Being set in medieval times, you are naturally going to have to combat in Going Medieval. One of the main challenges in the game are raids from your enemies. Whilst wooden spears and bows are great for the early game, eventually you will want to move onto using metals to craft new things. How do you get metal and how do you make something usable from it? Read on.
How to Get Iron
In order to get iron in Going Medieval you will have to mine it from the Earth. First, find an area on your map with an exposed iron vein. Mark this area to be mined by your settlers using the mine option. Now, your settlers who are assigned to the mining job will come over and mine the iron from the ground. You will now be able to take those iron nuggets and store them in your base.
Once you have the raw iron you are able to make ingots with this in another production facility. To see the entire process read on as there will be a step-by-step guide below.
A Step-By-Step Guide on Producing Usable Iron in Going Medieval
As these kinds of games can have convoluted menus or confusing parts to the new player, I will create a step-by-step guide to iron. This guide will show you how to identify iron, mine and process it into a crafting material. To begin with we will start with the basics.
JUMP-To Links
How to Find Iron
In order to find iron on your map you won’t really need anything special. Every map in Going Medieval is generated by a world seed. This determines the topography, features and resources that can be found on your map seed. This will also govern how much iron or other resources will be available. Depending on the type of map you choose there will be more or less natural resources. The mountain terrain has the highest natural resource count. The valley is great farmland but lacks iron and other resources. Choose wisely depending on the type of colony you want to create.
To find iron in your map, move around the map until you find some strange terrain. This terrain could be anything at first, from salt to clay. Iron veins look like brownish mounts with large silver scarring. You can put your mouse over an area you believe to be iron and check the bottom right of the screen. The UI will tell you the type of terrain you currently have selected. Check the image below for an idea of what iron looks like.
Keep in mind that iron can appear at any level. Maybe you will have to dig down to expose an iron vein. The easiest is obviously to find one on the surface. Now, we will move on to mining the iron.
How to Mine Iron
Now that we have found an iron vein to mine out we can assign this area to be mined. To do this, you can select the Mine action. An area can be selected to be mined by pressing the mine button and clicking. The small icon in the bottom right of the main screen that looks like a pickaxe is the mine button. Once you have selected that, either click and drag an area to designate it to be mined, or click specific tiles. By default, your colonists will mine down 1 level.
When you have the mine action selected, you can also see the type of ground that you have under the cursor. As you can see in the image above, we have the mouse over a iron vein area. You can also see the types of resources that remain at this area. Once the vein is fully depleted of resources it will disappear. To get back out of the mining action, right-click.
Now that we have designated some resources to be mined, colonists that are assigned to mine will do so when it is priority. I’ll cover that next.
Assigning Mining Jobs and Priorities
In Going Medieval each colonist has a specific set of skills. Some of them area better at mining, cooking or hunting for example. This depends on their heritage and the skills they’ve developed as part of your colony. To change a settler’s jobs and make them a miner, open up the Jobs menu at the top left of the UI. Here, we can see all of the settlers and which jobs they are currently allowed to do.
The priority of each job can also be changed. For example, if you set one of your colonists mining priority to 1, higher than any other job, they will do this first before anything else. Using this you can focus specific tasks for settlers that are good at them. For example, someone with a low gardening skill shouldn’t be in charge of planting and harvesting plants. They will ruin the harvest if their skills are not high enough. Make sure you have at least one colonist assign to each job, otherwise they will never get done.
Smelting and Processing Iron into Ingots
Now that our colonists have mined up some iron out of the ground we have to turn it into a crafting material. Raw iron nuggets really aren’t good for anything at all. Apart from becoming iron ingots, that is. First, we have to research the necessary items in order to melt down iron. You will not be able to do this from the beginning.
Researching Smelting
In order to unlock new recipes and features, you will have to research them. Build a research table through the production menu at the bottom of the screen. You will unlock the ability to research new technologies now. Once you have researched enough at the table, you can pick an item to unlock. Open up the research menu at the top of the screen and find the Smelting research item. You can see this in the image below.
As you can see in the image you will have to create 20 Chronicle at the research bench in order to research smelting. This is done by your colonists as one of their jobs. You will also have to research Architecture before you can unlock Smelting. Wait until your colonists have produced enough research and then unlock these two items. You will not be able to build a smelting furnace and melt down iron into ingots.
Building and Using a Smelting Furnace
To build a smelting furnace, go to the production menu once again. Here you will build everything that can produce other items. You can find the smelting furnace in this menu. Once selected, you can decide whether you want to build the smelting furnace out of Clay or Limestone. There is not production speed benefit of either. The limestone furnace has slightly higher hitpoints. This is only helpful if you are being raided and they attempt to destroy your furnace. It will merely last slightly longer than a clay one.
Once placed down, one of your colonists will build up the furnace if they are assigned to construction and you have the resources. You can build the smelting furnace indoors or outdoors. When you place it somewhere think about where your stockpiles are. It is beneficial to create a stockpile with raw metals like iron nearby. That way your settlers won’t have to run all the way to the other side of your colony to grab the materials.
Now we can start to process Iron at the smelting furnace. To melt down raw iron nuggets select the smelting furnace. You will see another menu appear at the bottom left of the screen. Here there are a few elements to check out. In the top left of this menu you will see a section titled Products. This is the area where you will tell your settlers what to create here. Find the Iron Ingot job and left-click it. This will add the job to the production queue.
Once a job is in the production queue of the production facility you can change some things about it. For example, there is a drop-down menu where you can decide how often you would like the job to take place. You can choose whether you want a specific amount of this item in stock at all times. You could decide you want only a fixed amount. What I usually do is set this to Forever. That was your colonists will continue to product iron ingots whenever they have time and the raw material to do so.
You can also melt down older items for metal here too. This is a great way to recycle armor and weapons you have collected from raids. Add the smelt items for metal job and press the Edit button to decide what types of items you will have your colonists melt down. If you have a lot of raids, you may never have to mine again!