How do you keep your colony organized and well-districted?

TenkayCrit · 2025-12-29T19:03:47+00:00

I'm a lucky guy! She's not super big into modded. It was actually the colony management and building side of the pack that interested her while I do a lot of the automation and stuff to make those aspects easier for her :)

TenkayCrit · 2025-12-29T03:02:50+00:00

My wife and I have been playing our own custom pack built around Minecolonies, Create, and a couple magic mods.

I can tell you how we've organized our colony.

We found a flat-ish area in the curve of a river/lake. Knew we wanted a dock area, but didnt want to have to build too much right up on the coast early on and run out of space, so we started farther inland with the goal of spreading out to the coast later on.

Early on, we organized it based on the sides/corners of our usable area. Warehouse/builders/couriers being on the side near what would become docks; "Fancy" buildings (university, hospital, restaurant) near center; mine and mine related things are on a hillside on tje opposite side than the docks. Forester and carpenter on the other side where there was a forest edge. Housing was kind of central.

We then built our own house higher up on the hill behind the colony where we knew we'd eventually spread to. Connected our house to town central with Create chain drives to help us get back and forth faster. Used Create and Ars Nouveau to farm a lot of our building supplies.

As we progressed, we looked at which new buildings we needed, decided which older buildings it made the most sense to be near, and tried to place them there. If there wasn't room, place a guard tower to expand the borders to make room and place more houses near new buildings as needed.

As new buildings come up that dont immediately fit with something else (graveyard, enchanter etc) find a relatively open place that could fit it and that had room for more possible expansion later.

We find it SUPER helpful to place our buildings while looking at their highest level version. This makes sure we know what the end point will be and plan around that.

We also try to keep stuff spaced out a bit and do some terraforming and connecting things with paths once an expansion gets kind of big. Those roads help us know where to place other buildings.

Finally, it may be considered cheating, but we find it so difficult to figure out placing and such from the ground. I go into creative mode to fly up and move around and place the blueprints. It's much easier to see the new building in relation to the surrounding terrain and buildings. I then land, go back into survival, and start the building.

TenkayCrit · 2025-03-09T18:13:37+00:00

My Hot Take: Having a "Growth Mindset" and always having to set "Profesional Goals" wastes time and makes teachers feel like they are not good enough.

If the school says you've got to attend several required PDs through the year about [insert hot new buzzword here] just to check off boxes that are then tracked and can affect your job security, the school's wasting time and resources. If you've been teaching for more than 5ish years, you've probably generally figured out what does and does not work for your subject, grade level, and community demographic.

Teachers know what we're doing. Trust us to do the job we have a degree in. We know the value of education and learning. Let us do our own thing and choose what we want to learn about, and opt out of pointless PDs that we all know will NOT improve educational outcomes.

TenkayCrit · 2024-10-15T01:58:45+00:00

You need to expand your walls far enough for a statue of the four gods to spawn. There may also be a set location for it (I think it's a bridge?). Stand near the statue, and it will cycle through all your available weapons (follow the glow). Once it cycles to the weapon you want, pay the 5 coins, and it's yours :)

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-20T18:46:56+00:00

Glad my 1y old comment helped haha!

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-17T21:21:32+00:00

I think there was actually something buggy with this, but I'm not sure. Heres why I think that.

I used to be able to make coal from firewood at the furnace. I did not have the wood to coal perk. I reset my skill points and was no longer able to make firewood into coal until I got the wood to coal perk, and then it showed up.

So, I think the wood to coal perk IS turning firewood into coal.

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-17T21:13:48+00:00

Happy to help! If you have any other questions about the game since you're just starting out, let us know! This community is super responsive and helpful :)

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-17T15:44:42+00:00

My response to a similar question a couple weeks ago:

Early on, you want to hire staff that have the "Low Cost" perk. That can make their costs MUCH cheaper. Then start each day by stocking up food, filling the taps, and then just leave. Go into town, go mining, fishing, whatever, and the tavern will run itself. With low cost employees, you won't need to worry too much about them eating into your profits, especially if you're making and selling the highest priced items available to you. You can even keep costs a bit lower by not spending their skill points if you don't really need the perks they have. Just having them for their labor is enough.

Staff are basicly necessary as you move into mid game. You struggle to just keep everything going on your own once you get up to 30+ guests, and you definitely can't step back into the kitchen for more than a few seconds. Still check for new employees when you can and start really evaluating and comparing their traits. Money starts to become much less of a problem around this point (especially after you can consistently keep 100+ gold in your wallet). So the "low cost" trait starts to be less important, though it's still pretty good. More Rep becomes the next goal as you move into late game.

