What Are Edicts?
Edicts are settlement-wide policies, purchased once from the Town Hall using stockpiled resources. They don't expire and don't require upkeep — once passed, the effect is always active. Edicts can be repealed later from the Book of Laws, but doing so carries a happiness cost across the whole settlement. Decisions have weight.
Open the Book of Laws from the Town Hall panel to see what's available, what it costs, and what each edict does. Some edicts require others to be passed first.
What Edicts Can Do
Edicts fall into a few broad categories depending on what aspect of your settlement they affect:
Production and crafting
Some edicts increase the output of all your workshops by a percentage, make buildings work faster, or reduce how much fuel your homes burn. If your economy is bottlenecked on a specific resource, there may be an edict that helps.
Movement and logistics
Edicts can increase how fast your villagers move — which indirectly speeds up deliveries, construction, and everything that depends on people walking from one place to another. Combined with a good road network, movement edicts compound nicely.
Construction
Some edicts reduce the material cost of building construction, or speed up how quickly your villagers raise a new structure. Useful when you're expanding rapidly.
Immigration
Edicts can increase how many immigrants arrive in each group or how frequently groups come. If your population is growing slowly, immigration edicts can accelerate it significantly.
Health and wellbeing
Certain edicts slow down health decay or reduce how quickly villagers need sleep. These are subtle but valuable — a healthier population is a harder-to-kill population.
Work and skills
Some edicts increase how quickly villagers gain job experience, which speeds up the road to Master-tier workers and the production bonuses that come with them.
Trade
Barter edicts improve the value of what you offer when trading with the travelling merchant — getting more in return for the same goods.
Edict Chains
Some edicts act as prerequisites for others, forming short chains. You may need to pass a foundational policy before an advanced version becomes available. Check the Book of Laws panel for the full dependency map.
Tips for New Players
- Don't rush edicts. They cost real stockpiled resources. Make sure you can spare the materials — especially stone and iron, which are also needed for construction.
- Think about your current bottleneck. Is food production lagging? Look for output edicts. Are buildings taking forever to finish? Try a construction speed edict. Match the edict to the problem.
- Movement edicts compound with roads. If you've already built a road network through your settlement, a speed edict makes the whole thing faster — effectively saving worker time across every task that involves walking.
- Immigration edicts are powerful in the mid-game. Once you have housing and food to support more people, accelerating immigration lets you grow into more complex production chains faster.