Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic — Build Guide: the starter republic and the construction chain

This guide is about what to build, in what order, and in what quantities, to get a Soviet Republic from three empty fields to a working construction industry that builds itself. Every number below is a per-workday figure taken from the game's official wiki data tables, with the source page named for each group.

Two things decide whether a build works in this game: labour travel time and material throughput. Get those wrong and a perfectly-positioned factory sits idle forever.

What version this is written for

The current public build is 1.1.1.9, released 10 August 2026 — a combined patch that shipped 1.1.1.8 and 1.1.1.9 together. It is a content and bugfix patch: new vehicles (Tatra 24 trucks, Fi 626 garbage truck, Ford T, several trolleybuses), new buildings, vehicle speed buffs. It did not change the production ratios below. The one balance-adjacent item worth knowing is that modern nuclear production buildings and nuclear power plants now require the modern industry research, and the Zaporozie reactor requires it too.

The wiki's own data tables were last brought up to 1.1.1.7 (16 June 2026). The 1.1.1.7 patch notes include "rebalanced flat quality in base game brick houses" and "corrected grocery store storage capacities", so treat the housing quality percentages in this guide as one patch stale, while the material costs and resident counts have not been reported as changed.

The rule that decides every layout: travel time

Citizens are the only real labour supply, and they will not travel arbitrarily far.

• Walking range is a maximum of 480 m, and that is only achievable on the fastest footpath —

asphalt footpaths with streetlights, at 100% walk speed. Mixing in slower paths averages down; at 50% walk speed the range collapses to 240 m. (Citizens page)

• The Residential buildings page states citizens search for work and ways to satisfy their needs

within 400 m of their house. The older "How and why should I build footpaths?" answer still says "approx. 300m" — that text predates the current movement model.

• A citizen will stay inside a single vehicle for at most 4 hours. At that point they leave

the vehicle and teleport home. This is the hard cap on commuter distance.

• Total daily travel over 5 hours (waiting plus riding, excluding walking) reduces happiness.
• If a citizen waits more than 1 hour at a stop with no vehicle, they teleport home and give up

for the day; job-seekers are then marked unemployed until the next shift.

Practical consequence: put clean workplaces (food, clothing, shops, offices) inside or against the residential block, and push polluting plants (brick factory, cement plant, steel mill, chemical plant) out to where a bus or train can still do the round trip inside 4 hours. The wiki's own advice on the starter city is the same wording: keep the polluting factories far enough that a worker reaches them by bus or train "within a travel time of 4 hours".

Funding vs building it yourself

Two completely different games, and the choice is made per construction site:

• Funded (auto-build with Rubles or Dollars) — the building appears finished and ready almost

immediately. You pay the resource price plus a delivery fee that also scales with the distance to the nearest Customs House. Convenient and expensive.

• Build from resources — the site is placed, then handed to a Construction Office, which sends

vehicles to fetch materials from assigned source buildings and workers from bus platforms. This is the cheap route, and the only one available in Realistic mode.

The Construction Office is the building that matters most early. Its configuration is:

• Search radius: under 1000 m, 2000 m, or 3000 m — the radius in which it looks for

construction work when 'Auto search' is on.

• Construction types it will take on: Roads, Buildings, Footpaths, Conveyor/Pipelines, Factory

connections, Electric wiring. Turn off the ones you do not want it wasting trips on.

• Vehicles (12 parking spots and a 30 t internal fuel store on the standard office): dumper

(gravel, asphalt), open-hull (steel, bricks, prefab panels, boards), concrete mixer (concrete), bus (workers), covered-hull (mechanical and electro components), plus road/tower crane, excavator and bulldozer.

• Sources must be assigned per material, or nothing moves: gravel to an Aggregate storage or

Truck Aggregate Loading; asphalt to an Asphalt plant; concrete to a Concrete plant; steel, bricks, prefab panels and boards to an Open storage; mechanical and electro components to a Warehouse; workers to a public transport station.

The Construction Office has no storage of its own and no outside connections. Every material it delivers must come from a building you have explicitly named as a source.

Office sizes, by construction workdays: 6 parking spots 181 workdays, standard 12 spots 346, 16 spots 654, 24 spots 912. A free construction office exists (no power, 4 parking spots, no research or materials) and you may build at most seven of them. That is the cheapest possible start for a Realistic-mode opening.

Construction phases, and what replaces workers

Every phase needs manpower measured in workdays — one workday is what one worker adds in a full day. Excavators, bulldozers, asphalt pavers and rollers can produce workdays without any workers present, so a phase can complete with nobody on site. Cranes do not replace workers — they speed the phase up and some phases require one. Excavators and bulldozers used for terraforming must work within 1000 m of the ground being moved, and must be in a depot or Construction Office.

