Foundation — progression guide: the first ten hours, tier by tier

Foundation is a medieval city builder by Polymorph Games. Progress is gated twice over: a Progression Tree that spends gold and Influence on unlocks, and a set of Needs that decide whether your villagers stay happy enough to keep arriving. This guide is the numbers for both, plus the building costs and production ratios you actually need in the first few hours.

Everything numeric here comes from the official Foundation wiki (wiki.polymorph.games) and the game's own patch notes. Where two wiki pages disagree, it is flagged rather than guessed at.

What this is written for

• Game version: 1.11.0.19 — a hotfix released 28 July 2026 (it fixes transporters and production

workers losing access to a building's resources after the building was moved). The previous patch in the line was 1.11.0.18 on 8 July 2026, an AMD OpenGL texture workaround.

• Foundation: Harvest Festival, the first paid DLC, is announced for 8 October 2026 — new crops

and orchards, chickens, pigs and geese, new production chains, and Festival Grounds. It is not live at the time of writing, so nothing in this guide assumes it.

• The wiki does not publish a usable balance history for the 1.11 line, so changes made inside 1.11

beyond the patch notes quoted above are not documented anywhere readable.

The opening, in order

The game's tutorial quest chain is the cleanest statement of the intended build order. Its steps are:

1. Buy a starting territory. Only territories containing berries and stone are selectable; they

are the ones outlined in white. Everything else has to be bought later.

1. Place the Village Centre. It is one of only two buildings that build themselves instantly.
2. Place the Builder's Workshop (5 wood) — the other instant build — then assign 1–2 Builders to

it. Every later building needs Builders, resources and time.

1. Lumber Camp plus a Woodcutting zone painted over trees, and a Woodcutter assigned. Without the

zone the camp does nothing.

1. Gathering Hut for berries.
2. Paint a Residential zone. Houses appear on their own inside it and Builders build them.
3. Well for water.
4. Village Market with a Market Stall, a Market Tender assigned, and berries assigned to the

stall.

1. Give every villager a job and push happiness to 75. That is the immigration trigger.
2. Storage from the Progression Tree, then a Warehouse, then planks assigned to a Warehouse slot.
3. Open a trade route and allow the sale of planks.
4. Buy a second territory, then build a Manor House with a Great Hall — the Great Hall is what

unlocks the Mandates tab (villager promotion, levies, Administrator tasks).

There is one deliberate trap in that order: the Sawmill needs stone as well as wood, so the Stonecutter Camp has to come up before you can make planks.

What the Village Centre gives you

It also spawns the town's first 10 villagers, who are Serfs.

What the first buildings cost

Costs are construction materials plus any one-off coin cost; most of these are buildable with the starting stock if you do not waste tools.

The Progression Tree

The tree has four paths: the Common Path plus the three Estate paths of Labour, Kingdom and Clergy.

• Common Path tiers unlock on Prosperity (10 / 50 / 100 / 200) and individual technologies are

bought with gold coins (25 / 50 / 100 / 250 / 500 by tier).

• Estate tiers unlock on that Estate's Splendour (25 / 75 / 150 / 300) and technologies are bought

with that Estate's Influence (5 / 20 / 35 / 50 by tier).

Prosperity is not one number you can push directly — it is made up of wealth (highest monthly net income to date), number of territories, commerce rating (trade routes and their levels), population rating, Splendour (an average across your buildings' Splendour types), Beautification, and your gold reserves including treasury capacity. Most of it rises on its own as the town grows.

Splendour comes from monuments and their decorations, and it is what gates the Estate paths. Civic buildings (Manor House, Tavern, Market) give Labour Splendour, churches and monasteries give Clergy Splendour, military buildings give Kingdom Splendour. Only parts marked with a Splendour star in the build menu actually count — usually decorations, doors and the expensive main parts. Influence accrues over time in proportion to Splendour, and Splendour also caps how much Influence you can hold (at 0 Splendour, Influence is capped at 0).

Common Path by tier

Estate paths by tier

Production ratios

These are the game's own recipe figures, from each building's wiki page. "Best rank" is the rank at which the job is at maximum efficiency — a Serf in a Citizen-optimised job works, just slower.

