What is the Geography of your town

First thing you need to worry is:

Where new settlers will claim property?

You need space that is:

• Close to town activities
  
• Close to a current road or a planned one
  
• Mostly flat, with little to no terraforming needed
  
• Not too much neighbours

This space needs to be available and not immediately claimed by town members that are already settled. So maybe a zoning would be necessary to have plots only available to one player (like, citizen can only claim if they don't have other claims in the town).


Screenshot by JoJo

Second thing you need to worry is:

Access to cheap building materials

New players won't directly build their house/workshop with the latest tier materials (if they do, may god help them). Latest Tier material usually comes out slowly, in small quantities and is a lot more expensive than early tier building materials. New players will start by building with T1 or sometimes T2 depending on the price difference. It is crazy important that at least one player sell those building materials. I've seen this problem in some towns where I had to go to an other town to get building materials and this other town used another currency. This pushed me to go cut down trees and then go sell the logs far away, buying some food and hewn logs. I could have made the hewn logs myself, but wasting so much calories in the process, that i would starve myself into poverty (the town didn't sell food too !! So I had to go trade in the other town I will talk about this problem in a later section of this guide)

Third thing you need (It's not mandatory, but it helps so much):

Properly marked shops

It is very frustrating when you can't figure out where you need to go sell and buy the stuff you are looking for. I'm talking about shops being in the corner of a house, not even close to the street. Shops that sell completely different things (crops and furniture ???). Have different shops for different things. One for buying, one for selling. Have images showing what the shop is about, with panel adding further descriptions


Screenshot by Taradyn

Title says it all. Food. Food. Food. Early players or new immigrants need food. But there is often a great difference between these two type of players. The early player (one that joined at the beginning of the game and/or is a town founder), usually is well established with high skill levels and producing more advanced items. For those players money is not that much of a concern. They can buy food either directly in town or travel to others (while selling their high demand items). It is a problem for new players. If a group of well establish players always travel outside of town to get their food, this force new players to do so. If the early players have or had a cook, maybe they didn't personally notice the food shortage new players are going to experience.
Your town must have at least two cooks

One is enough no ? Well no, especially in high-collab servers, its going to lead into one profession having to specialised, either in milling or baking and then their advanced skills (advance milling and advanced baking respectively). The other benefit of two cooks is not really competition, as price equalise, but the zone it can deserve, having one in a part of a town and one in the other. Also, it produce much more food output, so if one never logs back or their shops run out, you still have some food available. Having cheap food is always a good idea, for those thinking it will make the shop empty out fast, that's actually somewhat of a good thing. If you have your own currency, it forces outside players to go sell produce into your town. Bringing non-available resources into the market. Cheap food, helps new players get their calories which they use a lot to level up their skills as they are very inefficient. I've seen this trend where as the cooking advance, they stop selling their basic food stuff and go to more advanced one. Although the price difference is not that much, the amount of calories it brings makes all thing equal. BUT new players have their survivalist skill pretty low, making their maximum calories that they can accumulate pretty low. It is a good idea to keep at least some campfire cooking food. It will actually sell a lot, especially to those new players.

Credit shops for cooks is bad, in one condition it is. When the cook only buy crops. Imagine as a new player you want to have a basic job, like mining or logging. You will need food. but the only way for you to get food is to go gather wild crops in the forest. Usually those crops will sell a few cents per crops. So you will need an absurd amount of crops to actually have enough credit to buy food to produce stuff that you can sell for actual currency. I'm not saying credit shops are bad, as i said it is only when the cook only buys crops from its shop. One way to mediate that is to buy simple obtainable resources. Logs, rocks and ores are a great way for new players to get their food through a credit shop. But you might ask: What is the cook going to do with those ? Simple, sell them to people who actually needs it; mason, carpenter and smelters all require one of those simple resources from the beginning of the game to the very end.

To conclude: Make sure your town has access to as much food as possible and that it is easy to get (cheap) and well located within your town. Either at the very centre where a lot of trade activity occurs or in the peripheries where new players will be and players usually work.

Oh boy. The economy of a town is a key point for the health and longevity of it. Here is a brief overview from the new player perspective:

Get a Mint

Having a mint makes you able to create and print your own currency. Some players don't mind using a foreign currency, but the drawbacks are huge compared to the advantages you get from monetary sovereignty. If you are using a foreign currency, it makes your town dependent on foreign trade. Added to that that most servers will have already more than one currency, it makes your town dependent on even more foreign trade.
Let's say you are a town in the desert, one of the few town in the desert. You can sell your iron ores and bars to the town who has currency (lets call them Bucks), in exchange you can buy stuff from theirs and bring it back home. Whats the problem ? Well, you can't dictate how much you're getting paid, you might have your own shop, demanding Bucks, but they can wait you out and you will need those Bucks one way or the other. You will always trade with a disadvantage, where the value sold of iron will always be inferior to the value of the items you buy. They go through one or more person, each of them trying to make a profit off their craft.
But think about the effect it has on your town treasury, you then have to get that money, either through taxes or government trade. This severely limits your ability to finance infrastructure projects and develop your town.