The starter city, in build order

The wiki's own Roadmap page lists twelve steps; compressed into what you actually place:

1. Pause the game and pick a spot. Weight three things: distance to the Soviet Customs

House (you start with more Rubles than Dollars, and a border-adjacent site cuts delivery fees), a visible raw material deposit nearby, and a river or lake downhill from your site for sewage — sewage flows downhill by nature.

1. Plan the whole starter city before placing anything. Stay in planning mode: housing,

bus platforms, the service buildings citizens need, then footpaths and roads.

1. Plan utilities last — power, water, sewage — if you enabled those settings. Then unpause.
2. Build the construction industry first, in this order: a Construction Office, then the

material producers you can afford. You cannot build anything else cheaply without it.

1. Import what is cheap, produce what is bulky. The wiki is explicit: most early materials are

really cheap to import and the expensive ones have long chains or need hundreds of workers. In particular, gravel has so little value that the time and starting money are better spent importing it — even though a gravel industry looks like the obvious first build.

1. Import the first consumer goods — food, clothing, meat, electronics — to stores and shopping

centres, and import water until you have a water chain.

1. Invite citizens from the Soviet bloc (paid in Rubles) rather than the third world

(Dollars), including some specialists.

1. Check, then export. Once supply lines hold, find something to sell through a Customs House,

or import a cheap intermediate and upgrade it — the wiki's example is importing Fabric and exporting Clothes.

The construction materials chain, with ratios

All figures are maxima per workday at full staffing, from the official wiki's generated factories table plus each building's own page.

Aggregates: quarried stone to gravel

Gravel quarry — 40 workers (small) or 100 workers (large), producing 3.5 t quarried stone per worker per day: 140 t/day small, 350 t/day large. Can be run by workers, by an excavator, or both; an excavator removes the worker requirement entirely. Fuel import 10 t (small) / 30 t (large), aggregate storage 20 t, but only 0.5 t of export storage, and just one road access and one loading station. Construction: 81 workdays, 0.82 t asphalt, 2.1 t boards, 4.8 t bricks, 1.3 t concrete, 1.0 t gravel, 0.88 t steel — the cheapest real building in the game.

Gravel processing plant — 15 workers, 120 t quarried stone → 82.5 t gravel per day (1.45 t stone per tonne of gravel). Small version: 5 workers, 40 t stone → 27 t gravel.

> Mine output is not the headline number. The wiki's mines table warns that actual production > must be multiplied by the resource quality at the location you place on.

Read the quarry's 0.5 t storage buffer together with its single loading station: the building sits idle most of the time because one dumper has to leave before the next can be loaded. Put the processing plant close, and do not run more than about two dumpers per quarry with "wait until fully loaded" enabled — otherwise the queue blocks the excavator from getting back to the face and stone production stops outright. Fixes: turn off the wait-until-loaded order, and make the quarry a refuelling point so excavators refuel on site.

Cement and concrete

Cement is stored in cement silos (270 t); concrete and asphalt cannot be stored at all — each plant holds a 0.5 t buffer, so both must leave by truck as they are made. Concrete needs cement mixers, asphalt needs dumpers. The concrete plant also needs water (85.1 m³/day consumption figure in its infobox; workers need quality above 55%).

Construction workdays: cement plant 5479, large cement plant 9054, concrete plant 2726 (its wiki building table is an unedited copy of the brick factory's — the workday count matches at 2726), asphalt plant 1441 (25 t concrete, 19 t gravel, 15 t asphalt, 40 t steel, 8.4 t mechanical components).

Asphalt is the gate that surprises people: it needs bitumen, which needs an Oil Refinery, which needs 500 workers and an oil supply. Until then, import bitumen or road-build with gravel.

Bricks and boards

Brick factory construction: 2726 workdays, 37 t gravel, 30 t steel, 49 t concrete, 30 t asphalt, 157 t bricks, 70 t boards — note it needs bricks to build, so your first bricks come from the Customs House.

Wood comes from a Woodcutting Post: 30 workers, 6.25 t wood per worker per day (187.5 t/day), 187 workday cost, 50 t open storage. Place it over trees — the placement overlay shows green squares for tree density, the same way mines show deposits. The wood then has to be trucked to the sawmill; the post itself does not fell anything until workers are there.

Prefab panels

Prefab panels factory — 65 workers, per the wiki's factories table 65 t gravel + 9.75 t cement → 71.5 t prefab panels per day: 0.909 t gravel and 0.136 t cement per tonne of panels.

