Getting Started Guide

Whether you are a new player to Factory Town 2: Paradise or joining us from Factory Town 1, this guide is intended to teach players the basics. If you have questions, you can reach out to the Discord channel.

Controlling your Character

Something new in Factory Town 2: Paradise is you now have an avatar/character you can control. This avatar can move around the world, harvest resources (default: E) and add them to their inventory. The avatar's inventory is the global inventory - everything you build will be subtracted from this collection.

The avatar can walk up to a building and transfer items in and out. You can use this to stock markets, or collect building outputs, and even feed the volcano.

You're not going to be manually collecting items for long - as soon as you can build a Magic Chest, you can deposit items there from conveyor belts or other automated means, and everything will go directly into the same global inventory.

If you don't want to use the avatar (say, you prefer something like Factory Town 1's overhead camera) then you can use Free Look Mode (default: V).

Free Look Mode

Most of the time it's going to be more convenient to move around the world and make edits from the 'Free Look' camera, which does not follow the avatar. Use the Toggle View Mode (default: V) key to switch to this Free Look mode. Now you can fly around the world much faster. Most players will probably be using Free Look mode the vast majority of the time, and only use the Avatar when they need to manually speed up some production.

When in Free Look mode, everything you build comes out of the same global inventory as when you are controlling the avatar.

Managing Workers

Unlike the Factory Town 1, you can not issue commands to units. There are two big reasons for this:

• Villager units never become obsolete, you'll have hundreds by the end of the game, and issuing commands to them individually would be a huge pain
• Villager units have their own schedules: they sleep when tired, they shop when their needs get high - and that would mean they would be frequently 'disobeying' commands you issue, and that would get annoying.

Instead, villagers will self-manage and perform whatever nearby job needs to be done. They'll even move to a new island if there's a job opening there. At any building, just choose how many workers you want and what the priority is. They will also choose housing closest to the job they picked.

Villager's tasks will change based on the job they picked:

• Production buildings: gather required resources. When there are enough resources, take a turn "Crafting" inside the building to speed up production
• Markets and Storage buildings: gather required resources
• Fishing Hut: collect Fish
• Farms and Foresters: cultivate crops and harvest crops
• Harvester Huts: harvest crops

Although workers are very autonomous, there are ways to influence worker behavior. Every building that supports worker deliveries has a 'Requests' tab. This lets you choose which items you want workers to actually deliver, how many, and what the priorities are. By default, this is configured automatically based on recipes, but you can change these settings manually. For instance, if you are automatically delivering wood to a workshop and don't want workers harvesting any, go to Requests, click on the Wood icon, and uncheck the 'active' toggle. Now, workers there won't spend any time gathering wood

Buildings

Buildings are large objects that can house workers, produce recipes, and store items. You can view them in the Build Menu (default: B) under 'Buildings).

When placing a building, press R to rotate it and Page Up / Page Down to change its elevation. Note that many buildings have to be on the terrain, or special foundation blocks.

A building's facing direction generally does not matter, although a few things like Pumps do need to connect based on their facing direction.

Chutes and Conveyor Belts

These path objects allow for items to move in the world automatically.

Connectors allow items to be moved between these paths and a building's inventory. Drag a path into a building or out of a building to automatically create a connector, but they can also be placed or deleted manually.

• When dragging a path, hold Ctrl to force the path to stick at its starting elevation.
• PageUp / PageDown changes the elevation of the path block. You can press this while dragging a path.

Pipes

In Factory Town 2: Paradise, pipes can be built in a full 3D space, including below ground. They use connectors to interface with buildings.

To access the underground view, pressing G or you can just drag a path in the world through the terrain and the view will automatically switch to underground.

To change the elevation when building a pipe, use PageUp or PageDown while dragging.

A very convenient way to build underground pipes, assuming your starting building is on the ground:

1. Equip the pipe you want to build
2. Select the "G" key to view underground
3. Start dragging a path from the ground location of your starting building.
4. If the pipe starts peeking above ground due to a hill, hit PageDown.
5. Keep dragging until you reach your target building.
6. Select PageUp to build vertically until you see the target building light up. This means a connection is established.
7. Release the mouse cursor to complete the pipe.

Markets and Happiness

All of your villagers have needs for food, drink, clothing, and many other categories. They will buy items from buildings that fulfill these needs - e.g. if they are hungry, they will buy Bread because it fulfills the Food need.

Markets are the most common place to stock items for purchase. Once you've built a market, you can click on any of its inventory slots to assign an item to be stocked. Villagers assigned to the Market will supply these items. Or, you can just use your avatar to drop an item off to a Market and a free slot will automatically be assigned to that item.

When a villager buys an item, it is added to their 'Equipment' section. The item lasts for a few minutes, but eventually is consumed and needs to be replaced. (This timer is controlled by its 'durability' stat).

Some later-game buildings like Dessert Shop and Apothecary can sell items directly to workers, without needing to bring them to a Market.

Villagers can actually store backup copies items in their equipment. The number of backup items they can store is controlled by the "Worker Pockets" perk. This is very helpful because it means they can buy more items with a single shopping trip, so that is less time wasted moving around.

You can view the needs that items fulfill by checking out the Misc / Item Stats panel.

Note that unlike Factory Town 1, Markets themselves do not generate happiness. They are really just glorified storage buildings with a special flag that lets workers buy items from them.

Overall town happiness is determined by comparing all villagers individual happiness. High town happiness makes new villagers arrive faster. Low town happiness makes new villagers arrive slower, or not at all.

Hotbars

A selection of the global inventory is shown in the Inventory Hotbar at the bottom of the screen, but you can open the Inventory panel (default: I) to view all the items you have collected. Drag and drop items from the inventory screen to the Inventory Hotbar to assign it to that slot. It just changes the hotbar slot assignment - you're not actually moving any items anywhere.

When in Free Look mode, you will see the Construction Hotbar. This is a way to put shortcuts to buildings and tools you use frequently. There are two ways to add things to this hotbar:

• Hit Shift+Num to assign the current building (whatever is on your cursor) to that hotbar slot
• Drag and drop an object icon from the Build menu

There are ten toolbar rows available to customize. You can use F1-F4 to open the first four toolbars, or hit Alt+num 0 through 9 to access the others.

Turning off Tutorial Highlights

Some players may not like the yellow arrows that tell you what to click on in the early game. Rest assured, this is only for the introductory quests, and once you reach a certain point in the game they will not happen any more. And in the full game, custom maps don't have any yellow arrows.

However if you would like to toggle them off, use the button that looks like a yellow arrow on the header of the Quests panel.

Helpful Hotkeys and Controls

• Q: 'pipette' the currently highlighted building onto your cursor so you don't have to go to the build menu each time
• X: activates the block delete tool
• M: activates the move tool. All buildings can be moved freely.
• Shift: Hold to move the free look camera faster
• R: rotates the selected building or structure. When placing connectors, also cycles through connector directions.
• Page Up / Page Down: change the elevation you are placing a building or path
• Page Up / Page Down also changes the cursor size for some tools, like when placing crops
• Shift+num: Assign whatever tool or building is active on your cursor to a hotbar slot
• Right-click = cancel current aciton
• U: Upgrade selected house(s)
• F1-F4: activate hotbar number 1, 2, 3, or 4
• Alt + Num: activate hotbar number X
• Ctrl: When dragging, this keeps the elevation fixed at the starting height
• Tab: For some tools like Terraforming and Grow Grass, cycles the tool action. When placing connectors, cycles the connector direction.