Patron Tips & Tricks: A Beginners Guide to Patron

Patron is the latest city builder to be released on Steam. However, the game’s tutorial isn’t as detailed as we would have liked, leaving a lot to be picked up by trial and error. We’ve learned from our mistakes to create the ultimate Patron beginners guide.

There are lots of little tips and tricks in Patron which can help you to build your town and keep your population growing and healthy.

1. Hide Trees to Help You Build

Although it’s a simple Patron tip, this is probably one of the most useful features I’ve come across.

Sometimes when building in or near the forest, it can be a pain to see where paths are being placed. Trees can often obscure your view, making it very hard to get right.

By pressing T, you can toggle trees on and off, meaning that you will be able to see what you’re building much easier.

2. Build Signposts Everywhere

Logistics is one of the most important things in any city management game. With Patron being so difficult at the start, you will want goods moving around as quickly as possible.

Making sure that you have signposts everywhere will ensure that your population moves around 5% quicker. While that’s not a huge boost, for the sake of one wood, it’s worth investing the time into building as many signposts as required.

3. Encourage Immigrants

If you’re new to Patron, immigration is a tough nut to crack. I mentioned this in my Patron review earlier this week, which is why I reached out to the development team to find out exactly what affects immigration in Patron.

• Have plenty of houses. The houses only hold one family, no matter the size. Having spare houses will encourage more people to join your settlement
• Build houses close to workplaces. The closer houses are placed, the more chances you have of attracting new people
• Upgrade your houses. The type of houses you build will also have an affect on how many immigrants join your city
• Resource stockpiles. A less obvious Patron trick is making sure you have enough resources in your city. If people can see your town is flourishing, they’re more likely to join
• Happiness. No one wants to move to a town or city where the people aren’t happy. Make sure religion, saftey, luxury items and other needs are met
• Decorations. Beautification items help keep your town happy, and as mentioned above, a happy town attracts more people
• Decrees. Once researched, decrees can be added to your townhall. There are immigration decrees that can increase immigration in Patron by 30%

Keep An Eye On Your Population

Of course when you first start playing Patron, having more immigrants is important. However, you will need to keep an eye on this. Make sure that you don’t get more people than you can handle. Ensure you always have enough housing as well as resources being produced to support them.

It can be very easy to suddenly start running out of firewood for example.

4. Upgrade Buildings & Reduce Costs

Most buildings have a set of upgrades that can be useful to cut costs. Some of these will reduce the cost of materials such as wood or tools, while others will reduce the number of coins the building’s upkeep costs.

Pressing L will open up the upgrades menu. Here you can see how many times each building has been upgraded, as well as how many upgrades are left.

There are also upgrades that improve the output of each building, these are worth keeping an eye on too.

5. Don’t Rush Your Research

In the first couple of play-throughs, I made the same mistake. I attempted to push research as quickly as possible, much like I would in Kingdoms Reborn.

Spend your money on upgrades, not research, and your city will be stockpiling resources in no time. This will also delay how quickly you will need to start meeting the needs of laborers and other classes above the peasant class.

6. Use Grid & Other Views

If you press G you will cycle through the different views in Patron. Each of these contains information that is valuable to make sure production is perfect in-game.

• Grid: This can be used to help you create perfect roads, hedges and other buildings, allowing you to follow the grid system for placement guidance
• Ore: This shows you where ore is located. At the moment, any mine or quarrywill work well in a green ore area, there are no resource specific ore areas
• Fertility: This will show you the ground’s fertility and help you to decide the most productive places to put farms

7. Choose The Right Map

Each map has pros and cons. If you’re a Patron beginner, I recommend starting with one of the easiest difficulty maps. Before committing too much time, load the map and investigate resources within the starting area.

This will help you to have an easier first run. Eventually, it might seem too easy, but to start with, it’s best to keep things simple. Learn the game and then choose a more challenging map, once you know what you’re doing.

8. Read The Manual

You might not have noticed, but in the game’s install directory there’s a handy game manual. Make sure to read through this and familiarize yourself with the game, before taking on the challenge of raising your own city.

9. Learn The Key Bindings

If you want to become an expert Patron gamer, learning the key bindings is essential. Some of the game’s graphs, views, and displays are mentioned in Patron’s short tutorial. However, there are still some that are not explained. Learning these can help you to manage your city much more effectively.

