Dice Legacy Beginner’s Guide

Dice Legacy is one of those games that seems simple at first, but can quickly become overwhelming. In this guide, we’ll give you step-by-step instructions to guide you safely through your first Winter on the ringworld!

Buildings and Placement

Before we get into the details of what to do at the start of the game, we need to talk for a moment about buildings, and building placement.

Briefly, if you aren’t sure how a building works or what it requires to operate, simply hover it. This also holds true for any harvestable resource, neutral and enemy camps, etc. As for placement: any activity that takes place adjacent to a District Hall gains efficiency, and there are other benefits you can gain from Class Districts (created from District Halls) that vary based on the Class District type.

To maximize this efficiency bonus, try to place buildings around District Halls, and try to place District Halls adjacent to forests and other harvestable areas. Think ahead, and if you’re placing a new building, leave a space for your next Hall nearby if you can.

You should also keep in mind the need to warm dice in the winter — try to consolidate your buildings as much as possible so a single Steam Generator can cover the maximum number of structures.

Landfall

When you first land, you’ll have a Town Hall, 5 Peasant dice, and an unbuilt Cookhouse. The very first thing we want to build is a House, and we’ll need 6 Wood for that, so let’s get some Wood! At this stage of the game, you’ll want to place any dice you can on forests or wreckage, build the Cookhouse, and then roll any remaining dice.

There are two potential sources of Wood when you start the game: the Wreckage on the shore, and the nearby Forests. Depending on what die faces you currently have available, you can go for the forest, the wreckage, or both.

Once you have 6 Wood, open up the Build menu [B]. It should already be on the ‘Essential’ tab by default — select the House, and place it somewhere near the harvestable resources to the north of your Settlement.

Next, get 2 more Wood and place a Wheat Farm somewhere near your new house. From now on, try to place any Work faces you get on the Wheat Farm, so you can start stockpiling Wheat for the Winter.

You might find yourself waiting for dice to finish their jobs at this stage of the game — use the number keys 1-4 to pause or speed up the game.

Dice Placement Priorities

Once you have your first House and your first Wheat Farm, here is how you should utilize the dice you roll:

1. Harvest faces should be placed on Iron Mines until you have 5, with forests and hunting grounds as your next priority. If there is no iron in your territory, try to expand in the direction of the nearest Iron ASAP.
2. Once you have 5 Iron, Harvest faces should be placed on forests first (until you have at least 20 Wood), hunting grounds second.
3. Work faces should be placed on the beach wreckage until it’s gone, then on your Wheat Fields.
4. Build , Fight , and Explore faces should be placed on the House — it’s OK if they sit there for a bit alone, they’ll find a mate soon enough. It’s also OK to place a Work face on the house, especially if your fields are already occupied. Try to keep your house occupied constantly until you have 12 dice.
5. If you roll a Build, Fight, or Explore face while the House is occupied, and that die has 8 or less durability, place it on your Cookhouse and add a Food. The reason we only do this at 8 or less durability is because the Cookhouse adds 8 durability by default, and 16 is the max.

If any die has 0 durability after you roll it, you must place it on the Cookhouse with a Food, or it will be lost next time you roll it — you cannot place exhausted (greyed out) dice on the Cookhouse.

Preparing for Winter

If you’re keeping your House occupied, you should eventually have enough dice that you can build a second Wheat Field (usually around 9 or 10 dice). Try to place it next to your first one, and make sure you’re leaving a space in the middle of the house and the wheat farms for your soon-to-be-built District Hall.

Once you’ve got the Wood for it, go ahead and place a District Hall in between the House and the Wheat Fields. Once you build it, don’t forget to use an Explore face to expand your territory around the District Hall. You may want to build the new Hall early if you need the expanded territory for optimal building placement.

This is also a good point to build another Cookhouse — I suggest placing it near forests or mines, so you can cover that area plus the Cookhouse with a Steam Generator (Welfare tab of the build menu). Before Winter comes, you’ll need to build a Steam Generator so your dice can keep working throughout the winter. Try to pick a spot that covers the most harvestable resources and at least one Cookhouse.

