First Steps

When you start Thea for the first time, two randomly selected deities will be available. Each deity has unique abilities that help your villagers. As you gain deity XP during play-throughs, more skills will be unlocked. You can also unlock other deities by reaching level 3 on an unlocked deity.

Start by selecting a deity, difficultly level, and profession focus. The profession focus (warrior, gatherer, crafter) affects the number of starting villagers with that profession. Once you’re in-game, the setting no longer has any effect.

After starting a new game, you will see a small area uncovered from fog of war, your village “Ostoya” in the middle, and your first expedition next to it. By left-clicking on one of them, you can access the radial menu which gives you access to equipment, inventory, movement, and if an expedition is on the same tile as the village, the option to join the village.

Survival is dependent on protecting your village, gathering basic resources like food and fuel, and gathering higher quality resources to craft items that generate research points. Research is vital to equipping your villagers with better gear, building structures that have a wide range of uses, and generally “keeping up” with the turn-based enemy difficulty scaling. Depending on the difficultly level you have selected, enemies become more powerful as turns go by.

You can rename your village, expeditions, and villager names by left-clicking the Quill icon next to the name.

Gathering

The first resource gathering you do will likely be in the village. Left-click the village and select “Manage” (the magnifying glass icon). You should see three options on the left – Gather, Craft, and Construct. Select “Gather” and resources on the same tile or within one tile will be available to gather.

Each task has a production cost and the amount of gathered materials per production cycle. The villager with the highest relevant skill, like Gathering, will have the greatest effect on production. You can assign other villagers to assist; however, their effect on production is significantly reduced. After assigning villagers to a task, you can see how many turns it will take to complete the production cycle.

Using resources gathered, you can craft items and buildings. Initially, the items and buildings will be of poor quality, but as you research new resources, you can make better items and buildings. Some buildings gain special effects from certain resources.

Crafting / Constructing

Crafting and Construction work identically. After selecting an item type to craft or a building to construct, you select the materials you want to use. Currently, the Catalyst resource has no effect on the item or building, but it is required for production. The primary material determines the type of item and its base values. The secondary material can be used to boost the base values or to add additional ones. Different combinations of materials will yield different results. Better materials will typically give better bonuses to items and buildings.

Once you have selected the materials that will be used, you can then select the quantity you want constructed. You can “over-select” more than you have resources, but production will halt when the resources are exhausted.

Managing food and fuel

You can prevent your villagers and expeditions from using specific resources via the Manage Supplies tab accessible in the general village and expedition management windows. Resources can be selected or deselected, forcing your people to use certain resources. This is particularly useful when gathering advanced wood and food types. Every new resource from the food and fuel categories is allowed for consumption by default, so it is a good idea to check the Manage Supplies tab frequently. You can also prevent new fuel and food resources from automatically being allowed for consumption.

Equipping villagers

You can manage your villagers’ equipment by left-clicking on the settlement or the expedition and selecting the Equipment icon from the radial menu. Equip your villagers by selecting a piece of gear and using drag-and-drop to place it in the appropriate slot. Villagers have a weight limit determined by their strength. Villagers cannot equip items if the total weight exceeds their limit.

Custom filters can be set using the Filter option at the bottom. To clear filters, left-click the icon below Set Filters.

Inventory

To access the village or expedition inventory, left-click and select the Inventory icon from the radial menu. On the left side of the inventory are filters to display only items of a certain type (e.g. Weapons/Armor, Food, etc.). You can dismantle equipment by dragging the item to the Dismantle box on the left. When dismantling equipment, you may gain back some of component resources. Items can also be destroyed the same way by dragging and dropping an item to the Destroy box.

Expedition

Managing expedition is handled by radial menu with one difference, there is of course move option. Whenever player chooses to move expedition, borders of maximum movement appears and movement cost under cursor. Enemies and their lairs will be attacked whenever expedition tries to walk on tile occupied by them, but quests and special locations require to stand on that tile and activate it.

While exploring Thea, player has to remember that during day he may be safe enough to move from one point to another without being bothered by monsters, but during night, when monsters are more aggressive he will be probably enforced to defend himself.

Fights

Whenever fight or a challenge occurs it will be handled by tactical mini card game, where each monster and villager are counted as one card.

Each fight uses the same rules:

• Player is battling in rounds
• Each round is divided into preparation phase and two combat phases
• At the beginning of each round cards are shuffled into two groups, offensive and tactical
• During preparation phase cards are put into play alternately by player and opponent
• During two combat phases cards attack each other from left to right
• If all cards from one side are destroyed, then fight ends. Otherwise another round begins.

For more detailed description see:

Some fights occur due to player or opponents actions, but some fights or challenges may occur due to random events and quests.

Events and Quests

Events may occur during player turn when expedition is moving or during monster turn. In both situations player gets information what is happening and options what he can do about it. Some dialogue options may be hidden and will be available only when any of villager has proper ability to unlock it (for example knowledge about folklore is needed to know how to handle mystical creatures such as vampire or ghosts and magic knowledge is needed to start ritual and banish ghosts). Quests starts as events, where player gets information and some dialogue options, but after this there is additional goal, which requires player action and usually it is connected with a place on the map, a house of herbalist that will cure sick villagers or a quest monster group that player has to meet. Each positively solved event or quest give a reward, which always is experience and sometimes items, materials, research experience or custom rewards.

From time to time player will get experience, which will be accumulated automatically and presented on right side of the screen as general experience and research experience.

General

As mentioned before player gets general experience from fights, solving quests or events. That experience is presented in general experience circle and every 10 experience accumulated all characters that player controls level up and get random bonus abilities.

Research Experience and Research Points

Research experience beside quests or events is mostly generated by finished crafts or constructions and is represented as research experience circle. Each task has additional information about how much research experience will provide and that value depends on material rarity used in production. Whenever player fills research experience circle (required value increases with each craft), he gets a research point and can spend it to unlock new crafts or materials. Each new unlocked craft is blueprint of an item or building, which can be created in many ways, dependently on used materials. Unlocked material gives player some amount of that material and reveals its location on map, where player can gather more of it.