• G – Toggle Grid: This changes the view between the grid overlays
• P – Show Status: This shows or hides the pannel in the top left, which shows you resources and population
• I – Show Inventory: This gives you a detailed view of your current stock, it also allows you to create production caps
• J – Show Jobs Board: This panel allows you to control where people work
• U – Show Research Tree: This opens up the research tree, allowing you to research new technologies
• K – Show Townhall Panel: This opens the town hall window, which allows you to create decrees
• M – Show Minimap: Shows or hides the minimap
• V – Resident Panel: This shows detailed information about each of your cities residents, including growth and happiness
• O – Show Annual: This shows recent events, such as citizens becoming adults and new babies being born
• L – Show Buildings: This shows all your buildings, including there current upgrade levels
• T – Show / Hide Trees: This completely hides or shows all trees in the game, making building easier
• F1 – Quick Save: Saves the game, without needing to go to the menu
• F8 – Photo Mode: Alows you to fly around the city, without a UI to take screenshots
• Space – Pause: Pressing spacebar will quickly pass the games time, but still allows you to build and manage the city
• H – Townhall: This will move the camera over to your townhall
• 1-4 – Speed: Pressing between 1 to 4 will change the games speed

There are some handy information panels in Patron, which you might not have noticed even exist. These are definitely useful, so remember the key bindings and start taking a deeper look at how your city runs.

10. Stock Various Food Types

Happiness is a huge part of success in Patron. Food has a big impact on happiness, so make sure to produce plenty of different types of food.

Fishing huts, for example, can be changed to farm crabs, adding another type of food to your stockpiles. Try and make sure that you have multiple food production buildings, all set to produce unique types of food.

11. Empty Buildings Are Free

There are times where you won’t need a particular building anymore. Rather than demolishing a building you might need again in the future, you can pause the production and remove the workers assigned to it.

A good example of this is the dock. This building costs money in upkeep, however, if you remove anyone from working there, it no longer costs money to run and simply sits inactive, costing you nothing at all.

This way, you can always simply reemploy someone back at this building when it is needed again. Personally, I tend to have someone work at the dock when I want to trade, make the trade, then instantly take them back out of the docks, saving me coins.

12. Make Room For Markets & Other Buildings

When you create your housing areas, it might be tempting to pack as many houses as possible. To be honest, this would help with security, health, and religion as you will need fewer shrines, watchtowers, and wells.

But, later in the game, you will unlock markets and other buildings which have a positive effect on your housing areas. It’s important to make sure that you make some room to fit these in for the later stages of the game, otherwise, you will end up needing to demolish some houses.

13. Choose Event Choices Wisely

During the course of the game, you will have events pop up which can affect the rest of the game more than you might realize.

Make sure that you read these well, consider the effects they might have on your population, and choose wisely. Something might help you in the short term but could affect trade prices for the rest of the game.

When an event pops up, you can hover over each of the choices, this will show you the current standing with your people, so you can work out if it’s worth doing or not.

14. Keep Production Buildings, Depo’s & Houses Close

When you are trying to build up your city, you will want to make sure things are moving quickly and efficiently. The best way to do this is by simply keeping all your buildings close together.

When you have fewer workers and carriers, it can take longer for goods to move around, so by keeping everything close, you will cut down the transportation times.

As your city grows, you will have more workers and carriers, as well as potentially having multiple of the same types of production buildings, this will make spreading out a bit easier.

15. Place Relevant Buildings Together

When you build your first toolsmith, for example, place it close to your iron and coal mines, and have a depo between them all, this will reduce transportation times and make production much quicker.

The same goes for any other type of production building, make sure they are not too far from the resources required to make the good.

16. Know When Less is Actually More

Sometimes you might see an immigration event right near the start of your game, while this is rare, and would usually be helpful, it’s very important to make sure you have the relevant supply chains to house new immigrants.

While new people in your city should be a boon to your economy, Patron is very difficult to strike the right balance between progress and sustainability, progress too quickly and your entire food supply (or other resources) could come crumbling down.

The same advice goes to employment too, while having all your production buildings and mines filled with people might be great to ensure your stockpiles remain high, this could bring your cities progress to a halt if you do not have enough workers or carriers to continue keeping the city moving.

Sometimes it’s also wise to remove a few people from their jobs, simply to reduce upkeep and ensure that you do not run dry on any one resource.

Summary

I hope you found my Patron tips and tricks guide useful, remember to check back on unboxedreivews.com for the latest Patron news and guides as we continue to explore this expanding city builder and help you build the best cities possible.