Mind Over Magic – Things I Wish I Knew Before Playing

Useful Tips

Give your rooms plenty of height. Four is not enough – you want at least six. It’s fairly easy to alter room layout horizontally, but very difficult vertically, e.g. if you want to add one extra height to your ground floor when you’re already three stories high, it means you have to deconstruct literally everything.

You can fit most Lofted room requirements into a 5×6 – Great Hall, Kitchens, Dining Rooms etc. and you can easily chop up spare corridor into Workshops. Six is also the minimum if you need a support bracket on the same wall as a doorway.

Seven height has some further advantages – Arboretum won’t fit in a 5×6, but I believe it will in a 6×7. Also you can make Skewed rooms with a door either side (using the double wall trick), whereas with six height and the same method a Skewed room has to be quasi-Private.

Make use of regular stairs. First playthrough I thought spiral stairs were the be-all-and-end-all, and they definitely have their place, but they can leave you with a lot of wasted space when overused.

Normal stairs use up space at the back of a room, giving you usable space in front, whereas spiral stairs take up space in the middle of a room, making it very hard to use that space for anything else. You can have stairs running behind/through multiple rooms, but this does remove the Private tag.

With really tall rooms, you can get additional floor space by putting ledges part way up the wall – so long as the extra floor doesn’t reach wall to wall then it all still counts as one room. You can use ladders to make the extra floor accessible. I use this to add extra beds in to a Common Room. This may disturb certain room tags – Grounded for example.

For rooms needing Luxury, particularly Kitchens, give them a bit more than they actually need. Mess, clutter, dead Quilts etc. will reduce luxury until they’re cleaned up, so you want a little buffer to stop the room losing its bonuses temporarily.

Incense Burners (the ones you need for the Infirmary) are a cheap source of Luxury early on and they can usually be fit so they don’t interfere with floor plans. Rugs are ideal but expensive to make; you can get free ones from crystals and some dungeon encounters.

You can create an outer wall (on the far end of your garden) to stop the birds eating your crops. A single piece of foundation will do. This will also make the rats bunch up against the wall making them really easy to farm.

Aesthetics aside, if you put crafting stations, ritual sigils etc. at the front of a room, it makes them easier to click on. Likewise, stuff that’s static and doesn’t do anything special (e.g. lights) can get in the way of your mouse if too far forward, so put them further back if possible.