This article is titled pro tips, but I included all kinds of tips. You’ll find advanced tips, beginner tips, and overall guides of Dawn of Man below.
Dawn of Man is a very simple looking city builder / colony simulation game. It’s actually very hard to master even though it looks very easy. For example, you need to micromanage, do resource management, pre-plan settlement layout, manage workload, and deal with disasters.
All in all, Dawn of Man is a game with a steep learning curve. Thus, I think this guide will be really useful to many players, both newbies and veterans alike.
Top 12 Dawn of man hints:
1. Use Hotkeys
Dawn of Man is one of those games where you must take advantage of hotkeys for a better overall gaming experience. I myself can’t imagine playing Dawn of Man without the use of some of the essential hotkeys. I bet you’ll feel the same after playing around with some of them.
There are lots of hotkeys in this game, things might be complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t worry though, I’ll teach you the most useful ones.
Most useful hotkeys of Dawn of Man:
- 4: 8x speed. (Very useful, you can speed up the game right after storm, blizzard, raid, and animal attacks.
- F7: Technologies. (Fast and effective way of keeping up with the technology.)
- F4: Resource limits. (Sometimes you need more, sometimes you need less resources. Quickly adjust the limits according to your needs.)
- Tab: Primal vision. (Most important game function for finding wild animals and natural resources.
- 7: Tasks & workload. (Can see what jobs are taking the biggest part of your workload. Can also cancel tasks.)
- 8: Knowledge progress. (You’ll know which buildings to build, which items to craft, which resources to collect, and which animals to hunt for getting more knowledge points.)
- Enter: Go to the center of your settlement. (Don’t bother finding your settlement manually after sending hunting parties.)
- +: Go to work areas. (See where are your designated work areas and edit them according to your current needs.)
- Del: Delete buildings. (Get rid of things you don’t really need with a single button.)
- Space: Pause. (Pausing is very helpful for assigning jobs, building buildings, researching tech, etc.)
The rest of the hotkeys can be found Dawn of Man Hotkey control guide.
2. Place Relevant Buildings Closely
Biggest mistake you can make in the Dawn of Man is going over 100% workload. That’s how you wipe out your colony… So, how to reduce workload? Answer is simple, place relevant buildings very close to each other.
- Granary close to fields, mortar and bakery close to granary.
- Haystack close to fields, stables close to haystack, and water well close to stables.
- Storages close to crafter, workshop, and blacksmith.
- Blacksmith close to rock pile.
- Outfitter close to weaver.
Don’t make your people go from one end of your settlement to the other end. Place production chain buildings closely. This will reduce the workload immensely.
Also don’t forget to place your most used buildings at the center of your settlements. Because most of the workload is coming from pointless walking.
3. Don’t Expand too Fast
Expanding too fast is a horrible strategy in this game. Because it will break the workload, kill morale, deplete key resources, and end up killing your population.
Before expanding your settlement and population you must accumulate tools, resources, and food. Must also have no more than %50-60 workload.
Dawn of Man settlements and populations are very fragile. One must always expand slow and steady.
4. Reduce the Workload
High workload can bottleneck your progress in the Dawn of Man. You need to reduce workload at all costs for development, for morale, and for stability.
Number one way of reducing the workload is building relevant buildings closely which is explained in the number two tip on this list. Another way of reducing workload is limiting production. For example, you don’t need more than 100 water, 100 milk, 50 leather, or 100 rock for any kind of settlement. Don’t collect more than you need, save the workload.
Workload is too high. – Dawn of Man
Also don’t collect resources from far distances when you can collect the same thing from a closer source. Pointless walking is a workload killer.
Do support your population with sledges, carts, plows, and high-end tools for completing tasks as fast as possible.
Never upgrade more than 4 buildings at the same time and upgrade walls partially.
Pro tip: You can always press 7 to see the active tasks and pending tasks. Just cancel the tasks you don’t really need. Press + to jump to work areas and delete the ones you no longer need.
5. Modify UI
You can add new modifiers to your UI by pressing the + buttons on the top right and top left corner of your screen.
We got resources on top left and general chart at top right as a default. I usually add animals to the top left to see my current domestic animal population. And for the top right, I like to add speed and defense functions in case my left hand is busy.
