Spiritlands

Spiritlands is a 4X resource and people management game about growing settlements from a campfire into a teeming city. You gather resources, build structures and assign people to roles such as farmers, explorers and soldiers. The goal is to take over the map by founding settlements, destroying barbarian camps, exploring ruins and befriending or fighting local colonies.

Shape your settlements

You can create or generate lands featuring forests, deserts and wastelands, then build settlements to suit your plans. You might focus one town on gathering faith points, or specialize it in producing a resource to distribute to other settlements. You can found multiple cities or spread villages across the land, with each settlement’s people serving as its explorers, workers and soldiers.

People need water, power, happiness, food and shelter. You can build schools and taverns, add nature or flooring, and provide natural power and water through wind-farms and water-towers. The on-tile building system lets you place structures quickly. Fires and infections threaten your population, so you need emergency services and health centres to deal with them.

Gather and automate resources

Resources fuel buildings and support your people, from feeding and training them to keeping machines running. Idle workers can collect resources in the wild; later, you can automate production by building farms, lumberyards, quarries, mines and fishing areas and assigning people to work there. The four main resources are food, wood, stone and coal. You can also collect special items such as diamonds, silver and flowers, which can be used for trade, building or appeasing barbarians.

Explore and expand

The world contains ruins, enemy camps and local colonies. You can place campfires to push back the fog and explore ruins for loot chests. Discover colonies to trade or fight with, and deal with enemy encampments of different sizes that may attack your settlements. You can strike first or offer the encampments special items to keep them happy.

Each land has four colonies: the Port Keepers, the Woodlanders, the Stonecutters and the Miners. You can trade with them at markets and build friendship by supplying resources they need. As they grow, they may provide you with freebies; attacks can turn them against you, prompting raids for food.

Defend your people

Combat can be part of expanding, whether you are fighting encampments or waging war on colonies. Attack barracks let you create an army, while nearby barbarians can launch frequent attacks. You can fortify settlements with defence barracks, water towers and walls, and use natural barriers such as mountains.

Upgrades and map editor

There are 30 upgrades across five routes: Discoverer, Scientist, Evolutionist, Dictator and Conqueror. Upgrades can unlock buildings or change resource costs, and everything can be unlocked.

The Map Editor is the first screen after you enter your name and your civilisation’s name. It has three paintbrush sizes, a tile selection panel and sliders for setting resource amounts; you can also enter seeds. You can make hand-built landscapes, use randomly generated default areas or choose presets such as Wasteland and Desert, which increase the difficulty by making resources harder to find.