Long term Gem plan

If you feel like you're in the game for the long haul, not in a massive rush, but also no opposed to throwing some money at Blue Byte, a Gem Pit investment can end up being quite profitable for you.

A Gem Pit costs 20,000 gems, and contains 40,000 gems that will be extracted over the course of a year (around 108 per day). This may sound like it will take forever to recover your costs, but it's probably not as bad as you might think.
If purchased during one of the not all that uncommon double gem sales, you can get yourself 22,000 gems for 50 euro.

Note: For the purpose of this post, I'm going to assume you do this, intend on not spending gems on anything else, and log on every day getting your weekly bonus.

You buy your first pit, it has 40,000 gems, and you have 2,000 gems left over from your 22,000 purchase.
Day 1, you have 1 pit pulling out 108 gems per day, and will be getting +100 gems per week for your weekly bonus, so you will be getting ~856 per week.

Week 21, You have reached 20,000 gems, and buy a second pit. Your pit has drained to ~24,124.
You are now pulling 216 gems per day, and will be getting your +100 gems per week for the weekly bonus.

During week 35 (14.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number three. Pit 1 has drained to ~14,750 gems, and Pit 2 is down to ~30,626.
You are now pulling 324 gems per day, and getting the +100 gems for the weekly bonus.

Week 44 (8.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number four. Pit 1 has drained to ~8,365 gems, Pit 2 is down to 24,241, and Pit 3 is down to 33,615.
You are now pulling 432 gems per day, and getting the +100 gems for the weekly bonus.

Week 50 (6.5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number five. Pit 1 has drained to ~3,526 gems, Pit 2 is down to 19,402, Pit 3 is down to 28,776 and Pit 4 is down to 35,161.

Week 55 (5 weeks passing). You reach 20,000 gems again, and buy pit number six. Pit 1 runs out just towards the end of this run, Pit 2 is down to 15506, Pit 3 is down to 24,880, Pit 4 is down to 31,265 and Pit 5 is down to 36,104.


And you can keep this up until pit 10 if you'd like, or take a break and buy a endless copper mine or something else.

There's also other incidental things I haven't take into account here (and couldn't really to keep the advice general) that will provide extra gems.
> Sometimes BlueByte give out small amounts of gems as general presents or to apologise for issues.
> Some quests end with Gem rewards
> Every level-up from 17 onwards provides some gems
> On the official forums, BlueByte occasionally hold competitions with Gems as prizes for the winners.

Pinewood setup in Sector 4

Sector 4 (sector above your Mayor's House) has a lot of Pinewood trees, and presents a good location to set up a group of cutters and foresters.
The ratio for these buildings is 2 cutters to 3 foresters, and you're going to have room here for 2 lots of these (so, 4 cutters and 6 foresters).

Here's a template to get you started in the sector. To start mapping it out, I'd recommend you begin tracing roads from the bush pointed out below, which fits in pretty snug.

Now, you've got space around and above your storehouse to place your 4 cutters and 6 foresters. Spread them out a bit so that your cutters aren't wiping out trees and the foresters have a chance to replant.
An arrangement something like the below will keep cutting/replanting nicely balanced (no need to copy layout precisely).

Now, you've got 4 spaces left in the front. You could fill these with coking plants/bowmakers, which would make the entire section a self-contained facility.

Improved Storehouse Update

Initially I thought the Improved Storehouse in sector 2 between the copper mines would be a longer walk for your Settlers than it is for a regular one

It certainly juts out further than the regular storehouse, and if it worked like regular buildings, should have been a 16 second travel time.

But this isn't currently true (but they could well change it before going live). As shown below, the walk path has the worker walking into the the side of the storehouse, and not walking down to the front as expected.
This makes it a 12 second walk exactly like if you placed a regular storehouse, making it an excellent spot to place the wonky shaped storehouse.

Pinewood in Sector 2

Pinewood is an important chain in Settlers Online. Even though it's the first type of wood you work with, it remains important long after you stop needing planks for its use in making Coal from coking plants.

It takes a ratio of 2 cutters to 3 foresters to keep a balance so that you don't run out of trees from the cutters overworking, and on the other hand don't just have foresters sitting around doing nothing.
Your 2 cutters produce enough wood to feed either 2 bowmakers, 2 coking plants or 4 sawmills (or some combination, such as 1 bowmaker and 2 sawmills, or 1 bowmaker and 1 coking plant).

There's a spot in Sector 2 you might not usually consider placing things, as it's not the best shaped piece of land, but, it does present itself with space for a storehouse with 5 spaces immediately around it. These 5 spaces are also surrounded by pinewood trees, so is an excellent place to put down a setup.

The spot is just below the river towards the right hand side of the sector, and for mapping it out with roads, I'd recommend starting from the bush as shown below.

Once you have it mapped out, you can place the buildings as you'd like in the 5 spaces provided, and you're on your way.