Gathering buildings — Lumber Camp (wood), Stonecutter Camp (stone), Gathering Hut (berries), Hunter's Hut (boar), Fisher's Hut (fish), Wheat and Hop Farms (crop fields), Sheep and Dairy Farms (pastures), Quarries (gold ore, iron ore, marble, quartz, stone), Apiary (honey and wax), Vegetable Garden (vegetables), Vineyard (grapes) — have no published conversion ratio. Their rate depends on how much resource you paint into their zone, how far away it is, and how many workers you add. All large mines (mountains) slowly produce gems as a by-product, and every game contains at least one deposit of each mineral type; deposits must be prospected by a Bailiff before you know what is in them.

Production buildings stop working when their output storage hits its cap — 50 units for most buildings. After the relevant Improvement is unlocked, a Lumber Camp can add up to 5 Wooden Wagons (+10 storage each) and 3 Wood Depots (+25 each), and a Wheat Farm with every upgrade can hold 300 wheat and support 7 workers.

Storage, distance and the logistics rules

• A production building's own output store is normally 50; a full store halts production.
• A Granary or Warehouse starts with 4 slots of 100 units each. Up to 2 depots add 4 slots

each, for a maximum of 12 slots / 1,200 units. Each storage building can hold up to 4 Transporters, and slots can be set to Accept, Refuse, Stock Maximum or Empty Stock.

• A Market Hall (City Market) has 6 slots of 200 and can run 8 Transporters.
• Traders can only buy or sell from a Granary/Warehouse slot holding that resource — stock sitting in

the Village Centre, a production building, a Market Stall, or in transit is unavailable for trade.

• Workers looking for input resources go to the nearest source with a non-zero amount, and they do

not care how much is there. A slow production building nearby will keep drawing trips that return 3–4 units, while a warehouse with a full slot further away is ignored. Place external storage between the producer and the consumer, and put the storage nearer to the consumer than any producer.

• The scalable pattern is a two-tier chain: a primary storage near the producers with its slots set

to Accept, and a distribution hub near the consumers with the same resource set to Stock Maximum. The hub's Transporters do the long haul so the local Market Tenders do not have to.

Villager ranks, needs and promotion

Promotion is done from the Mandates tab, which requires a finished Great Hall. A villager cannot be promoted until their current Needs are satisfied, and promotion converts some Additional Needs into Essential Needs.

Read the costs as they are printed in the wiki's table: 20 gold on the Serf row is the price of moving a Serf up a rank, 100 gold on the Commoner row the price of the next step. Monastics are promoted with Manuscripts from the Monastic Scriptorium, not coins. Combatants promote for free, but a Militiaman must reach a strength level (weapons plus campaign experience) before becoming a Soldier, and you may only hold 1 Knight per 5 Soldiers.

Where each Need is satisfied:

The distinction that costs new players the most: Additional Needs are free to ignore — until the first time they are met. Once a villager can fill Entertainment or Goods, losing access to it makes them unhappy exactly like an Essential Need. You cannot reach 100% happiness without filling every Essential and Additional Need.

Immigration

A group of Newcomers arrives every week at the Village Centre and waits on a timer; accept them and they become Serfs. With happiness at or above 100% and no unemployment, a wave brings around 4–6 Newcomers. Immigration slows as unemployment rises and stops completely at roughly 10 unemployed villagers — unemployed Monastics and Combatants count the same as unemployed Villagers.

Housing: density and quality are separate systems

Houses are never placed by hand. Paint a Residential zone and foundations appear inside it; the house's shape is fixed when the foundation is laid. Villagers will only accept housing within 150 metres of their workplace, which is the usual cause of "my miner has no house" complaints.

• Density controls capacity: tier 1 = 2 occupants, tier 2 = 6, tier 3 = 10.
• Quality controls which rank can live there: Commoners need tier 2 quality, Citizens tier 3.
• Density upgrades need patrols from a Watchpost plus Light Fortification (tier 2) or **Heavy

Fortification (tier 3). Quality upgrades need a desirable neighbourhood plus Beautification (tier 2) and a paved road nearby** (tier 3). The two systems are independent — quality does not affect capacity and density does not affect who can live there.

