Dawn of Man (developed and published by Madruga Works) is a game that has players commanding a tribe of man in the earliest days of our unwritten history. Now that our review is out, it's time to give players some great Dawn of Man tips for making the most of their game! The game has more than a few quirks and this Dawn of Man guide will help you navigate through the various challenges that you'll face.
About This Game Take control of a settlement of the first modern humans, guide them through the ages in their struggle for survival. Dawn of Man is a survival/city-builder from the creators of Planetbase. Dawn of Man is a city builder game themed around the earliest days of man. You start with a small group capable of little more than picking up sticks and rocks, fighting off wild animals, and progress until the discovery of iron and steel.
While things may seem simple at their face, there's some more complex bits that aren't as easy to understand. If you're looking for some good Dawn of Man tips, you're in the right place. Read on to figure out how to make the most of your prehistoric village!
Dawn of Man Tips - Storage & Stockpiles
Tools degrade over time
We're kicking off our Dawn of Man guide with one of the most basic facets of the game: tools. Regardless of the material, the tools you make don't last forever. This is most evident with the wood, bone, and flint tools of the early game. As such, you should make an effort to always have enough tools on hand. Failing to have enough scythes or knives around can cause food production to fall off of a cliff and result in the rapid decline of your village.
At the minimum, I would recommend that you make enough knives and sickles for 100% of the population. Fishing tools are somewhat important for a different reason: they make excellent export fodder. You can certainly go with higher or lower levels depending on your needs, but you don't want to run out of tools at a critical moment. The slightest halt in production can spiral into a situation where a lot of people end up starving to death.
This is one of the Dawn of Man tips to take to heart: do your best to keep your tool production from falling behind. Failing to do so can end in disaster!
Filter your stockpiles & storage sensibly
There are two kinds of stockpiles placed on the ground in this game: wood and stone. These can be further filtered to only allow certain types of materials. I personally like to have four each for wood and stone at the beginning. One wood stockpile is dedicated to sticks and the other three are for logs. As for the stone piles, I dedicate one to flint and the other three to stone. I set my limits for sticks and flint to 40 and the limits for logs and stone to 100. This is a good amount of materials to keep on hand.
When you're in the later metal ages, dedicate a single stockpile to each of the three ores and one for charcoal. This will help keep everything organized and free up valuable space in your storage tents/storehouses/warehouses.
As for storage, you can't do anything about storage tents/storehouses/warehouses. However, you can filter granaries. It may be a good idea to filter them for different types of food so villagers arne't traveling all over to put foodstuffs away.
Place storage where it makes sense
Aside from filtering your stockpiles, you should also place your storage in sensible places. For example, place your charcoal and ores near your metalsmiths and blacksmiths so that your villagers won't have to walk as far. Sticks and flint should be placed near the crafting buildings that use them. This is one of the simplest Dawn of Man tips, but the efficiency gains will definitely add up over time!
Here's another helpful bit of info in this Dawn of Man guide: do the same thing for your food storage. Place a granary near your wheat crops and make sure it's filtered for wheat. (Don't forge to place a haystack nearby, too!) Have granaries for meat and fish near your food drying racks, and try to keep your food drying racks in a location where hunters are most likely to go.
Dawn of Man Tips - Knowledge Points & Efficiency
Earn knowledge points by building and recycling
Knowledge points are necessary for advancing through the tech tree, but how you get them isn't always clear. There's a menu that shows you milestones which award knowledge points; one of these centers on building a certain number of buildings. Typically, you get one point for your first building and one for your fifth building of a type. But what if you don't need five buildings? Well, this Dawn of Man guide has got you covered!
The solution is to build the buildings and recycle them as soon as you earn the knowledge points. As an example, you can build five Menhirs to earn the knowledge point, dismantle 4 of them, and you'll have two-thirds of a stone circle good to go.
