to this guide as I find more stuff worth putting in here.

Please rate and/or comment if you found this guide helpful.

Thanks!

If your looking for a guide on the various buildings and professions in Banished, along with a good explanation of game mechanics, I would suggest checking out Bandaids complete guide to banished. Pay close attention to the youtube videos he links in his guide, specifically the two on foresters and the firewood economy.
http://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=229911994#236835