Dawn of Man Tips & Tricks for New Players

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 tips guide will help you navigate through the various challenges that you'll face.

If you're interested, you can also check out our full Dawn of Man review to see what we thought of the game. You can also check out some of our coverage of similar games, like Going Medieval and Valheim. 

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 Tips - 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!

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