Kingdoms Reborn — Progression Guide: The Four Ages, Tech Order and Building Costs

Kingdoms Reborn is Earthshine's card-drawn city builder: you place a Townhall, draw buildings from a deck, and pull a medieval hamlet up through four ages into an industrial empire. The gates between those ages are hard numbers — house levels, science totals, and a resource chain that has to be built in the right order or the town freezes and starves in its first winter. This guide is that order, with the costs, ratios, prerequisites and unlock thresholds behind it.

Read the version section first. The best data source for this game is its Fandom wiki, whose building-data page was last edited 16 July 2025, and the live build has moved twice since — one of those moves changed how houses upgrade and what they eat. Every place that matters is flagged below rather than smoothed over.

What Version This Is Written For

Data currencies, because they matter:

What the 17 February 2026 update changed (verbatim from the patch notes, and these override anything the wiki says about consumption):

• Beer is required to upgrade House Level 1.
• Beer consumption increases with each house level.
• Tools consumption +50%.
• x2 immigrants from the Immigration Office.
• Duchies got a full art revamp; the original Duchy continues as the "Classic" faction.

So the wiki's house-upgrade and consumption tables describe the pre-February-2026 game. Where I quote them below I say so.

The Year Clock

Everything in this game is paced by a 30-minute year, and farms only run for part of it.

• Spring: farmers seed and nourish. Autumn: they harvest. Winter: all crops still standing are destroyed, and Farms and Fruit Gatherers stop producing. Other production buildings may also pause in winter.
• The card draw timer ticks every 150 seconds (one third of a season) and adds a new card to your draw hand, so a year is also 12 card draws.

Before You Place the Townhall: The Map Settings That Decide Your Start

The world generator settings are the cheapest advantage available and the only ones you can change after seeing the result.

Province type is the other half of your start. Forest is described in-game as the ideal starting biome; Grassland is ranching country; Savanna feeds Hunting Lodges; Jungle has good Forester/Fruit Gatherer land but warmer winters and heavy disease; Tundra and Boreal Forest are mostly colony land; Desert is for mining (gemstone deposits). Disease frequency is stated per province as 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 per year, and citizens need that many medicines per citizen, per year — the wiki's table puts Jungle at 3.0 while its prose calls Jungle and Desert "twice as high", so check the figure on your own province panel. Mines must be built inside the province that holds the deposit, and deposits deplete.

Claiming a province costs gold; a province occupied by a minor settlement has to be razed first. Colonial provinces (disconnected, on water) require the Colonization tech and cost twice as much to claim.

Faction Choice

The Emirates penalty is the one that bites: every building that normally costs Wood costs Clay instead, and your wood-cutting yield is halved — so in a forest start you are working against your own faction. Norsemen are the low-variance pick: wood is the material every early building wants, and +30% yield on it compounds. Duchies' Wheat Seeds card removes a whole tech purchase from the opening.

Unique buildings and wonders by faction, since they are progression milestones with big costs:

The Dark Age: The Actual Opening Sequence

The Townhall is the first thing you build and the only building that cannot be destroyed. It occupies 12x12 plus a 12x1 road ring and a 12x4 storage yard, so clearing that footprint is the first decision you make. Do not skimp on the flat land around it — later Townhall levels and the buildings that serve it need room.

The order below is the one the resource chains force you into. Costs are the wiki's building-data values; Duchies pay Wood, Emirates pay Clay on most of these.

1. Townhall — free, cannot be destroyed. Gives 1 global-card slot and, from level 2, military training.
2. Houses — 10 Wood each (20 Clay for Emirates). Housing capacity is what converts immigrants into population, and house levels are the gate on every age.
3. Dirt Road — free, laid by laborers, +20% movement speed. Slow citizens are the single most underrated cause of a stalled early town.
4. Food, two sources minimum — Fishing Lodge (100 Wood, 2 workers, 11 Fish, must be 4x4 on water), Fruit Gatherer (30 Wood, 2 workers, range 22, fruit stops in winter), Hunting Lodge (30 Wood, 2 workers, Meat and Leather). Do not rely on one of them: Fruit Gatherers stop in winter and Fishing Lodges need coastline.
5. Quarry — 65 Wood, 4 workers (8 when upgraded). Stone is behind half the early unlocks and mountains are finite.
6. Charcoal Burner — 25 Wood, 2 workers, upkeep 10. It takes 10 Wood → 21 Coal, and the wiki's own annual figures for it are 362/yr on its own page and 319/yr on the Coal page — treat throughput as variable. What matters is the second half of its description: Coal provides x2 heat when heating houses.
7. Forester — 50 Wood + 50 Stone, 2 workers, range 29, 3 Wood per tree. This is what stops your forest from becoming a bald patch.
8. Tavern — 40 Wood + 40 Stone, range 30 tiles, base Service quality 50. Entertainment happiness, and happiness feeds productivity.
9. Research — Foreign Trade (64) and Medicine Farming (64) open the tree; then Pottery, Furniture and Beer Brewing at 129 each.
10. Stone Tools Shop — 20 Stone, 2 workers, 16 Stone → 9 Stone Tools. Tools are consumed by your workforce, and the February 2026 patch raised tool consumption by 50%, so this is now closer to mandatory than optional.
11. Storage Yard and later Warehouse — storage is where hauling bottlenecks show up first.