> The factory's own wiki page states the cement figure twice and disagrees with itself: the > infobox says 33 t cement, the article text says 9.8 t cement for the same 65 t of gravel and > 71 t of panels. The generated table's value (9.75 t) matches the article text, so that is the > figure used here. Treat the infobox as wrong.

Panels cost 3236 workdays, 33 t concrete, 25 t gravel, 20 t asphalt, 55 t steel, 7.3 t mechanical components, 158 t bricks, 52 t boards to build. They are stored in open storage and hauled by open-hull trucks or forklifts. From 1.1.0.16, prefab panels, concrete railways and sewage systems are locked behind research — see the research section.

Steel

The steel mill's inputs are the single most disputed number on the wiki, and both of its own pages disagree with each other:

• The Buildings generated factories table: 200 t iron + 375 t coal → 40 t steel per workday

(5 t iron and 9.375 t coal per tonne of steel).

• The Steel mill page: 200 t iron + 357 t coal → 43 t steel per workday (4.65 t iron and

8.30 t coal per tonne).

Both variants agree on the shape of the thing — a steel mill is a coal monster that wants roughly five tonnes of iron and eight to nine tonnes of coal per tonne of steel, and 500 workers. Plan your coal industry around the mill, not around your power plant. The page also lists 33 MWh/day of power draw and a 48 MWh maximum, and only 150 t of internal steel storage, so steel backs up and stalls the mill unless open storage is attached.

Building costs: steel mill 9553 workdays, 142 t gravel, 241 t steel, 484 t concrete, 113 t asphalt, 32 t mechanical components, 47 t boards, 141 t bricks. Iron ore processing plant 4122 workdays; coal ore processing plant 4122 workdays. Coal, iron and oil deposits are only visible on the minimap once the geological mapping technology is researched, unless you started with research disabled.

The whole chain in one ratio table

Per 1 tonne of finished material, from the wiki's per-workday figures:

How many plants you actually need

The numbers do not balance themselves. At full rate:

• One cement plant eats 210 t gravel/day. One concrete plant eats another 135 t gravel/day.

Together that is 345 t gravel/day — 4.2 gravel processing plants (82.5 t/day each), which in turn want about 502 t of quarried stone/day, or 1.4 large gravel quarries at 350 t/day.

• One 82.5 t/day gravel plant only makes 31.8 t of cement's worth of gravel. Building a cement

plant before you have gravel capacity means a plant that runs at a third of its rate.

• Feeding a steel mill at 40 t/day needs 200 t iron/day, which is 429 t iron ore/day — that is a

large chunk of one 1000 t/day iron mine plus a quarter of your coal processing output.

Build the aggregate side first and overbuild it. Gravel is the resource every other construction material is made of.

Power

Optional, and only present if Energy management is enabled in the game settings. If it is, these are the generators:

A coal power plant costs 7635 workdays, 113 t asphalt, 871 t concrete, 142 t gravel, 287 t steel, 7.3 t mechanical components and 3.7 t electro components — a serious mid-game project, and the reason wind and imported power carry most early republics. Wind needs no workers and no fuel but is intermittent; solar needs workers and produces nothing at night. Plants produce only what the grid demands, so a 1400 MWh plant idles down to a 3.4 MW draw.

Distribution rules:

• Electric substation: 2.5 MW output, one medium-voltage connection, feeds buildings up to

325 m away. That radius defines the grain of your city — a substation every ~300 m.

• Power transformer: takes one high-voltage connection and splits it into 6 medium-voltage

connections, 18 MW.

• High-voltage wire types carry 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15 and 18 MW; underground 5, 7, 12 MW.
• Medium-voltage wire types carry 0.65, 1.2, 1.5 and 2.35 MW; underground 0.5, 0.95, 1.45 MW.
• Switches do not switch. They are interconnections only, and each switch reduces the voltage,

so lines with switches cannot carry power as far. Priority switches do work: power is drawn from the higher-priority source first, which is how you put wind or solar ahead of a coal plant.

• Power plant switch yards output power only; they cannot pass power through like a switch.
• A Foreign power connection at the border can import or export, not both at once, and you only

pay for what you actually draw.

• The steel mill and aluminium plant take a direct high-voltage connection rather than a substation.

Food and farming

Citizens need food, meat and alcohol. Two farm types, and fields are separate buildings:

The wiki marks its own field-yield table as outdated and "needs to be checked again": it was written before seasons were added, when fields could be harvested repeatedly. With seasons on, fields are sown in spring and harvested once in autumn, and the accompanying pre-seasons figures (about 53 days to grow, small field ~10 t, medium ~40 t, large ~120 t) describe a world that no longer exists. Plan your food chain around one harvest a year, not a daily yield.

