Tips and tricks

In this page you can find a lot of useful tips for a better game-play.

Avoiding danger

 * Only goblins steal items from your stockpile, so if there are too many enemies for your tribe, you can move all your dwarfs to a safe place and return in the morning without having items stolen.
 * Destroy graveyards as soon as possible in order to reduce the number of skeletons you encounter during night time. Do it during day time so any spawned skeletons die immediately. Or do it during night to get some extra easy experience. Leave one or two graveyards as you may need to kill the spawned skeletons to get skeleton's bones for crafting and for keeping your dwarfs challenged, improving their fighting skills. And as a bonus, loot weapons can be disassembled to iron ore & other materials.
 * Use beware sign to limit and prevent dwarfs from moving into dangerous locations, like deep waters, heights or enemies.
 * Stay away from guardians until you have mythril weapons.
 * When a dwarf falls into lava (the bottom of the "world"), it takes severe damage and dies unless they manage to get out. Dying in lava destroys equipment (armor, weapons, etc.) rather than leaving loot that other dwarfs can collect.

Defense

 * While melee monsters are attacking a door/hatch, you can attack them from inside safely without getting damaged. Ranged enemies like skeleton archers though can shoot through the door/hatch and damage dwarfs. Use stone loopholes to reduce the damage received.
 * Build terrain traps
 * You can create pits around your shelter to trap monsters. Most monsters cannot climb, unless they find a shield stair.
 * Sand walls may be used as a good defensive setup.
 * Craft defensive traps
 * Use wood/iron cages to hold monsters and delay them as much as possible.
 * Wisely use wooden/iron traps to kill/injure monsters and to kill animals near your base, instead of running after them. Note that traps will be consumed in the process and re-crafting traps will quickly deplete your wood/iron resources, so limit their use.
 * Spikes are so good at delaying hordes but consume resources, so limit your their use too (creating many 2*2 stone block pits from both base sides are more effective, and some stone can be retrieved after it is destroyed).
 * Seal your base under three layers of dirt, only venturing to the surface using the portal spell.

Battle

 * Use the swordsman/archer/mage skill books as soon as you get them, so that your dwarfs will deal more damage.
 * Dwarfs will run if hit too often from both front and back, avoid this by taking control of the dwarf.
 * Use magic fireball and other offensive spells to aid the dwarfs if they are swarmed.
 * Archers can do damage from distance, but cannot fire unless the enemy is 2 blocks away. They also miss some shots.
 * Try to fight enemies while they are spread out, by catching them with a portal spell.

Healing

 * You must place 1 bed per dwarf. Dwarfs without a bed are unable to sleep.
 * Improve the comfort level of your shelter by replacing home walls with wood and then better materials.
 * Mages will use health elixirs automatically.
 * Place different dishes on tables, or dwarfs will get bored of the same food and not eat.

Advancement speed

 * Shamelessly use the portal spell, especially in the early game, when leveling up happens more frequently, replenishing the mana pool.
 * You can instantly build anything by manually controlling a dwarf because you have access to all items.
 * Mine second background layer of material by replacing with dirt.
 * Destroy the goblin camp for loot to give yourself time to advance before they spawn another camp.
 * Skeletons and Goblins sometimes drop better weapons and good loot, so fight them often, especially in the early game.
 * Use scaffolds for construction, mining and even in fighting ... be creative.
 * Scaffolding is erected immediately and doesn't require assembly by dwarfs.
 * Removing scaffolding is instant, and doesn't require assembly by dwarfs.
 * Constructing a foreground block on top of a scaffolding immediately return the scaffolding to your inventory—there's no need to haul it back to the stockpile.
 * Build a vertical shaft above the stockpile and put crafting stations in a column over it with ladders between levels. Dwarfs will drop crafted items onto the stockpile for faster gathering.
 * You can have more than one wagon on the same rail track to quickly transport more than one dwarf horizontally.
 * Place an elevator at the top of a vertical shaft. The elevator mechanism requires a 3x2 area, but the shaft below only needs to be 1 block wide, and can contain ladders.
 * Tea, beer, and wine makes dwarfs move quicker.

Play speed

 * When crafting an item for the first time:
 * Click a missing ingredient to switch to its inventory page
 * Double-click a placed ingredient to spread it to adjacent cells
 * Use hotkeys
 * Use "Ctrl" to open another quick slot bar
 * Use "P" to pause the game so you can navigate the level and plan your strategy (zooming out will show you all monsters as big icons).

Skills

 * See the main article.

How you equip skills to your dwarfs will have a large effect on how well you can defend. The following are good options on how to distribute skills:
 * one gathering, one production, and one combat skill on each dwarf; or
 * one mobility, one gathering/production, and one combat skill on each dwarf.

As long as a dwarf has a combat skill, they will continually become more effective in battles, and will get most of your kills until you make more consistent tower defences.

It's possible to spend the initial gold to get mining and any missing crafting skills, but getting combat skills as soon as possible is a more safe way to go. The more you mine, the more gold coins you will find.

Base layout
You will be fine just building one-level-thick stone walls to enclose your base for at least the first few hours of the first level, upgrading later to two layers thick, then upgrading one or both levels to bricks as you get them.

Try not to think of your base as being an unbreakable nut to crack, but more as a way to funnel attackers so you control the engagement. For example, a long corridor filled with doors will allow you to attack even with melee without getting hit back. Using spikes and traps will give your missile troops more time to kill enemies. A row of spike traps will also give you extra time.

Armor your melee dwarfs initially. If you need to put armor on your archers/mages to protect them, your base layout needs improvement. Once you start going after guardians though, you'll definitely want to armor everyone up.

Misc

 * You can disassemble the dwarfs' default hats, such as the feathered hat, to obtain extra materials early in the game. Since these hats do not provide armor, you've only the resources to gain and nothing to lose.


 * Some other items can also be deconstructed to receive material (e.g. deconstructing a Mummy's Saber will give you Iron Ore).


 * A world can only hold a limited number of non-hostile creatures at a time, so you should kill snails to ensure that more sheep, boars and chickens spawn.


 * Don't relocate early level up's bonuses and awards (like a 2nd stock pile), as they will be destroyed. You won't be able to craft these until the very late game, so pay attention to where you construct them.


 * The game is paused while the inventory/crafting/skill tree window is open, but mana will be regenerated, so take your time to take the right decision or just take a rest. Mana is refilled at the speed of the unpaused game so switch to 2x speed before taking a rest.


 * Save files on Windows are stored in . AppData will generally be a hidden system folder. To view it, select Tools > Folder options > View from the menu and enable the option to "show hidden files, folder & drivers".


 * You can change the orientation of doors, hatches, walls, bridge parts and roof parts by left clicking on them while you have the item type selected (it will also works if you have 0 in stock, you just need to have the item in a quick slot).


 * If it's your first time playing Craft of the world, you may want to restart the game after completing half the Tech Tree, as by then you will understand the game mechanics better. You'll know what to do, craft, and which resources to conserve to prevent your early dwarfs from being killed.


 * Keep an eye on dwarfs' activities, as they may face unexpected monsters or discover books, rooms and other stuff while mining.


 * Keep the underground well lit to prevent cave spirits from spawning (although you probably want to leave some dark areas so you can kill them for needles).