Two Dark Age details that are easy to miss:

• The wiki's Dark Age page gives Foreign Trade and Medicine Farming at 70 science and the follow-ups at 161, while the newer Technology page gives 64 and 129. The numbers below use the Technology table; treat the Dark Age figures as ±10%.
• Researching Pottery, Furniture or Beer Brewing is what unlocks the Upgrade tree (the slot-card bonuses), which is separate from the tech tree.

Heat Is the First Real Threat

Houses need fuel. Wood burns, and Coal burns at double the heat per unit, which is why the Charcoal Burner (10 Wood → 21 Coal) is the highest-value early building after food.

The trap: the Charcoal Burner has a 25-tile diameter in which it applies −9.2% house appeal and −1.9% service quality to entertainment buildings, and those penalties stack with every other industry building in range. Appeal below 70% is a hard ceiling on house upgrades. Build industry downwind of housing, not next to it.

Two upgrades exist to soften the fuel economy: Chimney Restrictor (Wood/Coal gives 15% more heat) and Coal Treatment (Coal gives 20% more heat), plus biome cards like Winter Resistance (+30% heat from Wood and Coal).

The Age Gates

Conflict flag: the wiki's per-age pages are older and disagree. The 2022 Middle Age page says 370 science, the 2022 Enlightenment Age page says 4,501, and the 2023 Industrial Age page says 80 houses at level 6 and 125,948. The house-count requirements above match the newer Technology and House Upgrade Unlocks tables; the science costs above are the individual tech prices from the 2024 Technology table. If your game's numbers differ, trust the in-game tech panel.

Townhall upgrades themselves:

Each Townhall level also adds income, and level-ups are when you pick a biome bonus (from the ground under the Townhall) and your era bonus (two options per age — e.g. Middle Age offers Geologist, Agriculturalist, Craftsmanship, Alcohol Appreciation). These picks are permanent, so read them before clicking.

The Science Economy

Science is the pacing resource for the whole run, and its formula rewards variety over volume.

The leverage here is the word unique. Ten barrels of Beer in a house give the same science as one: what pays is the number of distinct luxuries a house can consume, which means the progression goal in every age is a wider luxury shelf, not a taller one.

The Tech Ladder, Column by Column

The wiki's tech table prices technologies in a clean doubling ladder. Knowing the ladder tells you how much science an age really costs you.

Dark Age

The faction split on that last row is written differently on different wiki pages — the Buildings page lists Forester, Pig Ranch and Mushroom Farm as default for Duchies, Norsemen and Shogunate while the Technology table slots Forester into the Emirates row. Treat the faction tag on column 2 as approximate; the tech names and costs are not in doubt.

Middle Age

Column 3 (261 each):

Column 4 (529 each):

Column 5 (1,073 each):

Enlightenment Age

Column 6 (2,178 each):

Column 7 (4,421 each):

Column 8 (8,974 each):

Column 9 (18,217 each):

Industrial Age

Column 10 (36,980 each):

Column 11 (75,069 each): Paper Mill (Industrialization), Cotton Mill (Industrialization), Card Combiner (Scientific Theories — combines building-slot cards into a better one), Fertilizers (Seed Selection, +10% farm productivity), Clock Makers (Jewelry Crafting + Scientific Theories, Pocket Watch from Glass + Gold Bars), Electronics Factory (Shogunate; Electricity + Industrialization).

Column 12 (152,390 each): World Trade Office (Cotton Mill + Clock Makers + Card Combiner), Petroleum (Electricity — Oil Rig and Oil Power Plant), Printing Press (Electricity + Paper Mill).

Column 13 (300,000 each): Victory Score, Economics Theories (+20% house income), Social Science (Motivation and Passion cards at the Scholars Office), and the fourth-tier faction wonders — Exhibition Hall, Great Mosque, Basilica, Himeji Palace, El Dorado — each requiring 80 houses at level 8 plus World Trade Office.