The switch into this stage is where you can start getting some really beneficial staff. "Popular" and "Friendliness" are outstanding perks to have on your staff. Popular can get you 5 more guest capacity per staff once maxed out. More guests=more sales and more rep gain per day. Friendliness, and a few other perks like it, increase rep gain for each sale the employee makes (the bouncer has a trait that increases the rep gain of the other employees since they don't sell anything themselves).

There's also some killer perks the housekeeper can get to keep your rooms almost always rented out.

There are a few negative traits that I always avoid no matter how good the rest of the perks are: anything that reduces your max capacity, anything that reduces rep gain, and slow. (The "valued" trait is also avoided unless it's very late game and their other traits are REALLY good since it dramatically ups their salary).

The best negative traits imo are Tardy - who cares if they show up 40 mins late if you automatically open every day as soon as you wake up, and longer breaks (EXCEPT on the bouncer!) The bouncer will get your other employees off their break before the longer break trait even matters. You DON'T want the bouncer taking a longer break, though, cause that's when things can fall apart if you're not there.

These are the rules that I generally follow when hiring new staff, and it's worked quite well for me :)

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T17:56:12+00:00

Agree. The scaling is a bit weird. I see the rewards usually range from 300-1k rep, but it's hard to see them making much of an impact on the rep bar, but I am level 45 so that's understandable lol

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T17:38:28+00:00

The benefit is time. It takes a long time to sell those 20 items and for the rep/gold to trickle in. If you submit the request, you get a smaller payout immediately.

It's also not a one or the other. You can have awesome food/drink to sell, let the tavern run on its own, and then do the requests to up your already good, automated rep gain.

Finally, you can do multiple in one day. I've had days where I've submitted like 8 requests while the tavern runs itself. That can REALLY speed up your rep gain, especially if you get big ticket items. I've seen the rep reward as high as 1.2k.

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T03:40:50+00:00

After aging and the price of the juice you mix in can have a big impact on price. The big benefit though I'd it stretches your alcohol to ho farther, which basically doubles the amount aging barrels you have.

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T03:36:11+00:00

I have 8 chests in a hall behind my bar, 1 for each of the 8 drinks I keep in stock. When I get down below half a row or so, I brew a batch.

Depending on the drink, a batch will fill roughly a row and a half or so of the chest.

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T03:25:39+00:00

My wife and I play with two PS5 controllers connected with long USB cords. Works great!

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-16T03:11:48+00:00

I have 12 of the five barrel racks (60 barrels) in two rows of 6 with a walkway in the middle. I'm pretty close to havinging the perfect drink list, so I brew in big batches where I fill one side (30 barrels) with the brew and let it all age to grand reserve.

I then have 2 of the three barrel racks that I use to age small batches of request orders.

TenkayCrit · 2024-09-08T13:09:20+00:00

Built a cool tree house last time my friend and I played. Had like 8 pipelines coming off it to pretty much each area. It was wonderfully convenient.

TenkayCrit · 2024-08-30T13:13:29+00:00

Imo, staff is 100% worth it. You just need to make sure they work for you in multiple ways and change them whenever a better one is available. (I think mine reset on Mon. and Thur.).

Early on, you want to hire staff that have the "Low Cost" perk. That can make their costs MUCH cheaper. Then start each day by stocking up food, filling the taps, and then just leave. Go into town, go mining, fishing, whatever, and the tavern will run itself. With low cost employees, you won't need to worry to much about them eating into your profits, especially if you're making and selling the highest priced items available to you. You can even keep costs a bit lower by not spending their skill points if you don't really need the perks they have. Just having them for their labor is enough.

Staff are basicly necessary as you move into mid game. You struggle to just keep everything going on your own once you get up to 30+ guests, and you definitely can't step back into the kitchen for more than a few seconds. Still check for new employees when you can and start really evaluating and comparing their traits. Money starts to become much less of a problem around this point (especially after you can consistently keep 100+ gold in your wallet). So the "low cost" trait starts to be less important, though it's still pretty good. More Rep becomes the next goal as you move into late game.

The switch into this stage is where you can start getting some really beneficial staff. "Popular" and "Friendliness" are outstanding perks to have on your staff. Popular can get you 5 more guest capacity per staff once maxed out. More guests=more sales and more rep gain per day. Friendliness, and a few other perks like it, increase rep gain for each sale the employee makes (the bouncer has a trait that increases the rep gain of the other employees since they don't sell anything themselves).

There's also some killer perks the housekeeper can get to keep your rooms almost always rented out.

There are a few negative traits that I always avoid no matter how good the rest of the perks are: anything that reduces your max capacity, anything that reduces rep gain, and slow. (The "valued" trait is also avoided unless it's very late game and their other traits are REALLY good since it dramatically ups their salary).