Beautification comes from Common Decorations placed around a house — the 5-gold tier 2 decorations (Rose Bush, Terracotta Flower Vase) each give 1 Beautification, and stacking them multiplies the area of effect. A house turns green when it is sufficiently beautified. Decoration placed inside a Monument instead converts into that Estate's Splendour, which is the cheapest way to climb the Estate paths.

Zones

Nine zones exist. Six are on the paintbrush in the bottom toolbar; Reforestation, Patrol and Crop/Pasture are painted from the menu of the building that uses them.

Trade routes and prices

Trade routes are opened from the Trade Routes page of the Royal Book (F3). Unlock cost and allegiance:

Once open, a trader visits roughly every two weeks and trades up to the route's volume per resource — 25 at level 1. Volume upgrades need a monthly trade total with that city and are completed as Mandates (10 days each, assigned to the Bailiff, Monastic Emissary or Royal Courtier). A route only trades what you have flagged for import or export on the Resources page (F4), and only out of a Granary/Warehouse slot holding that resource.

Prices are fixed in every game. What each city buys from you (your income per unit):

What they sell to you, for the arbitrage worth knowing: Northbury sells Tools at 6 and collects planks at 1 and polished stone at 3; Myddle sells Coal at 2 and buys Tools at 3, which is what makes the iron chain affordable; Davenport sells Herbs at 6 and Common Wares at 8; Trotbury sells Stone at 3, Iron Ore at 3 and Coal at 2; Kinstone Abbey sells Cheese at 8; Castle Harbour sells Steel at 16 and Tools at 6.

Taxation

Taxes are stored in the buildings that generate them and are emptied into your treasury by Tax Collectors working from a Tax Office. A full building stops earning until a collector visits — the taxation tracker overlay in the Visibility menu shows what is about to overflow in red.

Residential taxes are the first type and are the only adjustable ones. The caps are 6 gold per Serf, 16 per Commoner and 36 per Citizen per collection at the highest rate, and a house can hold 10 coins per occupant (so a 6-occupant density-2 house holds 60). They are also the only taxes that cause a happiness penalty: −5% at the first level of tax, up to −150% at the highest.

Every other tax type is penalty-free for happiness, but implementing more than one type cuts your Labour Influence cap by 5 per additional type — five taxes means −20, the Labour Privilege "Additional Taxation" lets you run one more before the penalty starts.

Aspirations (the objective-based modes)

Choosing an Aspiration at game setup sets a quest chain and restrictions that force one Estate path. Each ends with an objective list; finishing it lifts all restrictions and the game continues as relaxed.

The intermediate quests are the useful part: the Labour chain walks you through building a Manor House with Great Hall, Tax Office and Bailiff Office, assigning a Bailiff and enacting Residential Taxes before it asks for 15 Commoners, 10 medium-density houses, a lodging-capable Tavern and 100 gold/month of tax profit. The Clergy chain starts by asking for 50 herbs sold via trade over 30 days, then a trade route with Kinstone Abbey.

What wastes your first ten hours

• Building the Sawmill before the Stonecutter Camp. Planks need stone. This is the first real

resource wall, and the tutorial does tell you.

• Promoting villagers on a whim. The wiki is explicit that the "Promote a Villager" advice appears

the first time any Serf has their Needs met, but that you will usually need several more industries before you can supply a Commoner. Monastics especially: only promote a Serf to a Commoner job you can actually feed, and delay Citizens — they drain a lot of resources.

• Forgetting that Additional Needs become Essential needs. Build the Entertainment and Goods supply

before the first villager ever gets them.

• Wasting tools. Tools are the bottleneck of the first hours: 40 of them in the starting stock and

every camp, sawmill and smith eats into them. The community guide's fix is to buy coal from Myddle, run the iron ore → iron → tools chain, and sell surplus tools back to Myddle, taking the Tools Edict early.

• Fences and boar. Boar spawn in deep forest and flee from cleared, noisy or built-up areas. A

community trick (written for 1.10.2.15, not verified on 1.11) is to fence a whole hunting territory and paint Hunting around its perimeter so boar migrate inward; if hunters go idle, pull the hunting zone's edge back in until they start working.

• Cheese is a dead end for a serf economy. There is no cheese Market Stall, so cheese is only worth

producing for trade or for later Tavern Meals.

