This is the moment everything has been building toward, and I am genuinely glad to walk you through it. You have land, a building, and the right specialists hired into it. Now that building can produce - it can take raw materials and energy and time, and hand you back finished goods worth selling. Production is the engine of your whole town, the part that finally turns all your setup into something you can spend. So let us walk through it carefully and calmly.
What a production run is
A building that is staffed and idle can start a production run. The shape of a run is always the same: it consumes raw materials and energy right now, works away for a set amount of time, and then yields finished goods that you collect at the end. It is a little factory shift - you pay the costs up front, the work happens over hours, and the output waits for you when it is done. Once you grasp this single shape, every recipe in the game is just a variation on it.
- Own a building that is staffed and free - meaning it is not already busy with another run.
- Choose a recipe that the building is able to make.
- Pay the recipe's energy cost and its raw materials up front, the moment you start.
- Wait out the production time while the run works.
- Collect the output for 1 energy once it is ready.
A small but important detail: the building must be free to start a run - it cannot already be producing something else. One run at a time per building. And when the goods are done, collecting them costs 1 energy, the same small charge you have seen for collection throughout. Once collected, your finished goods go into town storage, ready to be sold or used. Nothing here is sprung on you; it is the same gentle pattern wearing a new hat.
Let us trace one run from start to finish so the rhythm is clear. You pick a recipe, and the moment you confirm, the game charges its energy cost and pulls its raw materials out of your inventory - that is the price paid up front, before any work happens. Then the building is busy for the recipe's production time, and during that stretch it cannot start anything new. When the timer ends, the finished goods are not automatically in your hands; you go and collect them, which costs 1 energy, and only then do they land in town storage. So a single run is really three moments: pay and start, wait, then collect. New mayors sometimes forget that last collect step and wonder where their goods went - they are simply waiting at the building to be picked up, patient as ever.
Gold recipes are different
Most recipes hand you stock - physical goods that land in storage. Gold recipes are a special case worth understanding clearly. Instead of producing stock, they pay gold directly into your balance. There is a catch attached: the game fund takes a 10 percent tax on mined gold. So when you mine gold, picture 10 percent of it going to the fund and the rest coming to you. It is still well worth doing - just account for that slice off the top so the number you receive is never a surprise.
Gold recipes also ask for more than the usual raw materials, and it is worth knowing before you begin so nothing catches you out. On top of the oak wood, titanium and gold ore a gold run already needs, it also draws three consumer goods from your storage - alcohol, beef and tobacco - each in the very same quantity as the oak wood the recipe calls for. So a run that needs 8 oak wood will also quietly pull 8 alcohol, 8 beef and 8 tobacco. The reason fits the fiction nicely: mining gold is hard, thirsty, hungry work, and the crew has to be kept fed, watered and content. Stock those three goods before you start, because if any one of them falls short the run simply will not begin.
For non-gold goods, the output is entirely yours, with one rare exception worth a calm word. If your town has been occupied by another country in war, the occupier takes a small share of what you produce as tribute - a flat 10%. In peacetime, when your town is your own, nothing at all is taken and every unit you make is yours to keep. So unless you are living under an occupation, what the recipe yields is exactly what reaches your storage.
Full storage means lost goods
If your storage is full at the moment a production run finishes, the overflow is lost for good - and you only get an alert afterward, once the damage is done. There is no way to recover those goods. Keep an eye on your storage and your warehouses so a finished run always has somewhere to land.
That storage warning is the single most expensive beginner mistake, so let it land hard. Goods that overflow do not wait politely - they vanish, and the only notice you get arrives too late to fix it. Before you start a big run, glance at how full your storage is. If it is close to the brim, build or upgrade a warehouse first. A little caution here protects hours of work, and it is the one place in this lesson where I will gently insist you slow down and check.
Buildings wear down
One last thing to file away, and there is no need to fret about it today. Each production run adds about 1 percent degradation to the building. Nothing dramatic happens today - your building is not going to crumble after a shift or two - but wear accumulates run by run. We will deal with degradation properly in the next lesson, including how to repair it. For now, simply know that producing is not entirely free of consequence: every run leaves a little wear behind, and that is normal, expected, and entirely manageable.
Now that you can run a single production run, let me show you the doorway to scale, because this is where the game truly opens up. Remember that each building runs one job at a time, but you can have many buildings, and each can be producing in parallel. A town with one workshop produces in a trickle; a town with several, each staffed and busy, produces in a steady stream. You do not learn anything new to get there - you simply repeat the setup you already know across more buildings. So the path from a tiny operation to a humming little economy is not some advanced skill you have yet to unlock. It is exactly this lesson, run many times over, which should feel encouraging rather than daunting.
It helps to picture production as the payoff for every lesson that came before it, because that is precisely what it is. You cleared land so you would have grass; you built so you would have a workshop; you recruited and trained and hired so the workshop would have staff. All of that was setup, and production is the moment the setup finally earns. When you collect your first batch of finished goods, that is the entire chain you have built paying you back in something you can sell. Hold onto that feeling - it is the loop from lesson 1 completing for the very first time.
You can now run the full loop end to end: build, staff, produce, collect, and head to the market. Take a quiet moment to feel that - the wheel from lesson 1 is finally turning under your own hand. The next lesson tackles keeping your buildings healthy over the long haul: upgrading them, understanding that 1 percent wear, and renovating before it ever becomes a problem.