Fishing tools are great trading commodities
Fishing is super important in the early game, but it loses its importance as the game goes on. That said, fishing tools can be a valuable trading commodity all the way through to the end of the game. At first, I'd recommend producing bone tools. You don't have much use for bone outside of totems as it is, so this will turn a bone (valued at 2) into a bone harpoon (valued at 15 in the earliest ages). Later on, the bone harpoons will become less valuable. Switch to fishing rods and continue to stockpile them for sale.
Build enough sledges for 50% of your population
Sledges, once unlocked, are enormously useful. They'll make many village tasks much more efficient and your villagers will be much happier for not having to lug around logs by hand. I've found that keeping about 50% sledges around works well for me, at least in the early and mid game. Check the number you have with F2 and manually produce more as needed. You can set up automated production once you unlock the workshop.
Set your clothing production to 125%
A villager's mood will go in the gutter if they don't have the right kind of clothes. Setting production to 125% will keep everyone in the right attire for the season and it will cover new births or groups of immigrants.
Build a variety of spiritual buildings
This bit of our Dawn of Man guide is listed right from the in-game help files, but it's important to restate it: build a variety of religious structures. Each of the game's five religious buildings have their own cooldown and villagers can only visit them every so often. This will help keep up morale and prevent work from slowing down too much.
Dawn of Man Tips - Crops & Straw
Grain is the most versatile (and important) crop
You can grow grains, pulses, and fruit trees in the game. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but grain is arguably the strongest of all. Grain can be turned into bread (and later beer). The straw that is produced as a byproduct is used for building mid-to-late game buildings and feeding animals. It can never hurt to overproduce grain for all the uses it has, so make sure that this class of crops is your main focus once you can grow them.
Plant flax after grain—and limit your linen production
Once you have some stable grain production, it's not a half bad idea to plant at least a full field of flux. Flux gets turned into linen which can be used to make fishing rods, compound bows, and linen cloth. Linen cloth can subsequently be used for higher-quality summer clothes.
Once you have enough linen clothes, make sure you limit your linen production to a reasonable number. The unprocessed linen will be needed for bows and fishing rods. As for wool, don't limit your production of wool cloth—there are no major uses for raw wool and the cloth fetches a better price from traders.
Trees are a great source of low-maintenance food
If you prefer a little more of a hands-off approach, planting trees is a great way to get low-maintenance food. Trees will take care of themselves and only need to be harvested at the appropriate season. I always like keeping some of them around to supplement my food production without worrying about planting something in the spring.
Straw is an important resource
I cannot possibly emphasize how important straw is. It's needed to keep your animals alive in winter and to maintain your buildings. There's a reason that one of the available charts monitors your straw, so make sure to always be producing more than you need. (You can put the grain to good use as well.)
Although straw can be stored in storage tents/storehouses/warehouses, it's a better idea to use haystacks. It gives you a good visual indicator of how much straw you have, it requires no maintenance, and it only costs sticks to build.
Plant your crops outside of walls
You may or may not decide to use walls in your village. If you do, don't make the mistake of encircling your crops with a wall. There really isn't a reason to protect them since villagers will probably be pretty close to your town and can easily make it to the safety of the walls before they get killed by raiders or wild animals. You'll also need to expand your crops further out as the game progresses and you don't want to make that any harder than it needs to be.
Dawn of Man Tips - Animals
Hunt large game with a group—it's worth it
Mankind once walked alongside some truly massive beasts that are now extinct. These animals are a major threat if you try to take them on solo—and that's why you should hunt them as a group. Select at least four or five villagers who are armed with hunting tools to take the big boys down. You'll get plenty of meat, skins, and bones without the effort of trying to run down much nimbler prey.
Sheep should be your first domestic animal
Sometimes, the best advice we can give in this Dawn of Man guide is to keep things simple. You have a bunch of different choices for raising animals, but it's hard to argue against having sheep as your first. While the milk production of goats and cows is nice, sheep are the best way to get winter clothes.
Wool cloth also makes for a great commodity to trade once your people have enough winter clothes. Combine this with fishing rods and you can import the items you might need to offset shortfalls.
