Mandate Order Guide — Beginner Walkthrough and First City

A Mandate Order guide starts with one idea: this is a Warring States war city-builder where the city and the army draw on the same people, goods and land. You are not placing decorative buildings; you are building a self-sustaining stronghold that has to feed, house, arm and defend itself through the seasons. This walkthrough covers the opening build order, the housing rule new players miss, production chains, seasonal farming and the retainers and armies that follow.

What You Do in Mandate Order

The official store description calls Mandate Order an ancient war simulation and city-building game set in ancient China, combining construction, management and tactical strategy. Its four pillars are gridless free-form city building, a retainer system inspired by the Hundred Schools of Thought, dynamic seasonal and weather change, and large-scale real-time tactical battles. The setting is the Spring and Autumn period rather than the Three Kingdoms, and the developers have said the defence system draws on the City Defence chapter of Mozi, which is why you build rammed-earth walls, beacon fire alarms and tunnel warfare rather than European castles.

The Opening: Logging, Food and Housing

The most-watched first-run gameplay starts in a valley ringed by mountains with copper, clay, stone and jujube trees nearby, plus hunting grounds and an entry point for bandit attacks. The opening order that footage follows is a logging workshop near the copper deposit, then a gatherer camp for food, then a storehouse, all joined by roads so workers can actually move goods. Housing is the step that decides whether the city grows: keep four tents available, because each tent holds five people and up to four crews can arrive at once. Finalise the layout with relocation in mind rather than demolishing mistakes.

Production Chains and Crafting Inputs

Mandate Order does not let a single building solve a resource. The beginner guide lists the full chain set: logging, wood working and forestry; storage and transportation; fuel; farming, hunting and food production; deposits of copper, iron, jade, tin, silver, salt and stone; waste, liquid fertiliser and siege filth; weapon and armour production; and the military and retainer systems that consume them. The practical habit is to trace a resource from where it is created to where it is consumed before you build the producer.

Chain	Producer	Processing step
Wood and fuel	Logging workshop, forestry site	Wood workshop
Food from hunting	Hunting camp (hunted game)	Slaughterhouse, then kitchen
Food from farming	Fields and gatherer camps	Granary storage and cooking
Metals and stone	Mines on deposits	Workshops feeding tool and weapon production
Waste and fertiliser	Settlement and siege waste	Liquid fertiliser for farmland

Seasonal Farming and the Year Cycle

Farming in Mandate Order is timed, not static. A community beginner guide describes the year as a sequence of decisions: spring cultivation, a summer choice between maintaining a field and letting it lie fallow, and an autumn harvest, with water from staffed wells and fertiliser from the waste chain feeding back in. Fallow is the summer recovery path when restoring land quality matters more than that season's output. Because the official store page says seasons affect both city management and the rhythm of marching and warfare, your military calendar has to respect the farming one.

Retainers, Policies and Rituals

Above the buildings sits a layer of people and ideas. The retainer system is inspired by the Hundred Schools of Thought, the rival philosophies of the Spring and Autumn period, and the beginner guide groups retainers with state policies and rituals as systems you learn alongside production. What is verified is that retainers exist, that policies are issued at state level and that rituals are a separate category; the exact effects of individual retainers and policies are not fully documented in public sources yet, so treat any specific numbers you see as to confirm.

Layer	What it seems to govern	Documentation status
Retainers	The people you recruit to run and improve the state	Confirmed to exist; individual effects to confirm
State policies	State-level mandates you issue	Confirmed to exist; exact effects to confirm
Rituals	A separate ceremonial or social category	Confirmed as a category; specifics to confirm

Raising an Army and Defending the City

Weapons and armour come off the same production chains that feed your city, and raising an army consumes people who could otherwise be workers, which is the recurring tension of the game. Defence is explicitly modelled on Mohist city defence: walls as the sovereign's shield and the people's refuge, with beacon fire and tunnel warfare as period-appropriate tools. The map also contains hostile camps and bandit attack routes, so a city that never invests in walls invites an early raid. The official store page confirms large-scale real-time tactical battles with thousands of soldiers as the endgame.

• Weapons and armour are crafted, so arm an army from the same chains that feed the city.
• Conscription costs labour, because soldiers are drawn from the population that works the fields.
• Walls carry the defence, following the Mohist model of walls, beacon fire and tunnels.
• The map attacks back, since gameplay footage shows bandit routes and hostile camps.
• Time the campaign, because the same seasons that govern farming govern marching.

First-Run Checklist

• Place a logging workshop first, then food gathering, then a storehouse, connected by roads.
• Keep four tents free so incoming crews are never turned away.
• Check a recipe's inputs before placing its producer, and build the whole chain.
• Plan housing and industrial space early, and use relocation instead of demolition.
• Staff wells and work the spring, summer and autumn farming stages.
• Match military spending to the seasons, and wall the approaches before bandits test them.