County of Fortune guide in short: you do not place individual buildings — you found a whole settlement on a grid and let it grow. You play a lokator, a medieval colonizer and noble steward, handed a blank stretch of kingdom that you turn into a living county. Streets and procedurally generated buildings fill in as each settlement climbs from hamlet to village to town to city, and every settlement specialises around the resources, biomes, soil and elevation it sits on.
Most players searching for County of Fortune how to play answers want the order of the first hour rather than a tour of every button, and that order is short.
County of Fortune guide: the four steps that start a run
- Pick the starting industry. Open the build menu and choose the industry your opening settlement will contain. A food-producing farm on fertile land is the usual choice, because a settlement that cannot feed its own workers never grows. You cannot place anything on the map until this building has been chosen.
- Open the settlement tool. Select "Build New Settlement" on the bottom bar, or press
C. - Place the settlement in the blue area. In the tutorial the first settlement has to go inside one of the recommended spots marked by a white circle, and it has to sit in the blue area — the part of the map where the resource you chose actually is: fertile ground for food, forest for wood, stone or clay for the later chains. The building cannot stand directly on the deposit, and only part of the deposit has to fall inside the settlement area for the matching production building to unlock.
- Read the river before you commit. River flow decides what can be shipped where later, because heavy goods travel downstream on rafts only. Select the settlement tool and zoom in on the river to check which way it runs from your site.
If the placement preview refuses the spot, the problem is usually the terrain or the circle boundary rather than the resource icons — where to build settlements walks through the site rules.
What the Needs and Buildings tabs tell you
Two tabs drive every settlement for the rest of the game.
- Needs lists the meals and equipment available to the settlement. A meal raises building efficiency, but only if every ingredient for it is present. A piece of equipment raises the maximum number of villagers the buildings can employ and unlocks extra building slots.
- Buildings lists everything you have constructed, with its efficiency, employment, maintenance status and what it produces. A production building that is missing an input shows a warning icon, which is the fastest way to spot a broken chain.
Equipment is what opens the extra slots, so building slots is the page to read once your first settlement is standing.
A third control sits above them: the mayor, drawn from one of the noble houses, who runs the settlement.
The demo, Early Access and how you win
There is no campaign. The goal is to fulfil every need for every tier of population class, and once you have done that you have won.
The free demo covers one map, lets you take settlements up to level 2 and unlocks the Commoner social class. Early Access removes the settlement level cap so you can reach level 4, adds the Artisans and Patricians classes, and adds ports with sailboats that can carry goods both upstream and downstream, over 40 new production buildings and 50 new products. Demo progress carries into the full game when you buy it; saves from the June Steam Next Fest demo do not carry over to the current demo.
Once the first settlement runs, the county starts to be a network rather than a village: found the next settlement next to a second resource, and level the settlement up when its needs counter fills.