Use a bottleneck check before buying upgrades

The game’s economy is a network. A tool shortage can be an ore shortage, a coal shortage, an empty smelter queue, slow bar production or insufficient tool-building throughput.

For any crafted item, ask in this order:

  1. Is the final queue empty? Queue work first.
  2. Are intermediate inputs available? If not, move one layer upstream.
  3. Are raw inputs capped or starved? Reassign workers or storage.
  4. Is the building itself saturated? Then a productivity/time upgrade or another building may help.
  5. Are quests consuming the same material? Pause optional spending while saving.

This prevents the common mistake of buying an expensive final-stage upgrade when the building spends most of its time waiting for inputs.

Early example: ore → bars → tools

Full-release gameplay shows the early smithing chain teaching this pattern. Iron Ore and fuel feed bars; bars feed Tools; Tools then gate worker and building improvements.

The exact recipe costs can change with upgrades and patches, so the useful takeaway is the dependency order, not one static number copied from a video.

Manual support is useful only when the queue is healthy

When a crafting building is producing, the game lets you hold the left mouse button over its work area to support production. This can finish a short early batch faster.

If the queue empties every few seconds because raw inputs are missing, manual support does not solve the real problem. Fix supply first.

Build multiple crafting buildings when inputs can feed them

Current gameplay guidance notes that building more than one of the same crafting building can add productivity. That makes duplicate buildings powerful after the upstream economy can support them.

A second idle building with no inputs is just another empty work area.

Queue controls added in v1.0.1

Hotfix v1.0.1 added faster queue adjustment:

  • hold/click crafting controls to change the queue more quickly;
  • hold Left Ctrl for a +100 modifier.

This matters in mid/late game when a queue of five is no longer meaningful.

Bookmarks protect important purchases

Press F on a button that needs resources to create a bookmark. Later, prioritized bookmarks can protect a target from automatic resource consumption that would otherwise make it unaffordable.

That is extremely useful around production chains: bookmark the upgrade you want, then let less-important systems consume only what remains.

Autocrafting and Prestige

Prestige eventually exposes automation-related permanent upgrades in current gameplay. Automation is often a better long-term answer than manually babysitting every queue.

Use an early reset to buy automation when the same manual setup repeats every reign. Keep manual support for short bursts where it changes an immediate unlock.

Gold Bar crafting changed in v1.0.6

Do not use old gold recipes to plan a current run. v1.0.6 cut Gold Bar crafting cost by 33% and time by roughly 10%, while reducing the cost of extra Gold Bar output/lines.

The Gold Ore & Gold Bars guide lists those current changes.

Sources