Fields need no workers at all — vehicles alone can sow and harvest them — and they do not need a farm assigned unless you want vehicles working them automatically. A field can only be worked by one sowing/harvesting vehicle at a time and can only be assigned to one farm. Fields start at 70% fertility and rise slowly; you raise it faster with fertiliser, applied by a tractor from the farm, which never needs to reload because it applies fertiliser directly as it goes. Set the minimum fertility threshold in the farm's window.

The food factory needs water at 97% quality or better; the distillery 95%; the livestock farm 93% for its animals and 97% for its workers. Ignore this and the plants stop.

Housing: cost per resident

Apartments are the cheapest thing you can build and the limit on everything else. Selected from the wiki's Residential buildings page:

Brick housing is roughly two to three times the workdays per resident of prefab, and prefab is gated behind the panels research chain. The type 464 — the khrushchevka — is the cheapest capacity in the game per workday and the wiki says so plainly: "very cheap and fast to build... good population capacity, but a shoddy quality." Since 1.1.1.7 rebalanced brick house quality, check the in-game figures before committing to a brick-only opening.

Buildings don't need to share a region with their occupants — citizens teleport across the map when moving in, so you never need a road from an apartment to its first residents. Keep at least one empty building in a city at all times, or children who turn 21 while living with their parents have nowhere to move and tend to leave. Each apartment also needs electricity (3–20 MWh/day), a heat connection, and 0.84–15.17 m³/day of water.

Research order and costs

Research is optional (a game setting) and is done at the Technical University, the Medical university, or the Headquarters of the Communist Party. Cost is in workdays, and it gates buildings — you cannot build a steel mill at all without the Steel production project.

The unlocks that actually stop you:

The long tail, for planning: Semiconductors 1100 → Electronic circuits 1800 → (Plastics 1700); Bauxite study 1300 → Bauxite purification 1900 → Aluminium oxide 2000 → Manufacturing aluminium 2200; Uranium mining 1900 → Uranium separation 2000 → Uranium enrichment 2500 → Nuclear fuel 3700 → RBMK reactor 3000 → Nuclear power plant project 3200 (plus Faculty of nuclear sciences 1700).

Note the ordering trap: Prefab panels construction costs 1200 workdays before you can build the factory, and panels are what make housing cheap. If you intend a prefab city, start the concrete and panels research before you need the housing, not after.

Connection rules that break builds

These are the mechanics that silently stop a production line:

• Storages and warehouses are passive. They cannot push or take resources. Factory A → Storage

A → Storage B → Factory B does not work: Factory A fills Storage A and stops, because nothing moves it onward to Storage B. Factory A → Storage → Factory B does work.

• Conveyors need engines between buildings, and pipelines need pumping stations, or the same

passivity problem applies. Both also have a maximum single-span length that engines/pumps extend.

• Factory connections are short automatic links between two adjacent buildings, drawn between

their resource connection points. Use them to bolt a warehouse or open storage onto a factory and extend its internal buffers for free. Only resources that live in open storage or warehouse storage travel this way.

• Forklifts are what move goods along a factory-connection network when it gets complex, or

when buildings are further apart via factory connection crossings. Buy forklifts in a Forklift garage and assign per building what to load and unload. Forklift garages also connect to the road network for construction and refuelling.

• Aggregate loading is slow unless you use a Truck Aggregate Loading / Unloading station;

road vehicles can technically load straight from the source building, but the wiki is blunt that it is much slower.

• Buildings with no road connection (playgrounds, statues) still need work access — connect them

to a road with a footpath, and the Construction Office can build them.

Traps that eat the first ten hours

• Building the gravel industry too early. The wiki says it outright: gravel is worth so little

that importing it is better use of your opening money. The quarry's 0.5 t buffer and single loading bay mean it produces in bursts and idles the rest of the time.

• Brick factory, cement plant, concrete plant in that order. Each one needs bricks or cement

to construct. Your first bricks and cement come from the Customs House.

• Asphalt before bitumen. Roads and half the buildings want asphalt; asphalt wants bitumen;

bitumen wants a 500-worker refinery. Import bitumen early.

• Coal is the bottleneck you don't see. A steel mill wants roughly 357–375 t of coal a day. One

coal ore processing plant makes 120 t of coal a day, which is 1.75 t of ore per tonne of coal to feed it. Coal also feeds bricks (0.662 t per tonne) and cement (0.278 t per tonne) and the power plant (24 t/day). Add it all up before you build the mill.

