How to play

Welcome to Microlandia. You are the mayor of a small city built one tile at a time. People will move in, businesses will open, taxes will be paid, and roads will fall apart. Your job is to make all of that hang together. This page covers the controls, the screens, and the few rules that drive everything else. The other pages in this section explain the model behind each part of the city, with the real numbers the game uses.

The camera

The world is a 3D voxel grid seen from a fixed angle, somewhere between an isometric map and a tilted top-down view. You can pan, rotate, tilt, and zoom, but you cannot fly the camera underground or spin it freely.

  • Pan: WASD, or push the mouse to the edge of the screen.
  • Rotate: left and right arrow keys.
  • Tilt up and down: up and down arrow keys.
  • Zoom: scroll wheel, or the P and O keys.

The toolbox

A vertical toolbox sits on the left side of the screen. Tools are grouped by purpose:

  • Roads.
  • Parks and decorations.
  • Homes, shops, factories, and offices. You place these one building at a time. There is no abstract “zone” step.
  • City services: police, fire, hospitals, schools, public transport.
  • Reports, which open the dashboards listed further down.

To build, click a tool and then click a tile. Click and drag to lay a row of road or a block of buildings. Some tools spend money from the city treasury (roads, parks, city services), and your funds must stay above zero. Others spend demand points instead, because the buildings they represent (homes, shops, offices, factories) are actually built by the private sector. See “Demand points” below.

The top bar

The strip across the top of the screen always shows:

  • The in-game date.
  • Your city’s funds.
  • Population.
  • Residential demand points.
  • Commercial demand points.
  • Your approval rating.

Demand points

Demand points are how the city paces its own growth. There are two pools, one for homes and one for shops and offices. They sit as small icons in the top bar.

  • Placing a new home costs residential demand points.
  • Placing a new shop, office, or factory costs commercial demand points.
  • Each pool refills a little every in-game month. The more of your existing buildings are full, the faster the refill. Above about 80% occupancy you get the fast refill; between 20% and 80% the pool refills slowly; at or below 20%, refill stops entirely.

The point of this rule is that you cannot just spam buildings. New space has to be earned by filling the space you already have. If you try to place a building you cannot afford in points, the cursor shows a warning like “Not enough residential demand (12/40).”

Reports

The toolbox also has buttons for read-only dashboards and map overlays. Use these to find out what your city is actually doing.

Dashboards (open in a window):

  • Banking. Loans and credit.
  • Budget Report. Where your money is going each month.
  • Fiscal Policy. Tax rates, the minimum wage, and pension settings.
  • Census. Population, ages, and health.
  • Job Market. Open jobs and unemployment by profession.
  • Approval Rating. What citizens are upset or pleased about.
  • News. Short, plain-text headlines about events in the city.

Map overlays (recolor the world):

  • Traffic View. Roads, congestion, and mode share.
  • Public Transport View. Bus routes and stop coverage.

Selecting things

  • Click a building to open an info panel. You will see who lives or works there, the rent, the occupancy, and so on.
  • Click an empty tile in query mode to read tile info.
  • Press Esc to drop the current tool or close an open window.

The menu

A small button in the top-right opens the main menu:

  • Pause and resume.
  • Stats.
  • Controls, for key rebinding.
  • Settings: sound, full screen, night mode, UI scale, language.
  • Graphics.
  • Achievements.
  • Exit.

The game saves on its own. There is no manual save or load window.

Your first city

You start on an empty map. There is no blocking tutorial. A short, non-blocking tutorial overlay can give you hints, but you are free to build as soon as the camera settles. A useful first session lasts five to ten minutes:

  1. Drop a small grid of road.
  2. Place a few basic homes along it. Watch the residential demand pool drop, and watch your population tick up as families move in.
  3. Place a small shop or two. Commercial demand will fall, and the new shop will start hiring out of your population.
  4. Add a school and a hospital before your children age out and before the first sickness hits.
  5. Open the Budget Report. See where your money is going. Adjust the tax rate in Fiscal Policy if the line at the bottom is red.

The rest of these docs

Every other page in this section explains one part of the model in plain language, with the actual numbers the game uses and the real-world sources behind them. Wondering how rent is set? Read Real estate. Wondering why a hospital costs so much even when it is half empty? Read Health. Wondering why your buses cost more than the fares bring in? Read Transportation, then Traffic.

Pick a topic from the sidebar to dig in.