• Walls that do not close. Fortification only covers an area if the wall forms a complete loop with

no gaps but gates — the blueprint shows blue stripes when it will work. Without it, houses never reach density 2, and buildings such as the Bailiff Office, Tax Office and Glass Smelter will not function.

• One giant Watchpost. Each extra Patroller adds less coverage than the last; the wiki advises

several small Watchposts of no more than about 5 Patrollers each.

• Scattered storage. Production caps at 50, and workers shop at the nearest non-zero source. Two

mid-sized storages between producers and consumers beat one big store far away.

• Buying territory too fast. The first extra territory is free, after that each one costs 100 gold

plus monthly upkeep that rises as the village grows. You cannot abandon a territory if doing so would split your land, and never the starting one.

• Expecting a full belt of immigrants. 4–6 newcomers a week, stopping at ~10 unemployed, means

"assign every villager a job" is not optional advice.

Conflicts and unverified numbers

• Starting gold: the Village Centre page (last edited 28 July 2026) says 500 gold coins; the

Starting a New Game page (last edited 7 July 2026) says 450. The newer page is used above. One of the two is stale.

• The first house's wood cost: the Housing table gives 11 wood for a tier 1 quality / tier 1

density house, while the Starting a New Game page says tier 1 houses cost 20 wood. The table is used above; treat the first house's cost as 11–20 wood rather than a single certain figure.

• The iron sword's name: the Swordsmith page says it produces a shortsword; the Buildings

summary table calls the same recipe Iron Sword. The recipe quantities agree (1 iron + 1 coal + 1 tools).

• Throughput per minute is not published anywhere readable. Recipe ratios are exact, but how many

units a building produces per day depends on distance, worker rank, pathing and the Workplace Production Time rule — no number is given here because no number could be sourced.

• The Steam community guide All serfs and no mercy was written for 1.10.2.15, one minor version

behind. Its hunting/fencing trick and its cheese and tools advice are experience, not game data.

Sources

Official Foundation wiki (wiki.polymorph.games), pages read as raw wikitext and rendered pages, current as of 2 October 2026:

• Progression Tree, tiers and costs: https://wiki.polymorph.games/foundation/Progression
• Building list with prerequisites, production and construction costs (the generated Buildings Summary

table): https://wiki.polymorph.games/foundation/Buildings

• Opening sequence and starting territory: .../Starting_a_New_Game, .../Village_Centre,

.../Builder's_Workshop, .../Territory

• Tutorial and advice quest order: .../Quests, objectives: .../Aspirations
• Ranks, needs and job optimisation: .../Villagers, .../Needs, .../Immigration
• Housing density and quality: .../Housing
• Zones: .../Zones; fortification: .../Fortification; mines: .../Mines
• Storage, transporters and slot settings: .../Resource_Logistics, .../Granary, .../Warehouse
• Recipes: the individual building pages — Sawmill, Stonemason_Hut, Charcoal_Hut, Butchery,

Windmill, Bakery, Cheesemaker, Weaver_Hut, Blacksmith, Iron_Smelter, Cooperage, Common_Wares_Workshop, Brewery, Gold_Smelter, Jeweller's_Workshop, Glass_Smelter, Candle_Workshop, Winery, Monastic_Kitchen, Tavern_Kitchen, Spearmaker's_Hut, Bowyer's_Hut, Swordsmith, Apiary, Vegetable_Garden, Vineyard, Provisioner, Quarries, Lumber_Camp, Wheat_Farm, Paviour's_Yard, Well, Fisher's_Hut, Granary

• Trade routes and prices: .../Trade; taxation rates: .../Taxation; Mandates: .../Mandates
• Decorations, Beautification and Splendour: .../Decorations
• Rulesets and rule toggles: .../Rulesets; maps: .../Maps
• Steam news feed for app 690830 (api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp) for the version and

patch history — Hotfix 1.11.0.19, 28 July 2026; Patch 1.11.0.18, 8 July 2026; Harvest Festival DLC announcement, 14 September 2026

• Community guide for trap-level play, written for 1.10.2.15:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443094529

Game version this guide was written for: Foundation 1.11.0.19.