You should be collecting Wood and Food as your top priorities. As a reference, it takes 24 Wood to power a single Steam Generator for the entire Winter; the first stages of Winter have only a 5% chance of your dice freezing, so you don’t have to run it the whole time if you don’t have the wood to do so — and you can also collect Wood during the Winter if you place your Steam Generator near forests.

If you’ve collected at least 8 Wheat, and have enough food for the Winter (and/or will be able to continue accessing food via a Wheat Field or Hunting Ground), you can build a Brewery (Production tab) and a Tavern (Welfare tab) if you like. This will allow you to unfreeze your dice (see here for details), but you’ll need to collect some Stone to build both buildings. Even if you don’t end up needing to use Ale to unfreeze dice, it has its uses later on in the game.

If you think your Steam Generator has enough coverage that you won’t end up with freezing dice, you don’t necessarily need to bother with building a Brewery/Tavern combo yet.

Check how much food you’ve managed to collect from Hunting Grounds. If you have less than say, a dozen food, you may also want to consider building a Mill. Don’t bother using the Mill yet, save all of your Work faces for your Wheat Fields for now. You can run the Mill for Food during the winter, when you’ll have no other use for your Work faces.

Note that it takes 2 Wheat each time you run the mill OR the Brewery, so if you didn’t end up collecting a lot of Wheat, you may only be able to run one.

Surviving Winter

When Winter comes, the Council will meet for the first time. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the option to choose the Policiy that prevents dice from freezing in Peasant Districts, or the one that lets farms continue to work in Peasant Districts during the winter. If you do snag one of these, be sure to upgrade your District Hall to a Peasant District Hall by placing a Peasant die and 2 Gold on it.

Even if you don’t get any of the Winter-focused policies, you should still be able to make it through the Winter just fine if you prepared properly. Prioritize Harvesting based on what you lack — if you don’t have enough Wood to make it through the winter, get that first, since it will prevent you from having too many frozen dice. Don’t panic if some dice do get frozen; they’ll unfreeze once Spring comes again (in 15 minutes at the default speed).

Once you’re stabilized, with your Steam Generator running (don’t forget to place wood on it, and note you can place multiple loads on one after another) and plenty of food stocked up, you can build the Tavern and Brewery if you haven’t yet. This will allow you to Harvest resources outside the range of your Steam Generator, since you’ll be able to unfreeze dice as necessary. Once you have a couple Ale, go ahead and start harvesting outside the Steam Generator‘s radius — though only if you have extra dice! Stay within the warmth as much as you can otherwise.

At this point, if you aren’t struggling to secure enough Wood and Food, you can start gathering resources for two more buildings: a School and a Workshop. You’ll use the School to create Citizen dice, which can then be used at the Workshop to generate Knowledge. You’ll have to create at least 3 Citizens in order to utilize the Workshop, and the Winter is a great time to do this (since you’ll likely have idle dice).

Next Steps

As Winter winds down, you should be well on your way to collecting your first Knowledge points. The best technologies to research first are the Tier I technologies in the first three tabs: Gathering, Production, and Civic. These significantly boost the resources you gain from Harvesting and Wheat Fields, and improve the durability restoration power of the Cookhouse by 4 points. To access the Technology tree, you can hit [T] or click the Lightbulb in the upper left of the UI, underneath your leader’s portrait.

Continue expanding north by creating more District Halls, and keep an eye on the happiness of your dice classes as you do so — a great way to increase the happiness of a class is by creating a new Class District for them. If you haven’t yet done so, hover the banners at the top of the screen to see details about happiness and its possible ramifications. You’ll want to keep a close watch on the various classes’ happiness as the game progresses.

You should now know everything you need to in order to survive in Dice Legacy! There’s a ton more to discover, and I encourage you to explore the Technologies tree and the Build menu to see all the possible tech and build paths available. If you have any questions or comments, roll ’em into the comments box below!