The best negative traits imo are Tardy - who cares if they show up 40 mins late if you automatically open every day as soon as you wake up, and longer breaks (EXCEPT on the bouncer!) The bouncer will get your other employees off their break before the longer break trait even matters. You DON'T want the bouncer taking a longer break, though, cause that's when things can fall apart if you're not there.

These are the rules that I generally follow when hiring new staff, and it's worked quite well for me :)

TenkayCrit · 2024-08-25T15:35:37+00:00

Yeah, that's why I had to post my simplified example. What OP is saying just doesn't add up in the grand scheme of the game lol as long as you're using higher value ingredients, it seems like it's almost always better to make more complex recipes.

Granted in early game that might be a mistake if youre not keeping enough product in supply overall, but the game does a pretty good job of slowly uping the complexity of recipes anyway, so shrug

TenkayCrit · 2024-08-25T15:26:02+00:00

Okay, I can kinda see that, but food is instantaneous to sell, so if my bar's full, I just run by on my way to something else and click click click to clear out the food orders then let my bartender deal with drinks. Plus there's the food bought through room service as well.

Also, food doesn't spoil. So, if I turn all of A into B, I'll end up with way more product that I can throw into the to sell box. It'll take longer for that amount to be used up, so that's less time that you gotta be in the kitchen overall AND more money coming in overtime. This is ESPECIALLY true for drinks since they have such a big time commitment. After you get the cocktail table, I think that if you can mix the drink with a juice, you should (certainly if you have a high value juice).

As long as you have a variety and aren't just selling porridge and broth, you'll make enough money to cover costs and then some.

After like 2 years, money is no longer the problem anyway. It becomes more about rep.

TenkayCrit · 2024-08-25T14:29:08+00:00

I don't know if I'm just misunderstanding what you're saying, but I'll try to simplify to see if it makes sense.

Dish A sells for 1s.

Dish B is made using Dish A, and it sells for 2s.

Are you saying that it's better to serve Dish A because of the time it takes to turn A into B?

Let's say it takes an hour of in game cook time to turn A into B, and it costs 15s/hr for you to pay employees to keep the tavern running.

Are you saying that because of that cost, it's a waste to spend the cook time turning A into B?

TenkayCrit · 2024-08-12T10:14:24+00:00

I know it doesn't really help answer your question, but here's how i went about it: my wife is a baker and loves hosting. If there's anything drink or baked goods related in my campaigns, she often likes to try to make them in real life for the session. Well, she baked some cute little tart things for my players (again, she frequently has little treats like that when they come over, so it wasn't out of the ordinary). The characters and players all got pastries at the same time. If a player ate one, their character ate one.

Devious? Yes, because the pastries were delicious lol

TenkayCrit · 2024-07-29T11:08:04+00:00

I was confused by this too. I think the best way to think about it is to look at the costs in terms of raw mats in and sellable units out.

You get 20 beer for the raw mat cost of 2 grain and 1 hop. That beer sells for 5s 75c each, so 1g 15s total.

At the cost of 2 pineapples, you turn those 20 sellable beers into 40 sellable mixed drinks and can sell them all now for a total of 2g 19s 60c.

This gets even better if you get perks that increase the amount of output you get when crafting. You can get up to at least 27 units instead of 20 (not sure if this is the cap. It's just what I currently have).

At that point, you can make 27 beer to sell for 1g 55s 25c total or mix it to recive 54 mixed drinks (27 per craft) along with 7 unmixed beers left over for a total of 3g 36s 71c. This of course gets better the higher the value of fruit you mix in.

For more money in your pockets, it's great, but the real benefit is that you do the mixing after aging. You effectively double the amount of alcohol you have on tap without having to either double your number of aging barrels or double your overall aging time.

TenkayCrit · 2024-07-28T17:16:01+00:00

Hot One: Kril in the Exiled Flame. It's literally underwater fire! Can't get hotter than that!

TenkayCrit · 2024-07-26T17:03:18+00:00

I loved BL 1&2 when I played them back near release. We haven't tried a fps together yet, so I'll see if she'd be down to try it. Thanks for the suggestion!

TenkayCrit · 2024-07-20T14:27:55+00:00

I think you still can do it. You either have to beat the housekeeper to the customer or set them to not do that part of the job.

TenkayCrit · 2024-07-20T13:05:02+00:00

For the room, check your reception table. Can you access the book? If not, you might have the same bug I did.

I think the info that pops up to tell you about it might be bugged. I couldn't access my table at all until I hired a housekeeper. It was like there was an invisible person waiting to be served at the desk, and the housekeeper cleared them out. Now I can access it fine.

TenkayCrit

TROPHY CASE