Control your animal population by managing sexes
The game's various menus have an option to see your animal population including genders and ages. Try to keep the number of female sheep lower than the number of male sheep. I prefer something like 20-40% females overall.
One thing to emphasize in this Dawn of Man guide is the risks of overpopulation: if you're not careful, the number of animals can expand beyond your ability to feed and house them in the winter. You'll burn through straw and your buildings will fall apart. Keep things balanced.
Dawn of Man Guide - Raiders & Defense
Raiders repeatedly spawn from the same locations - defend those areas
The early-to-mid game will see you pushing your village's borders out gradually, but you'll eventually hit a point where growth slows down. Eventually, you'll have to contend with raiders attacking your village. If you pay attention, you'll notice that they typically approach from certain places all around your village. Those are the places that you should focus your defense.
One of the more important Dawn of Man tips is to make good use of rivers. If raiders spawn on the far side of river, they have no problem with swimming it. However, they may very well make use of one of your bridges if it happens to be close enough to where they're headed. This allows you to turn bridges into defensive chokepoints with towers all around.
Guard towers are weak - build a lot of them
Players may or may not make use of walls, but you'd be crazy not to use watch towers or guard towers. There's a bit of bad news in this Dawn of Man guide, though: guard towers are terribly weak. If you build eight of them at a defensive point, odds are that you'll lose 2-4 of them to a raiding party.
One of the better (and possibly counterintuitive) Dawn of Man tips is this: you may not want to build guard towers too early. While watch towers go down much faster, you're going to be losing towers anyway. You may as well save the iron for more important tools and weapons!
Huts can be used as rally points for raids
Here's the final piece of advice in our Dawn of Man guide: villagers will rally at the nearest building when you sound the alarm during a raider attack. Unfortunately, guard towers and watch towers aren't counted in this calculation for some reason. People will move to man those towers, sure, but any leftover villagers won't stack up underneath them.
However, building a hut (or any other normal building) near the guard tower will get villagers to stack up on it. Place huts (or gates) near your defensive strongpoints and you'll have a large group of villagers ready to help out if too many towers go down.
That's it for our Dawn of Man guide for new players! Hopefully, these will help you succeed all the way through to the days of steel swords and beer. Don't have Dawn of Man yet? You can grab it right now on Steam, the Humble Store, and GOG for $24.99 or your regional equivalent. Don't forget to check out our review of the game!
Disclosure: Humble Bundle & GOG work with TechRaptor for affiliate partnership and TechRaptor earns a small commission off purchases made from links in this article. In addition, GOG provides a monthly giveaway to our Pack Hunter members.
Help make our Dawn of Man guide better by sharing some of your own Dawn of Man tips in the comments below!
An action RPG channeling the glory days of Diablo II and Titan Quest.Expect to pay: $25/ £20Developer: Crate EntertainmentPublisher: Crate EntertainmentReviewed on: Windows 10, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980Multiplayer: Yes, co-op with up to 4 playersLink:I find myself hanging from a rope in Grim Dawn, seconds from death and moments after barfing out a mutagen-colored spirit who’d used me as a puppet. Some grizzlefaced bastard among the group who strung me up sees the spirit flee and saves my life by snapping the rope with two clean shots. Are there hugs? Nah, they shove a shield and sword in my hand and instantly send me to face the undead hordes outside alone, my throat still hoarse from the ordeal. This is how Grim Dawn begins, and my saviors' callousness reveals the priorities of a world long gone to hell.So dark. So very grim. So many of us wanted this in the wake of Torchlight's Pixar-ed up heroes and Diablo III's dazzling halls, and Grim Dawn certainly delivers.