The card-tech names in the wiki table (Motivation, Passion, Productivity Book, Sustainability Book, Trading Company and so on) are the science-tier upgrades that grant slot cards; the exact per-card science costs are only partly published, so they are listed without prices rather than padded with guesses.

Houses: The Engine of Every Age Gate

Every age gate in this game is a house-level gate. Nothing else in the tech tree matters if your houses are stuck at level 2.

Luxury tiers — a house can only use a tier once it reaches the level shown:

• Tier 1 (level 1+): Beer, Cannabis, Furniture, Pottery, Tulip, Sake
• Tier 2 (level 3+): Clothes, Wine, Candles, Vodka, Spices, Tequila, Magic Mushroom, Coffee, Glassware, Carpet, Honey Mead, Green Tea, Bonsai
• Tier 3 (level 5+): Book, Fashionable Clothes, Jewelry, Chocolate, Pocket Watch, Toilet Paper, Electronic Gadgets

Gate counts — how many houses at what level each tech wants (from the wiki's House Upgrade Unlocks page, which is consistent with the tech table above):

The wiki's own table of how many luxuries of each tier a house needs per upgrade is malformed in the wikitext (its rowspans are broken), so I have not reproduced it. What is reliably stated and consistent everywhere: tier 1 unlocks at level 1, tier 2 at level 3, tier 3 at level 5, and appeal thresholds 70 / 80 / 90% gate the upper levels.

Production Ratios That Matter

Input → output per production cycle at base (no upgrades, no cards, no bonuses), with worker counts. Duchies/Emirates build costs are shown where the data distinguishes them.

Annual throughput, where the wiki publishes it and where it is worth knowing: Sheep Ranch ≈ 300 Meat + 300 Wool per year at full 15/15 efficiency (≈135 Wool at 7/15); Charcoal Burner ≈ 319–362 Coal/yr depending on which wiki page you read; Coal Mine ≈ 525 Coal/yr on a finite deposit; Advanced Charcoal Burner ≈ 2,294 Coal/yr using 1 Wood per 2.69 Coal against the base Burner's 1 per 2.1.

Farm rules, because farms are their own little system:

Farmers seed the leftmost column bottom-up, then move one column over; a second farmer starts on the third column. Nourishing can be skipped when the first plant is already grown, and on the current test build farmers switch to harvesting when seeding/nourishing has run out of time. Crops still standing when winter arrives are destroyed.

Building Costs by Era

Costs are the wiki's building data; "Wood/Clay" means Duchies pay Wood and Emirates pay Clay. Workers are base values with the upgraded figure in brackets where known.

Dark Age and default

Middle Age

Enlightenment Age

Industrial Age

Labour: Laborers, Builders and Jobs

The employment model is the thing new players break first.

• Free Laborers move goods between production buildings, farms, storage and warehouses, and carry building materials to construction sites. If this number hits zero, deliveries stop and nothing gets built. The game recommends always keeping free laborers.
• Assigned Builders are taken from free laborers. Builders can only be set manually when you have zero free laborers.
• Employed is the number of citizens working production buildings and farms against the number of jobs you have created. In winter the first number always drops below the second, because farms and some industry stop — that is normal, not a bug.
• Outside winter, if employed is persistently below available jobs, you need more citizens: build more houses, use the Immigration Office (which now brings 2x immigrants after the February 2026 patch), or the Immigration Act action card.
• The Employment Bureau is a free system card awarded once you have 6 production buildings. It is the screen for setting job priority: when you are short of citizens, move the buildings that must not idle to the top. Manual laborers and builders are taken from the buildings lowest on that list, so priority order is not cosmetic.
• Immigration Office upgrades are pure throughput: level upgrades in each age raise work speed 15%/10%/10%, Immigrant's Dream gives +2% productivity per point of average happiness above 75%, and First Impression is +20% productivity outright.

