How to Play

How to Play
This is a quick guide on how to play Sustainaville. This page contains basic information on all facets of the game, as well as links for further reading. This isn't a comprehensive guide, but contains all the information you'll need to finish your first game of Sustainaville. We recommend you play the in-game tutorial before consulting this guide, in order to get a firmer grasp on the flow of the game. If you feel confident in your abilities, this guide is in no way necessary reading, but it will help those who struggle to understand one or more features present in the game.

World Map
Once you've selected 'Play' from the main menu, you'll be taken to the world map. This map shows you all of the regions of Sustainaville, as well as each level within those regions. These levels are colour coded to show the difficulty of each level - red pins represent a community that still requires a lot of work to reach self-sustainability, where a green pin shows a community that's nearly there.

For the purpose of this guide, select a green pin. This will allow you to learn the mechanics of the game without the pressure of a struggling community.

Basics First
Once you've selected a level, you'll be taken to the local community. Unless you've been to this level before, you'll see an area devoid of any civilisation or life, except for rocks, trees and shrubs. Your goal here is to build a self-sustainable community through the construction of structures and generation of resources. Don't worry if this sounds a bit confusing! It'll become more clear as you play.

When you first enter the level, the guide will give you important basic information. He'll explain your resource requirements for this level, so make sure you pay attention - if at any point you need to see them again, all of your resource requirements are displayed in the top-right hand corner of the screen. If you click on a given resource bar, the guide will detail your current and required level of resources.

The most basic first action for any level of Sustainaville is to begin generating water, the most basic and necessary resource for starting a community. If you select an empty area of land, you'll see a new tab open at the bottom of the screen. This is the "Purchase Bar", and it's where you'll be making most of your decisions throughout the game.

From here, select the "Build Facilities" button. As the name suggests, this button allows you to build facilities, otherwise known as "structures". Structures are necessary to generating resources, which in turn are necessary to completing levels, so it's important to understand how they work.

Now, the Purchase Bar will display your six primary resources; Disaster, Education, Food, Health, Housing and Water (click the resource name for more information). While all will be necessary to completing the level, we'll first focus on water. Water is the most basic resource, as many structures require a small amount of water to build. So, select water from the Purchase Bar.

Now, you'll see a list of water resource structures displayed in the Purchase Bar. These are sorted by cost and quality; the structures on the left are cheaper but less efficient, and the opposite is true of the structures on the right. Since you haven't generated any resources yet, select the Water Supplies on the far left.

Once you've done so, a list of information will be displayed. This is information on the selected structure, in this case, water supplies. The green bars represent which resource the structure will generate, where red bars denote the resource cost to build that structure. Since water supplies don't require any other resources to build, they're an ideal first choice. For further reading on any structure, select the blue information button in the structure information pane.

To build the water supplies, click the green purchase button at the top of the structure information pane. You'll lose some credits, but you'll see the structure being built, as well an increase in your water supplies. Congratulations! You've built your first structure in Sustainaville.

Other Info
You may not know it, but you've already displayed all the skills necessary to completing a level of Sustainaville. The game consists of building these structures, generating resources to build more structures and eventually reaching your resource goal. There are some other features at play, which the following section will talk about.

Namely, townsfolk are important. Townsfolk will move into your community once you've developed some housing, and are absolutely vital to achieving self-sustainability. This is because they can be assigned to existing structures to improve their resource output, by dragging your townsfolk icon onto the structure you want to assign them to. More importantly, you can assign your townsfolk to crops to generate food!

The above information is enough to get you well on your way to achieving self-sustainability. If you have further questions, please see the home page for more links. If you're still confused, try playing through the tutorial again (found on the world map).