It's a true heir of old ARPGs like Diablo II and Titan Quest, dumping mountains of loot in dimly lit dungeons but with far more spunk and personality than you'll find in its closest cousin, Path of Exile. It's got skill trees, five classes, and (admittedly fiddly) peer-to-peer four-person multiplayer, and it plays like Crate Entertainment used the most upvoted nostalgia posts on Reddit as a blueprint. If you want an old-school action RPG, this is it.It sticks to that legacy with such grim determination, in fact, that it pushes it to absurdity, as if afraid any fleck of humor might oust it as a sellout. Grim Dawn unfortunately never recaptures the promising pathos of the opening cutscene, but it slathers the grittiness around in text boxes and often laughable voice acting like old crunchy peanut butter on otherwise savory fresh bread.Here's the guy who tells me to track down the partner who stabbed him and stole his cart full of scrap; here's his partner, who tells me the other guy tried to rape his daughter. There's the traitor I let live in return for the key to a loot-filled hovel; in the distance there's a man attempting to burn his family in his house as a mercy. All this, all the time. It's so unrelenting I ended up wanting to skip over a lot of it, but Grim Dawn allows enough important choices regarding which factions to level and which NPCs to send back to base that I never felt comfortable ignoring the depressing conversations entirely.Ten-gallon hats and telekinesisHappily, though, the story's a mere sideshow to the action and exploration.
Grim Dawn handles these aspects so well I barely cared about the origins of the 'aetherials' who've borked the world and why the second act suddenly becomes Red Dead Redemption with greataxes. With the ability to mix classes like demolitionist, occultist, and soldier with one other class to make a hybrid, there's virtually no playstyle it doesn't embrace.For me, the lion’s share of its joy springs from that freedom. Rarely if ever do I slip easily into an RPG class; instead, I frown at archetypes and agonize for days over which class 'suits' me.
But I love my Druid. Drawn from the Shaman and Arcanist skill trees, he's my RPG dream character brought to life.
I click the left mouse button, and he chops up Lovecraftian horrors with his lightning-kissed greatsword. With the right, he calls insect swarms that bring even bosses down to their knees. Press one hotkey, and twisters tear through undead hordes; press another, and magic missiles shoot out, splitting on contact and ricocheting into the rotting guts of nearby trash. I especially like how the progression of the skill trees crescendoes to a point where the screen is bursting in splattered blood and blinding magic and frenetic action. It certainly doesn't hurt that the whole game wallows in a strange Medieval England-meets-Wild West aesthetic that agreeably evokes Stephen King's Dark Tower series, allowing him to slash zombies in general stores advertising alchemical goods and slaughter otherworldly horrors in laboratories that'd fail any health inspection.It doesn't hurt that the whole game wallows in a strange Medieval England-meets-Wild West aesthetic.And the massive world around him is a wonderful canvas on which I use him to paint destruction. Some settings slightly outwear their welcome and the trek from one hub to another often tends to drag, but the shattered, wasted landscape nevertheless delivers a welcome balance of light and color to serve as the yang to the yin of the gloomy dungeons and basements. Grim Dawn also caters to the challenge-minded with two starting difficulties and two tougher unlockable ones.
It offers choice on virtually every front, and thus the limitation of choosing between a dirty brunette man or a dirty brunette woman on the creation screen feels like some kind of inside joke.The loot can feel a bit like a joke, too, as gear, weapons, crafting parts, lore scraps, and more drop like Louisiana rain. More often than not, the gear's not even useful, being either vendor junk or limited by huge stat restrictions, and I found myself accidentally picking it up in my click-trance even when I meant not to. That thus leads to one of Grim Dawn's few real downsides: the perpetual trips back to town to sell it all off.
At least it has the decency to give us a free portal to get back there.But this is the experience we said we wanted, isn't it? If anything, Grim Dawn is both empowered and chained down by its retro stylings, preventing, say, the randomized levels of Diablo III and thus its endless potential for replay.
But on the upside, none of its recent competitors deliver that old-style hack-and-slash experience so purely and so satisfyingly, and its hybrid class system makes each new jaunt a little different. More than once it found me playing until dawn, and my appreciation for any game that manages to do that is anything but grim.