All in all, you can increase your quality of gaming in the Dawn of Man by modifying UI.
6. Manually Defend Against Raiders
In Dawn of Man the best defense is offence. You press alert button on raids and let the AI do the thing? That’s one biggest mistake you can do in Dawn of Man. It’s literally a noob trap. That’ll cost you lots of manpower.
What you should do instead is to press alert button from the correct gate, wait for raiders to come, and manually attack raiders with your villagers when the conflict begins.
Guys on towers and platforms will automatically attack raiders. You don’t need to touch them. The guys you should manually direct to attackers are the ones waiting idly at the gate.
You can’t select more than 25 people in one instance. So, you might want to do manual raider targeting twice.
I usually send 2-3 people to one raider while the game is at pause. That way I don’t lose more than one or two people and sometimes zero people in each raid.
7. Build Fields Outside Walls
Fields takes lots of space, I mean A LOT. Building fields inside walls is a huge waste for two reasons. Firstly, raiders can’t attack or destroy fields. Secondly, building walls and towers around fields cost lots of manpower and resources for no reason.
So, build your precious buildings inside walls first and then you can go wild with fields on the outside.
8. Prepare for Harvest Season
Don’t give many manual orders right before harvest (fall) such as hunting, megalith mining, fruit harvesting, fishing, or building. Because you need people to harvest crops in the fall and do nothing else.
Failing to harvest grain in the fall is a disaster because you’ll need to wait a whole year for the next harvest.
You don’t want to lose precious harvest. Especially when you have a large population.
Grain is the longest lasting food related resource in the game. 1 grain equals two breads. That’s the key element of sustaining larger populations.
Grain is the best food source in the Dawn of Man after all.
9. Tick Automatic Production
Right clicking to a tool, weapon, clothing, food, or anything on any crafting station will set it to automatic production.
Continuous production can be set on and off by a simple right click. After a certain point, you don’t really need to bother with manual production.
Set everything to automatic production and focus on other things.
10. Limit Production
You don’t need to hoard everything in the Dawn of Man. Hoarding unnecessary stuff will definitely cripple your workload. Besides, most resources go bad after some time. So, avoid pointless hoarding, limit your production on non-essential things.
That way your population can focus on more important things such as harvesting, building, taking care of animals, and perhaps fishing.
My recommended resource limits:
- 100% wool outfit, 20% skins outfit.
- 100 meats, 20 fish, 20 vegetables, 50-100 bread, 15 cheese, 15 beers.
- 100 raw skins, 40 dry skins, 40 leather.
- 20 tannins, 20 mud.
- 25-50 to all stones, rocks, and ores.
- 20% spears, 50% knives, 20% axes, 25 fishing tools, 75% sickles, 25 picks, 100% bows.
- 15 sledges, 15 cart, 15 plow.
- 20-25 each animal except donkey which is pretty much useless.
11. Don’t Bother with Swords and Shields
Dawn of man combat is revolving around projectiles, ranged weapons. Swords, shields, and armor are waste of resources… Only thing that’s worth having are bows, towers, and platforms. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of the Dawn of Man.
Dawn of man armor mechanic is not really great. Bows do lots of damage, armor or not.
You already got dogs to go melee anyways. So, just wait at your settlement and throw projectiles whoever is stupid enough to attack your defenses.
I wish swords, shields, and armors were useful, but it is what it is.
12. Buy Limited Resources
I recommend you buy every limited resource trader brings.
You can have infinite sticks, logs, food, wool, linen, tanning, coal, mud, and hay. But some resources are limited such as stones, flints, and ores. These resources are limited to what you have in your map. Only way to get more is to use trader. So, I always buy them whenever traders appear, especially if I’m thinking of doing a long run.
I also try to buy tannin, leather, mud, and charcoal because they’re somewhat hard to get even though they’re infinite on the map. They’re very cheap too.
Last trader tip: Don’t forget to sell your outdated equipment such as slings to the trader so that settlers equip the newer tools.
Thanks for reading this Dawn of Man strategy guide. Do let me know what you think about these tips, tricks, and hints via comment section below. See you soon!