Now let's take the opposite, your town has a mint and can print their own currency. What can it offer ? Well your town members must adopt the currency for internal trade (at least), assuming you have the essential skills in your town (Cook, gatherer, carpenter, mason). If every one of those use your currency as their trading currency for their shops, new players will try to get that currency for buying the essentials (food, building materials, decoration, etc.). There are ways to force your citizens to use that currency, but I wont talk about it in this guide (Comment down below if it is a guide that would interest you). Now your currency is well established in your town, naturally it's influence will go outside your town. Attracting outsiders to come and buy some stuff you sell. At this point, it is important to buy a variety of items. Not only what your town doesn't produce, but also what your town already produce. As the leader of your town, injecting money into the economy must be carefully planned. Here are some ideas to inject money into the economy for productive use:

• Road building
  Road building is an easy one, placing a road block on a road district rewards you with a small amount of money, but I often see this fails as the players who make the road are going to place it for money, instead of selling it to players to place it. As the reward for placing it is either higher than the selling price (thus making more), and if lower, the players won't be able to cover the cost of buying the road
  
  Screenshot by Niko
  
  
• Infrastructure projects
  
  Digging a tunnel, clearing a plot, making a building, making a tailing storage
  
  
• Government Store
  
  You can buy things directly at this store as the government, giving currency to you own citizens or foreign ones. The amount that you buy doesn't matter that much, as you can print the money, but pay attention to not give so little that no one is going to sell or not too much that you actually give too much to the players. Limit yourself at what you really lack, like a town in the desert will most likely be without corn or wheat, you can buy it at a higher price than others to encourage selling it here. But be aware that this can be detrimental to your citizens, that need this resource and can't simply print their own money. They will try to match your price or a bit higher. It is a good idea to also buy upgrades and create contract to upgrade them
  
  
• Have your own electric grid
  
  Buying electric generators (solar, wind turbine, etc) through government store. Having your town distribute electricity to your citizen for free helps them grow in the long run. They don't have to personally buy it. Having a private electric generation system disadvantages poorer players who use a bigger portion of their finances to keep being competitive. Having a public grid system helps everyone, not just electricity demanding industries as lighting houses gives more housing points. Overall it has a good return on investment and encourage immigration if other towns don't do the same
  
  
• Fund research
  
  THIS is the best way to inject money. Buy research papers and create contracts to put labour into researching books. Once the book is complete, you can then sell the scrolls and since you don't need to make a profit (unlike private players) sell them at a lower price, helping players (especially new players) get into a much needed profession early on.
  
  
• Help your own citizen
  
  If you are fond of your own town well being, you can give your citizen more advantages that foreign ones. For example you can sell them much needed item at a lower price with a special store only accessible for your own town citizen. For this you need to go to the authorisation panel in a store and select the demographic citizens of your town. Beware that it gives them the possibility to resell those items at global market value and make a profit off of you.

Easy money making

For new citizens, making money to start being economically productive is the priority. But often they will need to invest in themselves; making a workshop, building a house, buying scrolls, buying food, etc. You must make sure that these players have an easy way of making this money, as previously mentioned, a government store can help, but private stores also can do the job. Buying easy gatherable items like logs, rocks, ores and crops. Diversify the item you buy, as players get a profession, they will try to sell on the market what they produce and it can be often hard to sell as they aren't efficient in doing so. You can help them by buying a small amount of what they make at a decent price, even if its basic stuff, other new players will want that, but its going to take a while for them so in the meantime serve as the time bank between those two players.

You might think that the aesthetics of your town doesn't matter but it plays into the previously mentioned geographical concerns. When players first spawn into the world, they have the option to select your town as their spawn location, automatically joining. For this, you must show that your town is a good place for them to live, from only seeing the map. Having tall buildings, crowded city centre shows that a great deal of economic activity is taking place there.

Town Hall

Once player decide to spawn, the first thing they are going to see is your Town Hall. For the love of this game, make something nice, i'm not talking about a greco-roman masterpiece, but don't make a shack, don't make the bare minimum requirements for town making. If you do, only make this temporarily. Get the town settled and functioning. Then start upgrading it, lumber or bricks can do the job. The goal here is to give a good first impression. If your town hall shows you don't really care, what does it say to new citizens about their well being ?

Town architecture standards

What does a hewn log house, with a brick complex and a steel/glass skyscraper have in common ? Nothing. I've seen this many times where a town centre has all of those right next to each others. It's not bad in itself and i understand that some players don't really need to upgrade their whole property to T3 materials in order to function. But having at least a coherent town centre architecture helps making the game more beautiful. You can encourage doing so by simply talking to players, or you can kinda force it with an average room tier tax on a specified district (i think, i'm not good with laws).

Usually depending on the biome your town finds itself in, the building material used will be reflected. Deserts usually have mortared stone, grassland shows more hewn logs and lumber, jungles have hardwood hewn logs and bricks. It shouldn't be that much of a problem and i'm not really emphasising on it. But it kinda helps attract more players if they have to chose between two different towns to join, they might be more drawn into the one that is pleasant to live in.



Screenshot by Pookims

Thank you for reading this guide, I sincerely hope you liked it and made you think about some improvement in you game. If you disagree with something I said or have a different opinion on a point I made. Please tell me in the comments.

All screenshots are from the DaoKingdom Server (very cool you should join)