Afterwards, there is also some spaces to the left you can place a couple of other buildings, maybe your 2 coking plants if that's what you need to keep it all together.

And that's about it. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to look at in the comments.

A few days of Collectibles

Collectibles have been live for a few days now, and I must say I'm pretty happy with them. They haven't fixed any of the issues from test with regards to them occasionally being hidden behind or in objects, but so far I've had greater than half each time being out in the open and relatively easy to find.

If you're extra bored, you can zoom in on an area, and wave your mouse over the objects in the zone looking for the popup of the name of the item, which is certainly easier once you recognise what the meat deposits name looks like and can phase it out.

Here's an example of an entirely obscured Scarecrow behind some trees.

 

You'll also have instances where the items kind of blend in nicely with the buildings, so while they are perfectly visible, you may overlook it as looking somewhat normal, a bit like this Banner that blends in nicely next to the storehouse.

 

Since there's no reward for finding them, I still wouldn't get too excited about searching unless you really fee like it, but if you do feel like scouring the map, it is somewhat satisfying to have the popup advising you that you've found them all, and certainly will be worthwhile during Halloween when you'll want to find all potential pumpkins (which will be worth quite a bit)

 



 

While the collectibles are a nice distraction, the buffs you can make with them aren't so amazing that you should consider it necessary to scour the map if you don't feel like it.

 

Of the six buffs, you've got

"Country Saying: Adds 200 Wheat units to a Wheatfield", which is just terrible, you can place a wheat field if you want some that badly, +200 is mediocre.

"Harvest Ritual: Boosts the production of a Farm up to 400% for 12 hours", not entirely terrible, but even a level 5 Farm produces about 290 wheat over 12 hours, so the buff will give you an extra ~870 over that amount of time, which is worth maybe 20 gold, hardly impressive.

 

 "Whips and Carrots: Boosts the production of a Stable up to 400% for 6 hours" Pretty bad, no one needs horses that badly.

 

 "Drill Sergeant Skunk: Boosts the recruitment speed of Barracks up to 300% for 12 hours" Pretty good, worthwhile getting, useful for replenishing your forces.

 

"A Sip From the Kettle: Boosts the population growth up to 300% for 8 hours." Not great generally, but during some events there are quests to increase your population by some quantity of settlers, and for these quests adding settlers that you created with Bread in the Provision house doesn't count, so you'll want items like this to increase the 'natural' rate your settlers grow to get the quest done quicker.

 

 "Potion of Endless Energy: Boosts the production of a work yard up to 300% for 12 hours." Quite nice, probably what you'll be going for usually, and the only item that needs Cauldrons (gotten from adventures, or from the Trade Office).

 

So far people seem mostly positive, and beside some of the slight issues with them occasionally getting trapped behind rocks, seems to have been one of the better and smoother implemented components to the game to date.



Silo Placements at Mayor's House

Here's a placement map for Silos and Farms in Sector 1 down in front of your Mayors house. It's a good big, mostly open piece of real estate, and following this plan you will be able to fit 14 of each building in the area, without any of them having to walk more than a minute to do a cycle.

To get going, you should try to lay out  a grid like below using roads. I'd start from the front of your Mayors house and work your way down from there. Remember that each building is 2 segments of road across, and you should be fine from there.
This picture is partially built already, but you should be able to work out the grid with what's there.

Here's a link to a bigger version.

Once you have the layout down, the 6 farms and 6 silos I've already built will have your little settlers all going to the field on the left. The silos have a slightly shorter walk time overall than the farms, which ensures that the field will never ever run out, and the whole side will be self sufficient. The average overall walk time for the farms is 46 seconds, and 45.33 for the silos.


I haven't completed the right hand side, but have mapped out the walk distances for you to fill it out yourselves should you have that many Silos laying around. Shown below:

Here's a link to a bigger version.

Mostly self explanatory, place Farms where I've written 'F', and place Silos where I've written 'S'.
The 'X's have been placed in squares where the walk distance is over a minute, so isn't a great place for placing Silos or Farms.
All of these buildings will prefer the field on the right, and the silos again have a slightly shorter walk distance to ensure the field never runs out. The average walk time for the farms is 45 seconds, and the average for the silos is 44.5 seconds.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback below.

New dates for Halloween & Collectibles

There's been some shuffles with upcoming times for maintenance/updates, so they are now as follows.


3rd October - Collectibles go live
10th October - Regular maintenance, nothing special.
17th October - Halloween goes live

This gives a bit more time to start stocking up on things in readiness for Halloween.
Pumpkins are going to be expensive, and you may want to start filling your Storehouse with things you can trade for them from the 17th.

You don't need to bulk up on coins specifically, players still need regular products like Sausages for their gift baskets and bread, and you may find some good deals to be had in these other commodities (with the players who typically sell these things instead focusing on coin -> pumpkins instead of their regular production, causing gaps in the market).

Good luck all.