• Unassigned construction sources. A Construction Office with vehicles and no named source

buildings does nothing at all. Assign every material you expect it to deliver.

• Forgetting the heat and water connections. Apartments and factories have heat tanks and daily

water draws. A city with power but no heat loses happiness in winter and stops producing.

• Planning a long commute. Four hours in a single vehicle is a hard ceiling. If your steel mill

is across the map from the housing, the workers simply do not arrive — and if there is no vehicle within an hour's wait, they go home and register as unemployed.

• Letting a mine run at poor location quality. Actual mine output is the headline rate

multiplied by the deposit quality where you placed it. Read the placement overlay before you commit the build.

• Believing the wiki's field table. It is flagged outdated by the wiki itself, pre-seasons.

With seasons on you get one harvest a year.

• Power switches that don't switch. Only priority switches route power by preference; ordinary

switches are just junctions, and each one shortens the usable line.

Sources

All game data was read from the official Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Official Wiki (wiki.hoodedhorse.com), as raw wikitext through api.php?action=parse&prop=wikitext, on 2 October

1. Pages used:

• Buildings — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Buildings (the

generated Mines, Factories, Powerplants, Storage and Fields data tables; the field table is marked outdated by the wiki)

• Gravel quarry — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Gravel_quarry
• Gravel processing plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Gravel_processing_plant
• Cement plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Cement_plant
• Concrete plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Concrete_plant
• Asphalt plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Asphalt_plant
• Brick factory — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Brick_factory
• Prefab panels factory — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Prefab_panels_factory
• Steel mill — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Steel_mill
• Iron ore processing plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Iron_ore_processing_plant
• Coal ore processing plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Coal_ore_processing_plant
• Coal mine — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Coal_mine
• Woodcutting Post — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Woodcutting_Post
• Chemical plant — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Chemical_plant
• Distillery — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Distillery
• Farming — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Farming
• Electricity — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Electricity
• Research — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Research
• Construction — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Construction
• Construction office — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Construction_office
• Residential buildings — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Residential_buildings
• Citizens — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Citizens
• Resources — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Resources
• Roadmap building a republic — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Roadmap_building_a_republic
• Questions and answers — https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Workers_Resources_Soviet_Republic/Questions_and_answers

Version and patch history: Steam news for app 784150, Update 1.1.1.9 (10 August 2026), Update 1.1.1.7 (16 June 2026) and the Hooded Horse August 2026 sale roundup — https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/784150

Game version: 1.1.1.9 (10 August 2026). The wiki's data tables were last updated for 1.1.1.7.

Known unverified or contradictory figures, listed rather than papered over:

• Steel mill inputs — the wiki's factories table says 200 t iron + 375 t coal → 40 t steel per

workday; the steel mill page says 200 t iron + 357 t coal → 43 t steel. Neither is marked as current for 1.1.1.9, and no in-game data export was available to settle it. Both are given above.

• Prefab panels factory cement input — infobox says 33 t/day, article text says 9.8 t/day, the

generated table says 9.75 t/day. Used 9.75 t; the infobox appears to be wrong.

• Chemical plant worker count — 60 on its own page, 50 in the generated factories table.
• Walking range — three different figures appear across the wiki: 480 m (Citizens page, maximum

on the fastest footpath), 400 m (Residential buildings page, citizens' search radius) and "approx. 300m" (an older answer in the Q&A). The 300 m text is stale; design to 300–400 m.

• Field yields — the wiki's own field table is explicitly flagged as outdated since seasons

were introduced, and states the numbers "need to be checked again". The per-hectare yields above are reported as the wiki has them, not as verified current values.

• Concrete plant construction cost — its building table duplicates the brick factory's

(2726 workdays, 157 t bricks, 70 t boards). The workday count is consistent with the other small plants, but the material list should be treated as suspect.

• Housing quality percentages — 1.1.1.7 "rebalanced flat quality in base game brick houses",

after the wiki's data snapshot. Brick-house quality may have shifted.

• Slaughterhouse — the meat chain has no wiki page at all, so no livestock→meat ratio is stated

here. The generated factories table's slaughterhouse row is column-shifted and cannot be read reliably.

• Farm crop production — the wiki's farms table lists the same production figure, "Crops 10 t",

for the small, medium and large farm, with an asterisk that has no footnote anywhere on the page, while their crop storages differ (40 / 76 / 144 t). The 10 t/day figure may well be the small farm's, copied across. Not verified.