Traps That Cost the First Ten Hours

1. Building industry next to housing. The Charcoal Burner's 25-tile radius costs houses −9.2% appeal and entertainment buildings −1.9% service quality, and the penalty stacks with every other industry building nearby. Appeal under 70% freezes house upgrades, which freezes your age progression.
2. Only one food source. Fruit Gatherers stop in winter and Fishing Lodges need water. Two sources minimum before the first winter.
3. Burning wood instead of coal for heat. Coal gives twice the heat per unit, and 10 Wood becomes 21 Coal. The Charcoal Burner pays for itself in fuel alone.
4. No free laborers. Set performance aside — with zero free laborers nothing is hauled and nothing is built. Watch this number, not just unemployment.
5. Ignoring tools. The February 2026 patch raised tools consumption by 50%. A town with no tools production grinds to a halt in a way that looks like a hauling bug.
6. Over-sizing farms. Farms cap at 500 tiles but the eighth worker only starts at 448; anything above 448 tiles wastes a citizen, and every farm wants 1 worker per 64 tiles.
7. Setting mountain density low. Stone, Coal, Iron and Gold all come from mountains. Low density makes the early game significantly harder, and deposits deplete.
8. Mining outside the deposit's province. Mines must sit inside the province that holds the deposit, so a quarry across the border is a wasted card.
9. Chasing depth instead of breadth in luxuries. Science scales with the number of unique luxuries a house can consume, not the quantity. A second type of luxury is worth far more than more of the first.
10. Rerolling the draw deck carelessly. The first reroll is free; every reroll after that costs +10 gold more than the last. The deck stacks to a maximum of 3 draws, you may hold at most 7 cards, and rewards (province shrines, crates, tribes, tech) need a free hand slot or they are lost.
11. Missing province rewards. Claiming a province with an Ancient Shrine, Crates or a Tribe pays out cards and population — but only if you have the hand space.
12. Forgetting winter's employment dip. Every winter the employed/jobs gap opens. If you read that as a crisis and over-build, you will have idle jobs all summer.

What Is Verified and What Is Not

Verified from the sources below: the tech tree names, prerequisites and science costs; age requirements and Townhall levels; every building cost, worker count, upkeep and input/output ratio in the tables above; crop yields and fertility sensitivity; farm sizing rules; the season clock; province-type mechanics; the labour model; the February 2026 patch changes.

Flagged rather than filled in:

• Science cost conflicts. The wiki's 2022–2023 age pages give different numbers (370 for Middle Age techs, 4,501 for Enlightenment, 80 level-6 houses for Industrial) than the newer tables used here. I used the newer tables.
• Dark Age tech prices are 64/129 in the 2024 Technology table and 70/161 in the Dark Age page.
• Charcoal Burner annual output is 362/yr on its own page and 319/yr on the Coal page. Both are wiki editor figures; only the 10 Wood → 21 Coal ratio is stated as a base-building output.
• Storage Yard cost appears in the building-data module as "2 × Storage Space" in wood, which is not a usable number, so it is not quoted.
• The luxury-per-upgrade quantity table on the House Upgrade Unlocks page is malformed in the source wikitext and is not reproduced.
• Faction tags on some tech rows differ between the Buildings and Technology pages, and Carpet Trade is described as unlocking the Candle Maker on the wiki, which looks like a copy-paste error.
• All per-card science prices for the upgrade/slot-card techs are only partly published, so those techs are listed by name and effect without costs.
• Anything about consumption per house is pre-February-2026 on the wiki; the current build changed beer and tool consumption and I have no published numbers for the new values.

Sources

• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Technology (tech tree, prerequisites, science costs — rev 9 May 2024)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Module:Buildingdata/data (build costs, workers, consumption, production, upkeep, sizes — rev 16 July 2025) and its wrapper https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Template:Bd and https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Module:Buildingdata
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Buildings (which build unlocks in which age, per faction — rev 5 July 2023)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Townhall (levels, costs, global card slots, starting cards, biome and era bonuses — rev 25 August 2025)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/House_Upgrade_Unlocks (house-level gates, appeal thresholds, luxury tiers — rev 5 August 2023)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Farm (crop yields, fertility sensitivity, worker-per-tile rule, farming mechanics — rev 18 October 2025)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Science (science per resident and per unique luxury)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Charcoal_Burner and https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Coal (wood-to-coal ratio, heat multiplier, appeal penalty radius, coal output comparisons — revs May 2024)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Cards_System (draw deck size, timer, stacking, reroll costs, hand limit)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Employment_Bureau (laborers, builders, jobs, job priority)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Seasons (150-second months, 450-second seasons, farm calendar)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Generate_world (map settings)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Province_Types (province types, disease frequency, deposits, claiming costs, colonial penalty)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Factions (faction start bonuses, unique buildings and wonders — rev 26 December 2024)
• https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Upgrades, https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Age, https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Middle_Age, https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Enlightenment_Age, https://kingdomsreborn.fandom.com/wiki/Industrial_Age (older age pages, used for context and for flagging conflicts)
• Steam news API, app 1307890 — "Major Update: Apocalyptic Map and Decoration System", 17 February 2026 (beer required for House Level 1, beer consumption scaling, +50% tools consumption, 2x immigrants, Classic faction)
• SteamCMD app-info API, app 1307890 — public branch build 21894337

Game version this guide was written for: Kingdoms Reborn, Steam public build 21894337 (17 February 2026, "Apocalyptic Map and Decoration System"), Early Access. Wiki data reflects builds from mid-2025 and earlier.