Relevant for Jade Dragon update 2024

The following guide is based on my experience. Is not necessarily the ultimate solution, but everything listed here worked for me very well.

Humans - best fire mages because of high mana pool and a chance to not consume mana on spell use.
Good starting race, because they will go to recharge mana less often.

Vivified - best tanks with earth magic and high hp.
And kinda that’s it.

Wolfkin - high speed makes them best support mages, who should act first in combat and buff, such as water or nature.

Raven cult - best for schools scaling with high damage, such as air and dark. Basic air spell attacks two or more times, and second dark spell attacks all enemies, so you have the most value out of the damage buffs.

Shattered - best nature mages for harvesting, because they are immune to negative plant effects. In combat can go earth - due to their armor they can take damage and still be at full hp, which is needed for some spells.

Those are schools that work well together, regardless if you have them on separate mages or go multiclassing.

Nature + dark + air

- Nature mage should be given speed relic and/or be wolfkin. He will buff the dark and the air mages.
- Dark and air are the ones who get the most value out of damage buffs.
- 4th mage depends on the situation and your playstyle. It could be an earth tank, so he and nature mage go to the front row. It could be lightning or water mage for support, so he and nature mage would go in the back row and dd guys will be in front. And so on, depending on your needs, races and relics of your mages.

My typical fight is nature mage buffing dark mage, he uses AoE attack. Then air mage gives him speed, and suddenly the dark mage can attack again before the enemy attacks, and sometimes even twice.


Fire + lightning

- Lightning mage serves as a mana battery for the fire mage. That’s it.

• start with an earth mage (human/vivified) and a nature mage (human/wolfkin).
  
  
• get a fire mage for cooking, a lightning mage for research, a dark mage for quilts.
  
  
• if you clear your first fog and see uneven terrain very close to you, you may very well restart the game. It’s better to have more flat ground around the starting area.
  
  
• default room walls should be at least 6 blocks tall.
  
  
• lofted rooms can be simply made by building two rooms on top of each other and replacing a floor tile between them with a bridge.
  
  
• since there is no resource loss on destroying stuff, don't be afraid to rebuild and experiment.

• you don't have to make an apprentice of the same school that he has.
  Hovering your cursor over the pentagram (actually heptagram) with magic schools in the character sheet tells you what penalties and bonuses you get when making an apprentice.
  If you need the max school level, you obviously make an apprentice of the same school. But otherwise it's better to choose one of the adjacent schools.
  
  
• read all text, explore all buttons and options in UI menus. There is a lot of information, and some of it can be easily overlooked.
  For example, only after some time i’ve noticed that there are more room types in the room book, because i can actually scroll it.
  I also didn't notice at first that in the item list on the right panel you can shift+click on any resource or animal to select them all and give a quick harvesting order.
  
  
• set priorities and schedules.
  For example, you don’t want your fully trained students to waste time by continuing learning. Or you don’t want your staff with earth 1 trying to teach earth. Everything can be customized and optimized with priorities, schedules and groups.
  
  
• explore underschool as soon as you can, especially Stone Ruins.
  There are a lot of resources and very useful stuff. Don’t worry about running out of mobs for future mages to fight, you won’t run out.
  
  
• plant lots of plants.
  Even if you think you have enough, you probably will need them later in big quantities. But not food plants, such as gutberry, bitterrice and so on, those you don’t need in industrial quantities.
  
  
• build refining beasts asap.
  
  
• have lots of quilted carriers and harvesters.

• Build attuning room and display room asap.
  
  
• Relics get xp when mage gets xp, even if the mage reached his lvl cap. So:
  - equip relics as soon as you summon the student, set attuning to highest priority. They shouldn’t go learning or complete trials before they get their relics.
  - try not to go fighting or performing rituals with people who have maxed out their relics.
  
  
• Maximizing relic lvl looks like this:
  1. get a student
  2. upgrade his wand
  3. complete trials
  4. promote to apprentice
  5. graduate or hire as staff
  6. ???
  7. profit
  
  
• Student comes with 3-4 relic slots:
  - one of his race
  - one of his magic school
  - one or two random
  When he generates relics, he picks its type out of those types. So, if you become a racist and only invite students of a specific race, you will have higher chances to have a relic that you can equip. Being able to summon students of a specific race only supports this idea. But having racial diversity has its own perks.